Nicely played. I would go one step further and say that the unchecked brutality and militarism of our police force, which in itself is fascist, serves as inspiration for domestic terror groups, and that many of these agencies serve as domestic terror groups to marginalized populations (the Democrat's favorite ICE comes to mind).
Thom, I hope you're watching. Please, please, please, stop using the softening descriptor Neo-nazi. They are not neo-anythings. They are Nazis. Period.
Prof Ruth ben-ghiat prefers "authoritarian" to "fascust," but pulitzer prize winners like chris hedges have long embraced "fascism." But hedges also has the highest regard for sheldon wolin and his concept of america (over previous decades) as a system if "inverted totalitarianism."
Pardon my lack of credentials (Pulitzer, etc.), but by the time one gets to the fourth syllable of that polysyllabic monstrosity, "inverted totalitarianism," attention span is exhausted.
This is a real-life battle for hearts and minds, not a learned disputation.
Huh? Was just discussing the terminology here - terminology is a frequent topic among those who write on the subject. Innocuous and i throw no flames and dont deserve any from you buddy.
Some news from Boeing hit the wire today but without the fanfare of Google, Microsoft, etc. layoff announcements: 2,000 'white collar' jobs being outsourced to India.
Huh. Permanent outsourcing to systematically eliminate good paying US jobs is alive and well. Boeing is massively subsidized by the US government so requirements to hire in US would be trivial. We all know that exporting manufacturing is one of the major causes of the loss of the middle class in the 70s and 80s. I am also aware that the current 'job shortage' is being used by lobbyists to resurrect the massive H1 visa programs used to export high tech jobs so effectively during the last 20 years.
So far, I see no media articles that this is bad for the country.
What is worrisome to me is that the law enforcement agents or agencies are on the side of the right, as to be expected as they are by nature and instinct conservative. The FBI sat back and despite the information of the growing threat on the right, has focused it's efforts on the left, and for all we know still prioritizes the left and ignores the right.
Then there is DOD, J6 evidence of their complicity is ignored. Gen Charles Flynn (Micheal Flynn's treasonous brother) manned the desk at the Pentagon when phone calls were flooding in asking for the NG, and he ignored the calls, he was punished by Biden by being promoted to 4 stars and given command of Pacific Forces. Pogo was right. I've seen the enemy and the enemy is us.
The officer ranks, especially the General ranks are full of Dominionists, Christian Reconstructionists, it started when the megachurches followed the Air Force Academy to Colorado Springs, and the ranks are dominated by young men and women from the south and midwest who have brought with them their racism. Oh they will obey orders, hesitantly, but what kiind of orders when the officer ranks are full of theocratic fascists. It is not the same military as it was when I retired in the 1980's.
Before the trump led Jan 6th attack on the Capitol, I believed that the corporate titans would stop the crazies from destroying our nation. With the overt ascendancy of crazed mega billionaires, not just Musk, these people have the financial power to fund militias with some very serious weapons! Combine this accumulation of fire power with compromised civilian leaders in the military chain of command, attacks in individual states can overwhelm the legitimate state government which can’t rely on a swift and effective deployment of the National Guard!
Damn Thom, even your typos are fantastic. Or maybe it was meant as is: "When more than half the country would be crippled by an unexpected $400 expense, you’re sitting on a power keg."
That's exactly what the result has been, a power-powder keg. This misuse of our system to enrich everyone, but the people doing all the work, could end-up exploding. I'd say it has at the very least backfired on them by way of the midterms.
These pockets of domestic terrorists have been around a long long time. Janet Napolitano took a lot of heat for pointing out their connection to former military members. They have their own cultural icons, music (horrible, violent by the way), and family events. They often rob places to raise funding. Whenever you see a very organized hit on a place, you can bet they are at the top of the list.
And oh there has been a LIST for a long long time too. The FBI and their state equivalents would take the lead on these traitors to our country, to civilization, and to humanity.
Merely a Fascistic Front for Big Money (all industries).
Also, the GOP plays fast and loose w/ the working poor's mental health.
Allowing Trump et al to spew their traitorous vomitus is like watching a cauliflower-tumor consume your face and head a tad more each morn, then popping a XANAX.
