QUOTABLES

Yes, ‘I Am Legend,’ the 2007 movie about zombie vampires, is now a part of the vaccine conversation. 

As of Wednesday, more than 166 million Americans have been fully vaccinated. The zombie count, however, remains at zero. -- Washington Post

Stephen Collison, CNN

At the same time, Biden was doing exactly what most Americans, exhausted by long years of foreign quagmires and confused as to why US troops were still in Afghanistan 20 years after 9/11, wanted. There was no national support for escalating the war. -- Biden's botched Afghan exit  

Taliban Spokesperson, Suhail Shaheen 

...told the BBC Sunday that the militants want a "peaceful" transition. -- CNBC

‘Saigon on Steroids’: The Desperate Rush to Flee Afghanistan,” by WSJ’s Yaroslav Trofimov, Dion Nissenbaum, and Margherita Stancati 

"The lucky few were already inside, crowded onto the last patch of government territory that hadn’t fallen to the Taliban. Outside, as thousands of civilians surged to break through the perimeter of Hamid Karzai International Airport, security forces fired gunshots into the air to force them back." -- Wall Street Journal

“Corporate America grows impatient on Biden’s China trade review,” by Gavin Bade

“Nearly eight months into his presidency, America’s largest corporations are voicing frustration that Biden has not rolled back any of former President Donald Trump’s major tariffs, particularly the duties on $350 billion worth of Chinese imports." -- Politico

NYT’s Elizabeth Harris

“Blackout,” by the right-wing media personality Candace Owens, has sold 480,000 copies across formats since it was published last fall by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. “American Marxism,” by the best-selling author Mark R. Levin, which devotes a chapter to critical race theory, sold 400,000 books in just its first week on the market last month. -- New York Times

CRITICAL RACE THEORY QUOTABLES

WH Press Secretary Psaki: "Kids should learn not just the good, but also the challenging in our history." -- Twitter

Nikole Hannah-Jones

’“At some point when you have proven yourself and fought your way into institutions that were not built for you . . . you have to decide that you are done forcing yourself in.” -- Statement on her decision to decline tenure at UNC

White House press secretary Jen Psaki 

...acknowledged during a briefing on Friday that the U.S. is still plagued by “systemic racism” and it is “responsible” to teach about it in schools as part of critical race theory. -- Press briefing

Paul Butler, Georgetown Law School professor

Sometimes, helping majority-White spaces be less racist and more inclusive feels transformative. Other times, it feels like an intellectual version of my great-grandfather’s job; he cleaned outhouses — i.e., shoveling White people’s excrement.  -- Washington Post

AFT Pres. Randi Weingarten 

"Mark my words: Our union will defend any member who gets in trouble for teaching honest history. Teaching the truth is not radical or wrong." -- Address at the union's TEACH conference.

Donald Trump

 "With the help of everyone here today, we will defeat the radical left, the socialists, Marxists, and the critical race theorists." -- CPAC Conference

Kansas joins the anti-CRT MAGA madness.

Dorothy: 'I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.' 
Toto: Nope. It's 2021 and we're still in freak'n Kansas.

State Sen. Caryn Tyson, R-Parker, announced last week that she would be preparing a bill that would ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in all Kansas schools. It's worth noting that Critical Race Theory isn't now and never has been taught in the state's public schools, unfortunately. It's just that CRT has become the latest Republican racist dog whistle in America's white belt. 

Jayhawk State Republicans are the latest to join the MAGA feeding frenzy on public schooling. More than a dozen red states are currently pushing bills targeting anti-racist teaching. 

Actually, it was Idaho that became the first to formally pass a law banning CRT from the schools.

Tyson's bill will likely succeed given that the GOP still dominates state politics as it has since Kansas became a state back in 1861. Back then, of course, the Republican Party in Kansas was quite different, embracing "free state" politics and opposing slavery. My, how things have changed.

For today's Kansas, this is just another brick in the wall, a continuation of the state's legacy of school segregation and an imposed right-wing/religious curriculum on its schools. 

It wasn't for nothing that the 1954 landmark court decision supposedly outlawing school segregation was called: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. 

Carrying on the tradition...in 1999 the Kansas Board of Education voted to delete virtually any mention of evolution from the state's science curriculum, in one of the most far-reaching efforts by right-wing creationists to supplant science teaching with religious doctrine.

The Topeka Capital-Journal  editorialized at the time that ''creationism is as good a hypothesis as any for how the universe began.''

And on it goes. 

Nikole Hanna-Jones

The new curriculum battlefield stretches far beyond Kansas and beyond K-12 education. Today, in North Carolina, UNC’s board of trustees is scheduled to hold a special meeting amid intensifying pressure over its failure to approve tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times Magazine.

Professor Hannah-Jones created the 1619 Project, a multimedia series from The Times Magazine that re-examined the legacy of slavery in the United States and provided educators with the tools they needed to do authentic teaching about race and racism. The use of the 1619 Project by teachers in school districts across the country prompted the right-wing backlash that we're seeing in states like Kansas.

She has gained the public support of more than 200 academics and other cultural figures who published a letter last month saying the board had displayed a “failure of courage.”

On Friday, UNC students held a protest in support of tenure for Hannah-Jones. Hopefully, their voices will be heard. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Surfside, FL condo building collapse could be an omen of things to come if we go light on the infrastructure bill.

AOC on the infrastructure bill

 “Frankly, we really need to understand that this is our one big shot, not just in terms of family, child care, Medicare, but on climate change,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said on “Meet the Press.” 

Dave Zirin

Civil disobedience in 2021 is teaching the truth. -- FB

Dallas Schools Superintendent Michael Hinojosa

“I’m Mexican American, and with the Alamo, they always talked about slaughtering the Mexicans when I was a little kid,” he said. “Can you imagine what went through my mind? When I became a teacher, I could say, ‘Well, here’s the other perspective. Make up your own mind about it.’” -- Washington Post 

Cas Mudde, Univ. of Georgia prof

There is a specter haunting America – the specter of critical race theory. -- Guardian

Gwen Berry

Athlete/activist Gwen Berry at the Olympic Trials

Berry said that her mission was bigger than the sport and "me being able to represent my communities and my people, and those that have died at the hands of police brutality, those that have died to this systemic racism."  -- Reuters 

More AOC 

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Calls AOC a "little communist" and says locking her up is a good idea. 

AOC: First of all, I’m taller than her -- Twitter

Former Attorney General William Barr

...in a newly released book excerpt, said he suspected then-President Donald Trump's claims of widespread election fraud were "all bullsh*t," but that he launched unofficial inquiries into some of them to appease his boss.

 D.T. responded

"The president, livid, responded by referring to himself in the third person: 'You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump,'" the excerpt reads. -- CNN

 

CRT is not taught in the schools. 99% of teachers never heard of it. https://t.co/OLQYPwRJr2

— Diane Ravitch (@DianeRavitch) June 28, 2021

Shit, my last paycheck for 89 hours of work in 2 weeks was $1323, and I'm at a job I kind of like. Can't imagine why people aren't chomping at the bit to go work at shit jobs to make shit money with little to no benefits

— David Raleigh (@david__raleigh) June 28, 2021