PARISFrench President Emmanuel Macron called for international regulation to curb the spread of ideological extremism in Western democracies, chiding tech companies and political correctness for allowing it to flourish.

Speaking to a group of reporters inside the lyse Palace, Mr. Macron said the storming of the U.S. Capitol was a sign of the Wests failure to rein in social media platforms, allowing them to become incubators of hate, moral relativism and conspiracy theories.

The French leader chided tech companieswithout naming themfor giving former President Donald Trump a platform to spread hate for years before taking action. Twitter Inc. banned Mr. Trumps personal account in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, citing the risk of further incitement of violence. Facebook Inc. announced a temporary suspension of Mr. Trump after the riot before extending that action indefinitely.

All those who allowed President Trump to succeed waited until they were entirely sure that he had no power left to then wrap themselves in dignity and now say Lets take away his whistle, Mr. Macron said. Why didnt they shut down his accounts before all this happened?

Mr. Macron said governments had delegated too much authority to tech companies by expecting them to act as stewards for Western democracy. This is an issue for real international regulation, Mr. Macron said.

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Frances Macron Calls for Regulation of Social Media to Stem Threat to Democracy - The Wall Street Journal

Harriet Tubman, circa 1870

HB Lindsey | Underwood Archives | Getty Images

The Biden administration will revive the push to make Harriet Tubman the face of a new $20 bill, an effort that was shelved during former President Donald Trump's term.

"We're exploring ways to speed up that effort," White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Monday after being asked if the new administration would pick up the Obama-era initiative.

An updated $20 note featuring Tubman, the former slave who became an icon of the abolitionist movement, was originally set to be unveiled around the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.

But Trump's Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, announced during a 2019 congressional hearing that the redesign would be delayed until 2028. Mnuchin said at the time that the primary reason for redesigning a currency is to combat counterfeiting efforts.

Psaki said Monday that the Treasury Department is "taking steps to resume efforts" to put Tubman's image on the front of the new $20 bills.

It's important for the bills to "reflect the history and diversity of our country," Psaki said, "and Harriet Tubman's image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that."

Tubman's face on the bill would replace that of Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president. Trump was such a big fan of Jackson that he featured a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office. Joe Biden, who took office last Wednesday, removed the painting.

Trump before being elected had called the plan to replace Jackson with Tubman "pure political correctness."

A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department echoed Psaki's remarks in a separate statement to CNBC. Jack Lew, the Treasury secretary under former President Barack Obama who spearheaded the effort to put Tubman on the $20, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Redesigning the bill is an intricate process that will take time and require more changes than just a simple face swap. For example, it took 11 years to develop the blue security strip that now adorns the $100 bill.

Producing the new $20 notes with robust anti-counterfeiting technology and other security measures in place will require a new high-speed printing facility, which is currently scheduled for 2025.

Concepts for an updated $50 note are in development.

Originally posted here:

Biden's Treasury revives push to put Harriet Tubman on $20 bill after Trump shelved it - CNBC

Russias state-controlled media has been turning to a disinformation playbook it has used before in a bid to discredit protesters agitating for the release from prison of Kremlin critic AlexeiNavalny, say analysts.

Navalny was detained on his return to Moscow for parole violations after recovering in Germany from a near-fatal poisoning. His arrest has triggered the largest anti-Kremlin protests seen in Russia since 2011, and Washington is being blamed for the demonstrations, with Kremlin officials and state media presenters alleging that Western powers, mainly the U.S., are behind the agitation.

Washington is becoming a convenient pretext for accusations, although in reality it has very little to do with what is happening, Donald Jensen, director of the United States Institute of Peace, a research organization, told VOAs Russian service. This is a question for (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and the Russian people, and it is clear that a significant minority of Russians are unhappy.

Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russias security council, has compared the Navalny protests to the popular Maidan uprising in Ukraine of 2013-2014, which he and other Kremlin officials also accused the West of fomenting.

He told the state-owned weekly newspaper Argumenty i Fakti the West needs Navalny, To destabilize the situation in Russia, for social upheavals, strikes and new Maidans.

What this can lead to we see in the example of Ukraine, which in essence, has lost its independence, he added.

Maidan revolt

Disinformation analysts also are drawing comparisons to the Maidan revolt not as an example of Western intervention, but in terms of the Kremlins information management strategy launched to try to save Putin ally President Viktor Yanukovych from ouster.

They say many of the same memes, tropes and conspiracy theories dissimulated during the Maidan revolt are being used now to try to shape a narrative discrediting pro-Navalny protesters.

In 2013, when hundreds of thousands of pro-Europe protesters occupied Kyivs Maidan to demand Yanukovychs resignation, Kremlin-controlled media portrayed the people behind the uprising as being opposed to traditional, socially conservative Russian values of family and religion.

Among the memes Russian disinformation channels broadcast were those conflating the agitation with homosexuality, warning of the risk that a homo-dictatorship would be established in Ukraine, according to analysts.

