Conservatives programed to trigger at words "Black Lives Matter" by Russian trolls.

Reading the comments made by two Virginia school board members apparently endorsing the burning of books they’ve deemed inappropriate, it’s hard to determine the effect.

“I think those books — I don’t want to even see them. I mean, I think they should be thrown in a fire,” one said. His colleague later added that many people in the community would probably like to “see the books before we burn them, just so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

When you watch video from the school board meeting, though, the intent is clear. The first speaker, 24-year-old Rabih Abuismail, is calling for the books to be burned specifically to emphasize his point. He’s strongly opposed to the books — in this case, primarily ones with content centered on gay, lesbian and transgender subjects — and decided to use one of history’s most notorious demonstrations of opposition to undergird his point.

One might justifiably dismiss this incident as an exception, one member of one small school board making one comment about destroying books. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, though, points out the broader context. Republican officials (like those in Virginia) have repeatedly called for the removal of books from school and public libraries in recent weeks, or have called for material to be reviewed as a first step to that end.

What’s useful to keep in mind about these efforts is how they contrast with the efforts to which they’ve been compared, the burning of books in Nazi Germany. As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum points out in this video, the impetus for removing books from university libraries in the 1930s was largely to eliminate anti-German rhetoric and thought. Though it eventually became a tool of the state, many initial efforts stemmed from enthusiastic university students who sought a sort of ideological purification of their schools.

But consider a critical difference between that effort and the ones in the moment. The Nazi regime embraced book confiscation and destruction in part because it provided a point of propaganda and a demonstration of loyalty. But it also clearly embraced the practice because collecting or burning the books largely took the ideas out of circulation. There was symbolism and political utility in large crowds surrounding bonfires of forbidden thought. But there was a very practical utility, too. If you burned all copies of a Hemingway novel, it became very hard to read that novel. The book burnings helped demonstrate how some ideas were prohibited in the abstract but they also helped limit the spread of those ideas.

That is not the case today. If you want to read the book “33 Snowfish,” for example — one of those targeted in Virginia — you can buy a copy and have it sent to your house. You can buy an e-book on Amazon and start reading it in about 20 seconds. You might be able to check it out of your local library, including through your library’s digital-access portal for e-books.

It is certainly possible that a dystopic future effort to uproot books like that one might see it vanish from libraries or online sales. But even then, the Internet and digital sharing means that it will be nearly impossible to eradicate. If we shut down the Internet, maybe — but by then, the scale of what’s underway is far worse than banning one book.

Put another way, the banning of books in 2021 is almost entirely about symbolism. They’re about the ability to posture about how some content is bad and toxic and how you are Taking a Stand. What’s particularly amusing is when the condemnations are centered on prurient content, as though a teenager looking for titillation in 2021 has no other recourse than skimming the stacks of the school library with fingers crossed. My friend, have you seen the things that are available on your cellphone these days?

To say you want to ban a book from being available to children in their school library is not to say you are protecting that kid from the book’s contents, because you can’t. (In fact, you’re probably just going to make them more interested in seeking it out, which they can do easily, because this isn’t 1933.) What you’re doing, instead, is saying that you are making a point about how robustly you will fight against thoughts and stories that your supporters dislike. You are saying that, while you might disagree with the Nazis’ rhetoric, you can’t argue with their tactics.

What makes the Virginia situation even more ludicrous is that the books being targeted were identified by a pearl-clutching parent on the school’s digital library app. What are you going to do, buy copies of the book to burn? Burn the kid’s Kindle? (If so, do they need to have that book actively being read or what?) It reinforces the point perfectly: The book itself won’t actually be burned or destroyed, but we’ll make a point about how much we hate it.

Ludicrous, yes, but this doesn’t make it better. There are calls to ban the essentially unbannable, to make it slightly harder to read a book, because of the political utility in doing so. The value to many of these legislators is not in limiting access but in being seen as the type of leader who will try to limit access to material his supporters might not like. That’s what the other board member in Virginia, Kirk Twigg, said: They need to show the community that they’re “eradicating this bad stuff.”

It’s the bonfire that’s the point, not the fuel.

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As Trump officials were moving the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management from Washington, D.C., to Colorado two years ago, Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, issued a stark warning to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt: The department risked a “significant legal liability” by driving Black employees from an agency that was overwhelmingly White.

Among a host of troubling diversity data, Grijalva wrote in a letter obtained by The Washington Post, “One of the most alarming statistics is that there are only 312 Black/African American employees nationwide at the agency, less than 3.5 percent of the BLM workforce” of about 9,000 people.

