Ever since Reagan’s presidency, the core of Republican positions on public education have been five-fold: 1. Let white students attend schools that are islands of white privilege where they don’t have to confront the true racial history of America, 2. Use public money to support private, for-profit, and religious schools that can accomplish this (and cycle some of that money back to Republican politicians), 3. Destroy public schools’ teachers’ unions, 4. End the teaching of science, critical thinking, evolution, and sex ed, and, 5. Bring fundamentalist Christianity into the classroom. Earlier this year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio called America’s public school system a “cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” “Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children,” Rubio wrote for the American Conservative magazine, adding, “We need to ensure no federal funding is ever used to promote these radical ideas in schools.”
A bit on the long side, but really informative over what has happened and what is currently happening in this seeming never ending war on Public schools. Hugs. Scottie
Jennifer Pippin says had she known of Rick Wiles’ antisemitic views, she wouldn’t have appeared on his program, but she didn’t apologize for having gone on.
By ANDREW LAPIN/JTAUpdated: NOVEMBER 1, 2023 18:01Books that have been donated to the “Read with Love Book Drive” run by PFLAG Bucks County to help place LGBTQ+ books in Bucks and Montgomery County libraries are placed in a donation box at the Doylestown Bookshop in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, U.S., April 7, 2023.(photo credit: REUTERS/HANNAH BEIER)
A Florida organizer of the right-wing activist group Moms For Liberty who successfully pressed her school district to remove a version of Anne Frank’s diary recently appeared on a livestream banned from YouTube because of its pastor host’s antisemitism.
Jennifer Pippin, who chairs the group’s chapter in Indian River County, Florida, appeared in September on the show TruNews, which is hosted by End Times preacher Rick Wiles. Wiles is a conspiracy theorist who has claimed that Jews and Zionists have “attacked Christian culture” and railed against the “Jewish lobby” and “Kabbalah wizard rabbis.”
Wiles, who is based in the same county as Pippin, has also stated, “That’s the way the Jews work, they are deceivers, they plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda.” He has claimed that “Israel” was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 2019 he stated, “It’s not Muslims that are going to kill us. It’s the Jews.”
The following year he called the first attempted impeachment of Donald Trump a “Jew coup.” adding that Jews would “kill millions of Christians” after they overthrew the president. The Trump administration credentialed the outlet multiple times, leading to major pushback from Jewish groups. The channel was permanently banned from YouTube in 2020 over Wiles’ antisemitic rants.
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday, Pippin said she had not been aware of Wiles’ antisemitism before she appeared on his show and would not have agreed to it if she’d known.
A Little Free Library, which was designed to look like a prison, invites residents to take books that the library says have been challenged by schools across the state of Texas, in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 3, 2023. (credit: REUTERS/CALLAGHAN O’HARE)
Says she was ignorant of hosts’ views, but doesn’t apologize
“Honestly, I’ve never heard of him before,” she said. “And I wasn’t aware of anything that he said against any organizations or group of people or anything like that.”
Yet when she was asked if she was sorry for appearing on TruNews, Pippin responded, “Absolutely not. No.” She said she did not necessarily endorse the views of everyone she speaks to about her efforts to ensure that school libraries contain only “age-appropriate” material.
“My interview was a representation of me and our work with Moms For Liberty,” she said. “Just because somebody says or does something years ago that I don’t agree with doesn’t mean that just because I did an interview with him, I agree with every single little thing that he said or what his news outlet has put out.”
Although Moms For Liberty has some Jewish members in its leadership, the group borrows much of its rhetoric from Christian nationalist organizations and one local chapter has quoted Hitler in its communications to parents. The “parents’ rights” movement the group represents has largely targeted books about race, gender and sexual identity, but some Jewish and Holocaust books have also been caught in the dragnet.
Public figures call the graphic adaptation ‘pornography’
This spring Pippin’s school district on the state’s Atlantic coast, acting on her challenge, made national headlines when it agreed to pull “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” from high schools. A spokesperson told JTA at the time that the 2018 illustrated reimagining of Frank’s diary was “a fictional novel” and “not age-appropriate.”
