Katie Halper Marianne Williamson (https://twitter.com/marwilliamson) talks about politics and revolution, materialism and spirituality. Christian Parenti discusses his latest piece “The Surprising Geography of Police Killings” (https://nonsite.org/symposium/the-sur…) published at NonSite and the life and work of his dear friend journalist Robert Eshelman-Håkansson, whose obituary Christian wrote for Jacobin (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/07/ro…). https://www.thenation.com/authors/rob…https://robertseshelman.com
Monthly Archives: July 2020
OPINION|Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun
Protesters are being snatched from the streets without warrants. Can we call it fascism yet?
Opinion Columnist
July 20, 2020 (NYTimes.com)
The month after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder published the best-selling book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century.” It was part of a small flood of titles meant to help Americans find their bearings as the new president laid siege to liberal democracy.
One of Snyder’s lessons was, “Be wary of paramilitaries.” He wrote, “When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.” In 2017, the idea of unidentified agents in camouflage snatching leftists off the streets without warrants might have seemed like a febrile Resistance fantasy. Now it’s happening.
According to a lawsuit filed by Oregon’s attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, on Friday, federal agents “have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland, detain protesters, and place them into the officers’ unmarked vehicles” since at least last Tuesday. The protesters are neither arrested nor told why they’re being held.
There’s no way to know the affiliation of all the agents — they’ve been wearing military fatigues with patches that just say “Police” — but The Times reported that some of them are part of a specialized Border Patrol group “that normally is tasked with investigating drug smuggling organizations.”
The Trump administration has announced that it intends to send a similar force to other cities; on Monday, The Chicago Tribune reported on plans to deploy about 150 federal agents to Chicago. “I don’t need invitations by the state,” Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said on Fox News Monday, adding, “We’re going to do that whether they like us there or not.”
PORTLAND PROTESTS Photos of clashes with federal forces
In Portland, we see what such an occupation looks like. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported on 29-year-old Mark Pettibone, who early last Wednesday was grabbed off the street by unidentified men, hustled into an unmarked minivan and taken to a holding cell in the federal courthouse. He was eventually released without learning who had abducted him.
A federal agent shot 26-year-old Donavan La Bella in the head with an impact munition; he was hospitalized and needed reconstructive surgery. In a widely circulated video, a 53-year-old Navy veteran was pepper sprayed and beaten after approaching federal agents to ask them about their oaths to the Constitution, leaving him with two broken bones.
There’s something particularly terrifying in the use of Border Patrol agents against American dissidents. After the attack on protesters near the White House last month, the military pushed back on Trump’s attempts to turn it against the citizenry. Police officers in many cities are willing to brutalize demonstrators, but they’re under local control. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, however, is under federal authority, has leadership that’s fanatically devoted to Trump and is saturated with far-right politics.
“It doesn’t surprise me that Donald Trump picked C.B.P. to be the ones to go over to Portland and do this,” Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas, told me. “It has been a very problematic agency in terms of respecting human rights and in terms of respecting the law.”
It is true that C.B.P. is not an extragovernmental militia, and so might not fit precisely into Snyder’s “On Tyranny” schema. But when I spoke to Snyder on Monday, he suggested the distinction isn’t that significant. “The state is allowed to use force, but the state is allowed to use force according to rules,” he said. These agents, operating outside their normal roles, are by all appearances behaving lawlessly.
Snyder pointed out that the history of autocracy offers several examples of border agents being used against regime enemies.
“This is a classic way that violence happens in authoritarian regimes, whether it’s Franco’s Spain or whether it’s the Russian Empire,” said Snyder. “The people who are getting used to committing violence on the border are then brought in to commit violence against people in the interior.”
When fascism starts to feel normal, we’re all in trouble.
Castro worries that since the agents are unidentified, far-right groups could easily masquerade as them to go after their enemies on the left. “It becomes more likely the more that this tactic is used,” he said. “I think it’s unconstitutional and dangerous and heading towards fascism.”
On Friday, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, tweeted about what’s happening in Portland: “Trump and his storm troopers must be stopped.” She didn’t mention what Congress plans to do to stop them, but the House will soon vote on a homeland security appropriations bill. People outraged about the administration’s police-state tactics should demand, at a minimum, that Congress hold up the department’s funding until those tactics are halted.