Theres a long tradition of pro-Kremlin propaganda using homophobic rhetoric to discredit pro-democracy activism, said Zarine Kharazian, an analyst at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, part of the Atlantic Council, a U.S.-based research group. The lab studies disinformation campaigns.

The protesters in the early days of the revolt were predominately young and their occupation of the Maidan, one of Kyivs central squares, was sparked by Yanukovychs decision not to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Because the EU supports same-sex marriage, Russias state-controlled medias starting point was that the European Union was homosexual, and so the Ukrainian movement toward Europe must be, as well, according to Yale academic Timothy Snyder.

Writing in his book, The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder noted, In November and December 2013, the Russia media covering the Maidan introduced the irrelevant theme of gay sex at every turn.

'Political pedophilia'

As the anti-Kremlin protests erupted this week in Moscow, St. Petersburg and about 70 other towns across Russia, state-controlled media appeared again to color the political agitation with sexual politics, accusing protest leaders of political pedophilia, part of an official claim that most protesters were manipulated minors.

Sociologists say the protesters came from a range of age groups, although some 25 percent were 18- to 25-year-olds. Nonetheless, Russian officials say Navalny and his supporters have been exploiting the vulnerability of children and the young, persuading them to demonstrate in the streets. This is a serious operation, alleged Valery Fadeyev, head of Putin's human rights council.

TV presenter Dmitry Kiselyov, the head of Rossiya Segodnya, complained on his marquee show News of the Week. There are people who are so low, they drag children into politics, like political pedophiles. Is this bad? Its horrible. Other presenters on Russian newscasts also tagged protesters as political pedophiles.

Pedophilia, with or without the qualifier political, is a charged word in Russia, say disinformation analysts. They argue that the government has a long propaganda history of linking homosexuality with pedophilia. They say labeling the protesters as pedophiles has to be understood within a larger state project of defining Russias identity in terms of traditional values, delineating Russia from a Western world often portrayed by the Kremlin as dissolute and decadent.

I do think its an attempt to paint opposition protests as Western and fundamentally at odds with traditional Russian values, said Kharazian. The equating of homosexuality and pedophilia is based on common homophobic tropes of homosexuality as unnatural or in some way perverted. And beyond Maidan, these homophobic narratives have also been applied to protests in Armenia, Venezuela, Georgia and elsewhere.

It is hard to say if this tactic will work for a wide swathe of Russians, but for those already receptive to anti-Western propaganda, it certainly is potent, she said.

Putin avoided mentioning his foe Navalny by name in a midweek speech to the World Economic Forum. But he warned against the destruction of traditional values. The social and values crisis is already having negative demographic consequences, from which mankind is at risk of losing entire civilizational and cultural continents.

Putin himself has defended Russia's anti-gay laws in the past by equating gays with pedophiles, saying Russia needs to cleanse itself of homosexuality.

In an interview in 2014 with ABC TV, on the eve of the Sochi Olympics, he suggested that gays are more likely to abuse children. And in September 2013, Putin talked about the excesses of Western political correctness, which he said had reached the point where there are serious discussions on the registration of parties that have propaganda of pedophilia as their objective.

Jakub Kalensky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a colleague of Kharazian, says the Kremlin-controlled medias homophobic tropes are playing into the prejudices of some of the more conservative Russians. Its not just about influencing the audience, but also using the audience's prejudices to discredit the protests, he said.

Here is the original post:

Why is Kremlin Tagging Protesters Political Pedophiles? - Voice of America

Dear Editor

To reduce potential confusion I begin this essay with the admonition that no president has represented my interests since JFK. We havent had a free press since at least acting President Reagan and slick Willie. What we have are Propaganda Outlets. Political correctness increases: our free press establishes official truth. Youre free as long as you stand where youre told and say whats expected.

On 1/6 the Dems found a political godsend enabling them to frame their opposition as enemies of the state, damned to ideological purgatory. The Dems now conduct a war of annihilation. The hildabeest said, during an interview, Trump and his deplorables took their orders from Putin. Divide and conquer is the tactic of the rulers and successful as ever.

Consensus is the only way to solve conflict.

If you think the game aint rigged, you aint been paying attention. It follows the same pattern as every other convenient crisis used by government as an excuse to expand its powers, and remove freedoms, at your expense. If you dare to subscribe to any views contrary to the governments you may be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.

Biden signaled its open season on any opposition: The opposition wont sit still and be abused.Theyll respond so, anticipate consequences. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party, was the question in 1950, but now its centered on the orange man.

Biden said On this January day my whole soul is in this: Bringing America together, uniting our people, and uniting our nation. I ask every American to join me in this cause. He itemized the target: Anger, resentment, hatred, extremism, violence and lawlessness.

The Biden gang speaks to the Not-Biden Rabble with a sense of conviction that theyre better people and more competent; the rabble are deluded simpletons, who need guidance from their intellectual, moral, and cultural superiors to re-direct their peasant yearnings for a better life into the approved Track.

