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As Ive talked this over with friends and colleagues, Ive found that there is quite a bit of support for the idea of a child allowance. At a gut level, people understand that its gotten objectively harder for the average person to afford children without working so much to make ends meet that they dont have the time or energy to spend the time with their kids that they need. The general sentiment is that the family is a haven in a heartless world and we should support anything that makes it easier for families to thrive.

Ive observed two things in these discussions that also map directly onto the broader fault lines in right-of-center politics. The younger people Ive spoken to are more likely to support a child allowance than the older. The dividing line seems to be around age 50, with support increasing among younger people, while opposition increases in frequency and vehemence with age. The other is that people who work in politics are more likely to oppose this idea, probably because they are the ones most invested in an ideological outlook and with the most institutional incentives to toe the line.

A cynic might reply that of course people in their 20s, 30s and 40s would be more likely to support this plan; after all, theyre the ones most likely to have kids and receive the cash. There is something to that, but I dont think this is a case of raw self-interest driving people to get their hands on some free money. Whats really going on is that these people are in a very different place financially than Generation X and especially baby boomers when they were raising young children. Millennials, many of whom are now in their 30s, own a share of national wealth that is roughly one-quarter what the boomers owned at the same age and are well below where Gen X was, too.

Theyre the ones feeling the brunt of the brutal slowdown in real wage growth that started in the 1970s, of the steep rise in the cost of education, of the financialization and globalization of the economy that have all made it harder to start a family and raise children. These private conversations have been instructive. One conservative friend in her late 20s, upon hearing about the Biden plan, told me, What the heck, I guess Im a Democrat now. She was joking about switching parties, but not about her support for the child allowance. Other young Republicans might go the additional step, which would spell doom for Republicans who are already struggling with younger people. My friend is a frequent critic of Mitt Romney, but she likes his plan a lot.

Elected Republicans who reflexively oppose a child allowance may need to catch up with their voters and with economic reality on this. Some might be getting the message. Another friend, who spent years working closely with Jack Kemp and might have been expected to oppose the idea for any number of reasons, told me he strongly supports a child allowance. He essentially waved off the sorts of concerns raised by Mr. Rubio and Mr. Lee as being trifles compared with the importance of supporting family formation and the stability that comes with it.

The long-term trend of demotherization, as social scientists gracelessly put it, is not good for children or the many women who report that they would prefer to be at home with their children, especially when they are young. Whats worse, both the earned-income tax credit and temporary assistance for needy families reinforce the problem, because they are means tested and linked to the mother working outside of the home. Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute explicitly worries that a child allowance would create the possibility that single mothers could afford not to work.

Strangely the concern that mothers whether single or married could afford not to work seems to be a fetish for many Republicans who are otherwise pro-family, at least in their statements. Whats incongruous about the Lee and Rubio statement is that when they say that being pro-family is being pro-work, they are saying, in effect, that only wage-work outside the home counts as real work. Thats false and inhumane. Raising children is in fact the most essential work there is. Kids need their parents. Its hard and time-consuming, but ultimately the most satisfying thing that most people do. Conservatives should believe in parents raising their own children rather than outsourcing it.

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Opinion | There Is a Generational Divide Among Republicans - The New York Times

(KUTV)

The Utah Platform Republicans PAC issued a resolution Monday censuring Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) for his vote to convict former President Donald Trump in his two Senate impeachment trials.

In 2020, Romney was the only GOP senator to vote in favor of conviction. The follow year, Romney again voted for conviction along with seven other Republicans.

The censure resolution states that Utah GOP Platform, a political action committee, believes Romney's votes were "unjust and unethical." Read the resolution in its entirety below.

2News has reached out to Romney for comment.

In February, 2News reported rumblings among Utah Republicans about censuring Romney over his impeachment vote.

Hundreds of people have signed the motion, circulating social media, calling for a censure against Romney.

The Utah Republican Party defended Romney in February, along with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) after talk of censuring and a motion, signed by hundreds of people, accused Romney of being a deep state agent.

Their statement read: "..The difference between our Utah Republicans showcase a diversity of thought, in contrast to the danger of a party fixated on 'unanimity of thought. There is power in our differences as a political party, and we look forward to each senator explaining their votes to the people of Utah. Disagreement is natural and healthy in a party that is based on principlesnot on persona. In fact, those principles are the reason behind unprecedented American prosperity during the last four years."

A censure does not remove a senator from office, but is a formal statement of disapproval, according to the U.S. Senate's website.