Through the Trump years, there’s been a debate about whether the president’s authoritarianism is tempered by his incompetence. Those who think concern about fascism is overblown can cite several instances when the administration has been beaten back after overreaching. But all too often the White House has persevered, deforming American life until what once seemed like worst-case scenarios become the status quo.
Trump has already established that his allies, like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, are above the law. What happens now will tell us how many of us are below it.
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Borat – Reiki Master
Existence and inequality
America needs an existential awakening
24th July 2020 (iai.tv)
Barrett Holmes Pitner
| Washington, DC-based philosopher, journalist and founder of The Sustainable Culture Lab
America’s ongoing crisis in cultural identity is at the root of its social unrest, and can be traced to a Cartesian preoccupation with essence driven by colonial ethnocide. An existential awakening is required to mend the nation’s deep divides, writes Barrett Pitner.
As a Black American, my familiarity with the absurdity of American society is all I have ever known. How could a society that projects itself as a beacon of freedom for the world also be built around slavery? How could a global champion for democracy systematically deprive Black Americans of their voting rights? How could a pillar for the rule of law also have a legal system that disproportionately sentences Black Americas to longer prison sentences than white Americans? The list of American hypocrisies that Black Americans must confront can easily make you question your own sanity.
To understand how America has maintained the ruse for so long you only need to know two words: ethnocide and Existentialism. Tragically, America has always been in this dire state, but has long been able to mask its destructive absurdity with a facade of inspirational reality.
“Ethnocide” was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin alongside its far better known sibling: genocide. Lemkin was a Polish Jew who fled the Nazis and escaped to America. While in America he implored the American government to intervene during World War II to save Jewish people, yet the Americans he met were unwilling to believe that Europeans could commit such despotic acts. In order to convince the American public of the atrocities befalling his people he committed himself to creating a new word to define this particular atrocity. This word became genocide, but initially it was genocide and ethnocide.
Since Jewish people were both a genos (people) and an ethnos (culture), he envisioned that genocide and ethnocide would be interchangeable. However, over time the words diverged and formed separate definitions. In genocide a people are exterminated or forcefully removed, and as a result their culture dies with them. During ethnocide the culture is destroyed, but the people remain.
Tragically, America has always been in this dire state, but has long been able to mask its destructive absurdity with a facade of inspirational reality.
Around the late 20th century, ethnocide started being used to describe colonial indoctrination programs that were forced upon indigenous people such as the Carlisle School in the United States, and the residential school system in Canada that forcefully removed indigenous people from their culture and literally beat and tortured a westernized education into them.
However, to fully understand the scale at which ethnocide has shaped American society, and many of the societies in the Americas, you must apply the language of ethnocide to the transatlantic slave trade. The explicit purpose of the slave trade was to forcefully remove the culture of African people, but keep their bodies in order to create a chattel slavery system. Europeans severed African tribal and familial bonds. Prevented Africans from practicing their religion and speaking their native tongue. They even worked to destroy African names, and replaced them with dehumanizing identifiers that are no longer culturally acceptable to say out loud.
Ethnocide did not aspire to break the bodies. It hoped to break their souls.
America’s ethnocidal foundation has systematically normalized a culture of perpetual division and exploitation. From slavery to the present, America has implemented countless laws and social mores that sustain the divisions of ethnocide. The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement shines a light on the terror that regularly befalls Black Americans at the hands of their own government.
For centuries America has gotten away with blaming the enslaved and the subjugated for their lower station in life, but COVID-19 has made the absurdity of these arguments obvious to the world.
COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted communities of color in America due to the stark discrepancies between the American experience of white and non-white people. Many Black Americans have ailments such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and asthma that have a direct correlation to the unhealthy food, stress, and polluted air that are often associated with living in poverty; and this makes them more susceptible to dying from COVID-19. Additionally, communities of color often occupy the jobs that America considers “essential” such as postal workers, garbage collectors, food production workers, and domestic workers; and as a result, these Americans were not allowed to shelter-in-place to help slow the spread of the disease. America’s most vulnerable were forced to work amidst the pandemic, and unsurprisingly this only exacerbated the problem.
