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Heres a smart move Democrats start channeling Ronald Reagans famous question in the 1980 presidential campaign: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

If Democrats want to win in the 2022 midterm elections, voters need to hear Reagans question over and over.

Democrats have a great answer.

Yes, Americans are better off economically today than they were ten months ago when there was a Republican majority in the Senate and a Republican in the White House.

The top issue for voters in last weeks race for governor in Virginia was the economy, according to a VoteCast exit survey by the Associated Press and Fox News.

The economy was named the top issue by 35 percent of voters, more than twice the 17 percent who named Covid, or the 15 percent who said education.

And here is the winning economic record the Democrats can talk about right now:

If former President TrumpDonald TrumpFormer Chicago-area CEO sentenced to 30 days in prison for role in Jan. 6 attack Noem formally launches reelection campaign Overnight Health Care Presented by Rare Access Action Project Biden unveils FDA pick MORE was still in office, hed brag that this is the greatest U.S. economy in all history.

In fact, Trump constantly bragged about low unemployment numbers as a measure of his success before the pandemic sent unemployment sky high. Now Biden has cut unemployment drastically despite the pandemic.

All these economic accomplishments by Democrats are locked in.

On top of all that, House Democrats passed a major infrastructure bill late Friday, which Biden is expected to sign into law any day now.

If an even bigger measure aimed at expanding the social safety net passes too, Democrats will have more evidence beyond a roaring economy. They will be able to point to better health care, universal pre-kindergarten and subsidies for child care none of which would have happened without Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill.

The Democrats current economic record is compelling because theyve done it alone.

Most Republicans in Congress refused to work on legislation to help the economy grow and lessen income inequality. But they had no trouble working with Trump to drive up the deficit by passing a big tax cut for corporations and the rich.

Now Democrats must start taking credit for the economy.

Terry McAuliffeTerry McAuliffe10 takeaways from Virginia's election Republicans find a message on race that works; here's how Democrats should respond Kamala Harris a 2024 problem for Biden and the Democrats MORE, the Democratic candidate in the Virginia gubernatorial race, saw his advantage in polls fall away when Republicans shifted the debate away from economics.

The GOP got McAuliffe and enough voters to fixate on the bogus issue of Parents Rights. McAuliffe was trapped in culture wars quicksand created by right wing groups outrage at the idea that schools might enforce mask mandates, talk about racial injustice or be open to new pronouns for transgender students.

Democrats can get back on their feet by recalling the message discipline of four winning campaigns by President Clinton and President ObamaBarack Hussein ObamaOvernight Health Care Presented by Rare Access Action Project Biden unveils FDA pick Washington Post removes large portions of two stories on Steele dossier Manchin opposes Biden FDA nominee MORE.

In Clintons successful 1992 race, his top strategist, James Carville, famously coined the phrase Its the economy, stupid. In 1996, the economic boom carried Clinton to victory.

Obamas 2008 and 2012 campaigns followed the same road.

Obama refused to be thrown off message by far-right culture war attacks. Those jabs began with claims he was not born in the United States the Birther movement and were followed by accusations that he was a radical leftist, seemingly based on the fact that he knew a man who was once in the Weather Underground.

Later, there would be suggestions that the Affordable Care Act would sink the economy. Oh, and dont forget the charge that Democrats backed a War on Christmas.

In the first campaign, Obama focused on ending the 2008 economic crisis. In 2012, he was all about bolstering the U.S. car industry and continuing the steady economic recovery.

But for some reason, todays Democrats are constantly dragged off message by the GOPs bellowing about divisive, culture war issues.

Clintons former strategist, Carville, has a theory about what befell the Democrats in the most recent elections.

What went wrong is just stupid wokeness, Carville told PBS NewsHour last week. I mean, this 'defund the police' lunacy, this take Abraham Lincolns name off of schools.Weve got to change this internally in my view.

Carvilles analysis is correct, but incomplete.

It is important base politics for Democrats to push for racial justice and cultural equality. But be alert it opens the door for the GOP to appeal to white racial grievance. And the overall electorate cares far more about themselves and kitchen table, economic issues.