Whereas, at the first impeachment trial, on February 5, 2020, without evidence of a federal crime or misdemeanor and ignoring the unconstitutional House impeachment process, Utahs junior U.S. Senator Mitt Romney was the lone Republican voting with the Senate Democrats to convict Pres. Trump, becoming the first Senator in 231 years of U.S. presidential history to vote against a President of his own party in an impeachment trial; and

Whereas, on January 13, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an article of impeachment claiming that President Trump had incited an insurrection against the U.S. government, without any evidence to prove he incited violence, given that President Trump had, on January 6th, asked his supporters to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard and that the FBI had concluded that the occupation of the Capitol building by the rioters had been pre-planned in advance of the Presidents speech; and

Whereas, on January 26, 2021, after President Trump had concluded his term and left office, Sen. Romney voted together with all of the Senate Democrats to proceed with an unconstitutional Senate show trial (at which the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court refused to preside) on the House's article of impeachment; and

Whereas, on February 13, 2021, Sen. Romney voted together with all of the Senate Democrats to convict Donald Trump on the House's impeachment charge; and

Whereas, Republicans in the other six States from which Republican Senators voted to convict President Trump have held their Senators accountable for their wrongful votes; and

Whereas, the Utah Republican Party Platform requires us to hold elected leaders accountable to ethical standards, and voting to convict a former President without sufficient evidence to prove any of the elements of the charge of incitement of insurrection is both unjust and unethical;

Therefore, be it resolved that: We, the Board of Directors of the Platform Republican PAC, hereby declare our united censure of Sen. Mitt Romney.

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Group of Utah Republicans issue resolution to censure Romney - KJZZ

Pollsters are perplexed. Many believed that the polling errors we saw in 2016 had been adequately addressed in time for the 2020 presidential election. But once again, the polls underestimated support for Donald Trump (and support for Republicans across the board). Now, more than three months out from the election, we still dont have a great sense as to why.

A number of theories may offer some clues, though. For instance, one popular explanation is that pollsters likely voter models were off. Survey screening for likely voters may have failed to adequately gauge voter enthusiasm. Or attempts to contact inconsistent or infrequent voters who tend to be harder to reach in surveys may have failed in reaching those more favorable to Trump. Also, due to the pandemic, Democrats chose to limit typical methods to increase voter turnout, like door-to-door canvassing, which may have affected actual turnout. Then again, maybe the polling error was due to sampling problems. If Democrats were more likely than Republicans to stay at home during the pandemic, they would more likely be available to take surveys. Of course, its not necessarily an either-or situation. Both of these theories could be true (not to mention a whole host of other explanations), but its also possible that something bigger is at play here since the polls misfired in similar ways in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections: Pollsters may be systematically missing certain types of Republican support.

This is a relatively new phenomenon, but pollsters have increasingly found evidence of partisan nonresponse that is, particular types of Republicans are just less likely to take surveys, so these voters opinions are not reflected in survey data. This was especially relevant in understanding Trumps support, too, as many of these voters broke for him and other Republicans in 2020.

But why are some Republican voters more reluctant to take surveys? As the director of polling at the Cato Institute, I, as well as other pollsters, am studying this and currently have two working theories for why this is happening. First, Republicans are becoming more distrustful of institutions and society, and that may be extending to how they feel about pollsters. Second, suburban Republican college graduates are more likely to fear professional sanction for their views and are therefore self-censoring more, including in surveys. Now, of course, understanding who isnt responding to a survey is inherently difficult because well, they arent taking the survey, and at this point, we dont know whether these two things are happening independently or are part of the same phenomenon. However, it indicates to me that some of the polling error we saw in 2020 is part of a long-standing issue that isnt unique just to Trump.

Long before Trump took office, Republicans were already losing trust in our society and its institutions. But there are now signs that lack of trust could be driving the nonresponse and distrust we see among Republicans in polls. In his examination of what drove survey nonresponse in the 2016 election, Alexander Agadjanian, now a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, found that in the past 40 or so years, Republicans trust has declined considerably. Initially, they were much more likely than Democrats to say that people could be trusted, but now the gap between the two parties has narrowed. If we look at more recent data, from 2018, we see that trust among Republicans is now at the same level as trust among Democrats: In 1972, 56 percent of Republicans said other people could be trusted, as did 41 percent of Democrats. In 2018, those figures declined to 35 percent among both groups a 21-percentage-point decline among Republicans and a 6-point decline among Democrats.

Declining trust in institutions also breaks down along very partisan lines with more Republicans than Democrats saying they lack faith in institutions. Take the share of Republicans who believe the national news media has a positive effect on the country. That figure plummeted from an already-low 24 percent in 2010 to just 10 percent in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center. For academia, the decline in confidence among Republicans has been even more dramatic. In 2010, Pew found 58 percent of Republicans thought colleges and universities had a positive effect on the country, but that share dropped to 36 percent by 2017. In contrast, Democrats confidence in both the media and higher education has gone up slightly since 2010, by 5 points and 7 points, respectively.

So, why are Republicans losing confidence in institutions?

According to Gallup, the most common reason Republicans gave for their low confidence in universities was that they believed they were too political and biased. Similarly, a 2017 Cato Institute/YouGov survey I worked on found that Republicans tended to believe many major news outlets had a liberal bias while an outlet like Fox News had a conservative one.