The chaos that we are witnessing in America exists because the United States does not have a collective cultural identity.
The chaos that we are witnessing in America exists because the United States does not have a collective cultural identity. We might claim to be one nation, but we are not one culture. Sustained division and exploitation is the American norm, and because of this Americans feel emboldened to behave as individuals without any collective obligation. American Individualism is perceived as an extension of freedom.
When given the option of individual freedom and death (such as refusing to wear face masks), or unity and life, an alarming number of Americans are opting for the former and not the latter. America’s dependence on ethnocide partially explains this absurdity, but to further understand this repugnant state of affairs we must also examine the European philosophy of Existentialism.
One of the foundational tenets of Existentialism under Jean-Paul Sartre is that existence precedes essence, which countered the dominant Cartesian philosophy of “I think therefore I am.”
Under Descartes’s philosophy essence defines existence, and your essence can be nearly anything. Your essence roughly equates to the thoughts and ideas that can shape your identity. Your religion, language, skin color, sexual orientation, proclivity with a particular skill or craft can become your essence, and having an essence is a perfectly natural part of life. We all have a multitude of essences. Under a Cartesian philosophy, your essence — or the thoughts that shape your identity — determines your existence, and under this rubric it became incredibly easy to conclude that those with different thoughts, and essences did not exist on an equal plain.
Europeans became empowered to consider themselves superior to other people purely based upon their own thoughts and without any concern for reality. Since the 1800s Existentialist philosophers in Europe have articulated the necessity of seeing the world not though an essence-focused lens.
Existentialism is incredibly important for understanding the chaos of America because our entire society is built around essence. Ethnocide is based around the propensity of European colonizers to view African people as non-thinking objects whose existence would be best served as a perpetually enslaved people. Extracting the culture of a people becomes much easier when you never considered them to be people in the first place. American colonizers eventually shed themselves of their European identities, and found purpose and meaning from the white essence assumed. Via the one-drop rule, where one drop of African blood would make a person perpetually Black and never white, the essence that European colonizers created for themselves required the absence of Blackness.
America has never had an existential awakening. We are yet to believe that existence precedes essence.
America’s racial divisions between Black and white are actually not based on race at all. They stem from a philosophical commitment to creating a culture in the Americas that prioritizes white essence and white thought ahead of existence.
America has never had an existential awakening. We are yet to believe that existence precedes essence. Our conflicts over the racial constructs that ethnocidal colonizers created equate to the absurdity of searching for meaning and commonality amongst two essences created for the explicit purpose for them to never mix.
If America seeks to grow and progress as a society we must work to dismantle our ethnocidal society and understand that culture precedes race. We must have a culture that prioritizes the existence of all of our people instead of one fueled by fabricated racial divisions and ethnocide.
Trump and his administration obviously prioritize essence, and the identities they cling to, more than the existence of the American people. This is an absurd reality, but it has always been the reality of America.
Evidence suggests UFO whistleblower Bob Lazar was telling the truth all along
Robert Scott Lazar (born January 26, 1959) is an American conspiracy theorist who claims to have been hired in the late 1980s to reverse-engineer purported extraterrestrial technology at what he described as a secret site called “S-4”. Wikipedia
By Vinay Menon Entertainment Columnist
Fri., July 24, 2020 (thestar.com)
Near the end of his 2019 autobiography, Bob Lazar writes, “I’m no kind of hero.”
With each passing day, that seems less true. I know what you’re thinking: Is this idiot really devoting a column to a controversial UFO whistleblower during a global pandemic? Should I stop reading this tinfoil claptrap right now and spend the next few minutes on something more productive?
Answers: 1. Yes. 2. Probably.
OK. To everyone still here, why is Bob Lazar on my mind? Because I just read a New York Times story — “No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public” — that includes a buried nugget about how astrophysicist and Pentagon contractor Eric W. Davis gave a classified briefing to government officials in March about retrieved “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
I know. It’s nuts. If you ever watched “The X-Files,” the U.S. government has basically done a 180 on UFOs. For nearly a century, intel gathering under clandestine programs — Project Mogul, Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Blue Book, Project Ozma — had one guiding principle: blanket denial.
The stated goal was to investigate UFO sightings. The outcome was official excuses.
