GOP: In Favor of Running over Leftwing Protestors

As you know, a Nazi killed a protester named Heather Heyer and injured many others. What you may or may not know is that over the last year, many different state GOP lawmakers have been proposing decriminalizing running over protesters. Here's a thread.

In North Carolina, the GOP voted to protect drivers who run over protesters. #HeatherHeyer @NCGOP https://t.co/HGxRRCzGf2

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) August 14, 2017

In response to BLM, Standing Rock, and anti-Trump protests, the GOP has been trying to criminalize protest and decriminalize violent acts against protesters. The murder of Heather Heyer is the direct result of these actions. The GOP should renounce these efforts.

The GOP Theocracy: Xmas vs Hanukkah Statements.

The RNC puts out messages on holidays. Here’s the text for Hanukkah:

“As our Jewish friends and family around the country gather to light the first candle, we hope they will enjoy a special time of closeness and joy this Hanukkah season. These eight nights serve as a reminder of how the Maccabees never gave up hope amidst danger and uncertainty, and each year the Festival of Lights is a time to reflect on the power of faith and perseverance. We wish a Happy Hanukkah to all who are gathering around the menorah, and pray this year’s festivities will be a time of celebration and blessings for our Jewish communities.”

And here’s part of that they say for Christmas:

“Merry Christmas to all! Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind. Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King. We hope Americans celebrating Christmas today will enjoy a day of festivities and a renewed closeness with family and friends.

Some people have read the “this Christmas … a new king” as referring to Trump. That’s not how I read it, but I understand why others do. Still, it's not an uncommon way of writing in that circle. Just as every Easter, “He is risen,” the present tense reflects a fairly standard American Evangelical phrasing that has now extended to anglophone Christianity everywhere.

It’s still a revealing statement.

• Notice the “As our Jewish friends” vs “We.”
• Notice the simple statement of theological belief as fact for the Christian statement.

I want you to imagine for a moment, as hard as it is, that a major USA political party put out a statement just casually affirming the belief that the Jews, and only the Jews, are God’s chosen people? Even harder, imagine a statement affirming that Muhammad, peace be upon him, is the last true prophet of God. That’s the equivalent here — a basic presumption that everyone believes in Christian theology and there’s no reason not to affirm that in a political party’s messaging.

We should realize, once more, that the GOP believes only Christians are real Americans, that it represents the wishes only of Christians, that it wishes to make Christianity even more dominant (legally dominant, rather than merely culturally dominant), and is complicit in the outpouring of hate against non-Christians.

The message of most Jewish holidays is often jokingly summarized as: They tried to kill us, but they didn’t kill (all of) us. Let’s eat. The roast is in the oven. Remember to #Resist.

Getting Refugee Crises Wrong - An American Tradition

The Twitter account @HistOpinion (Curated by historian Peter Schulman), has been posting historical poll data about the refugee crisis of the 1930s. Some examples:

US Apr ’39: If in Congress, would you support a bill to open US to larger number of European refugees? By Religion. pic.twitter.com/pWsqyRXZoW

— Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) November 17, 2015

US Dec 12 ’38: College students: Should the US offer haven in this country for Jewish refugees from Central Europe? pic.twitter.com/KD0c53mKhn

— Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) November 16, 2015

Here's the source for that college student poll:

@mrdancohen Sure-This is the _Daily Northwestern_, 12/13/38, p 3. No idea abt other polls group may have conducted pic.twitter.com/2dDXGb0NvT

— Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) November 17, 2015

One could, of course, make the argument that people are SCARED of the Syrians, whereas they just hated the Jews. They didn't see the Jews as threats.

But that ignores that since late-19th cen, many indeed viewed Jews as threat: as socialists, communists, anarchists, labor agitators & worse

— Peter A. Shulman (@pashulman) November 17, 2015

As I said after 9/11, as violence against brown people with head coverings (Muslims, Sikhs, etc.) raged - America always gets these moments wrong. We had plenty of anti-German panic during the World Wars too. Before that, it was Catholics and Chinese. We all know (I hope) about Japanese internment camps.

Large swathes of America are always ready to turn to nativism and hate as core elements of our foreign policy, even as we slap flag decals on our car and chant about freedom and liberty

So here's Ted Cruz, although I could link to any of the GOP presidential candidates and most of the GOP governors for comparably terrible examples (via the New Yorker's Amy Davidson)

President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s idea that we should bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to America—it is nothing less than lunacy,” Ted Cruz said on Fox News, the day after the attacks on Paris. If there are Syrian Muslims who are really being persecuted, he said, they should be sent to “majority-Muslim countries.” Then he reset his eyebrows, which had been angled in a peak of concern, as if he had something pious to say. And he did: “On the other hand,” he added, “Christians who are being targeted for genocide, for persecution, Christians who are being beheaded or crucified, we should be providing safe haven to them. But President Obama refuses to do that.”

The next day, at a middle school in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Cruz spoke even more openly about those whom he considers to be the good people in the world. He told reporters that we should accept Christians from Syria, and only Christians, because “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror.” This will come as a profound surprise to the people of Oklahoma City and Charleston, to all parties in Ireland, and to the families of the teen-agers whom Anders Breivik killed in Norway, among many others. The Washington Post noted that Cruz “did not say how he would determine that refugees were Christian or Muslim.” Would he accept baptismal certificates, or notes from pastors? Does he just want to hear the refugees pray?