To be clear, these trends predate Trump, but he likely also accelerated them. Think of all the times he called the news media an enemy of the American people and claimed that the polls were fake that is, unless the results were favorable to him.

And this perception that knowledge gatekeepers like the media and academia are politicized may have given some Republicans the impression that other institutions like polling are politicized too. Or at least this is a working theory I have. Take the fact that media organizations and colleges or universities are often frequent sponsors of polls (e.g., CNN, The New York Times, Monmouth University). In fact, in my analysis of the polls included in the Real Clear Politics polling average one month before the 2020 election, I found that 79 percent of the polls were sponsored by either a media outlet or a college or university. Consider that the sponsors of these polls often explicitly identify themselves when they contact respondents and ask them to participate in a survey. If most Republicans believe journalists and academics are politicized, it stands to reason they might assume the polls they sponsor are politicized, too.

Taken together, its plausible at the very least that as Republican confidence in societal institutions plummets, so does their trust in polls and pollsters more generally. And, as a result, some Republicans in particular, Trump voters who have lower levels of social trust are less likely to take surveys.

But Trumps anti-establishment rhetoric and Republicans declining trust in societal institutions is probably not the whole story either. Polls of the 2018 midterm elections held in the middle of Trumps presidency performed reasonably well. This indicates that something else may also have been at work.

One possible explanation? Republicans may be more likely to opt out of election polls because they increasingly fear retribution for their views. A Cato Institute/YouGov survey I helped conduct in July found, for instance, that 62 percent of Americans have political views they are afraid to share given the current political climate. Republicans were overwhelmingly likely to say they self-censored their political opinions (77 percent) compared with Democrats (52 percent).

Not only were many Republicans afraid to express their political opinions, but those with more education were also more likely than Democrats to say they feared getting fired or missing out on job opportunities if their opinions became known. Interestingly, Republicans with a high school education or less (27 percent) were about as likely as their Democratic counterparts (23 percent) to fear their political views could harm them at work. But Republicans with college degrees (40 percent) and post-graduate degrees (60 percent) were far more concerned than Democrats with college degrees (24 percent) and post-graduate degrees (25 percent) in this regard.

Several other studies have also found that more educated, affluent, white suburban Republicans were hesitant to share their political views. Public Opinion Strategies, for instance, found that Trump voters were more likely to keep their vote a secret from their friends (19 percent of Trump voters versus 8 percent of Biden voters) and that this demographic was more likely to be college-educated white women. Wes Anderson of OnMessage, a Republican consulting firm, also told me that in their research they found that higher-income, college-educated white voters were more likely to say they knew someone who was uncomfortable telling people they were voting for Trump, and whats more, they were more likely to say that description could apply to themselves.

There is also some evidence that these voters might be less likely to reveal their voting preferences in a live telephone interview, although we want to be careful about putting too much stock into shy Trump voters. That said, the pollster Morning Consult did find in 2015 and 2016 that more affluent and educated voters were slightly less likely to indicate that they would vote for Trump in a telephone interview, which carries social desirability pressure, than in an online survey. In 2020 they found limited evidence for an education effect but slightly higher Trump support among higher-income households online. A team of academics also found in an online survey of registered voters that Republicans were about twice as likely (12 percent) as Democrats (5 percent) to say they would probably or definitely not share their true voting intentions for president with a pollster in a telephone poll.

But why are these Republicans resistant to telling pollsters their true preferences? Theyre likely afraid their opinions might get out, even though polls are conducted confidentially. In the aforementioned study, the voters who admitted being unlikely to tell pollsters who they were voting for were asked why that was the case. As one respondent put it, I dont believe the information would be confidential and I think its dangerous to express an opinion outside of the current liberal viewpoint.

Another said, I would not give my real opinion for fear of reprisal if someone found out. These quotes are not just cherry-picked either. The researchers categorized all the open-ended responses and identified six primary reasons why respondents wanted to keep their opinions private, and four of those six reasons involved a fear that ones political opinion could be traced back to them and prove harmful. Republicans considerably outnumbered Democrats in these fears.

Its possible, of course, that this second theory of mine isnt telling the whole story either. It may be that two separate phenomena are occurring simultaneously. Perhaps a sliver of college-educated affluent suburban Republican voters are reluctant to express their views with pollsters, as was detected by Public Opinion Strategies, OnMessage and Morning Consult. And its possible that this group is entirely different from another set of low-trust Republican voters who refuse to take surveys. Or maybe these two theories overlap more than we realize.

Nevertheless, this second theory does help explain, in part, why Republicans did better than expected in more affluent suburban House districts. Most Republican incumbents in suburban districts won, and instead of losing seats nationally, as was forecasted based on pre-election polls, Republicans actually picked up a net gain of 12 House seats (and flipped 15) primarily in suburban areas.

