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The Republican party, and the U.S. media, have been exercised recently
about critical race theory. The Republicans see it as a dire Marxist
threat to children, who are supposedly being indoctrinated in CRT in the
public schools. It’s nothing of the sort, of course, but it’s a useful
tool to help the Republicans conduct what you might call “artisanal
secession” — the careful, step-by-step separation of Republican states
from a federal state run by anyone but themselves.


Let’s deal with CRT first. It’s an academic approach to American law and history intended to study ingrained racism in U.S. laws and institutions.
It’s been around since the 1970s, the domain of a small number of
scholars, and it’s rarely if ever taught outside post-secondary.

CRT has gained attention in the last few years, largely because of
heightened public awareness of police violence against Black people. The ability of most cops to escape punishment for murder has seemed
increasingly unjust, and CRT does help to explain how laws and courts
favour the police over their mostly non-white victims.

Admittedly, you don’t need arcane legal analysis to demonstrate the racism
in American laws: it was wired in, right from the start, in Article 1 of
the constitution. The “three-fifths clause” gave the slaveholding states
extra clout in Congress by pretending that five enslaved persons, with no
vote, would be counted as three free persons for purposes of
representation. So southern whites’ votes counted for more than northern whites’ did.

And it’s hard to see the U.S. Supreme Court as sublimely neutral and even- handed when the first great chief justice, John Marshall, was a
slaveholder. The court consistently supported slavery, notably in the Dred Scott decision, which cited state and local laws since 1787 as grounds for denying citizenship even to native-born free Black Americans. With the exception of the Reconstruction years after the Civil War, American laws
and institutions remained openly and proudly racist through much of the
20th century.


Only since the 1950s have the Americans taken awkward and contested steps toward racial equality, but it was easy for white American liberals to
tell themselves that the U.S. was indeed making progress. It took the
Trump administration to show the liberals what BIPOC Americans had known
all along: that white-supremacist racism was alive and thriving in the
21st century.

The Republicans are now looking for a cause, not an academic debate, and
CRT is simply the tag for a non-existent threat. Yet Republican
legislators are introducing anti-CRT bills in state after state, without
even bothering to define it. As Alabama Republican Chris Pringle sees it,
“It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people
because of the colour of their skin, period.”

Similar, the anti-CRT bill introduced in the Texas legislature stipulates, among many other things, that:

“No teacher, administrator, or other employee in any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration shall require, or make part of a course the following concepts: (1) one
race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (2) an
individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist,
sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; (3) an
individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment
solely or partly because of his or her race or sex; (4) members of one
race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect
to race or sex; (5) an individual’s moral character is necessarily
determined by his or her race or sex; (6) an individual, by virtue of his
or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past
by other members of the same race or sex; (7) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or (8) meritocracy or traits such as a
hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a members of a particular race to oppress members of another race.”

Of course there is kind of legal gaslighting going on here. None of those assertions in the Texas bill are inherent to critical race theory, which
does not dwell on whose moral character is tied to race, or who should
feel personally guilty for acts they have not committed. Instead it
documents historical structures of oppression and how their effects are
evident in today’s inequalities.

Such bills are begging for court challenges, and if passed they will
likely be overturned — and then appealed, if need be all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court. The point is not to enshrine anti-CRT in law — the
point is to create an issue to keep the Republican base stirred up, while intimidating educators at all levels from primary to grad school.

Plenty of parents will support anti-CRT; an organization called No Left
Turn in Education says its mission is “To revive in American public
education the fundamental discipline of critical and active thinking which
is based on facts, investigation, logic and sound reasoning.” Its founder,
Dr. Elana Yaron Fishbein, says she was worried that her children’s public education “was becoming tainted with historical revisionism, political correctness, and the outright rejection of values which have long been at
the core of the American experience.”

Critical thinking would demand extensive definition and discussion of historical revisionism, political correctness and the values at the core
of the American experience. Dr. Fishbein doesn’t seem to want such
discussion.

Slow self-isolation

Education is just one area largely controlled by the states, and Republican-dominated states have been pushing for years to isolate
themselves from federal programs since at least the passage of Obamacare. Health is a notable example: Republican states have resisted Obamacare for
a decade, and just saw their latest challenge overturned by the U.S.
Supreme Court. No doubt they’ll keep trying.