Thats why Democrats need to wake up and bang one drum loudly Its the economy, stupid!

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Juan Williams: Democrats must fight and win on the economy | TheHill - The Hill

University campuses have long been battlegrounds of ideas, but lately we have seen a sharpened weapon: the claim that ones rivals are suppressing the right tofree speech.

Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamolas Free Speech and Koch Money is an essential analysis of the amped-up culture wars over free speech. It offers a history of conservative philanthropic networks orbiting around the Koch family, who fund right-wing student groups as part of a larger effort to reverse collectivist inroads made by centrists and leftists.

By now, many aspects of the Kochtopus are well-known to observers of the dark money that underpins electoral, judicial and legislative campaigns. That is the nickname given to the American oil dynasty whose wealth is rooted in the fortune of Fred Koch, the founder of a refinery that became Koch Industries, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate later headed by two of Freds sons, Charles and David Koch.

The younger son David died in 2019. Charles Koch, at85, is still feisty as co-owner, CEO and chairman of Koch Industries, a role hes been in since 1967. He also finds time for exhaustive lobbying and philanthropic work, gifting gargantuan grants to conservative and libertarian causes and thinktanks that have proved successful in repealing environmental and worker protections and voting rights over recent decades.

Hence, Kochtopus a term capturing the fact that the familys lavish philanthropic work has spawned a billion-dollar arsenal fighting to suppress the rights and livelihoods of poorer people in America and across the world. For leftists today, the vampire-like nature of the capitalist famously identified by Marx, sucking the lifeblood of workers, has a face, and that face belongs to Charles Koch.

But the term Kochtopus has a longer heritage than many people today might realise, and is not the sole preserve of the left thats one of the valuable points of this nuanced study of ideological splits on the political right. Wilson and Kamola report that Murray Rothbard, for example, used the term during a breach with the Kochs in the late 1970s over the direction of the Cato Institute, which he had co-founded with Charles Koch. Rothbard took issue with the Donor, as he referred to Koch, micromanaging his work and acting like a sort of autocrat, which Rothbard thought undermined his own anarcho-libertarian vision of freedom from all coercive authority.

The end result isnt surprising. Rothbard was kicked out of the Cato Institute. He had challenged the power of richer men, and, as typically happens in the land of the free, the richer men prevailed.

Scholarly attention to this age-old problem the fact that paying the piper enables people with deep pockets to call the tune has been revitalised in recent years across the social sciences as BigMan philanthropy from donors such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros has become a hot political topic. But so far, alot of the academic focus has centred on the explicit goals of donors: Gates claimed intention to improve education in the US at the primary and secondary level, for example, and how the results have often fallen short of initial hopes.

This book, by contrast, looks at the surreptitious money flowing through university campuses, all of it geared to overturning what funders see as leftist biases in teaching and policymaking.

As Wilson and Kamola describe, such funders regard campuses as breeding grounds for future conservative thought leaders, politicians, right-wing pundits and DClobbyists. They spend big to achieve big deliverables when it comes to developing a pipeline of students committed to conservative causes, wording thats not Wilson and Kamolas, but taken directly from a funding proposal submitted by a faculty member at Western Carolina University to the Kochs. When academics at the university voted against establishing a Koch-funded Center for the Study of Free Enterprise, the university trustees overruled them and approvedit.

This isnt unusual in itself: the use of Koch money to seed libertarian research at universities is well documented by writers such as Jane Mayer and Kim Phillips-Fein. What Wilson and Kamola add is a timely focus on a new tool, the provocateur speaker who is invited to campus by well-funded conservative student groups, who then feign shock and outrage when the provocateur attracts a by-now familiar reaction: astorm of student protests. The speaker gets exactly what they wanted: the oxymoronic fame of being spectacularly cancelled.

