Housekeeping: The First Thanksgiving

We’re introducing a new series here at the HP, this one devoted to correcting our own previous errors.

Yes, we strive to be accurate in our posts, but they only reflect the extent of our knowledge at the time of posting. We realize now, many years in, that some of our content is now badly outdated and even inaccurate–and, importantly, that it was inaccurate at the time of writing, because our own knowledge was incomplete.

Do we ignore this? Never! We fix it, and we’re starting with our very auncient post on “the first Thanksgiving”, which seriously needs revision. Our knowledge and appreciation of Indigenous history has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few years, and needs to inform this post.

We’re going to subject it to the same merciless close-reading we subject others to, with the original writing first, and our response after in bold.

And so, enjoy anew, or perhaps for the first time, our post on Truth and Myth and the First Thanksgiving

This is the time of year when people take a moment to wonder about the Pilgrims: why were they so cruel to the Indians? The Thanksgiving celebration is marred by this concern. There are many reasons why it shouldn’t be. First, Thanksgiving has only been a holiday since 1863. Second, it had nothing to do with the Pilgrims whatsoever.

–Wow, we can’t believe we wrote this. It’s technically correct, but so very technically that its correctness not only has no meaning but is actually harmful. Yes, Thanksgiving didn’t become an official holiday in the U.S. until 1863, and the Pilgrims did not celebrate it. But it is now so inextricably and obviously tied to the endless destruction of colonization that the Separatists we call Pilgrims were early agents of that it is a very appropriate, symbolic time to protest that destruction.

President Lincoln instituted this holiday during the Civil War to unite the U.S. in thanks for its blessings even in the midst of that terrible war. Here’s how he put it:

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

—Britain and France have refused, in the end, to support the Confederacy, the U.S. itself is still intact and strong, and the U.S. Army and Navy are driving back the enemy.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

—The U.S. economy has not fallen apart for lack of slave-produced cotton, as the South had always predicted it would. Industry and agriculture are stronger than ever and the U.S. continues to expand.

–“Slave-produced”?? Again this is painful to see. We mean “cotton produced by the forced labor of enslaved people.”

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

—God has punished the U.S. with this war for the sin of slavery, but is showing encouraging signs of his support for the U.S. war effort.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

—While thanking God for his mercies to the U.S. so far, Americans should also offer up prayers asking for his care for all those who have lost someone in the war, and asking for his help in ending the war as quickly as possible.

So the First Thanksgiving in the U.S. was held in November 1863 and inaugurated for a good cause.

–Yes, but it very quickly lost all connection to ending slavery and became a celebration of the Pilgrims, so let’s deal with that real history.

The first lower-case “t” thanksgiving in what would become the U.S. was held in November 1621 and was merely the first of many, many days of thanksgiving observed by the Pilgrims and was not celebrated as an annual holiday at all. Let’s go back to the original article to learn the real story:

____

The First Thanksgiving: it’s a hallowed phrase that, like “Washington crossing the Delaware“, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” or “Damn the torpedoes!”, does not bring up many solid facts. Unfortunately, “the first Thanksgiving” is usually either completely debunked, with people saying no such thing ever happened, or used as a weapon against the Pilgrims—i.e., they had a lovely Thanksgiving with the Indians and then killed them all.

The truth about the first Thanksgiving is that it did happen, in the fall of 1621. The Pilgrims had landed in what is now Massachusetts the previous November—a terrible time to begin a colony. Their provisions were low, and it was too late to plant anything. It is another myth that they landed so late because they got lost. They had intended to land south of Long Island, New York and settle in what is now New Jersey, where it was warmer, but their ship was almost destroyed in a dangerous reef area just south of Cape Cod, and the captain turned back. They then had to crawl the ship down the Cape, looking for a suitable place to land. Long story short, they ended up in what is now Plymouth.

Most Americans know how so many of those first settlers died from starvation and disease over the winter, and how it was only by raiding Wampanoag food caches that the colony survived at all. By the spring, there were not many colonists left to plant food, but they dragged themselves out to do so. They had good luck, and help from the Wampanoags, who showed them planting techniques—potentially just to keep the Pilgrims from raiding their winter stores again. By November 1621, a very good harvest was in, and Governor William Bradford called for a day of thanksgiving.

–The morally neutral tone of the two paragraphs above is dishonest. Any discussion of the Separatists has to begin with their decision to colonize, which in itself is morally problematic, to say the least. Feeling compassion for their suffering is natural, but it displaces compassion for the Indigenous people who helped them when they could have destroyed them, and in return were systematically displaced from the land they belonged to and subjected to a determined attempt to eradicate them, by death or being driven away, that continues to this day in the U.S.

The Pilgrims often had days of thanksgiving. In times of trouble, they had fasts, which were sacrifices given for God’s help. In celebration times, they had thanksgivings to thank God for helping them. So thanksgivings were a common part of Pilgrim life, and calling for a thanksgiving to praise God for the harvest would not have been unusual, and would have been a day spent largely in church and at prayer.

So the men went out to shoot some “fowls” for the dinner, and perhaps they ran into some Wampanoags, or maybe a few Wampanoags were visting Plymouth, as they often did, and heard about the day of celebration. At any rate, here is the only—yes, the one and only—eyewitness description of what happened next:

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

That’s Edward Winslow, writing about the thanksgiving in his journal of Pilgrim life called “Mourt’s Relation”, published in 1622. We see that Massasoit and 90 of his men arrived at some point, having heard about the feast, and the Pilgrims hosted them for three days, and had some rather traditional Anglican sport firing their guns. Certainly the Wampanoags had a right to feel they could join in, since it was their help that had led to the good harvest. A one-day thanksgiving turned into three days of feasting and games.

And that was it. People often wonder why there wasn’t another thanksgiving the next year. We have seen that thanksgivings were not annual events, but came randomly when the people felt they were needed as a response to current events, and the idea of celebrating the harvest every year didn’t make sense to the Pilgrims. They had only held a thanksgiving for the first good harvest because it was a life-saving change from the previous fall. Once they were on their feet, they expected good harvests, and didn’t have to celebrate them. It was also against their Separatist beliefs to celebrate annual holidays—like the Puritans, they did not celebrate any holidays, not even Christmas. Holidays were a human invention that made some days better than others when God had made all days equally holy. So to hold a regular, annual harvest thanksgiving was not their way. When things were going well, Separatists and Puritans had days of thanksgiving. When things were going badly, they had days of fasting. None of them were annual holidays or cause for feasting (of course fast days weren’t, but even thanksgivings were mostly spent in church, with no special meal).