The pandemic gave the states real incentive to isolate themselves from Washington, because Trump effectively offloaded the national response down
to them. He also made public health itself a political issue by turning
masks into anti-Trump statements; had he done the same for toilet paper,
the Americans might be dealing with a cholera pandemic as well.

And Republican states, taking their cue, offloaded public health onto individuals’ private decisions. Even counties that tried to implement
mandatory masking were sometimes overruled, with predictable increases in
case counts and mortalities.

A recent analysis showed that Republican states have less effective
vaccination programs, fewer graduates and less-safe schools, lower median incomes — but lower taxes, which of course explain the other outcomes.

Worse yet, almost 500 U.S. counties, mostly in states with Republican governments, had fewer than 25 per cent of their population fully
vaccinated by early June. Such counties will be reliable sources of fresh outbreaks through the summer, fall and winter, prolonging the stress on health-care systems across the nation (and on the Canadian Prairies, dangerously close to many American hot spots).

On top of all this, Republicans are very upset about election fraud, and Republican states have been taking measures to prevent it by making it
even harder to vote — especially for voters who are poor, non-white or Democrats. Such laws, plus skilled gerrymandering, can ensure that a
right-wing white minority can still hold on to power in many states.

The immediate political effect of the Republican states’ withdrawal from national life is obvious: to ensure that in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans regain control of the House and Senate. That will thwart Biden
and clear the way for Trump or someone like him to become president in
2024, whether or not that person wins a majority in the general vote or in
the Electoral College.

The Republicans are gaming a system they long ago ceased to respect, and
if they lose that game, they will still be well positioned to continue
their artisanal secession from the United States. Step by step,
methodically and even creatively, they will detach their own states from a federal state that demands a certain level of equality for all citizens.
In some states you will be able to vote, or afford health care, or have an abortion, or send your kids to a local university with a worldwide
reputation. In other states, you won’t.

As COVID-19 outbreaks continue in Republican states, other states will
close their borders, or at least require vaccination passports. Scholars
and health-care workers will migrate to more welcoming states (or
overseas), further weakening the economies and public health of Republican states.

Education and health care are famous for their ability to recruit mad
saints to work in no-hope schools and moribund hospitals. The Republican
states will coast for a while on those efforts, but not forever.

In 1861, the mass defection of the slave states from a Union that no
longer protected them triggered a violent civil war that took as many
American lives in four years as COVID-19 has taken in 18 months. The slave states lost that civil war but won the peace with the end of
Reconstruction and the resumption of white supremacy.

Now, as the slave states try to extend and entrench that supremacy, they
show themselves no more loyal to a federal government than they were in
1861: they will overthrow what they cannot rule.

But this time they will do it with new expertise and sophistication: no dramatic bombardments of federal forts, just the artisanal secessionism of
a voting law here, a school law there and the slow, steady dismantling of
a nation they cannot rule.

Artisanal secession

For a federal government representing the majority of Americans, artisanal secession will pose an agonizing dilemma: let the Republican states go,
even as their representatives and senators hamstring Congress? Or declare
a national emergency, suspend the constitution, and impose direct federal
rule on Republican states?
image atom
The US Continues Its 156-Year Civil War
read more




Even if the U.S. government did that, what would trigger the crisis? Could Washington rely on its armed forces to enforce such rule? Would police
forces maintain order even in cities run by Democrats, or go on strike? Or stage counter-coups against their municipal governments?

The real lesson in the hysteria whipped up by right-wing politicians and
the media over critical race theory is that in this slow-rolling civil
war, the new weapons are swords beaten from cultural frames. Any frame
will do as long as it can be caricatured as a conspiracy of some distant “elite” (which is to say the federal government, higher education and
media reporting on historical inequity producing today’s systemic racial injustice).

