In War Against DEI in Science, Researchers See Collateral Damage

King Trump's terror campaign against medical science

By Teresa Carr Margaret Manto

This story was co-reported by Teresa Carr for Undark and Margaret Manto for NOTUS. 

When he realized that Senate Republicans were characterizing his federally funded research project as one of many they considered ideological and of questionable scientific value, Darren Lipomi, chair of the chemical engineering department at the University of Rochester, was incensed. 

The work, he complained on social media, was aimed at helping “throat cancer patients recover from radiation therapy faster.” And yet, he noted on BlueSky, LinkedIn, and X, his project was among nearly 3,500 National Science Foundation grants recently described by the likes of Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican and chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, as “woke DEI” research. These projects, Cruz argued, were driven by “Neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda,” and “far-left ideologies.”

“Needless to say,” Lipomi wrote of his research, “this project is not espousing class warfare.”

The list of grants was compiled by a group of Senate Republicans last fall and released to the public earlier this month, and while the NSF does not appear to have taken any action in response to the complaints, the list’s existence is adding to an atmosphere of confusion and worry among researchers in the early days of President Donald J. Trump’s second administration. Lipomi, for his part, described the situation as absurd. Others described it as chilling.

In the Authoritarians’ New War on Ideas, Biology Might Be Next

The right is gearing up for an all-out attack on biology

By C. Brandon Ogbunu

In 2021, U.S. Sen.Ted Cruz compared critical race theory — an academic subfield that examines the role of racism in American institutions, laws, and policies — to the Ku Klux Klan, the most notorious homegrown terrorist organization in U.S. history. 

In doing so, he opened a playbook that resembles one put into practice by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others: Attack ideas that are unfriendly to a narrow view of the world, and do so by eliminating them from our school curricula and public conversation. 

The movement against critical race theory has now swallowed up high school Advanced Placement African American Studies in several states and threatens the teaching of basic facts about U.S. history. And this movement has devolved from pundit tough talk into authoritarian policies to ban books, modify curricula, and threaten intellectual freedom across the country (and world).

By now, many realize that these policies are a harbinger of things to come —  even for fields ostensibly unrelated to African American studies, like biology. Modern breakthroughs in biology are producing a picture of life that is increasingly incompatible with authoritarian preferences for neat boxes that dictate what people are and how they should behave. Consequently, biologists must shed the naive belief that our work is apolitical and recognize that the recent attacks on how to teach U.S. history are a battle in a larger war on ideas that includes the natural sciences.

Evolutionary biology in particular is not new to political controversies. Over the past century, it has been at the center of several high-profile legal battles. Most famous are the debates about the teaching of evolution in schools (documented in Brenda Wineapple’s new book on the Scopes trial, and many others). The political tension is generated by the world view that Darwinism presents. 

The reasoning from evolution deniers: If public education can challenge religious explanations for how life began, then tomorrow it might question the religious basis of good and evil, man and woman, and explanations for how we all got here. And they aren’t wrong. Biology’s increasingly complicated picture of human behavior isn’t so friendly to political stances peddling the myth that one group is essentially inferior to another; and that a deity decides the boundaries around sex, sexual preference, and other dimensions.

While biological sex is a meaningful dimension for millions of species, modern biology has frustrated many classical models for what sex is and how it manifests in nature. In recent decades, evolutionary theorists have offered improvements on models that implied that females were passive actors, driven by interest and competition between males. 

At our most charitable, we’d call these interpretations naive and imprecise, and they highlight a long tradition of confused thinking on sex and gender that is increasingly subject to scrutiny. And when we consider the added layer of culture in the world of Homo sapiens, then hard rules and expectations regarding sex are on even shakier ground.

GOP attacks against Kamala Harris were already bad – they are about to get worse

To no one's surprise, MAGAs have already started racist, sexist attacks

Stephen J. Farnsworth, University of Mary Washington

Vice President Kamala Harris attends a political event on July 17,
2024, in Kalamazoo, Mich. Chris duMond/Getty Images

Public opinion polls suggest that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is doing slightly better than Joe Biden was against Donald Trump, but Republican attacks against her are only now ramping up.

Even as a candidate for vice president, Harris was the target of an intense barrage of conservative attacks that claimed, among other things, that she slept her way to political prominence, a common slur against women in power. 