That one-time harvest thanksgiving was indeed a happy event, shared in equally by Pilgrim and Wampanoag. If only that first thanksgiving–an impromptu, bi-cultural celebration–had set the tone for the rest of the interactions between the English colonizers and the Indigenous peoples of North America. Since it did not, we can only think happily of the Thanksgiving called for by President Lincoln, who made an annual Thanksgiving a holiday in 1863.

–A “happy event”? …sort of. “Shared in equally”? Not really. The Wampanoags were already becoming aware, that early on, of the English colonizers’ single-minded self-centeredness. They weren’t invited to this thanksgiving that they made possible. But they came anyway, in one of the many hundreds of thousands of attempts Indigenous people made, and still make, to invite reciprocal relationship and live together in peace and understanding. Just deciding not to think about this, and to focus on 1863, is a cop-out we can’t believe we suggested to you.

The hype around the Pilgrims’ first thanksgiving only began after 1863, when historians noted the tradition of impromptu thanksgivings in the 1600s and made an unwarranted and improper connection to the new holiday to make it seem less new and more traditionally American. Before then, their many days of thanksgiving and fasting were completely forgotten. The Pilgrims certainly weren’t the inspiration for the holiday we celebrate today—they were retroactively brought into that in the worst, most ironic way: after the Civil War, southerners resented Thanksgiving as a “Union” holiday celebrating U.S. victories in the war and so the focus was changed from fighting slavery to the Pilgrims… who supported slavery.

This year, spend Thanksgiving however you like, and share the truth about where the holiday really comes from—the depths of a terrible war fought for the greatest of causes. Let Thanksgiving inspire you to stand up for the founding principles of this nation and re-commit to upholding them in your own daily life of good times and bad.

–You can’t really do what we recommend in this final paragraph without joining in any local protest against colonization and the destruction of people, lands, and living things that takes place in your area on Thanksgiving. Join with Indigenous people if you can to acknowledge that upholding the principles of liberty and justice for all can’t begin without a 180 move away from the values of colonization. Enjoy Thanksgiving as a reminder that a different, constructive way to live together exists—one that prioritizes reciprocal relationship. It’s not too late to honor what the Wampanoags were trying to establish!

A treasure trove of puritan myth-busting: NEHH

Hear ye, hear ye–if ever there were a resource for myth-busting about the puritans of Woodland New England, it’s got to be the records kept by Congregational churches from the 1600s through the 1800s. Congregationalism was the denomination formed by the puritans who left England, and, as its name tells us, it was based on the independence of each local congregation. There was no hierarchy of priest or minister, vicar, bishop, archbishop. Orders did not flow from the top down to local churches. Each individual congregation completely governed itself–chose its minister and church officers, dismissed them if/when necessary, handled its own internal disagreements (cases of discipline), and provided/requested advice to/from other congregations.

This was revolutionary, and Congregationalism itself is fascinating. It’s still around, of course, but its high point of influence ended in the mid-1800s. We’ll be sharing more about Congregationalism in the coming weeks because it has a huge impact on our understanding of the puritans and the nation that their descendants did so much to ideate in the mid- and late-1700s during our Revolutionary period.

The problem with our understanding is that those church record books, which detailed not only all births, marriages, and deaths but also all church meetings, personal notes, letters, etc., of the congregation, were not available to the public, or even to scholars, because they had been locked away for safekeeping and completely forgotten. Or totally lost. Even when they were close at hand they weren’t easy to read. So tens of thousands of pages–hundreds of thousands–of puritan and Woodland New England history were effectively missing from our historical record, leaving scholars to extrapolate from a tiny fraction of records. An enormous scholarly canon was founded on scraps, and since there were so few primary sources around to contradict the scholars when they went wrong, scholarly opinion was eventually taken as fact–a kind of primary source in itself.

Then came New England’s Hidden Histories. This is a digital history project sponsored by the Congregational Library and Archive in Boston that’s now in it’s 12th year of finding, digitizing, and transcribing Congregational church records. It’s an amazing resource that is already blowing the scholarly world wide open and challenging ideas about the puritans and their religion that have been accepted as self-evident fact for 150 years. It’s free and open to the public, so while not all the records that you’ll find on the website have been transcribed, more are arriving every season, and what’s there already will keep you busy for a long time.

You just go to New England’s Hidden Histories at the Congregational Library and Archive website to get started. As noted above, we’re going to be diving into some of the records to share amazing new data that challenges many of the ideas about puritans that people hold dear–that they were punitive, excommunicating people who hated happiness and lived only to judge and hurt others… and that they were all white.

Get a head start on us–go to NEHH and check it out!

Boston 400 – coming up “soon”

It’s Fall 2023, which means 2030 is just over 6 years away, which can only mean (here at the HP) that interest and input should start growing in the 400th anniversary of English colonizers we know as the puritans arriving on the Shawmut peninsula and shortly renaming it Boston.

This event has been celebrated in years past by most of the descendants of those English colonizers and immigrants from other parts of the globe who followed them. It has been mourned by Indigenous people and some of those colonizers’ descendants as the beginning of the many types of destruction that colonization relies on–of people, languages, trees, water, animals, and cultures.

In 1930, the tercentenary celebrations in Boston were aggressively massive.

$202K in 1930 was over $3 million in today’s dollars. That’s how you fund a “Monster Reception in Boston Garden.” That Afternoon Pageant on Boston Common lasted three hours and involved tens of thousands of people celebrating the Puritans as the font of all virtues and the founders of the nation. The legend lives on from the Singing Societies on down of the great week they called “Tercentenary”…

But in 2030, ideally, things will be different. They already are. The City of Boston authorized the Boston Commemoration Committee to “to ensure that the many diverse community voices and organizations who steward Boston’s history, and the City departments with responsibilities related to historical narrative, exhibits, curricula, archives, preservation, and event-planning, are all able to work together to deepen the public opportunities to engage with that history, in collaboration with state and federal partners.” That’s a quote from the full ordinance authoritizing the Committee, and if you read page 3 you’ll see the intention to people it with a full range of representatives.