Its an open secret that for celebrity scholar-pundits across the political spectrum Jordan Peterson, Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, Slavoj iek nopublicity is bad publicity. They want to be reviled, because its better press. If any group comes off looking bad as a result of the highly publicised campus free speech wars, its not the speaker who books a media tour on the back of it, its the students. They appear intolerant: either too fragile to listen to ideas they dont like or, paradoxically, all-powerful magically capable of eviscerating the lives of more powerful men and women with a simplewave of their placards. Neither perception is true, but the publicity surrounding speaker protests suggests otherwise, exaggerating both the sensitivity and the efficacy of campus protests today.

If this seems surprising if a reader is certain that Im wrong, and that all university students today are snowflakes who find their lectures too traumatic to endure and spend much of their time forming human barricades around any approaching guest speaker its because the Kochtopus has achieved its goals and is functioning exactly as intended. The aim is to manufacture and stoke campus culture wars, fuelling public support for a range of right-wing aims such as mandates against teaching critical race theory and severely punishing students who engage in protests on campus. Ironically, funders are often pro-free speech but anti-education, as if teaching is a special type of speech they cant abide.

That, at any rate, is what Wilson and Kamola argue that the free speech wars are financially lubricated by the Koch machine to fuel the impression of left-wing intolerance among students and faculty, thus rationalising donor influence on hiring boards to balance the bias on campuses.

Its a convincing thesis. As the authors put it compellingly, the culture wars are rooted in an anti-democratic power grab organized by a brilliantly conceptualized, deeply integrated and well-funded partisan operation. Following this conclusion, they add an appendix on When and How to Protest a Speaker with tips for, inessence, safer, better, louder speaker protests. Igroaned. The appendix is like counselling a school of fish about the exact size, shape and dangers of the fish hook and then saying: now leap up.

To lay my own cards on the table, Im no fan of noplatforming. Ithink it helps to cultivate solipsistic, insular protest movementsthat tend to alienate rather than enrol wider communities.

My own response to the craven provocateurs is simple perhaps too simple, but its better than throwing oneself again and again on the fish hook. Dont respond. Better to ignore the bastards when they come fishing across university campuses.

Remember the line that Howard Roark offers his enemy in Ayn Rands TheFountainhead (1943) when pressed about what he really thought ofhim? Roark replies with majestic indifference: But Idont think ofyou.

Thats how to beat Peterson or Murray or Coulter. By acting as if they dont matter, they cease tomatter. How will the right respond then? Byforcing and strapping students into seats? So much for free speech.

Linsey McGoey is professor of sociology at the University of Essex and the author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (2015).

Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus CultureBy Ralph Wilson and Isaac KamolaPluto Press, 256pp, 72.00 and 16.99ISBN 9780745343020 and 9780745343013Published 20 November 2021

Ralph Wilson, co-founder and research director of the Corporate Genome Project in Tallahassee, Florida, was born into an itinerant military family but grew up largely in rural Alabama. He studied physics and mathematics at Troy University in Alabama and then Florida State University, where he became involved in years of campus organising and activism against corporate influence. Icame to see how the highly influential donors that flooded our electoral process with money were also present oncampus.

The public needs tobe aware, argues Wilson, that the groups stoking the current crisis [about free speech] are the same groups that have advanced climate change denial and tobacco industry misinformation, and with the same tactics. People should also beware a marketplace of ideas model of the academy, which not only comes loaded with a free-market worldview, but misportrays the function and purpose of the academy while neglecting the presence of power and influenceIt is critical to protect the ability of campuses to regulate themselves and guide their own speech policies.

Isaac Kamola, associate professor of political science at Trinity College in Connecticut, was born and raised in Washington state, where his father worked in the timber industry and he spent as much time as possible in the woods. He studied at Whitman College, in rural south-eastern Washington state, and, as a postgraduate student at the University of Minnesota, became active in organising strike support for the clerical workers union and on anunsuccessful graduate student union campaign, experiences that led to a strong sense of how hostile university presidents and trustees are towards their employees.

Asked for advice on handling potential free speech controversies, Kamola urges university administrators to trust your staff, faculty and students to make complicated decisions about what is, and isnt, acceptable on campus. Capitulating to outside groups and their political agendas might spare a few minutes of bad press, but at the expense of sowing distrust on campus and a loss of faith in your institution.