The anti-Harris rhetoric is part of what a report by the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan think tank, described as a broad pattern of gendered and sexualized attacks on prominent women in public discourse.

More recently, those comments were joined by conservative attacks branding Harris as the “border czar,” part of an effort to tie her to immigration, a hot-button topic for conservatives.

The intense attacks so far are only a fraction of what will come. Trump is skilled at both character assassination and political self-defense. Together, they translate into an exceptional ability to defeat his political rivals once they enter the presidential campaign arena.

But Harris also has sharp rhetorical skills that could make this a fierce election fight.

Trump’s alternative facts

As I discuss in my book “Presidential Communication and Character,” Trump is highly skilled at both channeling white working-class anger into political support for himself and at convincing his supporters to disregard the former president’s own well-chronicled professional and personal failings.

Trump’s character generates enduring contempt among liberals, but those voters will back the Democratic nominee.

It's what they do best

The Law & Order Party

MAGA-nuts worked up over another imaginary issue

Right-wingers outraged against a federal two-beer limit that simply doesn’t exist. 

By Jim Hightower 

Oh, thank God for Ted Cruz! Once again, the far-right-wing U.S. senator is saving you and me from a political horror that doesn’t exist.

This is Ted’s specialty, for he seems unable to deal with the real economic and social problems that workaday people actually have. 

Thus, he constantly tries to divert attention by staging embarrassing political stunts, such as his furious fulminations against Big Bird, Mickey Mouse, and other fictional characters.

Unable to triumph over them, however, Cruz is now conjuring up entirely fictional conflicts to let him — a Harvard-educated elitist — pose as a hero of working-class commoners.

Beer drinkers, for example. The Cruzer recently swooped onto a Republican TV show, squawking like Chicken Little that Joe Biden intended to restrict us Americans to only two beers a week!

Oh, the horror.

The Rise of White Nationalism Alongside the Second Coming of Trump

American fascism on the march

CLARENCE LUSANE for the TomDispatch

In 2020, The Daily Show ran a segment in which statements by Republican leaders, including Donald Trump, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), and various Fox News personalities were juxtaposed with those made by Ku Klux Klan leaders like former Grand Wizard David Duke and former Imperial Wizard Bill Wilkerson. Fired Fox News commentator Tucker Carson, for instance, screeches manically that, because of immigration, “eventually there will be no more native-born Americans.” Immediately following that comment comes former Grand Wizard Duke saying, “We’ve got to start protecting our race.”

Donald Trump is then shown at a rally (with several Black people behind him wearing “Blacks for Trump” T-shirts) saying about Covid treatments, “If you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line. Discriminating against white people!” Again, there’s a cut to Duke stating, “There is racial discrimination going on right now in this country against massive numbers of white Americans.”

The Supreme Court is corrupt: let's fix it

The justices aren’t even hiding it anymore.

By Jim Hightower

When public officials get themselves mired in the muck of corruption, they can always count on Senator Ted Cruz to issue a moral judgment: If the offender is a Democrat, he pronounces the corruption inexcusably grotesque; if it’s a Republican, he wails that the offender is the victim.

For example, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was recently caught (yet again) butt-deep in judicial immorality, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of freebies from a Texas real estate baron who has both a partisan and corporate interest in Thomas’ court rulings.

So, Cruz to the rescue! No judicial impropriety here, he squawks, for this is nothing but a diabolical plot by Democrats to “smear” poor Clarence.

But Thomas is busy smearing himself. From the start of his court tenure, Thomas has been a shameless seeker of personal gain, tucking untold sums from untold sources in the inner pockets of his judicial robes.

The Real 'Right Wing Death Squad' Is the Cowardly Republican Party

There is not one single legal rationale to keep weapons of war on the streets of America

THOM HARTMANN in Common Dreams

Steven Spainhouer’s son worked at one of the stores in the Allen, Texas shopping mall chosen by America’s most recent mass shooter (as of Saturday: there were seven this weekend).

He arrived at the mall just after the neo-nazi murderer had slaughtered several people, sometimes ripping their bodies and faces into an indistinguishable mass of flesh with his .322 ammunition.

The killer had moved on into the mall, Steven Spainhouer was probably thinking, when he saw a 5-year-old child.