We’re on board with this intention. As we teeter on the brink of a planetary crisis originating to a great extent in the economics of colonization, it’s time to use these “founding” anniversaries as a chance to change direction and return to the Indigenous economy that sustained the Earth in what we now call North America for millennia.

If you’re living in Massachusetts, get in touch with the Committee, and consider how you can shape local events in your own town. If you’re elsewhere in the world, investigate what’s happening locally. Let’s look ahead with optimism to 2030 and the end of tercentenary thinking!

War on two fronts, Ukraine and U.S.

Right now, we are watching two wars on TV: the top 3/4 is about the new war, the advent of WWIII, which is where we’re headed with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the bottom 1/4, on the crawl, is the old war, the war against democracy that was unofficially begun under Reagan, but ramped up beyond reckoning during the Trump presidency.

The two are linked, of course. Both are waged on peace and equality by people who believe–and often have reason to believe–that they profit more from war and hate. Any lie can be told, any murder committed, any beating administered, on the slightest pretext, and the war-makers walk away unscathed. Just like the world is currently “standing with Ukraine” by sitting back and doing nothing as Russia invades a sovereign state. As Garry Kasparov puts it

This is already World War III. Putin started it long ago & Ukraine is only the current front. He will escalate anyway, and it’s even more likely if he succeeds in destroying Ukraine because you have again convinced him you won’t stop him even though you could.

We are witnessing, literally watching live, Putin commit genocide on an industrial scale in Ukraine while the most powerful military alliance in history stands aside…

There is no waiting this out. This isn’t chess; there’s no draw, no stalemate. Either Putin destroys Ukraine and eventually hits NATO with an even greater catastrophe, or Putin falls in Russia. He cannot be stopped with weakness.

Unfortunately, doing nothing or responding to violence with weakness is well-ingrained in too many Americans by now. The million-front war on our democracy is hard to track and easy to ignore in its more invisible phase, and by the time our next elections are held, it will be too late for the realization that so many gerrymandering, voter suppression, and vote-overturning laws are now in place in the majority of U.S. states that they are unlikely to be authentic.

The war of attrition is over in Europe and in the U.S. Outright war on the ground is happening in Europe, and war through state legislatures and the judicial system is happening in the U.S. If ever there were a time to actually stand, and act, for democracy here and abroad, it’s now.

It takes courage and it will bring hardship. Fighting for democracy costs money, jobs, and lives. It always has. But there is no alternative. Brave people everywhere in this country are risking everything because they know that in the big picture, there’s really nothing to lose. The links between fascism in Europe and the attack on democracy in America are too clear, as Indiana state senator Scott Baldwin made clear during the testimony of K-12 history teacher Matt Bockenfeld during a Senate Education Committee hearing on pending anti-CRT legislation:

During the hearing, Indiana history teacher Matt Bockenfeld testified regarding a requirement in the bill that teachers “remain impartial in teaching curricular materials.” Bockenfeld said he was teaching “the rise of Nazism right now” and “we’re not neutral on Nazism. We take a stand in the classroom against it, and it matters that we do.”

State Senator Scott Baldwin (R), the author of the bill, replied that he believed Bockenfeld and other teachers had an obligation to be “impartial” when discussing Nazism. “I believe that we’ve gone too far when we take a position on those isms… We need to be impartial,” Baldwin said.

Bockenfeld told the Indianapolis Star that he was “shocked” by Baldwin’s comment and he will “oppose Nazism until they fire me.” Baldwin, facing an avalanche of criticism, partially backtracked, saying he “failed to adequately articulate” his point. The Senate Education Committee, however, decided not to move forward with its plan for a vote later that week.

Let’s add to that avalanche of criticism. Let’s not tell ourselves that Baldwin misspoke, or is a nutty outlier or anomaly. Let’s not assume that Bockenfeld hasn’t received an avalanche of hate mail and death threats. And let’s not tell ourselves that the war is over because of one successful battle. Let’s actually stand up and fight in the courts and the classrooms, and the school board meetings and the legislatures, and march in the streets for the democracy that is under such sustained attack in this long and brutal war on what can make America great.

The 1950s in America… not the greatest time

The full 1950 Census results have been released–each Census is made completely available 75 years after it was taken. You can access them at The United States Census Bureau website.

We were scanning a collection of highlighted data and were depressed to see this roundup of questions:

One notes, of course, that “he” is used for “person” throughout, until that last question: “If female and ever married, how many children has she ever borne, not counting stillbirths?”

No questions about how long a woman has been working or how much money she has earned, or her potential service in the Armed Forces during the wars, or anything about her being a head of household. Of course women did all of these things, as the actual Census data makes clear. For women to have to answer questions clearly meant to exclude them, to make ridiculous or fantastical the idea that they might work or serve their country, was painful. But they did it. They refused to be turned into objects of reproduction whose only purpose or “service” to their country was to be pregnant.

It’s still painful today for women to be acknowledged as heads of household and breadwinners, but subjected to economic, physical, and mental discrimination and violence. And it’s frightening as well as painful to endure the hysterical insistence that’s been rising since the 80s to force women “back” into an existence as birthing objects. As we face the seemingly inevitable reversal of Roe v. Wade, the battle against sex education, and the refusal of many health insurers and employers to cover birth control, it’s very frightening to see how much some people want women to be pregnancy vessels and nothing else.

These “pro-birth” people demand that every pregnancy be carried to term, but then steadfastly refuse to offer any supports for the baby that is born, voting against free school breakfast and lunch, government-funded preschool programs, after-school programs, and affordable health care. Once a baby is born, the people who demanded that birth do their utmost to make sure the child does not thrive.

An important step in continuing the battle against sexism is to reject the myth that the Fifties were a golden age in America. Start that work today! Fight back against any and all programs and laws that relegate women to child-bearers, and so many children to lives of want.

Fuchs is leaving UF – will censorship remain?