On inauguration night, Antifa mobs rioted in Portland and Seattle. Similar mobs gave us a summer of rioting, looting and arson after George Floyds death. Democrats never condemned these mobs, but they did the activities of 1/6. Referring to the 2011 invasion of Wisconsins state capitol Nancy Pelosi praised it as an impressive show of democracy in action.

Police brutality certainly is Americas sin. To purge it, we have to kneel. To remove systemic racism while kneeling, white people have to apologize for their privilege. Slaverys next; to free ourselves from that we have to destroy sculptures as white people judge themselves while kneeling and repenting of their white privilege. White supremacy is the latest fiction. I havent seen much of that since the seventies. Now its the new burning issue.

De-fund the police calls have become fund the secret police. Domestic terror bills creating new DHS units to monitor extremism are being advanced. During summer BLM riots were called acts of courage. They even declared an autonomous zone taking over government buildings, yet our free press never used the words insurrection, sedition, or treason. AOC praised these mostly peaceful protests and said the point is to make people feel uncomfortable.

If you feel uncomfortable that 25,000 troops were in the district of corruption, then were told youre a conspiracy theorist. Remember, ignorance is strength, so you must obey the experts. When you accept the accusation, which its become, that someones a conspiracy theorist, youre allowing another to do your thinking for you. Replace that term with: critical thinker.

The media says its their job to control what you believe. Americans in the Land of the Free have had their free speech censored by most media, which features who and what they want while forbidding different views. Welcome to double standard America.

You cant make someone be someone else. You might convince them with patience and evidence.

A majoritybelieve journalists/reporters mislead by knowingly presenting false or exaggerated news; most news organizations favor a political position more than informing citizens. Americans can see that the news is the same no matter which channel you watch. The hypocrisy is thick. Party loyalists are a huge problem because they wear blinders. We expect the media to hold the powerful to account but its mostly image marketing.

After the Trump supporters, with much evidence they were directed by Antifa masquerading as trumpers, stormed the Capitol on 1/6, the media piled on. Their first move was to make it a story about race. The Trump extravaganza had nothing to do with race, but a confederate flag or two and suddenly its a KKK rally to hear the TV present it. Covid blowback, unrestricted immigration, wars of choice, election fraud, but were told its about race. Imagine the outcome/response if BLM had done 1/6? An unarmed Trump supporter at the Capitol was shot dead. If a black protester died by police in 2020s incessant BLM riots, lootings and arsons, hed already be on a postage stamp.

The TV tells us that immigrants from failing countries need free admission to the empire but neglect to remember/consider, the reason theyre running is because our empire has continually destroyed their elected governments that dont toe the empires line, creating mayhem in their countries.

Racism is an endless game of political correctness ignoring that, worldwide, there are differences others have trouble getting past, especially when you factor in the crime of micro aggression whatever that means. Disney is now, with a straight face, calling Peter Pan and Dumbo racist.

Who needs fiction writers these days when we have the Democratic Party? Our ministry of truth sells lies so well, many accept them. All the presstitutes said that theres no evidence of fraud, and all who support examining the evidence are enemies of democracy.In other words, democracy is a stolen election.If you protest the theft, you oppose democracy.

America is close to the monolithic control of information that Orwell predicted in 1984. Big Tech has banned debate about government policy on the coronavirus, and any discussion of election fraud is treated as a crime.One mans misinformation is anothers truth: ignoring Israels crimes is an example of that, as is the recent election. The world clearly sees that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

Our free press was joyous at the arrival of slow Joe. You can sleep easy again: the party of peace, tolerance, and reconciliation has returned. They want to heal and unify the nation, but clearly the only way to do so is to create enemies lists and silence anyone with dissenting opinions.

Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, said, Me-first capitalists are going to be the first peoplelined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. Ill happily provide video commentary. Companies like Twitter are a big part of the efforts to unify the nation deleting 70,000 accounts using 1/6 as an excuse. The completely fair and objective media says that simply acknowledging this tech purge makes you a conspiracy theorist.

Axios wrote:Right wings new conspiracy: The silencing. They said that only crazy conspiracy theorists believe that there are efforts to silence their voices. In other words, dont believe your lying eyes.

Its illegal for businesses to discriminate due to peoples ancestral origin, but its legal to prohibit opinions. In the manner of No Colored signs on the door of businesses in the 50s they have every right asprivately owned businessesto do business with whomever they wish. The Left is defined by its psychotic doublethink. Its intolerant while advertising itself as open-minded. It promotes discrimination in the name of combatting it.

What are they afraid of, and who have we become?

The first amendment says you shall make no laws restricting free speech. Were told we must ensure harmful speech is regulated to guarantee broad participation in the public dialog thats essential to our democracy. Were told that thefirst amendment needs removal because right-wingers are speaking in unapproved ways. This open-ended condition can be interpreted however any official feels necessary.