I agree with the gist of this piece, but while you allude to the core cause you mostly delineate the symptoms to make Republicans out to be the perpetrators. Both parties have contributed directly to the record wealth and income inequality we are experiencing, as well as to our decline in life expectancy over the past three years (starting prior to the pandemic), that is fomenting the unrest and rise of domestic terror. Republicans are the party of choas while Democrats are the party of austerity, their performative politics and milquetoast public policy garnering rave reviews from those steeped in binary thinking and rah rah relativism, neither of which has served us well as this piece indicates.
My greatest fear is the amount of support these traitors may have in the military. Hopefully not anywhere near the field grade level. Also, hopefully, the president and the top brass are working on ways to deal with the potential traitors.
If Biden was a uniter and not a divider and he had prosecuted about 206 GOP insurrectionist for sedition, I would be his biggest fan.
Biden could be using his bully pulpit too point out to the Trump dictator lovers what a dictatorship really is. He could tell them that the GOP would take their guns, make them slaves, starve them and their children, harvest their organs, dissect them in public restrooms, and feed them food and water and drugs, laced with toxic chemicals.
Biden could also put an end to cheap union busting immigrant labor like FDR would.
Thanks, very good summary here. Esp like the tristan harris quote - civil war for profit business model. Thats really what its all about, imho, that plus the complete ignorance about history, how we already did this and how we passed the 14th amendment which supreme vourt jurisprudence routinely ignores.
This is still part of the "unfinished work" a certain mr lincoln referred to one day in gettysburgh.
"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
This daily take ends with the statement that “America didn’t ask for a right-wing terror movement...” I am not so sure that we did not ask for it. We, as a people have been largely smug, self-satisfied, indifferent, oblivious to much that doesn’t impact us directly, willfully ignorant, and obsessed with our own specialness and self-interest.
The people who seriously want to pursue civil war can accurately be called insane or unhinged, if being irrational, volatile, paranoid, extreme, and self-destructive are insane. However, I believe that the real concern is the uncounted and somewhat invisible number of people at the margins who have been influenced by extreme and irrational ideas and those who are willing to entertain the thoughts, ideas, and rhetoric of fanatics and fearmongers. Once again, we are talking about the “followers,” the apathetic and cynical by-standers, and the fearful and faithful people who may become subject to the influence of a cult, often to the point of mobilization. We got mistrust in government and the blind acceptance of lies and conspiracy theories by neglecting to admit what was staring us in the face about the American people.
The analysis offered appears to be 100% true and accurate. Brown v. Board was a turning point and structural and unacknowledged racism was a national pastime. Reagan brought neoliberalism and doubled down on racism. Authoritarianism, plutocracy, and fascism were waiting in the wings. All the other factors ring true. Government-hating Libertarians and right-wingers want to destroy “public schooling” and the Department of Education. Inequality is off the charts.
However, as I have asked before, how do you destroy that which has already been destroyed? If you want to defend traditional schooling, how do you answer the more legitimate and liberal/progressive critic’s powerful condemnations of our sacred schools which preceded the Koch brothers by decades? No one can say that Dewey, Goodman, Holt, Postman & Weingartner, Kozol, Dennison, and dozens of others were trying to destroy public schooling or that they were anti-government, radical, or reactionary. I keep asking for a rational discussion and get only blank stares and smug silence.
After hearing a story about six weeks ago on December 15, 2022 on NPR, I did a little more digging. On the “Fuzzy Librarian” website/Newswire I discovered these sad stats. They cite that 23% of Americans, or 48 million adults, struggle to read or are semi-literate or illiterate. How does one defend those numbers and how are our schools not thereby indicted?
We truly are asking for civil war if we continue to alienate children from themselves, from each other, and from reality in authoritarian bureaucracies. If someone can defend unconstitutional compulsory attendance or traditional schooling (state schooling disguised as public schooling) I repeat my challenge. I believe they have an obligation to present arguments, facts, and empirical evidence which contradicts my claims. If the status quo is not defensible, then remaining silent and impotent is not defensible.
Friday, I wrote in effect that I strongly believe that establishing classes to teach elementary children ethics as a subject matter would be an absurdity, and in schools as they are currently operated under compulsory attendance laws, it would be counterproductive and futile. I implied that our schools do not and cannot foster or facilitate ethical conduct under the present paradigm. Another implication was that any curriculum to be widely imposed which has the fingerprints of officials and supposed experts on it, and which is designed to teach specifics relative to values and ideals is likewise, doomed to fail.