Back on November 1, 2021, we first posted about president Ken Fuchs at the University of Florida and his rationale for preventing three political science department faculty members from testifying against Florida’s unconstitutional voting restriction law, which was that “despite the economic challenges faced by the State of Florida due to Covid, our elected officials invested even more in the University of Florida this past year, for which we are incredibly grateful.”

We continued on by commenting that

So “incredibly grateful” is UF that it is paying back the favor by refusing to allow its faculty to testify against state voting policy. This inevitably leads one to wonder if that state financial support for UF was predicated on the State of Florida’s understanding that the gift would make UF (even more) unwilling to criticize any state laws. Fuchs has made no secret of his own sense of being a figurehead, saying in the same August 26 address that he could not issue a mask mandate: “I literally don’t have that power… within hours, another message would go out from someone to everyone, again saying we’ve been informed that there will be no such mandate. We’re part of the state government.”

There was intense outcry against this censorship, but outcry from academics generally has very little or no impact on politics. This time, however, due to whatever behind-the-scenes actions may have been going on along with academic outcry, UF reversed its policy on November 5. And due to that, perhaps, and whatever else might be going on behind the scenes at UF, President Fuchs announced on January 5, 2022 that he will be stepping down “in about a year”.

He’s claiming victory:

“When I was appointed in 2014, I was asked to make three commitments to the Board of Trustees and the Board of Governors,” Fuchs said in the video. “First, that I would work to raise the stature of UF to be among the nation’s top 10 public universities. Second, that UF would launch and complete a $3 billion fundraising campaign. Third, that UF would not increase its tuition while I served as president. Those promises were made and those promises were kept.”

It seems that Fuchs, like many other people, defines “stature” as “rich” – a university with $3 billion is a university of high stature. But a university is supposed to be measured by the learning it makes possible, and its fidelity to objective investigation and free debate. It’s depressing to read that he will remain at UF as faculty in the engineering department.

Let’s hope this is a victory, and that the next UF president will be dedicated to the traditional definition of stature.

“A Template for Academic Freedom”

A shorter note than usual this time, to refer you all to a new weapon in the battle against censorship in education in the U.S.

Three faculty members–Valerie Johnson of DePaul University, Jennifer Ruth of Portland State University, and Emily Houh of the University of Cincinnati–wrote this two-page template for an Academic Senate Resolution that faculty at any institution can adapt to present to their own Academic Senate. The goal is to “get as many faculty senates as possible to adopt a resolutions called ‘Defending Academic Freedom to Teach about Race and Gender Justice and Critical Race Theory.'”

You can see the actual template here–it’s a Google doc that faculty can download to a local computer and edit for presentation to their own Academic Senate.

It’s refreshing to see the legalese of “WHEREAS” used, for once, in the name of fighting censorship:

WHEREAS state legislative proposals are being introduced across the United States that target academic discussions of racism and related issues in American history in schools, colleges and universities.
WHEREAS the term “divisive” is indeterminate, subjective, and chills the capacity of educators to explore a wide variety of topics based on subjective criteria that are inapposite from the goals of education and the development of essential critical thinking skills;
WHEREAS educating about systemic barriers to realizing a multiracial democracy based on race or gender should be understood as central to the active and engaged pursuit of knowledge in the 21^st century to produce engaged and informed citizens;
…THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that Senate resolutely rejects any attempts by bodies external to the faculty to restrict or dictate university curriculum on any matter, including matters related to racial and social justice, and will stand firm against encroachment on faculty authority by the legislature or the Boards of Trustees.

That’s just a short excerpt. If you are a faculty member at a higher-ed institution, go to the link and download it. If you know a faculty member, point them to it. This is a way to help do our part in this battle against censorship meant to shut down education on racism, sexism, and other ongoing human problems that have and do exist in the U.S.

Pushback on book banning and gay silencing in Texas

Two stories involving academic freedom in Texas came out recently within a few days of each other. The first involves librarians who created the Twitter hashtag #FReadom (freedom and reading = freedom to read) to inundate the Texas legislature hashtag #txlege with protests against the growing movement to ban books that Republican legislators and Republican governor Greg Abbott feel are inappropriate.

It will be no surprise to constant readers of the HP, or anyone who is fighting to save our democracy from Republican legal attacks, that the basis of the banning is that “certain types” of books must be banned from school libraries if they “make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” That is from Texas Rep. Matt Krause’s October 25, 202 1 letter to the Texas Education Agency “demanding that school districts report whether they carry titles from a list of 850 books” or any others that carry out their malevolent purpose of helping white males understand how they benefit from racism and sexism and helping them to reject that privilege. In other words, the same old claim that we first encountered last November in Donald Trump’s Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping: teaching people about racism is racist. As we said way back then,

The duplicity here makes one want to cry out. Here is the pretzel: acknowledging racism at work in America today is actually racist. To bring up race is, somehow, to have a “racialized view” of America, and, beyond that, to bring up racism is to be an apologist for slavery.
…Fighting racism and working for civil rights is also not racist. To claim that fighting racism forces people to think about race, and only race, and therefore is racist, can only be the product of a deep stupidity or a deep evil. It’s very hard to say which would be worse.
…This is more of the same idea that acknowledging race and racism is racist. We should all be allowed to be “color-blind”. This phrase, as used in this Order, represents a false assumption, which is that America, or at least most Americans, are not racist and do not ever made judgments about people based on their race. Therefore, being told to think about race is ruining this paradise by introducing race-based thinking, and therefore, racism.
…While one might find fault with a diversity training program that singles out white people as racist when we know that it’s a part of human nature the world over, we are after all in this case talking about the U.S., where centuries of institutional racism have worked to promote the interests and well-being of white Americans at the expense of black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous Americans. So in a U.S. diversity training, the focus will indeed be on how white people can renounce the privileges racism offers them. If white Americans don’t do that, they cannot “let people’s skills and personalities be what differentiates them.”
…If one group have worked to institutionalize racism, then yes, they participate in racism and benefit from it, even if they’re not fully aware of the full extent of that participation and benefit. It become so normalized that it’s just the fabric of life. Sexism works the same way. Making people aware of the benefit, or privilege, they experience is a first step in teaching the basic lesson that discrimination must be actively opposed, and that can’t happen until it is personally acknowledged. The work doesn’t stop there. Acknowledging one’s own participation in discrimination is just the first step to fighting it, and being part of the solution.