The rebels this time rally on the airwaves and social platforms of the
nation, inexorably enacting their digital revenge for Sherman’s March to
the Sea.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: alt.survival, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, can.politics
XPost: rec.arts.tv, alt.politics, alt.atheism
XPost: talk.politics.guns, alt.abortion, alt.global-warming
XPost: alt.journalism.criticism, alt.news-media, alt.checkmate

The Republican party, and the U.S. media, have been exercised recently
about critical race theory. The Republicans see it as a dire Marxist
threat to children, who are supposedly being indoctrinated in CRT in the
public schools. It’s nothing of the sort, of course, but it’s a useful
tool to help the Republicans conduct what you might call “artisanal
secession” — the careful, step-by-step separation of Republican states
from a federal state run by anyone but themselves.


Let’s deal with CRT first. It’s an academic approach to American law and history intended to study ingrained racism in U.S. laws and institutions.
It’s been around since the 1970s, the domain of a small number of
scholars, and it’s rarely if ever taught outside post-secondary.

CRT has gained attention in the last few years, largely because of
heightened public awareness of police violence against Black people. The ability of most cops to escape punishment for murder has seemed
increasingly unjust, and CRT does help to explain how laws and courts
favour the police over their mostly non-white victims.

Admittedly, you don’t need arcane legal analysis to demonstrate the racism
in American laws: it was wired in, right from the start, in Article 1 of
the constitution. The “three-fifths clause” gave the slaveholding states
extra clout in Congress by pretending that five enslaved persons, with no
vote, would be counted as three free persons for purposes of
representation. So southern whites’ votes counted for more than northern whites’ did.

And it’s hard to see the U.S. Supreme Court as sublimely neutral and even- handed when the first great chief justice, John Marshall, was a
slaveholder. The court consistently supported slavery, notably in the Dred Scott decision, which cited state and local laws since 1787 as grounds for denying citizenship even to native-born free Black Americans. With the exception of the Reconstruction years after the Civil War, American laws
and institutions remained openly and proudly racist through much of the
20th century.


Only since the 1950s have the Americans taken awkward and contested steps toward racial equality, but it was easy for white American liberals to
tell themselves that the U.S. was indeed making progress. It took the
Trump administration to show the liberals what BIPOC Americans had known
all along: that white-supremacist racism was alive and thriving in the
21st century.

The Republicans are now looking for a cause, not an academic debate, and
CRT is simply the tag for a non-existent threat. Yet Republican
legislators are introducing anti-CRT bills in state after state, without
even bothering to define it. As Alabama Republican Chris Pringle sees it,
“It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people
because of the colour of their skin, period.”

Similar, the anti-CRT bill introduced in the Texas legislature stipulates, among many other things, that:

“No teacher, administrator, or other employee in any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration shall require, or make part of a course the following concepts: (1) one
race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (2) an
individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist,
sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; (3) an
individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment
solely or partly because of his or her race or sex; (4) members of one
race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect
to race or sex; (5) an individual’s moral character is necessarily
determined by his or her race or sex; (6) an individual, by virtue of his
or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past
by other members of the same race or sex; (7) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or (8) meritocracy or traits such as a
hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a members of a particular race to oppress members of another race.”

Of course there is kind of legal gaslighting going on here. None of those assertions in the Texas bill are inherent to critical race theory, which
does not dwell on whose moral character is tied to race, or who should
feel personally guilty for acts they have not committed. Instead it
documents historical structures of oppression and how their effects are
evident in today’s inequalities.

Such bills are begging for court challenges, and if passed they will
likely be overturned — and then appealed, if need be all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court. The point is not to enshrine anti-CRT in law — the
point is to create an issue to keep the Republican base stirred up, while intimidating educators at all levels from primary to grad school.

Plenty of parents will support anti-CRT; an organization called No Left
Turn in Education says its mission is “To revive in American public
education the fundamental discipline of critical and active thinking which
is based on facts, investigation, logic and sound reasoning.” Its founder,
Dr. Elana Yaron Fishbein, says she was worried that her children’s public education “was becoming tainted with historical revisionism, political correctness, and the outright rejection of values which have long been at
the core of the American experience.”

Critical thinking would demand extensive definition and discussion of historical revisionism, political correctness and the values at the core
of the American experience. Dr. Fishbein doesn’t seem to want such
discussion.