Were told Twitter is big, so anti-vaccination/anti-war/pro-Russia/Covid denial viewsare going to cause panic so we must redefine free speech; Offensive, misinformation, and hate speech will be discoveredoften. Everythingcan be made to meananything. The ministry of truth has arrived.

Sowell wrote: If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today. Our free press presents selected information designed to do your thinking for you.

Our political/media class have beenpushing for more authorityto solve their fear of domestic terrorism. New domestic terror policies were in the works before 1/6. Internet censorship isincreasing normalized, and digital armiesare encouraged to report suspects to the authorities, just like the Soviets. An incredibly large part of America seems to have no problem with any of this.

Monopolistic Silicon Valley tycoons are censoring worldwide political speech, just like the TV news. Theres lots of narrative manipulation going on to keep it from being obvious.

The way to stem the tide of whatever concerns you is to eliminate conditions which created it.

Trump was successful by using the widespread awareness that theres a swamp that needs draining: a corrupt political system unconcerned with your interests. Governmentoften does evil things and lies about themassisted by our free press leaving people to imagine whats happening behind closed doors. People see that the system has failed them. Those interested in ending Trumpism/populism would act to end the corrupt political system, from top to bottom.These changes arent being promoted by our political/media class because they speak for an empire that depends on these things.

Corruption enables campaign donations and corporate lobbying/revolving doors,to advance the ruling interests; Government secrecy enables members to conspire (ops, conspiracy theory) to advance the empires agendas. The lying mass media manufacture yourconsent for wars in a system which doesnt serve your interests.

Youre not going to change Americas existing fascist system by expanding an authoritarian monster: you need drastic actual change.

If you dont comply with the ruling parties dogma and agenda, your ability to work, communicate, express your once-free-opinions will come to a halt. The Biden gang doesnt seem to care that there are costs for persecuting Trump and 75 million Americans. It cant be long until those consequences arrive, violently.

Criminalizing opposition to our government is insanely dangerous. The globalist ruling classes have reminded us who is in charge, and how quickly they can remove the democratic and legal facade. The War on Populism is becoming the War on Domestic Terror, one part of the Global War on Terror.

The treatment by the propagandists at CNN/ABC/NBC/CBS/Bloomberg/Fox, et al, of 1/6 proves that when they lie, mislead, quote biased official sources, and reject as conspiracy theory anything opposing their misrepresentations, they can fool half the country. Im reading about arrests for spreading misinformation.

Craig Dudley

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LETTERS / To Ensure That There - High Country Press

Palm Beach Post

In two prophetic books, Animal Farm: A Fairy Storyand 1984,the British essayist George Orwell depicted a future world in which the state would exercise complete control over all facets of social life.

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four," Orwell wrote. "If that is granted, all else follows.

Sadly, Orwell's depiction of state-controlled life is being ignored and challenged today by the "cancel culture"cult. Nonviolent free speech, our First Amendment right in our Constitution, is being attacked vitriolically and is tearing our nation apart. People are being fired from their jobs, expelled from schools, blacklisted, abused verbally and even harmed physically by simply declaring, for example, "All lives matter."

A surge of selective censorship has been directed at conservative ideas especially if those ideas are not consistent with the narrative of the political elitists and advocates of political correctness.

Freedom of speech is one of the powers of freedom of the will. It is the right to speak and think as one wants without hindrance or restraint. It is the polar opposite of political correctness, which is used as a weapon of fear and is a threat to our nation's survival.

My past and present stance on mob violence of any kind has been to confront it without prejudice. Wrong is wrong no matter who you are, what color you are, what religion you are, or what your politics are. Sadly, the hypocrisy is in plain sight today when individuals react vigorously but selectively to criminal behavior that fits their own interests and agendas.

Well-meaning citizens or large segments of our population who protest peacefully or vote differently cannot be branded as pariahs just because the majority in government power want to maintain Orwellian control as Big Brother.

Our nation was built on compromise and a free exchange of ideas. If we abandon these two tenets, our future is doomed. If we disrespect our First Amendment, knowing full well that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, then perhaps we should recall the words of the providential biblical figure who said as his life ebbed away beneath a crown of thorns, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!

We must embrace the gift of free will granted to us by Providence, and stand up and resist political correctness in every form. If not, we may be forced to accept that 2+2=5.

DR. DAVID TUCKER, PALM BEACH GARDENS

Read this article:

Point of View: 'Cancel culture' is tearing the nation apart - Palm Beach Post

Ill readily admit that the face gracing the $20 bill is not our most urgent issue not with 420,000 people needlessly dead and 45 Republican senators saying that their insurrectionist in exile should get a pass.

But we can all agree that symbols are important, define who we are as a people and help us craft our national narrative.

So, in that sense, it surely matters whether the face on the $20 bill depicts a racist genocidal white guy who enslaved human beings or a Black woman who repeatedly risked her life to successfully free human beings. The good news is that the Biden administration intends to right a wrong by putting Harriet Tubman where she belongs.