Since then, opposition to the book has only grown. A Jewish parent at another Florida school district successfully petitioned for the book’s removal last month, while a middle-school teacher in Texas was recently fired for reportedly assigning and reading aloud passages from the book. Politicians and other public figures have since claimed that the book’s depiction of Frank’s attraction to another girl, and her descriptions of her own genitalia, were “pornography”; a local Florida news outlet claimed Pippin had called the book “sexually explicit” in her own challenge.
Pippin told JTA that the quote attributed to her was incorrect and that she did not object to the book’s sexual content, which she recognized came from Frank’s original diary. “I didn’t challenge it for the sexually explicit content because this was actually what she wrote,” she said. “This is what she was thinking in her teenage years, during the Holocaust.”
She instead said she objected to the book’s presence in her high school for a different reason: that it was a highly abridged version of the diary’s original text, and she and a local Holocaust education group jointly believed high school students should be expected to be able to read the original instead.
“They agreed that this one book, the graphic adaptation, should be permanently removed because they felt that children in high school should be reading the true diary of Anne Frank, and not the graphic adaptation, to get the actual, factual information from the diary,” Pippin said, adding that she supported “age-appropriate” Holocaust education in schools.
Wiles: ‘Marxist Communists are waging war against America’s innocent children’
Pippin said Wiles had reached out to her to ask about her challenge to the Anne Frank book specifically, although she said she did not think his questions about the book were antisemitic in nature and the two did not discuss the book in their live conversation.
Wearing a Moms For Liberty T-shirt, Pippin spoke to Wiles for around 30 minutes on his show, chiefly promoting the work of her group, which Wiles said he fully supported. “I will do everything I can to help you,” he told her. “I will help raise money, I will help organize, I will help you get a lawsuit against the school board.”
Wiles introduced his interview with Pippin by stating, “Marxist Communists are waging war against America’s innocent children in almost every state in the USA. They have infiltrated our nation’s local school districts and public libraries.” He concluded it by comparing Moms For Liberty’s battles with school boards to the French Revolution, adding, “If we don’t stop it really soon, none of us are going to survive over the next 10 years, because these people are violent. … They’re going after our children now.”
Pippin told JTA she did not agree with Wiles’ characterization of her activism and had tried to steer the conversation back to books.
TruNews has broadcast in various forms for more than two decades, and Wiles has taken aim at Muslims and LGBTQ individuals as well as Jews over time. In recent weeks, since his broadcast with Pippin and Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Wiles has posted almost exclusively content targeting “godless, atheistic, antichrist Zionism” on social media and called on the Israeli government to “stop the Palestinian pogrom.”
Even protecting kids from killing themselves and bullying is the target of hate from the “Christian” right. Seriously, you would think the Pro-life crowd would rush to protect children from death, instead they pretend that someone dressed in a costume reading a story is the real danger to kids. Sickening and the world needs to wake up to the cesspool that X, Twitter, and right wing media has become. Hugs. Scottie
The Trevor Project, which has nearly 350,000 followers on the platform, said LGBTQ young people are “regularly victimized” on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The Trevor Project at the Los Angeles Pride Parade on June 11.Rodin Eckenroth / Getty Images file
The Trevor Project, a national suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth, announced it is leaving X, formerly known as Twitter, because of “increasing hate & vitriol on the platform targeting the LGBTQ community.” The decision comes just over a year after billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk finalized his $44 billion purchase of the company.
“LGBTQ young people are regularly victimized at the expense of their mental health, and X’s removal of certain moderation functions makes it more difficult for us to create a welcoming space for them on this platform,” the organization wrote in a tweet Thursday.
The Trevor Project, which has nearly 350,000 followers on X, said the decision to leave was made with “input from dozens of internal and external perspectives.” In particular, the group wrote, “we questioned whether leaving the platform would allow harmful narratives and rhetoric to prevail with one less voice to challenge them.” But in the end, the group decided that leaving was “the right thing to do.”