Yet this ploy of shutting down teaching about racism has only gained steam, as more and more Republican lawmakers at the local, state, and federal level successfully use it as part of their cancel culture (in which democracy is canceled).

Part of what makes them successful is the threatening, overbearing, intolerable dictates they send to their targets. In this case, Krause’s letter to the TEA contains these not-to-be-questioned, immediately-to-be-obeyed orders:

1. Please identify how many copies of each book in the attached [850-book] Addendum your district possesses and at what campus locations including school library and classroom collections.
2. Please identify the amount of funds spent by your District to acquire the books identified in request No. 1 above.
3. Please identify any other books or content in your District, specifying the campus location and funds spent on acquisition, that address or contain the following topics: human sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, or human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), sexually explicit images, graphic presentations of sexual behavior that is in violation of the law, or contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Items 1 and 2 are very heavy lifts, requiring a good deal of record-searching. Item 3 is the poisonous type of intimidation that comes from someone making a long list of “forbiddens” that is meant to seem so all-encompassing that people will just back down under its onslaught and not try to fight it.

We choose to fight it by reading it through. The first list of topics is clearly meant to be red-hot; that is, most likely any book on any of these topics is perverse and bad for students. This includes human sexuality, a rather broad topic. We know from long experience that human sexuality is dog-whistle code for “sex ed or birth control”, HIV and AIDS the same for “homosexuality”, and explicit or graphic sexual behavior is also, in most cases of Republican protest, code for “gay”.

The second list is just the usual “anything that makes white students aware of white racism is racist against whites because it makes them feel bad when they haven’t done anything wrong–“why are you blaming white kids in 2021 for slavery??”–and/or judges them guilty until proven innocent. “…consciously or unconsciously” at the end is particularly revealing of the extent to which these lawmakers are drunk on their power. Whatever the intention of the material, if a white male individual finds fault with it, out it goes.

Governor Abbott’s letter to the Texas Association of School Boards carries on in the same vein:

A growing number of parents of Texas students are becoming increasingly alarmed about some of the books and other content found in public school libraries are extremely inappropriate in the public education system. The most flagrant examples include clearly pornographic images and substance that have no place in the Texas public education system.
These parents are rightfully angry.

Books and “other content” that have “clearly” pornographic images and… “substance”… The vagueness is, to borrow a phrase, at once conscious and unconscious. Using scary umbrella words like “pornography” is a conscious attempt to pre-empt any pushback on the Republican book banning process. Who would defend pornography, or ask what you mean by the word, ask for concrete examples and definitions? What kind of monster would get fired and possibly jailed for doing that?

Using 100% meaningless words like “substance” is a conscious attempt to pile on more threat–these things are so bad we can’t even name them; we just hint that it’s even worse than printed materials. In this way, it’s unconscious of the fact that it’s so vague as to be meaningless. Unless you are terrified into submission by the mere thought of the governor rebuking you, you’re going to laugh at the random and obviously bogus use of the word.

Parents feature repeatedly in Abbott’s letter. But how many is “a growing number”, and how are they finding out about “some” of the books and “other content” in public school libraries that are “extremely inappropriate”? The lack of hard data is damning. Anyone can say “lots of people don’t like this”; proving it is another story. Allegedly, the inventory that Krause demands will be Step 1 in carefully reading and assessing each title to judge its appropriateness. But one feels this will not really be the case. Instead, every material on the 850-item list will be confiscated and–who knows?–perhaps burned by police or the army in a public square, with speeches and rioting, just like the 1930s.

In a tiring lack of surprise, many of the books the Republicans want to ban are about interracial romance, homosexuality, and trans experience.

The librarians protesting this deserve support. As one of them, Carolyn Foote, put it so well:

“One of the chilling effects is people get scared, and you get siloed. You’re afraid, you’re alone,” says Twitter takeover organizer Carolyn Foote, a library consultant who spent 29 years as a school librarian. “We hope people realize they’re not alone—there are people and librarians fighting for students to have rights to literature and information.”

Yes – the best thing to do when confronted with a threat meant to shut you down is to open it up to the world.

Meanwhile in a related story, Texas also has a law mandating that public school sex ed “course materials and instruction relating to sexual education or sexually transmitted diseases should include:

(1) an emphasis on sexual abstinence as the only completely reliable method of avoiding unwanted teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases;
(8) emphasis, provided in a factual manner and from a public health perspective, that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under Section 21.06, Penal Code.

The first note is clearly established by precedent in schools around the country to be Christian pedagogy. The 8th is confusing–is it really illegal to be gay in Texas? Sadly, a 1973 law is still on the books–that’s the Section 21.06 of the Penal Code–and so each county and/or city in the state has to vote on and pass non-discrimination protections to make it possible for gay people to live there. Some universities in Texas have also passed anti-discrimination laws. But these simply put gay people in those counties, cities, or schools in the uneasy position of being free from discrimination but still identified as criminals.

This is why books about being gay or sex education materials that discuss homosexuality are on the Republican hit list. This kind of oppression is already almost completely successful at muzzling and erasing gay people: currently, only 6% of sex ed programs in Texas public schools use materials that include LGBTQIA+ needs and experiences. So the most recent book banning campaign is certainly meant in part to flush out that remaining 6% and get rid of it. Teachers are also forbidden to mention homosexuality or gay people in class.

It’s easy to target people who are already defined as criminals, and then you just expand out from there to anyone you don’t like: immigrants, people for whom English is a second language, black and brown people, and anyone else you label with increasingly vague and threatening names, like “liberal”, “leftist”, “socialist”, etc. These people produce “pornographic” “materials” and “substance” and then force them on school children. Again, the hope is that everyone will be too afraid to be identified with this to ever push back.

The real inappropriate material here is the assault on our democracy. Book banning is not part of it. People banning is not part of it. Do what you can where you are to prevent or overturn these laws through legal channels, and remember that you are not alone.