As press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday, The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put (Tubman) on the front of the new $20 notes. Its important that our money reflect the history and diversity of our country.

Well, yeah. White men werent the only people who built this nation. Black women have never appeared on American currency. Tubman, a fugitive slave and heroine of the Underground Railroad, rescued hundreds of African-Americans from servitude.

She was a Union spy during the Civil War, recruited ex-slaves for a Union regiment, and led an assault that freed 700 more. In her late 70s she delivered speeches for womens suffrage, but died seven years before women won the right to vote.

Wait, let me back up a bit.

Did Psaki say that the Biden administration wants to resume the process to put Tubman on the $20 bill?

When did that process start and why did it stop?

Take a wild guess why it stopped.

Back in 2016, President Barack Obamas Treasury secretary announced a plan to replace facial incumbent Andrew Jackson starting in 2020. But that plan was quickly shelved during the MAGA occupation. As the MAGA candidate had signaled during the 2016 campaign, when asked about replacing Jackson with Tubman, I dont like seeing it. I think its pure political correctness.

In his mind, the reality of racial diversity and the truth of our national narrative was political correctness. And he was reportedly blunter in conversation with White House aides. According to Omarosa Manigault Newman, the ex-aide who last year wrote the book Unhinged, her boss told her what he really thought about Tubman: You want me to put that face on the $20 bill?

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was thus tasked with telling Congress that the switch to Tubman was unfeasible because of security concerns, something to do with unspecified counterfeiting issues.

And so the woman who once said that slavery is the next thing to hell was thereby consigned to the back of the bus.

Besides, the insurrectionist-in-chief loved Jackson and put the guys picture on the Oval Office wall. In his words, Andrew Jackson had a history of tremendous success for the country.

If living as a member of the landed gentry with slave labor and ethnic-cleansing Native Americans is what constitutes success, then, yes, Jackson was boffo.

As the recent excellent book Jacksonland chronicles in great detail, Jacksons style of negotiating (with Native Americans) was frank and coercive. In talk after talk over the years, he told native leaders he was their friend, and that he wanted to pay for their land but that if they failed to sell, white settlers would take their land for nothing.

Jackson, his family members and his closest business associates, ultimately stole more than 45,000 acres. Having thus enriched himself prior to becoming president, he worked with his postmaster general to suppress anti-slavery mail from northern abolitionists.

Yes, were only talking here about faces on currency. But its high time we honored people such as Tubman who truly made America great. This was a woman who in her last years preached hope to people of color during the worst of Jim Crow. She once said: Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.

And she was right on the money where she belongs.

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

Dick Polman is a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia. His column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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Dick Polman | Show me the money: Put Tubman on the $20 bill - TribDem.com

Nearly everyone in Connecticut knows that its capital city, Hartford, is a mess, and that its largest city, Bridgeport, is too. Yet for saying so about Hartford in an essay in The Wall Street Journal on New Year's Day, former gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski continues to generate outrage from news organizations and the establishment leaders they strive to give voice to. Predictably enough, none of the responses has addressed Stefanowski's specific criticisms. Instead the responses have constituted only mindless boosterism for Hartford.

Decades of boosterism haven't improved the city but the latest installment may be meant to prevent the failure of Connecticut's urban policies from becoming the issue it should be.

For example, why, despite ever-greater state spending on Hartford, do its demographics grow only poorer and its schools never improve?

Though it was already insolvent and a ward of the state, why was Hartford allowed to borrow tens of millions of dollars to build a minor-league baseball stadium, leading to a $500 million bailout by state government? State government could have prevented that disaster, so why didn't it?

Why did Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin pander to the "defund the police" crowd by reducing the city police budget by $2 million only to have to appeal for state troopers a few weeks later as crime in the city exploded?

Even the news organizations purporting to serve Hartford have yet to pose such questions. With his essay Stefanowski began to do so, and the response from those news organizations was only: That's mean! Don't do that again!

What'sreallymean is leaving Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven in perpetual poverty and dysfunction, where they will stay until the failures of policy and management are acknowledged. As Stefanowski wrote, state government shares responsibility for those failures. Those who took offense at their mere mention now share responsibility too.

* * *

COURANT'S P.C. POSE: Congratulations to the Hartford Courant for pledging, in the name of social justice, to do less of what it hardly had been doing anyway: publishing police photos, "mug shots," of arrested people.

This pledge was just a load of what is called virtue signaling, since few mug shots have appeared in the Courant lately not because of concern for social justice but because of the newspaper's long retreat from local news.

Of course this retreat doesn't contradict the Courant's argument that mug shots can be prejudicial and contribute to racial stereotyping. But crime itself is racially disproportionate, and it is not stereotyping to acknowledge it. A mug shot doesn't stereotype; it signifies an actual arrest. Andanyarrest publicity is potentially prejudicial.

So is the publicnotto be reminded that crime is racially disproportionate, just as family disintegration, educational failure, and poverty are? And is criminal justicenotto be watched closely so injustice may be diminished? Are only the arrests and mug shots ofwhitepeople to be published?