“The first girl I walked up to was crouched down covering her head in the bushes, so I felt for a pulse,” Spainhouer, who is trained in CPR, told CBS News, adding that he then “pulled her head to the side and she had no face.”

Next, he found a dead woman who appeared to be laying across a young boy.

“When I rolled the mother over, he came out,” Spainhouer told CBS reporter JD Miles. “I asked him if he was OK and he said, ‘My mom is hurt, my mom is hurt.’ Rather than traumatize him any more, I pulled him around the corner, sat him down, and he was covered from head to toe.”

The child looked, Spainhouer said, “Like somebody poured blood on him.”

His mother’s blood. His dead mother who will never again hold or comfort that little boy for the rest of his life.

All because a white supremacist with a “Right Wing Death Squad” patch — commonly worn by Proud Boys — across his chest decided to shoot up a Texas shopping center with a mass-market version of the rifle the Army developed in the 1960s for hunting people in Vietnam.

In response to the unimaginable horror that weapon of war inflicted on these humans, Republican Congressman Keith Self — who represents Allen, Texas in the US House of Representatives — stepped up to a microphone and explicitly refused to say he’d do anything about the American slaughter:

“Our prayers are with the victims and their families and all law enforcement on the scene.”

Other Texas Republicans offered similar sentiments. Not even one of these cowards mentioned the word “gun” or promised to do a single damn thing.

Republican Governor Abbott minimized the tragedy, saying, “Our hearts are with the people of Allen, Texas tonight during this unspeakable tragedy.”

Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick might as well have spit on the corpses, asking Texans to, “Please join me in mourning the victims of the unspeakable tragedy in Allen.”

Republican Senator John Cornyn, as he has so many times before, ignored the AR15 that made such a quick and complete slaughter possible, saying instead, "I am grieving with the Allen community tonight…”

Republican Senator Ted Cruz slipped into his usual sanctimonious acceptable-to-the-NRA word salad: “Heidi and I are praying for the families of the victims of the horrific mall shooting in Allen, Texas. We pray also for the broader Collin County community that's in shock from this tragedy.”

Indicted bribe-taker and fraudster Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton also talked like this slaughter was the result of some sort of bizarre natural disaster, saying, “Pray for Allen, Texas. Pray for these families and law enforcement…”

Thoughts and prayers won’t do a damn thing. Coming from these mealy-mouthed Republicans, they don’t even comfort the families. All they do is prepare Texas for the next massacre.

Now Comes the Hard Part for Progress

What the Midterm Election Taught Us

CHARLES IDELSON In Common Dreams

The winds blowing in Washington and many communities post-election just might be a sigh of relief. The red wave, or red tsunami as Ted Cruz boasted, evaporated. "There wasn't even a red splash," as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie put it.

Democracy, as President Biden emphasized, was on the ballot, and a clear majority of voters had no truck for those most aligned with a lurch toward authoritarian rule. Despite the dreams of the far right, and predictions of many pundits and pollsters that voters would overlook the insurrection and election conspiracy theories because of inflation, the results largely told a different story.

Election denier Republicans, those most likely to overturn future elections, lost critical Governor and Secretary of State races, often by large margins, especially in swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada. (Despite their high profile defeats, as the Washington Post noted, at least 150 election deniers were winning in House races as of November 12.)

Retaining Democratic Party control of the Senate alone is a major triumph in blunting a Mitch McConnell-led Senate that would likely forward major assaults on social insurance programs and block the critical appointment of federal judges need to provide balance to a court system corrupted by Trump and McConnell the past four years.

Democrats also flipped several state legislatures, notably both Michigan's House and State Senate, as well as Pennsylvania's House, and Minnesota's State Senate, all major efforts to defend democracy in that state and block punishing attacks on working people and families as seen so often, especially in Michigan the past decade.

New GOP Agenda Proves These People Are Just Plain Nuts

When not attacking the Muppets, they've spent the year laying out plans to tax the poor and eliminate Social Security.

JIM HIGHTOWER by OtherWords

Let me say one word to you: Nuts.

Now, let me say one name to you: Ted Cruz.