If the headquarters move went ahead and Black employees suffered a disparate impact, Grijalva warned, Interior could be sued by its own employees under the Civil Rights Act. He described it as a “significant legal liability that could rival the cost of the entire relocation.”

Bernhardt did not respond to a request for comment.

While Black employees have not sued the bureau responsible for overseeing more than 245 million acres of public lands, a new Government Accountability Office report found that its relocation reduced the number ofBlack employees, as The Post reported last month. Dismantling the D.C. office also drove out the bureau’s most experienced employees and created widespread staffing shortages, investigators concluded.

“Increased vacancies, and the details used to temporarily fill those vacancies, sometimes led to confusion and inefficiency, according to staff members we interviewed,” the report found.

Despite the warning, the Trump administration pushed ahead with the relocation to Grand Junction, Colo. — which is now being reversed by President Biden. The move did dramatically worsen diversity, with more than half the Black employees at the headquarters retiring or quitting rather than accepting the move to Colorado.

The agency’s major reorganization was also done out without a “strategic workforce plan,” laying out how the changes would advance the agency’s goals, the report added.

As a result, “BLM lacks reasonable assurance the agency will have the workforce necessary to achieve its goals in managing millions of acres of public lands,” the report said.

While Trump administration officials argued that moving the BLM West would put employees closer to the lands they manage — primarily located in 12 Western states — current and former employees have described how, in fact, the move derailed the agency by breaking up teams that once worked closely together and scattered people across several Western cities. Most of those ordered to move West chose to quit or retire rather than accept new jobs.

The GAO report adds new detail about problems created by the move, particularly in vacancies created by the upheaval and in its impact, across the total workforce, on Black employees.

At the time BLM announced its relocation in July 2019, the headquarters staff of about 550 positions had 121 vacancies, the report found. Over the next year, that number of vacancies shot up to 326, before gradually declining to 142 as of May 2021, the most recent available data.

Current and former BLM employees have told The Post that ongoing uncertainty over where headquarters jobs would be located has made it hard to fill many positions.

The upheaval also drained the agency of its most experienced career civil servants: the percentage of BLM staff with at least 25 years of service at Interior declined from 24 percent to 17 percent during the Trump administration.

“In our interviews with 13 BLM staff members, almost all told us that the loss of experienced staff negatively affected their offices’ ability to conduct its duties,” the report said. “For example, one staff member said that the loss of institutional knowledge about laws and regulations meant that BLM was not able to provide knowledgeable input on proposed rules and legislation.”

The report also documents changes in the racial makeup of the agency before and after Trump’s time in office.

The Post last month reported that the number of Black employees within BLM headquarters dropped by more than half from the start of Trump’s term to the start of Biden’s. There were 126 Black employees in headquarters positions when Trump took office.
When his term ended, that number had fallen to 55, according to department data. The total number of non-White HQ employees fell from 202 to 116 between January 2017 and January 2021, a decline of 43 percent, according to department data.

The GAO report looks at the racial changes across the wider 9,000-person agency.

In that larger group, the number of Black employees in the agency fell from 306 in January 2016 to 287 in January 2021, a decline of 6 percent. The largest increase in minority representation came among Asian employees, whose numbers rose during that period from 161 to 190, a gain of 18 percent. Overall, however, Asians still represented just 2 percent of the entire workforce. By the start of Biden’s term, White employees made up 80 percent of the staff, a decline of about 2 percent from January 2016.

While Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced in September that the bureau’s headquarters would return to Washington while Grand Junction would serve as its Western hub, the details of that plan still need to be worked out with lawmakers.

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Former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi tweeted about an analysis of the tweets from the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse came largely from outside of the United States.

Figliuzzi said that the researchers took a sample of 32,315 pro-Rittenhouse hashtag tweets on Nov 19-20. The data showed 29,609 tweets came from Twitter accounts that disabled geolocation. "Of those, 17,701 were listed as "foreign", but a deep scrub revealed most of those were in Russia, China, and the EU," he said.

Figliuzzi noted that this is more of the "divide and conquer" approach that Americans saw around the Black Lives Matter movement to pit different races against each other.

"Throughout the campaign, Russian operatives created hundreds of fake personas on social media platforms and then posted thousands of advertisements and messages that sought to promote racial divisions in the United States," wrote William J. Aceves from the California Western School of Law. In his 2019 article Virtual Hatred: How Russia Tried to Start a Race War in the United States, Aceves explained that the fake accounts were created by Russian operatives. "But their effects were real."They sought to manipulate Americans to such a degree that they would attempt to bring down U.S. democracy.