The Trevor Project has made the decision to close its account on X.
At the end of its message, the organization directed LGBTQ young people to TrevorSpace.org, its own social networking space for queer teens and young adults. The Trevor Project also noted that it will continue to maintain its presence on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Facebook.
X’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on The Trevor Project’s departure or its characterization of “hate & vitriol” on the platform.
As NBC News reported last month on the one-year anniversary of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, many LGBTQ people say the once-hospitable home for community building has turned toxic.
This, they say, is due in part to a number of policy changes and business decisions at the company, including the layoff of employees who worked on reducing misinformation and harassment on the platform, and the removal of the site’s previous ban on intentionally using the incorrect pronouns or names for transgender people, practices known as misgendering and deadnaming.
GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy group, releases an annual Social Media Safety Index and Platform Scorecard that evaluates social media platforms’ policies for ensuring the safety of LGBTQ users. In its most recent scorecard, published in June, X ranked in last place among the major social media platforms.
Since Musk took over the platform, LGBTQ people running some of the most-followed X accounts have abandoned it. Elton John, who has over a million followers, announced he was leaving in December, and Ellen DeGeneres, who has 75 million followers, hasn’t tweeted since April.
And The Trevor Project is not the only LGBTQ nonprofit to leave. The San Francisco LGBT Center, LGBTQ Youth Scotland and the U.K.-based Mermaids, a transgender charity, have also left the platform, just to name a few.
This story is bat shit. Random nobody staffer copy and pasted a Presidential directive to pull out of Afghanistan without consulting any national security leaders. He’s the guy running Project 2025. These fuckers are a menace. https://t.co/KYKyG4LOx1
Trump's aide John McEntee was fired today because he is currently under investigation by DHS for serious financial crimes. Minutes after McEntee was escorted from the WH, he was named a senior adviser to Trump's reelection campaign. Only the best people! https://t.co/vYhq57nVxl
Good old Johnny McEntee – the fuckboi frat bastard that ran trump’s Presidential Personnel Office – where if you came across a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, you were obligated to chug it. (That’s not a joke) https://t.co/xL81DTePeG
Read the full article. According to the piece, the flag was re-popularized in 2013 by Christian nationalist Dutch Sheets and is now often seen at far-right and QAnon events. Rioters brandished the flag during the attack on the US Capitol. As I reported this morning, Johnson is presently attending a far-right conference in Paris.
"An Appeal to Heaven" flag outside #NAR Mike's speaker's office.
"But for the past decade it has become a symbol of the NAR movement and their goal of establishing a “Seven Mountain Mandate" over the government."
Read the full article. The piece notes that $1.7 million is more than Ohio dioceses spent running local Catholic Charities programs last year. Cincinnati Archbishop Dennis Schnurr last appeared here in 2014 when he launched a “prayer in defense of marriage” campaign as the Sixth Circuit Court considered the same-sex marriage case that ultimately would be folded into the Obergefell case before the Supreme Court.
Read the full article. The original clip has nearly 10 million views at this writing. As you can see below, Salzman appears to be a supporter of Moms For Liberty. Salzman has one of the wildest Wikipedia entries that you’ve likely seen.
What happened in Wichita and JoCo is happening nationwide, the AP reports. Voters rebuked conservative candidates who want to ban books and restrict classroom conversations on race and gender. #ksedhttps://t.co/OF1RKOg15G
Yesterday CNN reported that “a plumber, a maid, a chauffeur and a woodworker are among Mar-a-Lago staffers and contract workers who federal prosecutors may call to testify against former President Donald Trump.”
This is one of the fallouts when you ban abortion in a state. Highly respected medical professionals leave and the people suffer.
This shouldn’t be our reality America. Nowhere in this land of freedom, should the personal feelings of politicians be considered above the medical decisions of people and their doctors.