They've become synonymous, with the Texas lawmaker perennially topping national lists of goofy, right-wing political goobers. Only, Ted can't rightly be called a lawmaker, for he's not a serious participant in that process, instead devoting his senatorship to political stunts and picking silly PR fights with a growing list of enemies.

Running out of people to attack, Ted has found another species for his vitriol: Fictional icons. He's been padding his right-wing credentials by going after Mr. Potato Head, Mickey and Pluto, and, believe it or not, the Muppets.

So. Why, again?

 

How could they do this to such a wonderful guy?

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.

 

The Supreme Court’s ideological rulings are roiling US politics

Historical precedent for fixing it

Calvin Schermerhorn, Arizona State University

“Impeach and remove partisan zealots from the court,” reads one
protester’s sign in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on July 9, 2022.
 Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Political conflict over the Supreme Court’s direction is raging in the aftermath of two sweeping rulings in the court’s most recent term, one which expanded individual gun rights and the other which removed constitutional protection for abortion. 

Those rulings were the product of a conservative majority made more muscular and bold in the last few years by the addition of three justices appointed by former President Donald Trump.

The rulings were hailed by conservatives and criticized by progressives and liberals. 

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas issued a statement saying: “The Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case, reversing Roe v. Wade, is nothing short of a massive victory for life.” 

President Joe Biden spoke of the “outrageous behavior of the Supreme Court,” while on his left, Rakim H.D. Brooks, the head of Alliance for Justice, a coalition of more than 130 progressive groups, said, “This disturbing milestone speaks to how hyper-partisan and lawless the Trump Court has become.”

The conflict over the court and its politics may be making headlines now. But history shows that political contests over the ideological slant of the court are nothing new.

In the 1860s, President Abraham Lincoln worked with fellow Republicans to shape the Court to carry out his party’s anti-slavery and pro-Union agenda. It was an age in which the court was unabashedly a “partisan creature,” in historian Rachel Shelden’s words.

Justice John Catron had advised Democrat James K. Polk’s 1844 presidential campaign, and Justice John McLean was a serial presidential contender in a black robe. And in the 1860s, Republican leaders would change the number of justices and the political balance of the Court to ensure their party’s dominance of its direction.

How to stop parade shootings, aside from the obvious

 

The NRA wasn't always crazy

How the NRA evolved from backing a 1934 ban on machine guns to blocking nearly all firearm restrictions today

Robert Spitzer, State University of New York College at Cortland

NRA conventiongoers, like these at the gun group’s 2018 big meeting, browse firearms exhibits. Loren Elliott/AFP via Getty Images

The mass shootings at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, just 10 days apart, are stirring the now-familiar national debate over guns seen after the tragic 2012 and 2018 school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Parkland, Florida.

Inevitably, if also understandably, many Americans are blaming the National Rifle Association for thwarting stronger gun laws that might have prevented these two recent tragedies and many others. And despite the proximity in time and location to the Texas shooting, the NRA is proceeding with its plans to hold its annual convention in Houston on May 27-29, 2022. The featured speakers include former President Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican.

After spending decades researching and writing about how and why the NRA came to hold such sway over national gun policies, I’ve seen this narrative take unexpected turns in the last few years that raise new questions about the organization’s reputation for invincibility.

Another typical week

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.

 

Why Democracy's Enemies Always Try to Destroy Trust First

Our task is to rebuild trust

By Thom Hartmann for the Independent Media Institute 

By Mike Luckovich

The crisis with the Supreme Court; the racist mass shooter in Buffalo; Republican primary candidates trying to one-up each other on how they will refuse to count all the ballots in the 2024 election; and our hitting 1 million deaths from Covid all derive from the same thing: the destruction of trust. 

Donald Trump destroyed our trust in our public health institutions for his own political gain, so we have massively more Covid deaths than, for example, Australia. 

As the New York Times noted this weekend:

“If the United States had the same Covid death rate as Australia, about 900,000 lives would have been saved.”

The single factor their investigation identified that most accounted for the difference between American and Australian deaths was the trust people have in their government, society, and each other:

“Dozens of interviews, along with survey data and scientific studies from around the world, point to a lifesaving trait that Australians displayed from the top of government to the hospital floor, and that Americans have shown they lack: trust, in science and institutions, but especially in one another.”

The Leprechaun Menace!

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.

 

Confederacy of Dunces