There is a well-known “hidden curriculum” in most of our schools as reported in the literature which affects everyone, and which many are at least vaguely aware of, which flies in the face of valid ethical practice and procedure. Much of what is declared in official school PR with regard to relationships of staff to students, with respect to realistic and achievable objectives, and relative to a glorious mission and history is more hopeful projection than real or realistic. When one takes a closer look without the rose-colored glasses, one almost invariably discovers a degree of deception and intimidation, and elements of ugly arbitrary authority under which both teachers and students regularly chafe.
Some things can be taught and some things must be learned. There is not always a clear distinction. Ethics may encompass certain identifiable behaviors or approaches. However, much more than skill or knowledge are involved in becoming ethical as a way of thinking, acting, and believing. The same applies to values, principles, and ideals. “Teaching” a strictly cognitive, logical, or theoretical understanding of ethics or values does not yield a high rate of emulation and practical results. These things must become second nature as thoroughly internalized models for application in novel or unpredictable situations. Better living through chemistry, so to speak.
What is actually being questioned here is the very concept of teaching. Jim Strickland, a teacher in the State of Washington reminded me last year that, “As the Buddhist saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” So, how do we reverse the direction we have taken in schools?
We seem to have that whole thing backwards. I believe we must start thinking about school and education in a radically different light and as two distinctly different enterprises. But before we move a muscle, we are wasting our time if we do not recognize that attempting to compel education, school, or anything else edifying and enlightening, is shooting ourselves in the foot and shooting our kids in the head.
Education IS change. The exchange of sterile impersonal information in a “curriculum” in the absence of a personal connection between teacher and learner and between learner and subject matter is not a process leading to a meaningful change. We are ALL here to learn. We are ALL here to change.
It just isn’t possible that someone with the phenomenal knowledge of history and insight into human behavior such as Thom doesn’t know all this intuitively or on some level. He may have spoken off the cuff and has likely decided that this is an area that is somehow self-correcting or for other people to be concerned about. Too many people are satisfied with the self-serving PR, self-congratulatory blather, and false promises for change of those in the school community.
Educators talk casually about curricula as if they are like Lego blocks that can be created and given to students to build structures which will fit together to form their education or some essential part of it. This is more absurd mythical mass-education madness (mass-mis-education madness). The Common Core Curriculum is something we should have expected to see in Communist China or Castro’s Cuba.
What is the latest brilliant innovation the academic wizards have created, you ask? They are changing from a STEM curriculum to a STEAM curriculum. They are adding arts back, which they removed a few decades ago. What genius!
When should a DeSantis or some other governor or state official control any school curriculum? Perhaps, for the school where the DeSantis kids are in attendance. Maybe, for the school he has personally started for a select group of students with private funds.
There is a fine line, it seems, between teaching civics and civility or teaching passivity, compliance, and the superiority of the establishment and its uber-capitalistic logic. Does it really make sense to rail against the powerful one-tenth-of-one-percent and to wax eloquent about their corruption, oppressive techniques, and political domination while defending the very institutions they have carefully constructed and imposed by law to pacify and dumb-down youth with bland and inert lowest-common-denominator curricula?
How incredibly bizarre is it that we are now, in 2023 – in the second decade of the 21st century - going to have Democratic governors fighting with Republican governors about what children can see and study in school and courts making the ultimate decisions about something which courts have no competence or expertise on which to make rulings. In a democracy!
An education or a school which is devoid of politics cannot rightly be called an education or a school. This is just one more reason attendance must be voluntary, the organization of schools should be democratic in a democracy, and curriculum should be designed by or approved by the people who interact locally with specific students on a relatively intimate basis and the parents. It all boils down to whether we believe and practice what we preach about democracy, or whether we apply it exclusively to those who use the academic edifice to weasel into positions of power. We can have our cake. Or we can eat it.
"Therefore, both federal, state, and local police agencies need to ramp up their surveillance and infiltration of these domestic terror groups."
The problem is that federal, state and local police agencies have a good number of members of these groups in their ranks.
Nicely played. I would go one step further and say that the unchecked brutality and militarism of our police force, which in itself is fascist, serves as inspiration for domestic terror groups, and that many of these agencies serve as domestic terror groups to marginalized populations (the Democrat's favorite ICE comes to mind).
beat me to it!
well done Michael.
Thom, I hope you're watching. Please, please, please, stop using the softening descriptor Neo-nazi. They are not neo-anythings. They are Nazis. Period.