Its easy to think something may be unique to Trumps being on the ballot considering we saw such a large miss in the 2016 and 2020 polls (the 2018 midterm polls, on the other hand, performed well), but although Trump did play a role in creating a contentious environment, we should avoid jumping to the conclusion that polling will return to normal now that hes out of office.

Thats because our country is in the middle of an uncivil war, full of partisan rancor and loathing. This predates Trump, of course, but many believe he brought a persons political identity to the forefront in both 2016 (immigration) and 2020 (immigration, but he also painted Democrats as politically extreme) to the extent that people are now changing their views on race and gender to match their political party. This, in turn, has meant political discourse in the U.S. is harder. For instance, a Yahoo News/YouGov survey conducted in late May 2020 found that a majority of Americans (52 percent) thought Trump was a racist. With those stakes, agreeing to disagree is simply hard for many to do. And those who think that Trump administration policies did more good than harm, on balance, may opt to not participate in polls in order to keep those views private given the stakes.

But this isnt unique to Trump. Other elections where political identity was pivotal to the outcome have also produced polling misses. Take the Brexit vote, the 2016 referendum in the United Kingdom to either leave or stay in the European Union. This vote, too, became strongly associated with issues of identity and immigration and had a surprising electoral outcome because polls systematically underestimated the conservative vote for Leave, which in the end won by nearly 4 points (52 percent Leave versus 48 percent Remain).

Notably, Leave support had actually dropped in the polls after a far-right extremist assassinated Labour lawmaker Jo Cox, a staunch Remainer, because of her views on immigration and globalization. But SurveyMonkeys Chief Research Officer Jon Cohen told NBC News that he thought the drop occurred because many Leave voters didnt want to be associated with Coxs murder; they may have just opted out of surveys even though they were still voting in favor of Leave because they were concerned about immigration. And this is a trend I think is likely to continue as long as sensitive, politically divisive issues like immigration, race, identity and citizenship frame the way voters think about what their vote means.

Provided this interpretation of the data is accurate, pollsters will have to contend with societal forces much larger than the industry itself. The perception that societal institutions are politicized, the belief that a growing illiberal zeitgeist will punish dissenting viewpoints, the inherently sensitive and salient issues of immigration and identity these all combine to undercut the social trust needed for accurate polling. Without Trump on the ballot, the issues at stake could very well change. But it seems unlikely that the highly contentious issues over the past four years will fade into the background simply because Trump is no longer in the White House. Indeed, these issues will likely remain in the forefront in future election cycles, especially if he runs for office again. And unless pollsters can regain respondents trust, todays reluctant Republican survey-takers may continue to conceal their political positions, only to reveal them at the ballot box.

Originally posted here:
Why Did Republicans Outperform The Polls Again? Two Theories. - FiveThirtyEight

A counterprotester gives a Nazi salute at a Black Lives Matter event in Milwaukee. Screenshot from a March 3 presentation by Milwaukee Jewish Federation.

Recent national events are now part of history: The man storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 wearing a Camp Auschwitz shirt. The chants of Jews will not replace us in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2019. U.S. Congress member Marjorie Taylor Green and her Jewish space laser theory.

Closer to home, incidents of antisemitism are on the rise, including social media attacks on two Jewish members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

According to an annual audit released March 3 by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, Wisconsinites experienced 99 incidents of antisemitism in 2020, a 36% increase from the year before; the group says these are reports that are verified and corroborated.

We are seeing a significant increase in overt antisemitic expression laden with conspiracy

theories and hate group rhetoric, said Brian Schupper, chair of the JCRC in a statement. The audit helps us discuss these worrisome trends with our community partners and understand where we need to focus our efforts.

Several of the troubling incidents involved Nazi imagery, including reports of people doing the Nazi sieg heil salute at a Republican Party of Milwaukee Protect the Vote Rally on Nov. 7, and a posting on Aug. 26 from a Kenosha middle school teacher posing in front of a swastika, writing, Glad they finally got rid of 2 terrorists in Kenosha [referring to Kyle Rittenhouses victims]. Now get rid of the rest.

It appears most Wisconsin legislators, regardless of party affiliation, believe one way to counter the spread of hate is through education. On Friday, the Senate Committee on Education passed a bill that would mandate Holocaust education by inserting it into the states social studies standards, requiring instruction on the Holocaust and other genocides in grades 5 through 12.

The bill, authored by two Republicans and one Democrat, has more than 40 bipartisan sponsors. It is aimed at countering a lack of knowledge among younger generations about this chapter in history. Recent surveys reveal a shocking learning gap regarding the Holocaust, the event that extinguished the lives of 6 million Jews in addition to Roma (gypsies), gay men, people with disabilities, ethic Poles and Soviet civilians during World War II.