Matthew Reisz

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Free Speech and Koch Money, by Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola - Times Higher Education (THE)

Transgernder flag at a protest against Trump administration policies in New York City, 2018(Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

National Review is never afraid to resist the Lefts demands for conformity.

Adead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it, said G. K. Chesterton. National Reviewhas demonstrated its liveliness by going against the tide of a culture that threatens to drag us down into the slough of despond.

You can help us continue the long journey upstream by contributing to our webathon.

The phrase culture war was born in Germany, then used in a Republican convention speech nearly 30 years ago, and has since become the description of the times we live in. But cultures are vast things, much larger and more mysterious than mere politics or even the state itself. A culture includes the religion of the people, their assumptions about human nature and about the purpose of their civic associations; it is our assumptions about what is good to know, and why. And of course, it includes the resplendent gamut of the arts, high culture, and mass entertainment. National Reviewhas been fighting for a healthy, free, excellent, and truly diverse culture from the start and carries on that fight today.

The Left talks about diversity, by which it means all types of people brought into conformity. They believe that every social and cultural institution is meant to embody and enact one set of progressive egalitarian values. But we have supported the republican institutions and a conservative judiciary that would allow truly diverse organizations to flourish in American society.

We have stood with the little platoons that make life in our society worth living in. And dying in! Over the years, we stood with the Little Sisters of the Poor and their right to spiritually and materially assist the dying while remaining Catholic. Weve stood with all religious organizations that seek freedom to honor God and serve His people according to their conscience.

We have been at the forefront of opposing the emerging threat of gender ideology that would rob women of their spaces, their sports, and even their exclusive claim to motherhood. The phenomenon would impose on young children a life of sterility and surgeriesand aims to put into doubt some of the oldest and most basic facts about biology. NR stands athwart this social contagion of lies.

National Review does not allow partisanship to cloud our judgment on these matters. When even Republican governors are willing to give in to the chemical castration and abuse of children, National Review rises up to oppose them. When a Republican-appointed and usually sound Supreme Court justice decides that transgenderism and gender identity are part of Johnson-era legislation on civil rights, we call out his false textualism, his tautologies, and his arrogant invitation to sue people to find out the true meaning of his ruling.

Before it became commonplace, we pointed out that our new identity politics was a displaced and discombobulated form of religion. Weve also pointed out that it is kind of a miserable way to go through life.

And National Reviews arts coverage reflects that deep commitment to human excellence and beauty, free of cant and the strictures of ideology. In particular, I think it is important to call out the essential, provocative coverage of cinema offered by Armond White, who not only argues for the greatness of cinema but is himself an American original. Alongside him, we have Kyle Smith and Ross Douthat covering the movies and what they mean for American life.

Weve stood up for a healthy, full life together and an American culture that protects life and enables the pursuit of happiness. So stand with us today.

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Swimming Upstream in the Culture Wars - National Review

Maud Maron is an attorney, mom, former school board member, and now an independent candidate for New York City Council. She knows firsthand how high the temperature can get at school board meetings.

"We're sort of algorithmically set up to run to the far corners of our positions instead of finding the middle ground," she says.

As for calls for federal law enforcement to investigate school board meeting outbursts, Maron says:

"Offering your opinion at a public meeting in a public setting is a quintessentially important American thing to do," she says. "It's a protected right, and it's something that we absolutely need to make sure is not ... stopped or intimidated."

While parents are showing up concerned about what their kids are learningat school, politics are also at play at school board meetings across the country.

Right-wing groups have often returned to public schools as a culture war battleground," Peter Montgomery says. "But it is also clearly an attempt to rile up and mobilize."

This hour, On Point: Inside the school board culture wars.

Peter Montgomery, senior fellow at Right Wing Watch, a progressive advocacy group. (@petemont)

Noah Weinrich, spokesman for Heritage Action for America. (@weinrich_noah)

Laura Vozzella, Virginia politics reporter at the Washington Post. (@LVozzella)

Shirley Brown, chair of the Sarasota County School Board.