I suggest Fascist. Primarily because it avoids the specific criticisms of overreach of a label associated with concentration camps and mass genocide.
yeah.
give 'em Time.
Prof Ruth ben-ghiat prefers "authoritarian" to "fascust," but pulitzer prize winners like chris hedges have long embraced "fascism." But hedges also has the highest regard for sheldon wolin and his concept of america (over previous decades) as a system if "inverted totalitarianism."
Pardon my lack of credentials (Pulitzer, etc.), but by the time one gets to the fourth syllable of that polysyllabic monstrosity, "inverted totalitarianism," attention span is exhausted.
This is a real-life battle for hearts and minds, not a learned disputation.
Perhaps Thom's show with Chris Hedges might help you cope with the "polysyllabic" terminology.
https://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2009/07/transcript-chris-hedges-empire-illusion-21-july-2009
Huh? Was just discussing the terminology here - terminology is a frequent topic among those who write on the subject. Innocuous and i throw no flames and dont deserve any from you buddy.
Thanks Thom another 'hit the bullseye' report.
Some news from Boeing hit the wire today but without the fanfare of Google, Microsoft, etc. layoff announcements: 2,000 'white collar' jobs being outsourced to India.
Huh. Permanent outsourcing to systematically eliminate good paying US jobs is alive and well. Boeing is massively subsidized by the US government so requirements to hire in US would be trivial. We all know that exporting manufacturing is one of the major causes of the loss of the middle class in the 70s and 80s. I am also aware that the current 'job shortage' is being used by lobbyists to resurrect the massive H1 visa programs used to export high tech jobs so effectively during the last 20 years.
So far, I see no media articles that this is bad for the country.
Brilliant synopsis of Today's America, Inc llc Thom. thank you.
.
"... federal, state, and local police agencies
need to ramp up their surveillance and
infiltration of these domestic
terror groups."
.
yes but we can likely Expect a
Significant Stockholm Syndrome reaction
from the Fascists already in those same agencies.
.
and whilst Pocket Nukes* IS an Intriguing Idea
I would NOT wanna be anywhere Near
the Massie (R) fambly when they're
having any Family Feud.
.
*betchya can't
Outrun one!
"Fascists already in those same agencies"
An extremely valid point, often omitted how infected these agencies already are.
What is worrisome to me is that the law enforcement agents or agencies are on the side of the right, as to be expected as they are by nature and instinct conservative. The FBI sat back and despite the information of the growing threat on the right, has focused it's efforts on the left, and for all we know still prioritizes the left and ignores the right.
Then there is DOD, J6 evidence of their complicity is ignored. Gen Charles Flynn (Micheal Flynn's treasonous brother) manned the desk at the Pentagon when phone calls were flooding in asking for the NG, and he ignored the calls, he was punished by Biden by being promoted to 4 stars and given command of Pacific Forces. Pogo was right. I've seen the enemy and the enemy is us.
The officer ranks, especially the General ranks are full of Dominionists, Christian Reconstructionists, it started when the megachurches followed the Air Force Academy to Colorado Springs, and the ranks are dominated by young men and women from the south and midwest who have brought with them their racism. Oh they will obey orders, hesitantly, but what kiind of orders when the officer ranks are full of theocratic fascists. It is not the same military as it was when I retired in the 1980's.
Before the trump led Jan 6th attack on the Capitol, I believed that the corporate titans would stop the crazies from destroying our nation. With the overt ascendancy of crazed mega billionaires, not just Musk, these people have the financial power to fund militias with some very serious weapons! Combine this accumulation of fire power with compromised civilian leaders in the military chain of command, attacks in individual states can overwhelm the legitimate state government which can’t rely on a swift and effective deployment of the National Guard!
Damn Thom, even your typos are fantastic. Or maybe it was meant as is: "When more than half the country would be crippled by an unexpected $400 expense, you’re sitting on a power keg."
That's exactly what the result has been, a power-powder keg. This misuse of our system to enrich everyone, but the people doing all the work, could end-up exploding. I'd say it has at the very least backfired on them by way of the midterms.
These pockets of domestic terrorists have been around a long long time. Janet Napolitano took a lot of heat for pointing out their connection to former military members. They have their own cultural icons, music (horrible, violent by the way), and family events. They often rob places to raise funding. Whenever you see a very organized hit on a place, you can bet they are at the top of the list.