According to a national survey released by Claims Conference, 58% of people surveyed believed something like the Holocaust could happen again. Forty-nine percent of millennials surveyed could not name one of the 40,000 ghettos or camps where Jews were slaughtered. And 22% of those did not know about the Holocaust at all.

I can remember interviewing Holocaust survivors when I was a teenager as part of a

youth group project to preserve their stories. While they shared survival stories that were nothing short of heroic, their stories were also those of tragic loss, Rep. Subeck (D-Madison), one of the bills authors and one of Wisconsins three Jewish legislators, said in a statement. Unfortunately, todays children will likely never meet a Holocaust survivor. While they will not have a chance, as I did, to listen to their firsthand stories, it is incumbent upon us to make sure this history is never repeated.

Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills ), another author of the bill, became a champion of Holocaust education after a visit to Auschwitz in Germany. At the Feb. 23 meeting of the Senate Education Committee that she chairs, Darling and several other co-sponsors spoke with passion about the need for such a measure. She said this history helps us learn and become sensitive to mans inhumanity to man, and to learn from that experience, so that experience of inhumanity isnt repeated again.

Darling and the other members of a delegation saw a film before their tour of the camp. The film was about people getting on the train, who are going to go to concentration camps, Darling said. It hurt the heart so much to see families going on this train, knowing what was going to happen to them. And I was very struck by one particular image of a mom holding the hand of her child . and then youd see these shoes of children who had been exterminated. And seeing these little shoes really, really bothered me. So this just moved me to the point that I thought if I ever have the opportunity, Im going to work on making sure that people understand what happened there.

Darling believes the bill could help address the knowledge gap. My concern was that if we dont have people understand what happened there, I imagined this atrocity could happen again. What happened with the Holocaust is that Hitler decided he needed a scapegoat because the economy was so bad. So he chose the Jewish population to be the scapegoat.

Nancy Kennedy Barnett, spoke at the hearing as a representative of the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center (HERC). The center has a speakers bureau that presents educational programs around the state. If the bill passes, it will provide support and curriculum to educators.

I am the child of a Holocaust survivor from Budapest Hungary, and Im a second generation speaker teaching my fathers story of survival, Barnett said. We have lost witnesses to this horrific time in history, but the lessons and messages cannot be forgotten. When I teach, I dont only speak about the atrocities of the past; I use it as a lens to illustrate what can happen when hatred and bullying is left unchecked.

Barnett recalled an incident that happened in one of classrooms where she taught in Hartland, Wis., after a group of 8th graders had visited the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie, Ill. After I had spent about an hour with them telling my fathers story, an eighth grade girl raised her hand and, clearly troubled, said to me, I was talking to my mom last night, and my mom says that she has a friend that said the Holocaust never happened.

Barnett said students need help separating fact from fiction, and can apply lessons from Holocaust studies to other incidences of hate and discrimination. Students must understand the consequences of hate. They must not be bystanders, she continued. They can be an upstander instead, by being someone who gets involved. They can be proactive and have the courage to speak up and care, but they must know the truth. Holocaust education teaches an understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping, and an examination of what it means to be a responsible and respectful person.

Many members of the committee appeared moved by the virtual testimonial of Eva Zaret, a Holocaust survivor from Budapest, Hungary, who came to the U.S. when she was 20. Zaret, who is Jewish, lost most of her family in the camps, and has devoted her later years to teaching about the Holocaust in middle schools, high schools and colleges.

I get such a response from the children, said Zaret. They are waiting to hug me and sometimes that takes an hour and a half after I speak, and they cry and they want to learn. I feel that this is the most important thing we can do as human beings is teach our

children.

Holding up a photograph of her parents, she talked about attending first grade at age 6. After my father was taken, my friends didnt want to speak to us. All of a sudden, I realized that we were different than my friends. They told me I killed Christ and cannot talk to me, she recalled.

Zaret said she will never forget the hate, violence and horrors she witnessed. I escaped from Vienna to come to the United States, she continued. And this is my beloved country. I want people to learn about the Holocaust and atrocities, because its not just the 6 million Jews who were killed. How about the other millions of people who stood by or did nothing or hated us just for being Jewish? I will do anything possible to help while Im alive.

Mark Miller, chair of the board at HERC, tells Wisconsin Examiner he is extremely encouraged by the bipartisan support for the the Holocaust Education Bill, which passed the Assembly in early 2020 before COVID-19 derailed everything, including pending legislation. He says the universal support for the measure speaks volumes.

Miller says the generation of Holocaust survivors is dying, so it is up to the next generation to carry on the knowledge. It was one of the most horrible events ever in the history of mankind, he says. And it will translate to other injustices also; it gives young people a perspective that they need to have to be better citizens.

In addition to teaching about what happens when hate goes unchecked, studying resistance can help students understand how to overcome prejudice. And, he adds, education itself is a victory. Clearly, we want to honor the 6 million people that didnt die in vain. This is a way to tell their story. They didnt die in vain. They actually won, and became educators for a better society.