Maud Maron, New York City Council candidate. (@MaudMaron)

On the politics at play at school board meetings

Peter Montgomery: It is a continuation of that trend that you talk about, for public schools to become cultural battlegrounds and political battlegrounds. I think one thing that's different right now is that there's a coming together of COVID conspiracies and people who view masks and vaccine requirements as a form of tyranny. And that's coming together with this manufactured right-wing campaign against critical race theory.

"And then preexisting concerns, and concerns that are being inflamed about the teaching of racism in schools, but also the inclusion of LGBTQ students. So there's a number of issues that are being used by right-wing groups to stir up people to show up at school board meetings, to run for school board and to try to take them over.

The National School Board Association wrote a letter on September 29th to the Biden administration, requesting that the Department of Justice look to the Patriot Act and consider some of these acts as domestic terrorism. Is that an overstep?

Peter Montgomery: It's really important to distinguish between what the School Board Association asked for and the Department of Justice has done, and what Republicans and right-wing groups are mischaracterizing. Nobody is trying to treat concerned parents as domestic terrorists just for showing up, something that the Heritage Foundation claimed in an email just this morning.

"The concern that was raised was about the increasing level of harassment and threats of violence directed at school board members and educators. ... The Justice Department made it clear that they support the right for spirited debate, and this is not an effort to silence people who want to show up and yell at their school board members. It's an effort to deal seriously with criminal acts like harassment, and threats of violence and actual acts of violence.

What are some of the organizations that are fomenting controversy?

Peter Montgomery: The Heritage Foundation, one of the large, influential think tanks on the political right in the U.S. ... They're encouraging people to report examples of critical race theory. And they and other organizations put out information, like if you see these words, that's critical race theory sneaking into school. And they're words like diversity, and equity and inclusion. And so they're creating this boogeyman out there that they can then use to stoke controversy.

"The Leadership Institute, a long-time conservative organization, is training people to run for school boards and take over school boards. The Family Research Council is raising money to, for what it says, is to train candidates to take over school boards. And they say that in June, they had a boot camp that trained 1,200 parents to do that.

"And this goes across what we might think of as the right-wing. From people like Heritage Foundation, and the Leadership Institute to newer organizations like Turning Point USA, which is a right-wing youth organizing group. Part of the Koch Brothers network like FreedomWorks, religious right groups like the Family Research Council. They have all jumped on the bandwagon because they see it as an issue that they can exploit to try to make political gains this year, and in 2022 and 2024.

On the fear that drives the school board culture wars

Peter Montgomery: "What we're seeing is really harmful to communities. When I heard you playing that tape of some of the anger coming out at meetings, I thought about some of the Tea Party meetings that we heard where people were fueled to anger with lies about what the Affordable Care Act would do, and how it was going to destroy Medicare. And so all this anger was created really around lies. But it worked for the right, if your only value is winning the next election.

"It helped people turn out to the vote and win. And I think some of that is what we're seeing here. You can often mobilize people if you make them fearful and angry. And you say that their children are being threatened by teachers in public schools who have evil intent. Some of the groups that are involved in this anti-CRT campaign have long records of trying to sow distrust in public education, and that plays into this as well."

On how to create civil school board meetings

Peter Montgomery: [Make] it clear that people do have the right to speak. They're not trying to silence people. Neither was the federal government trying to silence people. They are concerned about criminal acts. They're concerned about some of this hostility leading to violence. And I think that parents, and parents groups and people that are organizing parents should also be concerned about the level of anger and fear that they're ramping up. And maybe get their activists to engage civilly.

Right Wing Watch: "Turning Point USA Targets School Boards Over Evil Mask Requirements and Radical Training on Bias and Inequality | Right Wing Watch" "Turning Point USA, an organization that trains and mobilizes right-wing college students, launched a project targeting public school boards on August 15, the Documented newsletter reported."

Right Wing Watch: "The Right-Wing Political Machine Is Out to Take Over School Boards by Fanning Fears of Critical Race Theory" "The right-wing campaign to stifle teaching and discussion about racism in U.S. history and institutions is fearmongering about critical race theory to mobilize right-wing activists and conservative voters to take over local school boards."