Another calm rational explanation of what is happening and the probable reasons why. The video details of the clear attempt of Israel to reclaim the land for its own use, removing all Palestinians from Gaza. Hugs. Scottie
There is no will of the people, the people will be ruled by church doctrine and like it. Our God can’t lose, sounds like the Middle East to me! Republicans have simply decided they are above all laws, they have decided anything they don’t like just did not happen. They have gone full tRump on everything. Don’t like election results, deny them and ignore them. Don’t like that you did not get a 100 on that test, just claim you did and attack anyone saying you did not. Rules not in your favor, change the rules and the majority that do like them be damned because they don’t have rights and will be ruled. The republicans have gone full ruling class over the ruled population. No wonder they love Putin.
“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” ― David Frum,Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic
Days after Ohio voters passed Issue 1 and codified abortion rights into Ohio’s constitution, Republicans are not accepting the election results.
In a new, unhinged press release issued by the Ohio House Republican Committee, GOP members rant that “foreign billionaires” impacted the election results and call the results tainted by so-called “foreign interference.” It is unclear what they are referring to.
The press release further argues that the results of the election do not invalidate a 6-week abortion ban previously passed by the Ohio Legislature and that “no amendment can overturn the God given rights with which we were born.”
Ohio Legislators will be introducing several bills to address this issue in the coming weeks.
“Foreign billionaires don’t get to make Ohio laws,” said Jennifer Gross (R-West Chester), pointing to millions from billionaires outside America that helped fund Issue 1. Gross added, “This is foreign election interference, and it will not stand.”
“Issue 1 doesn’t repeal a single Ohio law, in fact, it doesn’t even mention one,” said Representative Bill Dean (R-Xenia). “The amendment’s language is dangerously vague and unconstrained, and can be weaponized to attack parental rights or defend rapists, pedophiles, and human traffickers.”
Melanie Miller (R-Ashland) said, “We will continue to be a voice for every child in their mother’s womb who cannot speak for themselves.”
Representative Beth Lear (R-Galena) stated, “No amendment can overturn the God given rights with which we were born.”
To prevent mischief by pro-abortion courts with Issue 1, Ohio legislators will consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary over this ambiguous ballot initiative. The Ohio legislature alone will consider what, if any, modifications to make to existing laws based on public hearings and input from legal experts on both sides.
Some of the money used to promote the amendment may have come from outside Ohio, but all the votes in favour of it were from registered Ohio voters.
Unless the Repukes can show irrefutable evidence of vote buying, they really have no recourse (unless they pass another undemocratic law, as they threaten to).
Had the Rethugs not managed to write the measure using intentionally pejorative terms and language AND hadn’t lied constantly about what the amendment would create in terms of a guarantee to reproductive rights as well as their now-constant blood-libel “abortion beyond birth” bullshit, the margin would’ve been even higher.
Estimates remain that less than 1/4 of Americans want abortion to be illegal under most or all circumstances.
Republicans hate and reject American democracy, including free and fair elections… because their policies are appalling and they keep losing, but won’t admit that unpopularity is why that keeps happening.
Also, don’t women and girls have “god-given rights”? Apparently not, according to these forced-pregnancy patriarchal misogynists.
The Christian outlook and hope is for a literal theocracy, but they will settle for a stand-in person instead. The bible has nothing to say about democracy. The only voting that was done was when Roman soldiers cast lots for Jesus’s cloak and the Apostles elected a new member after Judas Iscariot “dropped out.”
There is such a simple solution at hand…If you don’t believe in abortion, gay marriage, or anything else…don’t have one. You see, no one is FORCING you to have one, it is your choice, just like it is their choice to make for themselves. Unique concept, personal freedom, isn’t it?
Besides, aren’t you Christians always ranting about Free Will?
As we know, it’s not about saving babies. Sure, there are some True Believers™ who really think they are babies in the womb, and that their god will is very very angry over gays getting married, but for most, that’s just their cover. It’s about control and establishing a theocracy.
Scottie's Playtime 