The Holocaust Education Resource Center is setting up a website and will make curriculum available for free, says Miller. Teachers have a lot on their plate. But our commitment here is to provide a resource that everyone can go to, to pull lesson plans, to teach their young people about this, he continues. If you dont want this to happen again, and you see the way society is fraying, and split up, then you have to educate young people because theyre the future.

Miller got involved in HERC because his wifes family survived the Holocaust and he has learned from their stories. If youre a survivor, you live it every day, you talk about it every day, he says. Its how you survive. The weight of the atrocities very few human beings mentally can handle that. And the way you handle that is by talking about it by sharing, by interacting with other people.

This story needs to be told because thats how they win, says Miller. These people didnt die in vain. They are going to become the educators. And that I know up in heaven, that theyre going to have a little smile that they won that Hitler didnt win.

Jonathan Pollack, an instructor in the history department of Madison College and an honorary scholar in UW-Madisons Center for Jewish Studies, tells Wisconsin Examiner he finds the Holocaust Education bill really kind of refreshing. Despite the level of party-based rancor in Wisconsin, he calls it a bipartisan slam-dunk bill, and I feel like we dont see many of those.

Because of the range of opinions in the Jewish community and beyond on the actions of Israel, he was glad to see that the bill avoided the trap of labeling criticism of the Israeli military and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu as antisemitism. It was pretty straightforward, he says of the bill. And there was no weird, hidden agenda in there.

Pollack says incidents like the Baraboo high schoolers photographed in 2018 doing a Nazi salute showed the importance of education. In the aftermath of that, people were saying there ought to be something in Wisconsin that mandates Holocaust education, because they just dont know.

Most of Pollacks classes cover modern U.S. history, including African American and Native American history. In each of these, the subject of genocide comes up, in Native American history, first and foremost, he says. But I certainly avoid Holocaust comparisons. I really like to talk about the differences.

Pollack taught a semester course in Jewish history and found that the Holocaust loomed so large for many Jewish students that they lacked much context for the rest of their history. The story of American Jewish communities and the Holocaust is really complicated and weird because the U.S. didnt officially want to recognize it, and American Jews were too insecure about their own position here to truly speak up a whole lot about it.

Pollack said most of his college students have possessed at least a basic knowledge of the Holocaust and he hasnt experienced Holocaust denial or students believing the Jews caused the Holocaust, another disturbing finding from the Claims Conference study.

However, says Pollack, progress toward racial equity in this country is slow, despite ethnic studies requirements that became part of college curriculums in the 1980s.

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State-mandated standards are certainly a step in the right direction, but not enough to make lasting change. Theres still racism, still institutional racism, and all the ethnic studies in the world isnt going to help especially students of color who dont have the money to pay full tuition, says Pollack. Does this make a difference? Will there be no more Baraboo because theres this line in the state statutes that governs what goes on in Wisconsin schools, that there has to be X amount of time spent on the Holocaust? I doubt it.

If the bill sails through, as expected, it will be interesting to follow the progress of Holocaust education in Wisconsin, says Pollack. His hope is that the Holocaust will be taught as part of a historical context, including important stories of resistance. At the university level people studying the Holocaust began looking at at genocide and looking at the the atrocities and the victims and so forth, and that where recent scholarship has gotten more into the Warsaw ghetto and the various partisan movements around Europe, he says.

Too much focus on atrocities can leave students feeling despair, he adds. Even with Jewish students who came up through Jewish day schools in Chicago and in New York and elsewhere, our modern Jewish history education is just focused on the Holocaust, says Pollack. It was just like looking in a bottomless pit. Theres more to Jewish history than that. Theres more to even the Holocaust than that.

He credits his mentor David Sorkin, a former UW-Madison professor now at Yale, for his ideas on how to teach the Holocaust. He said to teach a class entirely on the Holocaust is to rob it of its context; to carefully understand the Holocaust, you have to look at it in the context of the Jewish experience in Germany and the rest of Europe.

Kiel Majewski, the co-founder of a grassroots truth and reconciliation organization called Together We Remember, was the first executive director of CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana. He shared an office with Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor, who was subject to medical experiments in the camp. An arsonist destroyed the museum in 2003.

We need this education, and it would be most useful if it leads us to address the history of genocide and atrocity in the land now known as the U.S. Majewski says, again citing the Claims Conference study on how many millennials cant name a concentration camp. Compare that to a survey released the same year by Southern Poverty Law Center which found that only 9% of high school seniors in the U.S. 9%! could name slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War. Is it any wonder that in the mainstream we have trouble recognizing structural racism and its longstanding effects?