Right Wing Watch: "Family Research Council Raises Money for Right-Wing School Board Takeover Campaign" "Family Research Council President Tony Perkins is raising money to promote right-wing takeovers of local school boards."

Spectrum News 1: "Conservative groups are training activists to swarm school board meetings" "Blanca Martinez stepped up to the podium at a recent meeting of the Fort Worth School Board."

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Why school boards are a nexus of America's culture wars - WBUR

Nicholas Ensley Mitchell, University of Kansas

American diversity is in the spotlight as racial discrimination in the United States reemerges as a major topic of public discussion, touching everything from education to housing to policing.

The context of the quality of American diversity is inescapable as multiple debates around race relations continue to rage.

We tend to think of diversity in demographic terms, but thats an incomplete take. It has a qualitative element to it it exists as a reality with which we all interact.

The debate around voting rights, for example, applies to an American electorate that overwhelmingly lives in racially segregated communities.

Even the bans on critical race theory the academic movement that examines how racism has shaped public policy will be implemented in currently racially segregated schools.

But the quality of diversity is rarely discussed in popular culture.

The meaning of words like equity and inclusion used often in discussions of diversity is difficult to grasp until Americans address what they think diversity looks like. Thats because the quality of diversity comprises both a political and moral stance from which equity and inclusion derive meaning.

The quality of diversity is how Americans exist among each other. It can be described in two ways: segregated coexistence and living in community.

These two terms reflect a fundamental battle in American culture between segregation and integration. As a curriculum theorist who studies how race impacts education and society, I believe it is necessary to acknowledge this distinction.

Segregated coexistence is a standard of diversity that relies on a surface-level demography that you could call diverse because different races all live in one geographic region, such as cities like Detroit or my native Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Beneath this demography, the reality is a ubiquitous state of de facto racial segregation where enclaves are so numerous in American cities that people easily associate races and ethnicities with certain neighborhoods, schools and ZIP codes.

An August 2021 map compiled by CNN based on 2020 census data vividly lays bare the endemic residential segregation in the U.S.

In June 2021, the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, a research group, released a report on residential segregation. Out of every metropolitan region in the United States with more than 200,000 residents, 81% (169 out of 209) were more segregated as of 2019 than they were in 1990, the report noted.

It also asserted that 83% of neighborhoods that were given poor ratings (or redlined) in the 1930s by a federal mortgage policy that denied Blacks mortgages were as of 2010 highly segregated communities of color.

Segregated coexistence is the racist seed from which many contemporary conflicts about race have their roots.

Thats because segregating where people live is physical confirmation of their forced inferiority. Denying them equitable treatment in other areas becomes easy once they have been denied the freedom of movement.

Living in community is a different reality. Its not easily achieved because integration is hard for many reasons.

Before different races can live in community there must first be interracial justice that leads to racial reconciliation. Noted scholar Eric Yamamoto describes this process as the recognition of the historical and contemporary harm different racial groups have caused one another, affirmative efforts to address justice grievances and the restructuring of present-day race relations in such a way that broken relationships are healed.

The success or failure of integration depends on whether Americans want to racially reconcile or if they are so accustomed to the conflict that they cannot come together.

This means remaking how governments allocate resources , including providing equitable funding for schools and, in the private sector, diversifying executive leadership.

Doing that work means answering the political and moral question that has been with us since this countrys founding: How should we treat those whom we see as different from us?

This question permeates everything from civil rights cases before the Supreme Court to whom we welcome as neighbors or ostracize as outsiders and trespassers.

All these debates have momentous implications for Americas domestic stability. But they are often discussed as a matter of theory and political talking points, with no grounding in the real world.

If we are going to debate diversity in any situation, perhaps we should ask ourselves if we want to live in segregated enclaves or in community, with the full knowledge of what that means and what our answer says about us as individuals and as a nation.

[Understand whats going on in Washington. Sign up for The Conversations Politics Weekly.]

Nicholas Ensley Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies, University of Kansas

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The first battle in the culture wars: The quality of diversity | Opinion - pennlive.com