UFOs were weather balloons or street lamps or migrating birds. They were illusions refracted by the natural world. They were fantasies of deranged imaginations. They were not real.
All of that has changed dramatically, starting with a 2017 New York Times blockbuster that revealed the existence of the U.S. government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, created a decade earlier to analyze unexplained phenomena. The Navy has since publicly verified three videos that show unidentified aircraft violating the laws of aerodynamics. Apparently, there are more.
What was once the stuff of supermarket tabloids is now taken seriously by politicians and scientists.
So isn’t it time Bob Lazar got a second hearing in the court of public opinion?
The man put Area 51 on the pop-cultural map in 1989, when during an interview with Las Vegas investigative reporter George Knapp, he made claims that would have sent Fox Mulder to a fainting couch. Lazar said he had worked at a top-secret military base, S-4, near Papoose Lake, where his job was to reverse-engineer crashed alien flying saucers. It was like hearing someone casually say they provided dental care to the Loch Ness Monster. I’m sorry, what?
I remember thinking Bob must be smoking crack out of a Bunsen burner.
But here’s the thing: 30 years later, nothing Lazar said has been disproven. Nothing.
Oh, I know the skeptics want to discredit him based on flimsy allegations he falsified his education or previous employment with the Los Alamos National Laboratory. But did he? Knapp visited that lab with Lazar many moons ago and they were granted access without showing credentials. Security recognized Lazar, who gave Knapp a guided tour while waving to former colleagues who waved back. I can tell you right now, if I wander into the Globe and Mail newsroom and start waving at people, I’m going to get tackled and escorted out by security. You can’t fake working at a place. So if Lazar really worked at Los Alamos — which officially has no record of him — why should we question his Area 51 claims?
There is also no record of Lazar’s birth. Does that mean he does not exist?
I’d then go several steps further and ask, “Why should we doubt anything Lazar says about UFOs?”
In a video authenticated by the Navy this year, a spacecraft is rotating and flying belly-up, exactly as Lazar described in the ’80s. It’s eerie. When he first talked about Element 115 as a possible power source of antigravitational propulsion, it didn’t exist on the periodic table. Now it does. Is that not a strange coincidence? What about his sketches that could now be blueprints for UFOs?
As far as I can tell, Bob Lazar has been vindicated at every turn. And you know what?
The world owes him an apology.
But if you google Lazar, you get sucked into a black hole that suggests he is a “fraud,” “liar,” “conspiracy theorist” and “UFO hoaxster.” What he was saying in 1989 — we have recovered crashed alien saucers that defy everything we know about the universe — was a stick of dynamite to rational thought. But what he was saying then is now backed up by the official record. Please read Lazar’s autobiography “Dreamland,” or watch the Netflix doc “Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers,” and tell me why you still think he is a deceptive kook. Spoiler alert: You can’t do it.
Lazar has never once tried to profit from the whistle-blowing that ruined his career. He’s not on any lucrative speaking circuits. He’s not selling kitschy T-shirts of Little Green Men. He goes about his business in the shadow of infamy and ridicule. Thirty years later, he just wants to move on and change the subject. He wants breathing room amid the suffocation of terrestrial doubt.
But if, as reported this week, more UFO revelations are forthcoming — and they involve new insights on retrieved meta-materials not of this world — isn’t it time to set the record straight on our most famous UFO whistleblower? Isn’t it time we landed this flying saucer on consensus?
Bob Lazar is either a diabolical liar or some kind of hero. He can’t be both.
But what he could be, now more than ever, is an invaluable tour guide into the unknown.Vinay Menon is the Star’s pop culture columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @vinaymenon
Tia Carrere / Aloha ‘Oe
ymz0612 Tia Carrere / Aloha ‘Oe / Hawaiian Music
Ha’aheo ka ua i nâ pali Ke nihi a’ela i ka nahele E hahai (uhai) ana paha i ka liko Pua ‘âhihi lehua o uka Aloha ‘oe, aloha ‘oe E ke onaona noho i ka lipo One fond embrace, A ho’i a’e au Until we meet again Aloha ‘oe, aloha ‘oe E ke onaona noho i ka lipo One fond embrace, A ho’i a’e au Until we meet again
(Contributed by Zoë Robinson, H.W., M.)
