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Tennessee school board member freaks out over anti-racism lessons: ‘You hate white men and white little boys and Christians’
June 21, 2021
A Tennessee school board member threw a written temper tantrum after a parent asked whether second-graders should learn about sexism and racism.
Jody Wallace, a mother of two students at Williamson County Schools, emailed school board member Dan Cash to ask why he believed that civil rights were not an appropriate topic for elementary students to learn about, and she was stunned by his reply, reported the Tennessean.
"Thank you for sharing what you really have in your heart," Cash wrote. "You hate white men and white little boys and Christians. I hope I didn't miss anything. My family has crossed cultural lines for many years. Including Hispanic, Black and family members from Malta. And I must say of all the conversations we have had knowone (sic) has ever demonstrated the amount of hate that I see in this email. I will pray that you look at people as individuals rather than by race and look at the content of their character vs what has happened before. Focus on all the great accomplishments we have had in race relations in our Country."
Wallace had written Cash after he complained about so-called "critical race theory" being taught in schools, a concern manufactured by right-wing activists and hyped by Fox News, and pointed out that children in the district's schools had been subjected to racial bullying and taunted with Donald Trump's name.
"You want children to be primarily exposed to happy, uplifting stuff about traditional families, when at least half the kids do not live lives like that, even in THIS wealthy, white county," Wallace wrote. "Shoving it down their throats that the happy white traditional Christian family is the 'normal good' way to be is damaging, rather than seeing a large variety of lifestyles as they build their awareness of the world…lifestyles many of them do see in their real lives."
"We shouldn't be implying that those ways of existing are 'not normal' or 'undesirable' or 'less than,'" she added. "Seeing a variety of lifestyles ALSO isn't damaging to kids living a so-called traditional lifestyle as they learn and accept that there are all sorts of ways to be a good human being. It increases empathy and understanding of ALL types of fellow humans when you learn how multifaceted this world is, and that includes things that aren't so perfect and happy. Things we as a civilization have done wrong and need to do better."
Cash had questioned whether women's suffrage was an appropriate topic for younger students to learn about, and expressed concern they would understand lessons about Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," which he called one of the greatest ever written.
"The social studies standards in Tennessee gradually get you into this," Cash told a board work session broadcast online. "It seems like with this [English language arts] program, we've taken a lot of nonfictional or fictional history and whatnot, and placed it at a younger age."
But Wallace argued that many district students had already been exposed to racism and other forms of discrimination, and she said that teachers addressing those topics in the classroom would be helpful.
"I think it's harmful to kids, even the kids that are growing up in the so-called traditional family, not to learn about all kinds of things," Wallace said. "A lot of kids are going to be feeling like they're the only normal person in the world and then unable to accept that other people are normal, and it's subtle, and it may not seem like a big deal to other people, but it happens."
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Iran's hardline president-elect rules out Biden meeting, open to mending ties with Saudi Arabia
June 21, 2021
Iran's President-elect Ebrahim Raisi ruled out on Monday a meeting with US President Joe Biden but said there were "no obstacles" to resuming diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, Shia Iran's Sunni arch-rival, which have been severed for five years. Raisi added that he will not allow nuclear negotiations for the sake of negotiations, in his first news conference since winning election last week.
Raisi, 60, won Friday's election in which more than half the voters stayed away after many political heavyweights had been barred from running and as an economic crisis driven by US sanctions has battered the country.
Raisi, an ultraconservative cleric who heads Iran's judiciary, will replace moderate President Hassan Rouhani -- whose landmark achievement was a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers -- in August.
"Any negotiations that guarantee national interests will certainly be supported, but... we will not allow negotiations to be for negotiations' sake," Raisi said of the nuclear talks.
"Any meeting must produce a result... for the Iranian nation," he added.
The 2015 deal saw Iran accept curbs on its nuclear capabilities in return for an easing of sanctions, but former US president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew three years later and ramped up sanctions, prompting the Islamic republic to pull back from its nuclear commitments.