November 2021 round-up: attacks on academic freedom in Florida and Texas

There’s a lot to include in any wrap-up of the battle going on in the U.S. right now to make colleges and universities nothing more than weapons in the hands of Americans who want to dismantle our democracy. Through sheer chance, we began our coverage of the University of Florida on the first of this month, and that story has continued to evolve throughout November. In our November 1 post, we described how three political science faculty members were refused permission to serve as expert court witnesses during a lawsuit challenging Florida’s new voting restriction law because, as UF president Kent Fuchs put it in a written statement,

It is important to note that the university did not deny the First Amendment rights or academic freedom of professors Dan Smith, Michael McDonald and Sharon Austin. Rather, the university denied requests of these full-time employees to undertake outside paid work that is adverse to the university’s interests as a state of Florida institution.

That is, UF employees will not testify against a state policy because then the state will cut funding to the university. The idea that state universities will lose funding if their faculty criticize the state is a new one, at least in the U.S., and it makes “the state” sound a lot less like Florida and a lot more like “the State”, as in “state-controlled media” or “state-controlled education”.

Reaction was swift, from inside and outside UF. The next day, higher ed reporters wrote that “Administrators denied requests from a fourth professor who had asked to participate in litigation supporting mask mandates against [the state of] Florida…

The professor, the pediatrician Jeffrey L. Goldhagen, was asked to testify and serve as a declarant in litigation that followed Gov. Ron DeSantis’s executive order that forbade mask mandates in schools as the Delta variant of Covid-19 tore through the state. Goldhagen is chief of the division of community and societal pediatrics at the University of Florida‘s College of Medicine, in Jacksonville, and a professor in pediatric palliative care. Goldhagen said he would have spoken about why masks work and why children need protection from the virus.
…Goldhagen’s case appears to contradict the university’s earlier explanation for why the political-science professors’ testimony was blocked. The campus’s president, W. Kent Fuchs, and provost, Joe Glover, wrote on Monday night that the political-science professors would be “free” to testify “pro bono on their own time without using university resources.” Goldhagen wrote in the disclosure he submitted to the university that he would not be using university resources and indicated, when asked if he would be paid more than $5,000 annually, that he would not. He told The Chronicle that administrators never separately asked him if he would be paid at all.

The very next day–November 3–it was revealed that a faculty member at another state university, Florida International University, who supported the Florida voting restriction law was allowed to testify in its favor by FIU:

Court records show that the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee hired a Florida International University professor, Dario Moreno, as an “expert witness” in League of Women Voters of Florida v. Lee, which challenges the restrictive voting law.
At Florida International, a public university, administrators signed off on Moreno’s outside-employment request with little fanfare. The “Outside Activity/Conflict of Interest Form” includes no comments or feedback to Moreno — just a couple of sign-offs by his superiors. Though the filled-out form does not specify the lawsuit, it names a law firm — Shutts & Bowen — listed on the same court documents that name Moreno as an expert witness for the Republican committees.
…Moreno, who could not be reached for comment, is an associate professor in the politics and international-relations department. He has previously been paid by the Florida Legislature to defend Republican-drawn redistricting maps in court. According to a 2015 article in the Tampa Bay Times, Moreno had been “hired by the Florida Legislature to be an expert witness in defense of every GOP-drawn redistricting map since 1994.”

Uproar over the discrepancy led UF to issue a statement saying their faculty could indeed testify against the voting law, but only if they were not paid. FIU put no such stricture on Moreno as he testified in favor of the law, and he billed for 112 hours’ worth of compensation.

Where does the fault lie–with the State of Florida’s Republican-led government, which may send a message to its colleges and universities that any criticism of the government will be punished? or with those institutions, like UF and FIU, that are all too willing to accept this situation? or with the general public, which includes people who support the situation and people who do not support it, who do nothing?

Silke-Maria Warnock, a faculty member at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, throws down the challenge we are all facing:

It’s rarely a good sign if you find yourself wondering how to translate certain German words: Gleichschaltung,for instance, or vorauseilender Gehorsam. But reading the news out of the University of Florida, where two administrators informed three faculty members that they were not permitted to testify as expert witnesses in a court challenge to Florida’s voter-suppression laws, will send you down that road.
Gleichschaltung is the process by which institutions are brought under the control of totalitarian ideology. It is frequently rendered as “coordination” or “synchronization,” but those terms lack the terrifying connotation of switches flipped, one by one, until the same ideological current flows through every previously independent institution.
Vorauseilender Gehorsam means “obedience ahead of the command.” The Yale historian Timothy Snyder translates it as “anticipatory obedience,” and that is close enough, but it doesn’t quite capture the scurrying servility implied in “vorauseilen,” to hurry ahead.
We don’t know on whose orders David E. Richardson, dean of the university’s college of arts and sciences, rejected the request of Daniel A. Smith, chair of its political-science department, to testify as an expert witness in the voting-rights case; or on whose orders Gary Wimsett, UF’s assistant vice president for conflicts of interest, rejected the requests of Michael McDonald, who studies national elections, and Sharon Wright Austin, who studies the political behavior of African Americans, to do the same. All three faculty members had previously testified as expert witnesses against the state in other cases, and the university had never declared them to be subject to conflicts of interest.
Unless we want to believe that two different administrators independently invented the same policy from scratch and presented it in near-identical terms, we have to conclude that Richardson and Wimsett acted on orders from above. The notion that they simply anticipated such orders is, in some regards, even worse… Whether they got their orders from the trustees, the president, the provost, or from Gov. Ron DeSantis or one of his minions will emerge in due course. But no matter where the directive originated, both men should have refused to carry it out. They should instead have offered their resignations. You do not obey such commands, you do not hurry ahead to destroy your university’s reputation at the bidding of an authoritarian regime.
…The implications of the assertion that the faculty must not act in a manner adverse to the regime’s interest — “activities that may pose a conflict of interest to the executive branch of the state of Florida create a conflict for the University of Florida” — are staggering. If you are not allowed to bear witness against voter suppression in court, why would you be allowed to study the effects of voter suppression in the first place, or to teach your students about them? Such research and such teaching are not in Ron DeSantis’s interest, either, and by the logic of Richardson’s denial, any activity that is not in Ron DeSantis’s interest is not in the interest of the University of Florida.
…the university’s decision to declare itself an arm of DeSantis’s government rather than an independent institution beholden to the production and dissemination of knowledge and expertise represents an instance of Gleichschaltung that will be more difficult to reverse. It will only get worse. That it is the democratic franchise itself that is at stake in the court case in question only highlights how deep the threat is. Access to the vote is to democracy as freedom of speech is to the university: fundamental, constitutive. Democracies go bankrupt the same way everybody else does: very slowly, then all of a sudden. We are still at “slowly.” All of a sudden is scheduled for Tuesday, November 8, 2022. If Florida’s administrators have ever asked themselves how they would have acted in 1932, now they know.