One could get that impression lately, as national news organizations are going out of their way to publicize any trivial incident in which a white person mistreats a Black person, like the incident the other day in New York City where a white woman mistakenly accused a Black teenager of stealing her cell phone. Meanwhile there is no reporting of trivial incidents in whichBlacksmistreatwhites. Are there no such incidents, or is political correctness overwhelming the news?

* * *

TEACHING MOMENT LOST: University of Connecticut President Thomas C. Katsouleas toadied to political correctness again last week in responding to an internet petition urging the university to "condemn" two students from Stafford who attended the "Stop the Steal" protest in Washington that ended with the attack on the Capitol. There was no allegation that the students broke the law, but one was photographed with the infamous provocateur Alex Jones.

Responding to the petition, Katsouleas wrote that Jones is "despicable." Katsouleas didnot write that the university has no business condemning anyone for peacefully exercising his First Amendment rights.

So a teaching moment was lost. Instead the P.C. petitioners were reminded of how easily the university president can be made to dance. Students may be learning that much anyway.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer.

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No one dares to answer for the disaster of Connecticut's cities - Journal Inquirer

The White House will resume the Obama-era push to put Harriet Tubmans image on the $20 bill, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.

The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the new $20 notes, Psaki said in response to a reporters question during the daily briefing. Its important that our money reflects the history and diversity of our country and Harriet Tubmans image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that.

Harriet Tubman, born into slavery, was a 19th-century abolitionist and conductor of the Underground Railroad, risking her life to rescue dozens of enslaved people and bring them to freedom after she escaped herself. Tubman learned the escape houses and secret routes throughout the Underground Railroad, making her an asset to the Union military during the Civil War, according to the National Womens History Museum. Tubman also joined the fight for womens suffrage after the Civil War ended.

In 2016, the Obama administration set out to redesign the $20 bill, replacing Andrew Jackson, who enslaved people and both fought Native Americans and forced them to move from their land. The Obama administration was hoping for a release of the new bill in 2020 to mark the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, a right that could at that point be exercised mainly by White women.

The project to get Tubman represented on the currency was delayed during the Trump administration. In the spring of 2019, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said counterfeit issues would make it impossible to unveil Harriet Tubman on the bill by 2020, the deadline set by the Obama administration. Trump, who put Jacksons portrait in the Oval Office, had criticized changing the image on the bill, saying it was being done out of pure political correctness.

Psaki said that the Biden administration doesnt have a set deadline for the release of the new bill but that the administration is working on it.

Were exploring ways to speed up that effort but any specifics would of course come from the Department of Treasury, said Psaki.

The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Originally published by The 19th.

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Harriet Tubman on the $20 Bill: Biden Administration Says It's Resuming the Effort - GovExec.com

Forward Theater Company has a knack for choosing plays that are accidentally a bit on the nose. Last year they planned on producing The Amateurs the story of a troupe of 14th century actors during the Black Plague which was canceled due to the outbreak of COVID-19. This season they chose The Niceties by Eleanor Burgess a play about people so entrenched in their opposing views that they cannot hear each others arguments across the enormous ideological crevasse that separates them. That describes this political moment in the U.S. to a tee.

Unfortunately this piece, available for streaming through Feb. 7, barely scratches the surface of the current, essential conversations that need to happen about race in this country. The weak script, uneven performances, and poor production values undercut the exchanges it would like to provoke.

The Niceties is a period drama set in 2016 on an elite college campus in Connecticut. It was originally inspired by the controversy surrounding a memo to Yale students from the administration that urged them not to don racially offensive costumes for Halloween. In response, one of the professors suggested that college kids wear what they want and talk to each other about crossing boundaries. This led to a much larger protest about institutional insensitivity to Yales BIPOC students and the playwrights observation that little actual communication resulted from the subsequent outrage.

Though it was only five years ago, it feels like decades have passed since then. Compared to the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests in response to the murder of George Floyd last summer, two hours of vitriol over issues of political correctness on a college campus seems positively quaint. And while The Niceties documents that moment, it doesnt add to the current conversation.

The biggest problem with The Niceties is that the characters are written as types who simply personify diametrically opposing views. Janice (played by Sarah Day) is a highly esteemed, white college professor at an Ivy League school, a 60-something Baby Boomer who has been insulated from reality by her position in the ivory tower. Cynical, condescending, and occasionally oblivious, she has a very practical view of how to couch unpleasant messages to those in power and affect change in a white, patriarchal society. On the other end of the spectrum is Zoe (played by an impressive Samantha Newcomb), a bright, passionate, Black 20-year-old college junior, majoring in political science. She feels it is her duty to protest injustice, foment change, and awaken the establishment to racism wherever she sees it from colonial syllabi and whitewashed history courses to micro-aggressions of mispronouncing students names. A Millennial and an idealist, she demands attention, validation, and immediate action.