Slow self-isolation

Education is just one area largely controlled by the states, and Republican-dominated states have been pushing for years to isolate
themselves from federal programs since at least the passage of Obamacare. Health is a notable example: Republican states have resisted Obamacare for
a decade, and just saw their latest challenge overturned by the U.S.
Supreme Court. No doubt they’ll keep trying.

The pandemic gave the states real incentive to isolate themselves from Washington, because Trump effectively offloaded the national response down
to them. He also made public health itself a political issue by turning
masks into anti-Trump statements; had he done the same for toilet paper,
the Americans might be dealing with a cholera pandemic as well.

And Republican states, taking their cue, offloaded public health onto individuals’ private decisions. Even counties that tried to implement
mandatory masking were sometimes overruled, with predictable increases in
case counts and mortalities.

A recent analysis showed that Republican states have less effective
vaccination programs, fewer graduates and less-safe schools, lower median incomes — but lower taxes, which of course explain the other outcomes.

Worse yet, almost 500 U.S. counties, mostly in states with Republican governments, had fewer than 25 per cent of their population fully
vaccinated by early June. Such counties will be reliable sources of fresh outbreaks through the summer, fall and winter, prolonging the stress on health-care systems across the nation (and on the Canadian Prairies, dangerously close to many American hot spots).

On top of all this, Republicans are very upset about election fraud, and Republican states have been taking measures to prevent it by making it
even harder to vote — especially for voters who are poor, non-white or Democrats. Such laws, plus skilled gerrymandering, can ensure that a
right-wing white minority can still hold on to power in many states.

The immediate political effect of the Republican states’ withdrawal from national life is obvious: to ensure that in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans regain control of the House and Senate. That will thwart Biden
and clear the way for Trump or someone like him to become president in
2024, whether or not that person wins a majority in the general vote or in
the Electoral College.

The Republicans are gaming a system they long ago ceased to respect, and
if they lose that game, they will still be well positioned to continue
their artisanal secession from the United States. Step by step,
methodically and even creatively, they will detach their own states from a federal state that demands a certain level of equality for all citizens.
In some states you will be able to vote, or afford health care, or have an abortion, or send your kids to a local university with a worldwide
reputation. In other states, you won’t.

As COVID-19 outbreaks continue in Republican states, other states will
close their borders, or at least require vaccination passports. Scholars
and health-care workers will migrate to more welcoming states (or
overseas), further weakening the economies and public health of Republican states.

Education and health care are famous for their ability to recruit mad
saints to work in no-hope schools and moribund hospitals. The Republican
states will coast for a while on those efforts, but not forever.

In 1861, the mass defection of the slave states from a Union that no
longer protected them triggered a violent civil war that took as many
American lives in four years as COVID-19 has taken in 18 months. The slave states lost that civil war but won the peace with the end of
Reconstruction and the resumption of white supremacy.

Now, as the slave states try to extend and entrench that supremacy, they
show themselves no more loyal to a federal government than they were in
1861: they will overthrow what they cannot rule.

But this time they will do it with new expertise and sophistication: no dramatic bombardments of federal forts, just the artisanal secessionism of
a voting law here, a school law there and the slow, steady dismantling of
a nation they cannot rule.

Artisanal secession

For a federal government representing the majority of Americans, artisanal secession will pose an agonizing dilemma: let the Republican states go,
even as their representatives and senators hamstring Congress? Or declare
a national emergency, suspend the constitution, and impose direct federal
rule on Republican states?
image atom
The US Continues Its 156-Year Civil War
read more




Even if the U.S. government did that, what would trigger the crisis? Could Washington rely on its armed forces to enforce such rule? Would police
forces maintain order even in cities run by Democrats, or go on strike? Or stage counter-coups against their municipal governments?

The real lesson in the hysteria whipped up by right-wing politicians and
the media over critical race theory is that in this slow-rolling civil
war, the new weapons are swords beaten from cultural frames. Any frame
will do as long as it can be caricatured as a conspiracy of some distant “elite” (which is to say the federal government, higher education and
media reporting on historical inequity producing today’s systemic racial injustice).