The date of November 8, 2022 refers to the next election day, when Governor DeSantis is up for re-election.

Of course, it’s not just Florida. If our CRT page has taught us anything, it’s that democracy is under attack in all 50 states, and that higher ed is a much-hated target. Most recently, the University of Texas at Austin has halted a research study “on the effectiveness of antiracism training for white children”–the original “critical race theory” topic that began our own coverage of CRT.

The name of the university is different, but the attack is the same:

This follows a complaint to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights that the project is racially discriminatory, among other criticism. his follows a complaint to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights that the project is racially discriminatory, among other criticism.

–It’s astounding and depressing that a single, horrible argument has gained so much credibility: that teaching about racism is racist. Our first CRT page post, Truth v. Myth: Trump’s Executive Order on Diversity Education, thoroughly explores this double-speak. Teaching Americans that racism existed in the past and still exists in the present, and takes the form of white racism against non-white people in our laws (institutional racism), is, the argument goes, racist because it makes white people feel bad by assuming that they are racist until they prove themselves non-racist. It is imperative, in this argument, that no white person ever feel bad or consider whether they participate in or benefit from racism, institutional and otherwise, and the deeper, much more screwed-up message is that non-white people are racist. Non-white people assume that white people are racist, which is racist.

To be brief, in a society where racism against non-white people is deeply embedded in law and social more, every white person does indeed have to make an effort to change this situation, and remove racist laws and representations from our nation.

To return to this particular UTA story, it seems logical that if CRT is “new” and suspect, it should be objectively, scientifically tested through studies of its impact. That’s what was happening at UTA. But its opponents could not take the chance that the study might prove that white children were not damaged by learning about racism, and so have shut it down, with the university’s meek acquiesence–or its gleichschaltung:

Numerous professors are asking the university to allow the research to proceed during the internal and external reviews, arguing that UT Austin’s institutional review board previously approved the project, as did peer reviewers during a competitive internal funding process.
These professors warn that halting research due to outside complaints threatens the integrity of the study at hand and, more generally, chills free inquiry into timely subjects such as antiracism.
UT Austin “leadership’s decision to pause elements of the study based on the mere filing of a complaint, and before any assessment of whether the complaint poses a credible claim, compromises the integrity of the research and the academic freedom to conduct research and draw conclusions rooted in evidence,” 18 UT Austin education professors said this week in a letter to President Jay Hartzell and Provost Sharon Wood.
…“The leadership’s decision to pause any aspects of the study has the effect of legitimizing actions that, however unfounded, seek to suppress scholarly pursuit of truth and the advancement of scientific knowledge.”
The purpose of the study, according to a recruitment flier, is to explore “overall engagement with the GoKAR! program, as well as the potential for the program to reduce bias and increase awareness of racism.”
The study hit a speed bump after Mark Perry, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Michigan and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, filed a complaint with the Dallas OCR office alleging violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race.
UT Austin “blatantly violates Title VI by illegally engaging in racial discrimination on the basis of skin color by promoting, sponsoring, offering, and marketing a discriminatory program that engages in racial segregation,” Perry wrote to the OCR. “In violation of Title VI, the University’s GoKAR! Program operates illegally and exclusively for caregivers and their 4-5 year old children who both must identify as white and illegally excludes and discriminates against and excludes non-white caregivers and their 4-5 year old children on the basis of their race and skin color.”
…Victor Saenz, chair of educational leadership and policy at UT Austin and the first of the 18 education professors to sign the letter of concern, said via email that he wanted “to clarify that we’ve been in constant communication with all levels of UT leadership throughout this review process.” The university is “working expeditiously to help resolve this matter to ensure our faculty are being fully supported.”
Saenz’s letter to Wood and Hartzell tells something of a different story: “We are deeply concerned by the request to pause any aspect of the research. The university’s actions raise serious concerns regarding the differential treatment of research based on subject matter and viewpoint. In our experience, and in consulting with individuals who have extensive experience interacting with the [OCR] and/or expertise in academic freedom and civil rights, this is an atypical and unprecedented response from a university.”
…Referencing several critical blog posts and news articles about the study, some of which suggest that the project amounts to training, not research, [a letter from UTA faculty] says that “to succumb to political coercion, especially as it relates to scholarship that confronts anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and any other forms of oppression, compromises the central function of a public university. The university’s actions send a message that risks censoring and chilling professor speech based on viewpoint, running afoul of central tenets of the First Amendment.”

Yes, Perry is saying that a study of white children’s responses to educational materials that will help change racist attitudes about non-white people is racist because it doesn’t allow non-white children to participate–it’s segregation. Perry is deeply concerned that non-white children are not being given the chance to learn how not to be racist, perhaps against other non-white children, but given everything we have learned about this topic, it seems safer to bet that Perry wants non-white children to learn not to be racist against white children.

If only this type of university-supported attack on science, the objectivity of higher ed, and our national commitment to liberty and justice for all were truly “atypical and unprecedented”. This snowball is quickly growing and the hill it rolls down becomes steeper and steeper.

We’ll end as we always do–everyone must do their part to stop this takeover and dismantling of our democracy. Get involved in whatever legal and non-violent ways that you can, where you are, locally and nationally. Stop the gleichschaltung before it becomes a way of life.

Freedom of double-speak

We’re back once again to flag just one of the many open, unembarrassed attacks on our democracy going on right now, and it’s clear that this is not going to stop until that work is accomplished, or an equally powerful bloc of pro-democracy Americans occupy positions of authority in federal, state, and local governments, in K-Ph.D. education, and in corporations.