And oh there has been a LIST for a long long time too. The FBI and their state equivalents would take the lead on these traitors to our country, to civilization, and to humanity.
What is the GOP?
Merely a Fascistic Front for Big Money (all industries).
Also, the GOP plays fast and loose w/ the working poor's mental health.
Allowing Trump et al to spew their traitorous vomitus is like watching a cauliflower-tumor consume your face and head a tad more each morn, then popping a XANAX.
I agree with the gist of this piece, but while you allude to the core cause you mostly delineate the symptoms to make Republicans out to be the perpetrators. Both parties have contributed directly to the record wealth and income inequality we are experiencing, as well as to our decline in life expectancy over the past three years (starting prior to the pandemic), that is fomenting the unrest and rise of domestic terror. Republicans are the party of choas while Democrats are the party of austerity, their performative politics and milquetoast public policy garnering rave reviews from those steeped in binary thinking and rah rah relativism, neither of which has served us well as this piece indicates.
My greatest fear is the amount of support these traitors may have in the military. Hopefully not anywhere near the field grade level. Also, hopefully, the president and the top brass are working on ways to deal with the potential traitors.
If Biden was a uniter and not a divider and he had prosecuted about 206 GOP insurrectionist for sedition, I would be his biggest fan.
Biden could be using his bully pulpit too point out to the Trump dictator lovers what a dictatorship really is. He could tell them that the GOP would take their guns, make them slaves, starve them and their children, harvest their organs, dissect them in public restrooms, and feed them food and water and drugs, laced with toxic chemicals.
Biden could also put an end to cheap union busting immigrant labor like FDR would.
Thanks, very good summary here. Esp like the tristan harris quote - civil war for profit business model. Thats really what its all about, imho, that plus the complete ignorance about history, how we already did this and how we passed the 14th amendment which supreme vourt jurisprudence routinely ignores.
This is still part of the "unfinished work" a certain mr lincoln referred to one day in gettysburgh.
"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
And i think thom recently discussed how confederacy had the attributes of fascism.
This daily take ends with the statement that “America didn’t ask for a right-wing terror movement...” I am not so sure that we did not ask for it. We, as a people have been largely smug, self-satisfied, indifferent, oblivious to much that doesn’t impact us directly, willfully ignorant, and obsessed with our own specialness and self-interest.
The people who seriously want to pursue civil war can accurately be called insane or unhinged, if being irrational, volatile, paranoid, extreme, and self-destructive are insane. However, I believe that the real concern is the uncounted and somewhat invisible number of people at the margins who have been influenced by extreme and irrational ideas and those who are willing to entertain the thoughts, ideas, and rhetoric of fanatics and fearmongers. Once again, we are talking about the “followers,” the apathetic and cynical by-standers, and the fearful and faithful people who may become subject to the influence of a cult, often to the point of mobilization. We got mistrust in government and the blind acceptance of lies and conspiracy theories by neglecting to admit what was staring us in the face about the American people.
The analysis offered appears to be 100% true and accurate. Brown v. Board was a turning point and structural and unacknowledged racism was a national pastime. Reagan brought neoliberalism and doubled down on racism. Authoritarianism, plutocracy, and fascism were waiting in the wings. All the other factors ring true. Government-hating Libertarians and right-wingers want to destroy “public schooling” and the Department of Education. Inequality is off the charts.
However, as I have asked before, how do you destroy that which has already been destroyed? If you want to defend traditional schooling, how do you answer the more legitimate and liberal/progressive critic’s powerful condemnations of our sacred schools which preceded the Koch brothers by decades? No one can say that Dewey, Goodman, Holt, Postman & Weingartner, Kozol, Dennison, and dozens of others were trying to destroy public schooling or that they were anti-government, radical, or reactionary. I keep asking for a rational discussion and get only blank stares and smug silence.
After hearing a story about six weeks ago on December 15, 2022 on NPR, I did a little more digging. On the “Fuzzy Librarian” website/Newswire I discovered these sad stats. They cite that 23% of Americans, or 48 million adults, struggle to read or are semi-literate or illiterate. How does one defend those numbers and how are our schools not thereby indicted?
We truly are asking for civil war if we continue to alienate children from themselves, from each other, and from reality in authoritarian bureaucracies. If someone can defend unconstitutional compulsory attendance or traditional schooling (state schooling disguised as public schooling) I repeat my challenge. I believe they have an obligation to present arguments, facts, and empirical evidence which contradicts my claims. If the status quo is not defensible, then remaining silent and impotent is not defensible.