To minimally complicate the characters, Zoe is from a well-heeled East Coast family and Janice is from working-class, immigrant stock. The professor is also a lesbian who has had her own struggles with lack of representation, prejudice, and legal inequality. They take turns being right, being sanctimonious, and wielding the power in the room.

Although the authors notes urge us to see the characters as equally flawed, three-dimensional people, its hard not to loathe Janice from the start, as she tosses off tone-deaf, white-privileged statements and mounts simplistic straw-man arguments. Her suspicion of any information found on the internet and instruction to Zoe that she should just go find primary sources from 18th century enslaved people to bolster her papers thesis sound ludicrous in 2016. Her bristling at using correct pronouns for her students and hurling you people at a student during office hours are equally ridiculous.

Not to be outdone, Zoes demands for change strain credulity because they are positioned as all or nothing ultimatums. At one point she tells Janice to quit her job and get out of the way so a person of color can have her post. And although she consistently accuses her professor of not listening to her, she is just as unwilling to hear things that dont square with her experience. Her own emotional truth trumps any opposing view.

In the end, both women seize opportunities for revenge instead of reconciliation, shifting our sympathies back and forth in a way that feels manipulative. Instead of developed character arcs, the play gives us two people who suffer for their actions but dont learn from them. Their very long argument ends with a final, ominous threat instead of any kind of growth or self-awareness on either side. Even as a cautionary tale, this is unsatisfying.

Under normal conditions this would be a difficult play to stage because its very talky and static except for a scuffle over a cell phone, there is no physical action prescribed in the text. In the current virtual world of playmaking, its even more problematic and proves the point that people who know how to make amazing plays dont necessarily know how to translate them to film.

The two actresses were recorded in front of green screens in their homes and directed remotely by Jen Uphoff Gray and DiMonte Henning. But the literal distance between them deflates the tension the actors are able to muster in each scene, just like it did in FTCs previous virtual play, The Lifespan of a Fact. Instead of floating heads in boxes that were used to seeing in online readings, the actors are superimposed onto an office backdrop, but its far from seamless. The performers gazes dont always match up, so at times they are not looking at each other while speaking. Theres a green fuzzy halo around the edges of bodies and props. A physical altercation between the two of them is unconvincing. Objects appear to float in space or are disproportionate to one another. And in its best moments, the actors simply sit still on two sides of a table and argue.

Further undermining the plays performance is the fact that one actress is off-book and the other one is quite obviously reading her script on the table in front of her. This prevents the scenes from flowing naturally and breaks thoughts up in artificial places. Its also not what audiences expect from a full, professional production, even in challenging times.

There are scheduled talkbacks after four more performances, and perhaps thats where audience members can have some meaningful conversations about race. But if they do, those conversations will probably be much more informed by the Black Lives Matter movement than by the presentation of this play.

Originally posted here:

Scratching the surface - Isthmus

Four schools in the Shawnee Mission School District will have new mascots by the end of the school year after the districts board of education voted unanimously last night in favor of a policy that bans what it calls derogatory or offensive mascots.

The change will affect Belinder Elementary, Rushton Elementary, and Shawanoe Elementary Schools, and Shawnee Mission North High School in Overland Park.

This is not a recent desire for change following a Black Lives Matter summer of activism, nor is it about political correctness, Shawnee Mission North graduate Alisha Vincent told school board members. "There have been people in this community working toward more inclusive indigenous recognition for decades.

Vincents daughter Halley, a sixth grader whose future school would be Shawnee Mission North, has taken a leading role in the push for change.

For months, she collected letters of support from community groups including staff members at Haskell Indian Nations University, Navajo Nation member and Kansas Rep. Christina Haswood and the Kansas City Indian Center, and presented them to the school board.

Under the new policy, mascots must now:

It will be up to the individual school principals to bring together students, staff, parents and others to decide on a new mascot.

District Superintendent Mike Fulton said, while the selection of the mascot needs to happen by the end of the school year, the change wont be immediate.

The actual implementation of the new mascot may vary by school, he said. It depends on the nature of how big that change is, and the amount of time it will take to accomplish completing that change.

In a written statement with Board of Education President Heather Ousley, Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe in Oklahoma called the move a first step.

The time has come to better align our language and our symbols to the values we represent, he wrote. Together, we will continue to work toward practices and procedures that treat all peoples with dignity and respect.

The move was not without opponents. An online petition to keep the Indians as Shawnee Mission Norths mascot, which it has used for 98 years, has nearly 3,000 signatures.

Emmitt Monslow, another Shawnee Mission North alumnus, asked school board members to delay the decision until later.

My biggest question I have when people are trying to remove names and images of Indians is what do we really get, as Indians, from these changes? he said. I know what we lose if we remove the names and images a seat at the table. Because after everyone has forgotten Shawnee Mission North Indians, what is the need to educate on who Indians are?

In November, Neiman Elementary School in Shawnee independently changed its mascot from the Indians to the Foxes. That change was led by the schools student council and approved by the principal and district assistant superintendent of elementary schools.