The rebels this time rally on the airwaves and social platforms of the
nation, inexorably enacting their digital revenge for Sherman’s March to
the Sea.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: alt.survival, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, can.politics
XPost: rec.arts.tv, alt.politics, alt.atheism
XPost: talk.politics.guns, alt.abortion, alt.global-warming
XPost: alt.journalism.criticism, alt.news-media, alt.checkmate

The Republican party, and the U.S. media, have been exercised recently
about critical race theory. The Republicans see it as a dire Marxist
threat to children, who are supposedly being indoctrinated in CRT in the
public schools. It’s nothing of the sort, of course, but it’s a useful
tool to help the Republicans conduct what you might call “artisanal
secession” — the careful, step-by-step separation of Republican states
from a federal state run by anyone but themselves.


Let’s deal with CRT first. It’s an academic approach to American law and history intended to study ingrained racism in U.S. laws and institutions.
It’s been around since the 1970s, the domain of a small number of
scholars, and it’s rarely if ever taught outside post-secondary.

CRT has gained attention in the last few years, largely because of
heightened public awareness of police violence against Black people. The ability of most cops to escape punishment for murder has seemed
increasingly unjust, and CRT does help to explain how laws and courts
favour the police over their mostly non-white victims.

Admittedly, you don’t need arcane legal analysis to demonstrate the racism
in American laws: it was wired in, right from the start, in Article 1 of
the constitution. The “three-fifths clause” gave the slaveholding states
extra clout in Congress by pretending that five enslaved persons, with no
vote, would be counted as three free persons for purposes of
representation. So southern whites’ votes counted for more than northern whites’ did.

And it’s hard to see the U.S. Supreme Court as sublimely neutral and even- handed when the first great chief justice, John Marshall, was a
slaveholder. The court consistently supported slavery, notably in the Dred Scott decision, which cited state and local laws since 1787 as grounds for denying citizenship even to native-born free Black Americans. With the exception of the Reconstruction years after the Civil War, American laws
and institutions remained openly and proudly racist through much of the
20th century.


Only since the 1950s have the Americans taken awkward and contested steps toward racial equality, but it was easy for white American liberals to
tell themselves that the U.S. was indeed making progress. It took the
Trump administration to show the liberals what BIPOC Americans had known
all along: that white-supremacist racism was alive and thriving in the
21st century.

The Republicans are now looking for a cause, not an academic debate, and
CRT is simply the tag for a non-existent threat. Yet Republican
legislators are introducing anti-CRT bills in state after state, without
even bothering to define it. As Alabama Republican Chris Pringle sees it,
“It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people
because of the colour of their skin, period.”

Similar, the anti-CRT bill introduced in the Texas legislature stipulates, among many other things, that:

“No teacher, administrator, or other employee in any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration shall require, or make part of a course the following concepts: (1) one
race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (2) an
individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist,
sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; (3) an
individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment
solely or partly because of his or her race or sex; (4) members of one
race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect
to race or sex; (5) an individual’s moral character is necessarily
determined by his or her race or sex; (6) an individual, by virtue of his
or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past
by other members of the same race or sex; (7) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or (8) meritocracy or traits such as a
hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a members of a particular race to oppress members of another race.”

Of course there is kind of legal gaslighting going on here. None of those assertions in the Texas bill are inherent to critical race theory, which
does not dwell on whose moral character is tied to race, or who should
feel personally guilty for acts they have not committed. Instead it
documents historical structures of oppression and how their effects are
evident in today’s inequalities.

Such bills are begging for court challenges, and if passed they will
likely be overturned — and then appealed, if need be all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court. The point is not to enshrine anti-CRT in law — the
point is to create an issue to keep the Republican base stirred up, while intimidating educators at all levels from primary to grad school.

Plenty of parents will support anti-CRT; an organization called No Left
Turn in Education says its mission is “To revive in American public
education the fundamental discipline of critical and active thinking which
is based on facts, investigation, logic and sound reasoning.” Its founder,
Dr. Elana Yaron Fishbein, says she was worried that her children’s public education “was becoming tainted with historical revisionism, political correctness, and the outright rejection of values which have long been at
the core of the American experience.”

Critical thinking would demand extensive definition and discussion of historical revisionism, political correctness and the values at the core
of the American experience. Dr. Fishbein doesn’t seem to want such
discussion.