Tweet link below:

Divide & conquer: A sample of 32,315 pro-Rittenhouse hashtag tweets, Nov 19-20, showed 29,609 with disabled geolocation. Of those, 17,701 were listed as \u201cforeign\u201d, but a deep scrub revealed most of those were in Russia, China, and the EU. @Tara_Writer @TAPSTRIMEDIA #Rittenhouse
— Frank Figliuzzi (@Frank Figliuzzi) 1637525170

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A video shows high school students in Washington state making ape noises and calling a Black basketball player from an opposing team a “gorilla" during a game last Friday.

The students from Capital High School in Olympia reportedly filmed the video themselves and later posted it online, even tagging the Black player.

The Black player's father, Quay Steplight, reposted the video on Facebook on Tuesday.

Steplight's son, Ahmari, plays basketball for River Ridge High School in Lacey, Washington.

"Please stand up and let your voice be heard," Steplight wrote above the video. "Blacks are not MONKEY’s, GORILLA’s, APE’s or N*GGER’s and whatever else they choose to call us. ... It’s time something be done!"

Steplight told KIRO Newsradio it wasn't an isolated incident.

“There’s this line drawn in the sand where it’s like, as soon as you walk into the Olympia School District, specifically at these sporting events, they have these fans and they get very ugly with their words, very racially driven,” Steplight said. “Some of the friends who are my age who went to that high school, a lot of them are saying, ‘Well, I left the high school because of this stuff, I didn’t do sports because of this.' So there’s a long history.”

KIRO Newsradio reported that it had received "a bevy of emails from parents with stories from Olympia high school sporting events."

"Parents of athletes of color reported similar incidents to last week’s game, with fans at Olympia School District high schools regularly yelling racist insults to members of rival teams," the station reported. "One mom said that when she tried to alert adults at the school during the game, she was brushed off. Others reported videos circulating with racist slurs, a student driving around with a Confederate flag hanging out of his car, and even a situation where Capital High School students chased down and ran a car of Black students from another school off the road after a game."

The Olympia School District issued a statement saying it "has no tolerance for racism," adding that the students involved in the video are being disciplined.

"For privacy, the district did not disclose the students’ identities, how many were involved, or what their punishment would be," the station reported.

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The conservative-dominated Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a challenge to the consideration of race in college admissions, adding affirmative action to major cases on abortion, guns, religion and COVID-19 already on the agenda.

The court said it will take up lawsuits claiming that Harvard University, a private institution, and the University of North Carolina, a state school, discriminate against Asian American applicants. A decision against the schools could mean the end of affirmative action in college admissions.

Lower courts rejected the challenges, citing more than 40 years of high court rulings that allow colleges and universities to consider race in admissions decisions. But the colleges and universities must do so in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity.

The court’s most recent pronouncement was in 2016, in a 4-3 decision upholding the admissions program at the University of Texas against a challenge brought by a white woman. But the composition of the court has changed since then, with the addition of three conservative justices who were appointed by then-President Donald Trump.

Two members of that four-justice majority are gone from the court: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, and Justice Anthony Kennedy retired in 2018.

The three dissenters in the case, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, remain on the court. Roberts, a moderating influence on some issues, has been a steadfast vote to limit the use of race in public programs, once writing, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

The court already has heard arguments in cases that could expand gun rights and religious rights and also roll back abortion rights in a direct challenge to the Roe v. Wade ruling from 1973.

Earlier this month, the justices weighed in for the first time on President Joe Biden’s vaccine policies, halting a rule requiring a vaccine or testing at large businesses while allowing a vaccine mandate for most of the nation’s health care workers.

The affirmative action case probably will be argued in the fall. Both suits were filed by Students for Fair Admissions, a Virginia-based group run by Edward Blum. He has worked for years to rid college admissions of racial considerations, and the court’s new lineup breathed new life into his project.

The group is calling on the court to overturn its 2003 ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld the University of Michigan’s law school admissions program.

The Biden administration had urged the justices to stay away from the issue, writing in the Harvard case that the challenges “cannot justify that extraordinary step” of overruling the 2003 decision.

Harvard President Lawrence Bacow said the Ivy League institution does not discriminate and vowed to continue defending its admissions plan. “Considering race as one factor among many in admissions decisions produces a more diverse student body which strengthens the learning environment for all,” Bacow said in a statement.

Blum voiced hope that the high court will order an end to taking account of race in college admissions. “Harvard and the University of North Carolina have racially gerrymandered their freshman classes in order to achieve prescribed racial quotas,” Blum said in a statement.