This time, it’s the University of Florida: three of its political science department faculty submitted requests to serve as expert witnesses in court during a lawsuit challenging Florida’s new voting restriction law. UF released a “University statement on academic freedom and free speech” on October 20, 2021, that was short and not sweet:

Recent news reports have indicated the University of Florida denied requests of some faculty members to participate in a lawsuit over the state of Florida’s new election laws.
The University of Florida has a long track record of supporting free speech and our faculty’s academic freedom, and we will continue to do so. It is important to note that the university did not deny the First Amendment rights or academic freedom of professors Dan Smith, Michael McDonald and Sharon Austin. Rather, the university denied requests of these full-time employees to undertake outside paid work that is adverse to the university’s interests as a state of Florida institution.

…the university’s interests as a state of Florida institution. What does this mean? One can quickly infer that it means “we don’t testify against the state government that funds us–our main interest is existing.” If we continue to browse UF Statements by Year, we see that on August 26, 2021, President Kent Fuchs included this paean in his state of the university address:

Despite the economic challenges faced by the State of Florida due to Covid, our elected officials invested even more in the University of Florida this past year, for which we are incredibly grateful. In the past five years we are the only university in the nation to have increased the size of our faculty by 500, and this past year the Governor and the State Legislature invested additional funding in UF to further increase the size of the faculty, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence. Although no new funds were provided for salary increases, the provost, vice presidents, and deans reallocated funds from existing budgets to provide compensation increases for both faculty and staff this year.

So “incredibly grateful” is UF that it is paying back the favor by refusing to allow its faculty to testify against state voting policy. This inevitably leads one to wonder if that state financial support for UF was predicated on the State of Florida’s understanding that the gift would make UF (even more) unwilling to criticize any state laws. Fuchs has made no secret of his own sense of being a figurehead, saying in the same August 26 address that he could not issue a mask mandate: “I literally don’t have that power… within hours, another message would go out from someone to everyone, again saying we’ve been informed that there will be no such mandate. We’re part of the state government.”

State funding is meant to fuel the inquiry, knowledge creation, and intellectual work of a university. It’s not supposed to be a muzzle or a leash. It’s supposed to be freeing–instead of relying on private money, which is given at the whim of wealthy individuals, state universities get public funding that is regular, objective, and not predicated on the university doing what a few people want it to do. It receives public money in return for serving the public good.

If a state university will not allow its faculty to testify in a case against state policy, no matter the reason, then that university cannot logically refer people to its “long track record of supporting free speech and our faculty’s academic freedom” and vow that “we will continue to do so” when they protest this shutdown of free speech and active democratic participation. This is just more of the open double-speak that is so hard to witness, so unbelievably brazen and acceptable and, it seems, often so persuasive to the American people.

It’s what Chief Judge Beryl Howell, FDC in Washington, DC, sharply rebuked on October 28, 2021:

“No wonder parts of the public in the U.S. are confused about whether what happened on January 6 at the Capitol was simply a petty offense of trespassing with some disorderliness, or shocking criminal conduct that represented a grave threat to our democratic norms,” Judge Beryl A. Howell said in court Thursday. “Let me make my view clear: The rioters were not mere protesters.”
…Why, she asked, when prosecutors called the riot an “attack on democracy . . . unparalleled in American history,” were Griffith and other participants facing the same charge as nonviolent protesters who routinely disrupt congressional hearings?
“It seems like a bit of a disconnect,” Howell said – “muddled” and “almost schizophrenic.”
“Is it the government’s view that the members of the mob that engaged in the Capitol attack on January 6 were simply trespassers?” Howell asked incredulously. “Is general deterrence going to be served by letting rioters who broke into the Capitol, overran the police . . . broke into the building through windows and doors . . . resolve their criminal liability through petty offense pleas?”
She said it was also unusual that prosecutors were not asking for defendants to be under court supervision until they paid their fines. “This is the first time I’ve ever had the government ask for a restitution payment and not ask for a term of probation,” she said. “Is it because the government thinks these defendants are more trustworthy?”
…”In all my years on the bench, I’ve never been in this position before, and it’s all due to the government, despite calling this the crime of the century, resolving it with a . . . petty offense.”

The worst attack ever, slap on the wrist. Academic freedom, no testifying against the state. Killing our democracy, petty offense. We’re far beyond the stage of a foundation for dictatorship being laid. It’s been laid, the concrete has set, and the framing is going up. All Americans who value democracy in general, and our historic democracy in particular, need to be as active as the fascists are, to get into politics at all levels at the rates they do, to be as forceful in fighting for democracy as they are forceful in attacking it, and to stop letting anti-democratic Americans dominate policy, media, and society.

This is that email with the subject line that says ACTION REQUIRED. We don’t call for riots or bloodshed, which is just another thing that distinguishes us from anti-democracy activists. We call for legal action to take the place of the amazing inaction and bystandering that seems to characterize even those Americans who support our democracy.

It’s much like the latest environmental crisis: people watch it grow and grow, and they get scared, but they comfort themselves that some small group of people will fix it. Some scientist will come upon a solution. Someone will solve it. Someone else. This is partly the result of the last 150 years or so of medical and scientific exploration and development: there have been many, many times when a small group or even one individual did create or discover a cure or a solution–vaccines, non-aerosol dispensers, seat belts.

But we cannot all sit back and wait for some free individual or team to solve our national or global problems. To bring it back to American democracy, there are likely many opportunities for you, wherever you live, to take up the long, slow work of participating in local government. Wherever you live, you can join the fight to prevent anti-democratic Congresspeople from calling a new Constitutional Convention that, with the solid voting bloc formed by anti-democratic Republicans, would be sure to shred our Constitution and institute the same kind of dictatorship that other countries whose leaders have re-written their constitutions (Hungary, for example).

Never heard of the “Article V Convention” effort? Just put it into a search engine and you’ll find plenty about it–sharply divided into pro-Convention stories from right-wing orgs and anti-Convention stories from left-wing orgs.

Whatever you do, do something to defend democracy. You may be that individual or in that small group that could change things.