“I have no anger toward Donald Trump.”
I have no anger toward Donald Trump. I see him as a deeply traumatized soul with very little introspection. I also have a viewpoint. He appears to be interested mainly in treating the US as a business. But the people of the US are not products to be bought and sold. And many issues must be looked out without an eye on making the rich richer. I live in LA with thousands of homeless people in the streets, nothing to eat or drink most of the day, begging for what they can find just to make it one more day. I see a country frightened by a pandemic that we haven’t had good leadership around. I see the Black Lives Matter movement taking shape and calling for reform for hundreds of years of oppression. And yet our leader will not acknowledge this much-needed call for reform.
Yes, these are all just thoughts. I’m not suffering over them.
But . . .
I will not vote for this man. I don’t see him as someone who deeply cares about all people in this country.
There I said it. To break the silence of so many teachers who will not share an opinion about politics. Why won’t they share them? Maybe they don’t want to lose followers. Maybe they are stuck in nothingness. I don’t know. I won’t be silent though. I have a platform and I like to use it, even if I lose people or friends in the course of it.
Being authentic and honest about all this is more important to me than having followers or friends.
Love you all, whether we agree or not!
Socrates: Greatest Quotes on Life (Ancient Greek Philosophy)
Some Random Observations
Courtesy of William P. Chiles
When one door closes and another door opens, you are probably in prison.
To me, “drink responsibly” means don’t spill it.
When I say, “The other day,” I could be referring to any time between yesterday and 15 years ago.
Interviewer: “So, tell me about yourself.”
Me: “I’d rather not. I kinda want this job.”
Cop: “Please step out of the car.”
Me: “I’m too drunk. You get in.”
Do you remember being able to get up without making sound effects?
I had my patience tested. I’m negative.
Just remember, if you lose a sock in the dryer, it ‘reincarnates’ as
a Tupperware lid that doesn’t fit any of your containers.
If you’re sitting in public and the stranger takes the seat next to
you without ‘social distancing’, just stare straight ahead and whisper, “Did you bring the money?”
When you ask me what I am doing today, and I say “nothing,”
it does not mean I am free. It means I am doing nothing.
Age 60 might be the new 40, but 9:00 is new midnight.
I finally got eight hours of sleep. It took me three days,
but whatever.
I run like the winded.
I hate when a couple argues in public, and I missed the
beginning …and don’t know whose side I’m on.
When someone asks what I did over the weekend, I squint
and ask, “Why, what have you heard?”
I don’t remember much from last night, but the fact that
I needed sunglasses to open the fridge this morning tells
me it was awesome.
TELL ME, when you do squats, are your knees supposed to sound like a goat chewing on an aluminum can stuffed with celery?
I don’t mean to interrupt people. I just randomly remember
things and get really excited.
When I ask for directions, please don’t use words like “East.”
It’s the start of a brand new day, and I’m off like a herd of turtles.
Don’t bother walking a mile in my shoes. That would be boring.
Spend 30 seconds in my head. That’ll freak you right out.
You know that moment when you walk into a spider web …that suddenly turns you into a karate master??
Sometimes, someone unexpected comes into your life outta
nowhere, makes your heart race, and changes you forever.
We call those people cops.
Yes, the older I get, the earlier it gets late.
My luck is like a bald guy who just won a comb.
CSU undergrads must take an ethnic studies or social justice class starting in 2023
By NINA AGRAWAL STAFF WRITER JULY 22, 2020 (LATimes.com)
In the first major change to general education across its system in decades, all 430,000 undergraduates attending Cal State universities must take an ethnic studies or social justice course, a requirement approved by CSU trustees Wednesday following a fierce two-day debate that left some longtime social activists in the awkward position of voting “no.”
The requirement will take effect starting in the 2023-24 academic year in the nation’s largest four-year public university system. Five trustees voted against it — including State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and social justice activists Lateefah Simon and Hugo Morales — who said it did not hew closely enough to the definition of ethnic studies. One trustee abstained.
Two questions dominated their debate: What should an ethnic studies requirement include? And who should decide: faculty, trustees or state lawmakers?