Majewski believes the Legislatures attempt to bring these stories into classrooms will strengthen the education of young people. The Holocaust is unique, and all genocides are unique in their own right, he says. Looking closer at them reveals both parallels and pitfalls in connecting the dots from past to present and across cultures. We can and should educate students to understand the nuances while appreciating how these moments in history are connected and part of the bigger challenge of bending the arc toward justice for the planet and all of its people.

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Republicans and Democrats agree on this: Teaching the Holocaust - Wisconsin Examiner

COLUMBUS, Ohio The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.

Ohioans were living with the coronavirus for about two months before GOP lawmakers initiated what would be a nearly yearlong effort to squash the state health departments ability to issue public health orders.

The earliest version of the idea was to limit any order issued by the Ohio Department of Health to a two-week window. After that, a small panel of lawmakers would need to approve the order for it to stay in effect any further.

We are clearly on the downside of the curve, there is no longer a risk of overwhelming the health care system, said now-former Rep. John Becker to the House State and Local Government Committee, setting one of the first legislative attacks on the health department in motion via Senate Bill 1.

Im not sure there ever was, but that argument did make sense to me initially.

Ten months, three gubernatorial vetoes, and more than 520,000 Americans dead from COVID-19 later, little has changed. The Senate passed a similar version of the idea last month on a party-line vote.

A review of emails obtained by public records requests, committee hearings, interviews and contemporaneous media reports highlight just how absent public health was from efforts to wrest power from the health department during a pandemic.

In several instances, abortion politics, coronavirus infections among lawmakers, and overly rosy assessments of the pandemic from Republican leaders played a larger role in the legislation than the coronavirus itself.

SB 1 died an unusual death last May when every state Senator even the bills sponsors voted it down. Its supporters gave varying explanations from the Senate floor. They said it didnt have an emergency clause, meaning it wouldnt take effect for 90 days; and it was clumsily drafted.

Then-Senate President Larry Obhof, one of the most powerful Republicans in the state, later told constituents that Senators killed the bill, in part, because it could have expanded womens access to abortion.

A prominent Right to Life organization pointed out that the language, as written, could allow lawsuits challenging health orders that regulate or close abortion clinics, he said in an email obtained in a public records request.

Thus, the language could have been used to protect abortion clinics.

The concern came from a letter the Greater Columbus Right to Life sent to lawmakers. Ohio Right to Life, which operates independently of the Columbus organization, disagreed, according to its director, Michael Gonidakis. However, he tried to stay out of it.

We had no desire to be involved in that debate, he said in a recent interview.

Sen. Tim Schaffer, R-Lancaster, later wrote on Facebook that the bill would have limited the states ability to shut down illegal abortion clinics. Then-Speaker of the House Larry Householder, R-Glenford, prior to being indicted in an alleged racketeering scheme, commented on the post.

He told the senator to grow a pair and called his rationale bullshit.

SB 1 was hardly unique. Lawmakers have introduced a flurry of bills aimed at curbing ODHs public health powers. Several passed at least one chamber including:

The Ohio Department of Health, the Ohio Hospital Association, the Ohio State Medical Association, and a vast majority of health professionals pleaded lawmakers to kill Senate Bill 311, another bill to grant themselves the ability to vote down public health orders. It also would have banned statewide lockdown orders from ODH.

Undeterred by surging hospital rolls and a crush of COVID-19 deaths, the Senate passed the bill in September. The House passed it in November.

Both chambers had to navigate plague among their own members to pass the bill.

The Senate delayed its September vote on SB 311 after a member contracted COVID-19, according to an email obtained via public records request.

We had hoped SB 311 would pass this past Wednesday, but session didnt happen due to a member whose vote we needed coming down with coronavirus, a Roegner aide emailed to a constituent in September.

At the time, WOSU reported that state Sen. Bob Peterson, R-Washington Court House, tested positive for COVID-19, which required Obhof to quarantine.

In the House, Becker, an early COVID-19 skeptic, missed the SB 311 passage vote due to a mystery fever along with fatigue, sore throat and mild congestion, he wrote on Facebook. At least five lawmakers contracted COVID-19 in early December, including two Democrats who were hospitalized.

The House passed SB 311 with 57 Republican votes three short of enough to override Gov. Mike DeWines eventual veto. On the last full legislative day of the session last year, Obhof claimed the House didnt have enough healthy members in attendance to override the veto.

Obhof opted against initiating the override in the Senate.

I think there was a core group of people in my chamber, and Im sure there was in the House because I heard from some of them, who said maybe this isnt the right time to have this fight, Obhof said in an interview.

A rosy outlook

Since May, Ohio Republicans have insisted COVID-19 isnt as bad as health officials say.

Early in the pandemic, Dr. Amy Acton, then-director of ODH, emphasized the need to flatten the curve slow down the rate of viral transmission to prevent an overload on the health care system, and to wait out a vaccine.

As far back as April, Republicans worked the phrase into the past tense.