Slow self-isolation

Education is just one area largely controlled by the states, and Republican-dominated states have been pushing for years to isolate
themselves from federal programs since at least the passage of Obamacare. Health is a notable example: Republican states have resisted Obamacare for
a decade, and just saw their latest challenge overturned by the U.S.
Supreme Court. No doubt they’ll keep trying.

The pandemic gave the states real incentive to isolate themselves from Washington, because Trump effectively offloaded the national response down
to them. He also made public health itself a political issue by turning
masks into anti-Trump statements; had he done the same for toilet paper,
the Americans might be dealing with a cholera pandemic as well.

And Republican states, taking their cue, offloaded public health onto individuals’ private decisions. Even counties that tried to implement
mandatory masking were sometimes overruled, with predictable increases in
case counts and mortalities.

A recent analysis showed that Republican states have less effective
vaccination programs, fewer graduates and less-safe schools, lower median incomes — but lower taxes, which of course explain the other outcomes.

Worse yet, almost 500 U.S. counties, mostly in states with Republican governments, had fewer than 25 per cent of their population fully
vaccinated by early June. Such counties will be reliable sources of fresh outbreaks through the summer, fall and winter, prolonging the stress on health-care systems across the nation (and on the Canadian Prairies, dangerously close to many American hot spots).

On top of all this, Republicans are very upset about election fraud, and Republican states have been taking measures to prevent it by making it
even harder to vote — especially for voters who are poor, non-white or Democrats. Such laws, plus skilled gerrymandering, can ensure that a
right-wing white minority can still hold on to power in many states.

The immediate political effect of the Republican states’ withdrawal from national life is obvious: to ensure that in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans regain control of the House and Senate. That will thwart Biden
and clear the way for Trump or someone like him to become president in
2024, whether or not that person wins a majority in the general vote or in
the Electoral College.

The Republicans are gaming a system they long ago ceased to respect, and
if they lose that game, they will still be well positioned to continue
their artisanal secession from the United States. Step by step,
methodically and even creatively, they will detach their own states from a federal state that demands a certain level of equality for all citizens.
In some states you will be able to vote, or afford health care, or have an abortion, or send your kids to a local university with a worldwide
reputation. In other states, you won’t.

As COVID-19 outbreaks continue in Republican states, other states will
close their borders, or at least require vaccination passports. Scholars
and health-care workers will migrate to more welcoming states (or
overseas), further weakening the economies and public health of Republican states.

Education and health care are famous for their ability to recruit mad
saints to work in no-hope schools and moribund hospitals. The Republican
states will coast for a while on those efforts, but not forever.

In 1861, the mass defection of the slave states from a Union that no
longer protected them triggered a violent civil war that took as many
American lives in four years as COVID-19 has taken in 18 months. The slave states lost that civil war but won the peace with the end of
Reconstruction and the resumption of white supremacy.

Now, as the slave states try to extend and entrench that supremacy, they
show themselves no more loyal to a federal government than they were in
1861: they will overthrow what they cannot rule.

But this time they will do it with new expertise and sophistication: no dramatic bombardments of federal forts, just the artisanal secessionism of
a voting law here, a school law there and the slow, steady dismantling of
a nation they cannot rule.

Artisanal secession

For a federal government representing the majority of Americans, artisanal secession will pose an agonizing dilemma: let the Republican states go,
even as their representatives and senators hamstring Congress? Or declare
a national emergency, suspend the constitution, and impose direct federal
rule on Republican states?
image atom
The US Continues Its 156-Year Civil War
read more




Even if the U.S. government did that, what would trigger the crisis? Could Washington rely on its armed forces to enforce such rule? Would police
forces maintain order even in cities run by Democrats, or go on strike? Or stage counter-coups against their municipal governments?

The real lesson in the hysteria whipped up by right-wing politicians and
the media over critical race theory is that in this slow-rolling civil
war, the new weapons are swords beaten from cultural frames. Any frame
will do as long as it can be caricatured as a conspiracy of some distant “elite” (which is to say the federal government, higher education and
media reporting on historical inequity producing today’s systemic racial injustice).

The rebels this time rally on the airwaves and social platforms of the
nation, inexorably enacting their digital revenge for Sherman’s March to
the Sea.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)