“I’m trying to hold with fidelity to what ethnic studies is and has been and what those who framed it and have been fighting for 52 years have asked for,” Thurmond said at the meeting Wednesday, referring to the discipline’s focus on the experience of four oppressed groups in the U.S.: African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Indigenous peoples.
Morales asked to rename the proposal as simply a “social justice” requirement. “This is about social justice, which we have championed,” he said.
But Chancellor Timothy P. White said that disciplines evolve, and the requirement his office was advancing offers students more choices.
“Ethnic studies has matured,” he said. “It’s deep, it’s powerful, but it’s more than what it used to be.”
The new requirement creates a three-unit, lower-division course requirement “to understand ethnic studies and social justice.” The requirement could be met by a traditional ethnic studies course or by a class focused on social justice or social movements.
Many were opposed to White’s plan — including educators and activists — and prefer a bill sponsored by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber (D-San Diego), that more narrowly defines the requirement, limiting it to ethnic studies courses. AB 1460, which passed both the Assembly and Senate, will go back to the Assembly for concurrence next week before being sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. If he signs it, that requirement will supersede the one approved by the CSU Wednesday.
“We’ve asked you to join the Legislature and support 1460, not put us in the same position we were in 1967, where we as entities were trustees fighting faculty, fighting students,” Weber, former president of the National Council for Black Studies, said during public comment Tuesday.
Questions about the content and mission of ethnic studies courses — which have also been raised in the discussion over whether to mandate a requirement at the K-12 level — go back half a century, when students and faculty at San Francisco State went on strike to create the first-ever ethnic studies department.
“The CSU is really proud of its heritage as the birthplace of ethnic studies,” said Loren Blanchard, executive vice chancellor for academic and student affairs.
Blanchard said the new requirement “elevates” the study of the four racial and ethnic groups that traditionally comprise ethnic studies to the same level as the natural and life sciences, the arts and humanities. It also “makes room for the voices and experiences of other oppressed and marginalized groups,” he said.
The requirement, for instance, could also be met with classes in Jewish or Muslim studies, LGBTQ studies or social justice, including courses on social change and social movements in the U.S., historical and cultural perspectives in disability studies, and health disparities in urban communities.
“For the system to stand up and say we’re going to make three units be ethnic studies and social justice is important,” said Alison Wrynn, associate vice chancellor for academic programs, innovations and faculty development, in an interview prior to the meeting. “Our students see themselves with multiple identities. … Our requirement is going to give them that opportunity to really see themselves in the curriculum.”
But trustee Silas Abrego objected.
“Let’s be clear,” he said. “This is not a requirement for ethnic studies. A student could meet this requirement without ever having to take an ethnic studies course.”
The California Faculty Assn. has formally opposed the chancellor’s proposal and endorsed Weber’s bill.
“CFA is severely disappointed in today’s decision,” President Charles Toombs, a professor of Africana studies at San Diego State said in a statement after the vote.
Toombs said the chancellor’s proposal did not reflect adequate consultation with ethnic studies faculty in particular.
“Since the overwhelming number of ethnic studies faculty are people of color, the lack of inclusion of their expert voices is a potent and real example of how systemic racism works in the CSU,” he said.
Simon, an advocate for civil rights and racial justice, said she had received emails and phone calls from ethnic studies leaders around the country who expressed dissatisfaction with the proposal.
“It is not in my conscience at at this moment to support this,” she said. “That pains me [because] I understand the work put in … I understand the 50-plus year quest for ethnic studies.”
The systemwide Cal State Academic Senate opposes Weber’s bill, arguing that state legislators are improperly interfering in matters of higher education curriculum, setting a dangerous precedent. Some Cal State officials cited those faculty concerns.
“If we were in a different state, we would be scared out of our wits by the idea that the Legislature would be telling us what we should be teaching,” trustee Rebecca Eisen said. “This is our responsibility.”
Board Chair Lillian Kimbell agreed. “If we don’t vote to approve this proposal, essentially what we are doing is ceding to the Legislature their right to create policy on what we teach,” she said. “This is a protest against that.”
Nina Agrawal is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. She previously reported for WLRN-Miami Herald News and for the Latin American affairs magazine Americas Quarterly. A Southern California native, Agrawal is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and School of International and Public Affairs.