Friday, I wrote in effect that I strongly believe that establishing classes to teach elementary children ethics as a subject matter would be an absurdity, and in schools as they are currently operated under compulsory attendance laws, it would be counterproductive and futile. I implied that our schools do not and cannot foster or facilitate ethical conduct under the present paradigm. Another implication was that any curriculum to be widely imposed which has the fingerprints of officials and supposed experts on it, and which is designed to teach specifics relative to values and ideals is likewise, doomed to fail.
There is a well-known “hidden curriculum” in most of our schools as reported in the literature which affects everyone, and which many are at least vaguely aware of, which flies in the face of valid ethical practice and procedure. Much of what is declared in official school PR with regard to relationships of staff to students, with respect to realistic and achievable objectives, and relative to a glorious mission and history is more hopeful projection than real or realistic. When one takes a closer look without the rose-colored glasses, one almost invariably discovers a degree of deception and intimidation, and elements of ugly arbitrary authority under which both teachers and students regularly chafe.
Some things can be taught and some things must be learned. There is not always a clear distinction. Ethics may encompass certain identifiable behaviors or approaches. However, much more than skill or knowledge are involved in becoming ethical as a way of thinking, acting, and believing. The same applies to values, principles, and ideals. “Teaching” a strictly cognitive, logical, or theoretical understanding of ethics or values does not yield a high rate of emulation and practical results. These things must become second nature as thoroughly internalized models for application in novel or unpredictable situations. Better living through chemistry, so to speak.
What is actually being questioned here is the very concept of teaching. Jim Strickland, a teacher in the State of Washington reminded me last year that, “As the Buddhist saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” So, how do we reverse the direction we have taken in schools?
We seem to have that whole thing backwards. I believe we must start thinking about school and education in a radically different light and as two distinctly different enterprises. But before we move a muscle, we are wasting our time if we do not recognize that attempting to compel education, school, or anything else edifying and enlightening, is shooting ourselves in the foot and shooting our kids in the head.
Education IS change. The exchange of sterile impersonal information in a “curriculum” in the absence of a personal connection between teacher and learner and between learner and subject matter is not a process leading to a meaningful change. We are ALL here to learn. We are ALL here to change.
It just isn’t possible that someone with the phenomenal knowledge of history and insight into human behavior such as Thom doesn’t know all this intuitively or on some level. He may have spoken off the cuff and has likely decided that this is an area that is somehow self-correcting or for other people to be concerned about. Too many people are satisfied with the self-serving PR, self-congratulatory blather, and false promises for change of those in the school community.
Educators talk casually about curricula as if they are like Lego blocks that can be created and given to students to build structures which will fit together to form their education or some essential part of it. This is more absurd mythical mass-education madness (mass-mis-education madness). The Common Core Curriculum is something we should have expected to see in Communist China or Castro’s Cuba.
What is the latest brilliant innovation the academic wizards have created, you ask? They are changing from a STEM curriculum to a STEAM curriculum. They are adding arts back, which they removed a few decades ago. What genius!
When should a DeSantis or some other governor or state official control any school curriculum? Perhaps, for the school where the DeSantis kids are in attendance. Maybe, for the school he has personally started for a select group of students with private funds.
There is a fine line, it seems, between teaching civics and civility or teaching passivity, compliance, and the superiority of the establishment and its uber-capitalistic logic. Does it really make sense to rail against the powerful one-tenth-of-one-percent and to wax eloquent about their corruption, oppressive techniques, and political domination while defending the very institutions they have carefully constructed and imposed by law to pacify and dumb-down youth with bland and inert lowest-common-denominator curricula?
How incredibly bizarre is it that we are now, in 2023 – in the second decade of the 21st century - going to have Democratic governors fighting with Republican governors about what children can see and study in school and courts making the ultimate decisions about something which courts have no competence or expertise on which to make rulings. In a democracy!
An education or a school which is devoid of politics cannot rightly be called an education or a school. This is just one more reason attendance must be voluntary, the organization of schools should be democratic in a democracy, and curriculum should be designed by or approved by the people who interact locally with specific students on a relatively intimate basis and the parents. It all boils down to whether we believe and practice what we preach about democracy, or whether we apply it exclusively to those who use the academic edifice to weasel into positions of power. We can have our cake. Or we can eat it.