Racism. Nativism. Fearmongering. These are American traditions as much as, or more than, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Former First Lady of Virginia: Disabled people can enter through the basement.

Roxane Gilmore, former first lady of Virginia, believes that disabled people should enter the governor's mansion through the basement, for "aesthetic" reasons.

A plan to build a wheelchair ramp at the Virginia Executive Mansion is turning into a tussle between old and new Richmond, with Gov. Terry McAuliffe saying the alteration will create a more dignified entrance for disabled guests and a former first lady raising alarm that the ramp needlessly threatens the historic character of the 200-year-old mansion.

The governor and first lady Dorothy McAuliffe announced the ramp project last month, calling it an improvement on the mansion’s existing method of wheelchair access: an elevator from the basement.

In response, Roxane Gilmore, the wife of former governor and current Republican presidential candidate Jim Gilmore, has circulated a letter among historic preservationists in which she characterizes the ramp as unnecessarily intrusive on the nation’s oldest continuously occupied governor’s residence. Several docents, the guides who lead mansion tours, were taken aback when the ramp plan was announced.

“A lot of us are Richmond natives,” said Betty Markham, a docent for 25 years who, like many of the guides, is a retired teacher affiliated with a women’s club. “And we just don’t want to see it defaced.”

For Markham, accessibility is "defaced." Meanwhile, Gilmore believes that an elevator from the basement is equal access. I was also struck by this further quote from Markham:

“We just don’t understand the need for it. It’s just a real unattractive thing for the mansion,” said Markham. “You don’t see this at Mount Vernon, the White House, Williamsburg. You don’t see this at other historical places.”

Maybe you should? You do at the White House. What if Virginia has a disabled governor some day, would they have to enter their house from the basement? Undoubtedly, that possibility has never occurred to Gilmore or Markham.

As Gilmore herself says, "It belongs to the people of the commonwealth.” If that's true, than all the people of the commonwealth deserve equal access.

Principle 1: Equality is more important than aesthetics and sight lines.
Principle 2: Someday, inaccessible buildings will both strange and antiquated.
Principle 3: Ramps can be beautiful, sweeping, architectural features. They always make me smile.

The Liberal Arts, Carly Fiorina, and the Middle Ages

Bruce Holsinger is a medieval literary scholar, a novelist, a public intellectual, and a friend. Here's my review of his novels, political thrillers set in medieval London, with John Gower as the protagonist. You should read them.

Holsinger has a piece in the New York Times today on Fiorina, extending the conversation about her regular invocation of her medieval studies B.A. (for my take, you can read here). Holsinger writes:

How could medieval studies prepare a president for the global struggle against Islamist fundamentalism? Well, Mrs. Fiorina explained, “What ISIS wants to do is drive us back to the Middle Ages, literally.”
And did she mean literally. “Every single one of the techniques that ISIS is using,” she elaborated, “the crucifixions, the beheadings, the burning alive, those were commonly used techniques in the Middle Ages.” She added, “ISIS wants to take its territory back to the Middle Ages.”
Sounds familiar. Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, American political discourse was flooded with this kind of language. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld spoke of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s “medieval vision of the future.” The writer Christopher Hitchens warned of the Taliban’s program of “medieval stultification.” Osama bin Laden himself mastered this medievalist idiom, invoking the Crusades time and again in his polemics against the West.
Mrs. Fiorina’s resort to this sort of garden-variety medievalism represents a failure of historical imagination on at least three levels.

One - ISIS is very, very, modern.

Two - By claiming that non-state actors aren't modern nations, we can torture them and otherwise be as savage as we like.

Three, and here Holsinger makes a point I tried to hint at, but didn't really nail in my own piece, Fiorina has been an eloquent defender of the vitality of the humanities, something so critical in an era with Republicans (and neoliberal Democrats) have so gleefully attacked in recent years.

This came across most clearly in Mrs. Fiorina’s address to the Stanford University class of 2001. The most valuable course she took at Stanford, she told the graduates, wasn’t economics or politics, but a seminar called “Christian, Islamic and Jewish Political Philosophies of the Middle Ages.”
Each week, she explained, students had to distill what they’d read into a mere two pages: “The rigor of the distillation process, the exercise of refinement, that’s where the real learning happened. It was an incredible, heady skill to master. Through the years, I’ve used it again and again — the mental exercise of synthesis and distillation and getting to the very heart of things.”
Rarely has the value of humanistic education been defended so eloquently.

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio is snarking about the uselessness of Greek Philosophy. He, of course, studied Political Science in college, a discipline that traces its roots directly back to people like Thucydides and Aristotle.

Bruce Rauner and the Destruction of Illinois History

Say goodbye to the Illinois History Museum. Bruce Rauner has pulled the plug.

There's something populist about museums like this. They tend to be free or cheap, they serve school kids from across the state, and they make our history accessible and interesting.

Naturally, Billionaire Bruce isn't going to permit that sort of thing to continue.