Trump's successor Biden has signalled his readiness to return to the deal and state parties -- also including Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia -- have lately been negotiating its revival in Vienna.
EU negotiator Enrique Mora said on Sunday that those involved in the talks were "closer" to saving the Iran nuclear deal but that sticking points remain.
'No' to Biden meet
An austere figure from the Shiite Muslim clerical establishment, Raisi smiled and raised his hands as he arrived for Monday's press conference.
Raisi said he has no intentions of meeting Biden.
"No," was his flat response to a question from an American media outlet on whether he they would meet in the event the talks lead to the US lifting sanctions on Iran, and to try and "fix" the issues between the two arch enemies.
Raisi also said his administration would be open to restoring ties with Iran's regional foe Saudi Arabia.
"There are no obstacles from Iran's side to re-opening embassies... there are no obstacles to ties with Saudi Arabia," he said.
Ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia were cut in 2016 after Iranian protesters attacked Saudi diplomatic missions following the kingdom's execution of a revered Shiite cleric.
The two sides are reported to have been engaged in talks hosted by Baghdad since April to improve relations.
Raisi, who is subject to US sanctions imposed over the executions of political prisoners in 1988, has in the past denied he played a role in the killings.
'Always defending human rights'
At Monday's news conference, Raisi said he has "always" defended human rights.
"All that I have done through my years of service has always been towards defending human rights," said the Iranian president-elect, while accusing the west of violating human rights.
Raisi, whose black turban signifies direct descent from Islam's Prophet Mohammed, is seen as close to the 81-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who holds ultimate political power in Iran.
His victory had been widely anticipated after the Guardian Council, made up of 12 clerics and jurists, had approved just seven candidates, all men, out of a field of almost 600 hopefuls.
Three of those vetted candidates dropped out two days before the vote.
Raisi said there was a "massive" voter turnout in Friday's election.
"This meaningful presence of the people, their massive presence, came about despite the coronavirus situation, despite the many enmities and psychological warfare of the Iranian nation's enemies," he said.
Turnout reached 48.8 percent, a record low for a presidential poll since Iran's 1979 revolution ousted the US-backed monarchy.
Participation had been expected to be low in a country where many have been demoralised by years of painful economic crisis that was brought on by a crippling US sanctions regime and worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
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Pence Chief of Staff made decision on masks that paved the way for them to be politicized: report
June 21, 2021
In 2020 Marc Short, the chief of staff to then-Vice President Mike Pence, made a fateful decision that paved the way for the politicization of wearing masks. Had he chosen differently there's no question countless lives could have been saved.
Short, who once served as the executive director of the far right Young America's Foundation, "focused on the political and economic implications of the coronavirus response and approached many public health decisions by considering how they would be perceived," The Washington Post reveals. That report comes from a deep-dive into the Trump pandemic response detailed in the new book, “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History," by Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta.
In possibly the most damaging of those decisions, Short nixed a plan, which was far along enough to have a PR campaign already created, to send face masks to every household in America. The Dept. of Health and Human Services was backing the program, while other reports have revealed the U.S. Postal Service was also working on it.
If it had been executed, "some public health experts think [it] would have depoliticized mask-wearing," The Post reports, but Short believed it "would unnecessarily alarm people."
Previous Post reporting revealed the program would have flooded the nation with 650 million face masks, five for every U.S. household.
Short has a long history of focusing on optics instead of fact-based communication to the public. As far back as the 1990's he labeled efforts to educate the public that HIV and AIDS do not only affect gay people a “propaganda campaign," a “distortion campaign," and “intentional deception."
And he called gay people “sodomites," while attacking “the perverted lifestyles homosexuals pursue," and delivered a warning to not “glorify homosexuals' repugnant practices."
Short tested positive for coronavirus in October.
Americans were already alarmed, but Short's and the White House's focus on optics and pretending the coronavirus was not as dangerous and deadly as it in fact is, according to Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, led to hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided.
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