The curve has been flattened and Ohio will not come close to exceeding its capacity to care for its citizens, said Sen. Kristina Roegner, SB 311s lead sponsor, in an April 23 op-ed.

Rep. J. Todd Smith, R-Farmersville, made similar comments in May.

We have either flattened the curve by some of the measures that have been put in place or it was just overstated to what the effect would be, but either way, were now looking at peoples lives being crushed financially, he said during a committee hearing.

In June, 19 lawmakers wrote a letter to the governor declaring that Ohio smashed the curve long ago. Mission accomplished!

In an interview, Obhof said he may have underestimated the gravity of the pandemic early on.

I think that we thought itd be done sooner, he said. When [House Majority Leader Bill] Seitz and I talked about this in April and May of last year, wed say, In June, lets do an after-action report. Because everybody thought that by the summertime, things would lighten up. And then they didnt.

When asked about the conversation, Seitz said last week its fair to say none of us anticipated the pandemic would still be going on today.

To the extent that we believed it would end well before now, that was not an error on our part, but rather, a belief based on 15 days to slow the spread and on subsequent comments, I believe in July, that the mask mandate would result in ending COVID-19 within 6 weeks, he said in an email.

In other words, to the extent that we believed well before now, it was based on the information furnished to us by the executive branch.

Despite Seitzs belief that the mask mandate would end the pandemic within six weeks, he and the GOP caucus have consistently voted down mask mandates at the Capitol for House members and staff.

At the time Seitz and Obhof were having these discussions, a few hundred Ohioans were contracting COVID-19 on a given day. Since then, on the worst days of the (still raging) pandemic, more than 13,000 Ohioans contracted COVID-19. On Dec. 16, a record 205 Ohioans died of COVID-19.

The surge in COVID-19 deaths this winter was disturbing but hardly surprising. Public health experts warned for months that respiratory diseases surge in the winter, and cold weather drives people inside where transmission is more likely.

Last spring, Democrats struck a different and demonstrably more accurate, tone. Rep. Fred Strahorn, D-Dayton, warned that legislation like SB 1 would make then-ODH Director Dr. Amy Actons job more difficult, and would likely cost lives.

I dont think people are understanding the gravity of this, he said. This isnt going away next month. Until theres a vaccine, we are going to live with this for over a year.

People are going to die, whether we pass this today or not The question is, are we going to do things to make fewer people die? Or are we going to put up barriers in place so more people die.

Acton would go on to resign in June after massive protests opposing the lockdowns, flush with men carrying assault rifles, formed outside the Capitol. Similar, though less militaristic protests arose outside her home.

Throughout the debate, Republicans have insisted its an issue of the separation of powers. They say its an issue of checks and balances.

Early in the pandemic, the argument goes, the governor and ODH needed free reign to issue orders as they saw fit. But in a prolonged emergency, lawmakers, who have consistently voted down in-house mask requirements and regularly downplay COVID-19, must have greater say.

This isnt about politics, this is about representation, said Rep. D.J. Swearingen at the May 6 hearing. This is about input.

Sen. Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, who sponsored several of the measures, insisted in an interview the legislation is about checks and balances, not the coronavirus specifically, nor the governor, the health director or anyone else.

Only one Republican in the legislature (her term ended at the end of 2020) has consistently opposed the moves against the health department: Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering.

During a floor speech in May, Lehner, an anti-abortion lawmaker, questioned how pro-life principles apply to a pandemic that has killed 17,000 Ohioans.

For years, I, and many of the sponsors of Senate Bill 1 and 311, have said we must put life first, she said. Over and above personal liberties of any kind. Suddenly, that argument has gone out the window. Now our personal liberties are replacing the protection of life in the state of Ohio.

When the House passed SB 1, the pandemic death toll in Ohio was 1,459.

When the Senate passed SB 311, it hit 4,883. When the House passed it, 7,321.

When the Senate passed Senate Bill 22 (the latest version of the same idea): 17,058.

Leaders in the legislature, when asked, were unfazed by the rising statistics.

A lot of folks have died from COVID-19, and does that affect what we did or what I think about Senate Bill 22? And the answer to that, of course, is no. Im very much in support of the bill, said Senate President Matt Huffman, R-Lima, in a press conference.

House Speaker Bob Cupp, R-Lima, made similar remarks, though he noted a recent reduction in infection rates and hospital burden.

I think this is an institutional question, a matter of checks and balances, he said. It really doesnt depend on any specific statistics.

Roegner declined an interview request and did not answer specific questions. In a statement, she reiterated her support for SB 22.

We must be able to respond in a manner that allows Ohioans to both protect and provide for their families, she said. When asked why not just trust the executive branch with this sweeping power, I can answer that with three words: Whitmer, Newsome [sic] and Cuomo.

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Inside Ohio Republicans 10-month war on the state health department over COVID-19 - News 5 Cleveland