The Supreme Court has weighed in on college admissions several times over more than 40 years. The current dispute harks back to its first big affirmative action case in 1978, when Justice Lewis Powell set out the rationale for taking account of race even as the court barred the use of racial quotas in admissions.

In the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Powell approvingly cited Harvard as “an illuminating example” of a college that takes “race into account in achieving the educational diversity valued by the First Amendment.”

Twenty-five years later, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor likewise invoked the Harvard plan in her opinion in the Michigan law school case.

Now the Harvard program is under fire from opponents of race-based affirmative action.

Students for Fair Admissions claims that Harvard imposes a “racial penalty” on Asian American applicants by systematically scoring them lower in some categories than other applicants and awarding “massive preferences” to Black and Hispanic applicants.

Harvard flatly denies that it discriminates against Asian American applicants and says its consideration of race is limited, pointing out that lower courts agreed with the university.

In 2020, the federal appeals court in Boston ruled that Harvard looked at race in a limited way in line with Supreme Court precedents.

Harvard’s freshman class is roughly one-quarter Asian American, 16% Black and 13% Hispanic, Harvard says on its website. “If Harvard were to abandon race-conscious admissions, African-American and Hispanic representation would decline by nearly half,” the school told the court in urging it to stay out of the case.

NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund director Sherrilyn Ifill said that the court’s decision to get involved in the issue was a threat to the country’s ideals of equality. In addition to creating diverse student bodies that allow students to learn from each others’ experiences, Ifill said, affirmative action programs address systemic barriers Black students and students of color face in higher education.

“The Court’s decision today comes amidst the backdrop of widespread efforts to erase and deny the experiences of people of color,” Ifill said in a statement. “As our country experiences a resurgence of white supremacy, it is as important now as ever before that our future leaders be educated in a learning environment that exposes them to the rich diversity that our country has to offer, so they may be fully prepared for the many challenges ahead.”

The Trump administration had backed Blum’s case against Harvard and filed its own lawsuit alleging discrimination against Asian American and white people at Yale University. The Biden administration dropped the Yale suit.

North Carolina’s flagship public university prevailed in a federal district court in October. U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs ruled that the school’s program was intended to produce a diverse student body and had shown the benefits of doing so.

The court accepted the North Carolina case for review even though it has not been heard by a federal appeals court. Blum filed a Supreme Court appeal with the hope that it would be bundled with the Harvard case so that the justices could rule on public and private colleges at the same time.

Beth Keith, Associate Vice Chancellor for University Communications at UNC-Chapel Hill, said in a statement that Biggs correctly ruled in favor of the school’s admissions process, which “allows for an evaluation of each student in a deliberate and thoughtful way.”

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hanimmal said:

View attachment 5073579


Just in time for the far-right controlled SCOTUS to 'hear' a case on the destruction of minority outreach in universities.

https://apnews.com/article/college-admissions-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-religion-affirmative-action-5fd79b529db78daee370de22ae17909f
View attachment 5073581

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A Trump-loving couple best known for painting over a Black Lives Matter mural is facing new felony charges for allegedly burglarizing a dead man's home.

David Nelson, 54, and Nicole Anderson, 43, made national headlines after they were caught on video defacing the Black Lives Matter mural in Martinez, California, on July 4, 2020. Fox News host Tucker Carlson even called the couple "brave" and said the prosecutor who later charged them with a hate crime should be impeached.

Nelson and Anderson are slated for trial later this year on the charges stemming from defacing the mural. But in the meantime, they've had another run-in with the law.

Nelson and Anderson were each charged Jan. 12 with second-degree burglary, a felony. In addition, Nelson was charged with two counts of possessing methamphetamine for sale.

"Prosecutors allege that Nelson and Anderson broke into the home of a recently-deceased man," the Mercury News reported Wednesday. "Authorities say the sheriff was receiving regular calls in December from residents complaining that cars were parking there at irregular hours. On Dec. 4, two cars later linked to Nelson and Anderson were seen outside, according to authorities. The following day, a deputy pulled over Nelson near the area, searched his vehicle, and allegedly found property from the home, as well as approximately 80 grams of methamphetamine."

Police later served a search warrant at the couple's home and found more of the deceased man's property, as well as an additional 120 grams of meth, the newspaper reported.

The mural incident in 2020 sparked protests and counterprotests, with the couple's attorney calling the charges against them outrageous and politically motivated. In video of the incident, Nelson could be seen wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat and a "Four More Years" T-shirt.

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