Gaylene Crouser, executive director of the Kansas City Indian Center, said the districts change is a result of a new push from students coupled with a decades-long effort from Native American organizations in the region.

Weve been asking them for years, weve been telling them for years, she said, and people are finally starting to listen.

The rest is here:

Four Shawnee Mission Schools Will Have New Mascots, After Years Of Using Native American Imagery - KMUW

It is fast becoming orthodoxy among both lefty contrarians and conservative apologists that, from the online cult of QAnon to the men and women who stormed the US Capitol in real life, the problem of the far-right stems mainly from disenfranchisement from bottled up resentment, provided no outlet by the effete snobs in publishing, exploding with righteous albeit delusional fury.

"These people know they are scorned and looked down upon," one right-wing blogger recently told a left-wing podcaster, "and the more you humiliate and make them feel powerless, the more you take away their ability to organize and express that rage, it's gonna find an outlet in more destructive ways."

Megyn Kelly, a former on-air personality at Fox News and NBC News, likewise blamed the media "the enemy of the people," in a former president's phrasing for spurring domestic right-wing terrorism. "Part of the reason we saw what happened at the Capitol here two weeks ago is because there has been a complete lack of trust, a destruction of trust in the media, and people don't know where to turn for true information," she maintained.

The problem is that this has not been the problem at all.

Civil unrest can often be viewed as the language of the unheard, per Martin Luther King, Jr.

This riot was egged on by the then-most powerful man in the world to amplify his grievance: his inability to accept he lost an election. This was a riot made up in part of small business owners, off-duty cops, military veterans, and the otherwise better off some whom even took a private jet to DC for the riot. It was largely an insurrection comprised by those to whom power has traditionally catered a white population who fears an ebbing of their privileged status, and others entering the democratic chat incited by the ultra-rich former president.

After an insurrection, an overdue national conversation about preserving democracy was drowned out, with the help of big media, by a reactionary conflation of "free speech" with the right to spread disinformation in private media. Political correctness, so-called, became "cancel culture": the red herring that, more so than overthrowing the republic, became the hot new threat to freedom and mom's apple pie.

But it has been remarkably ineffective, this recent spate of canceling. Big Tech is happy to shovel inflammatory content into the gaping mouths of consumers, blaming the algorithms they designed for the fact that anger, above all, means engagement (while the performance of wet-blanket fact check is abysmal). It has not been censorious liberalism that has ruled the online world, but capitalism. Dollars and cents. Clicks and views.

And so it is that the angriest, with the most outrageous opinions about politics and society, have not been silenced but amplified each irrational fear reported by media outlets eager to fight a no-win battle against the perception of a liberal bias.

Amid cries of censorship, reactionary content overperforms on Facebook, a site where the reactionary tabloid Breitbart, formerly run by Steve Bannon, was formally considered a "trustworthy" news entity in 2019 by the social media giant, part of an explicit appeal to the far right of the political spectrum. One cable news network has been devoted solely to airing their grievances, and at least two others have sprung up to air them even harder. There was a presidency and, for a time, two echo-chambers of Congress dedicated to "triggering the libs" on behalf of this constituency.

Right-wing extremism did not fester in dark corners. It all happened out in the open with followers led down a rabbit hole by the world's most powerful man the TV billionaire who started out promoting conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's place of birth and a cast of faux-populist millionaires willing to entertain falsehoods, on television, about everything from COVID-19 to the 2020 election.

Sedition was plotted and streamed on Facebook and Parler. While the events of January 6 were shocking, there really wasn't an element of surprise.

The belated removal of Donald Trump from platforms like Twitter is not the apotheosis of "safe space" culture, nor does it mean liberals and leftists have to put their faith in the Big Tech giants. It is, in fact, the least that could be done: holding the powerful to the same terms of service applied to shock-jock internet comedians and two-bit online harassers.

For years, the far-right used mainstream platforms to organize, these social networks indeed serving as a melting pot for locked-down conspiracy theorists to vigilante killers; half-measures to thwart this, taken after several terrorist attacks and a violent coup attempt incited by a head of state, are an embarrassed acknowledgment of this.

There are pitfalls to not allowing everything that could be said to be said, and no one trusts tech to reliably pursue the public- over self-interest. But the status quo was neither benign nor neutral. The worst rose to the top, with a lift from foreign states andAmerican politicians not the powerless who used formerly inane technology to inflame the masses. In Myanmar, that meant sparking a genocide against the Rohingya, Facebook fees serving as the 21st century Radio Rwanda. In the United States, that's a third of the Republican Party believing in QAnon, a digital rehash of a 19th-century anti-Semitic hoax.

The issue is decidedly not that the far-right among us have been denied a platform, but rather that they have been handed megaphones by corporations and politicians, Americans' worst natures exacerbated and monetized. Legitimizing a victimhood mentality that's been used to justify an increasingly violent and unhinged resentment only compounds the error.

Read more:

The US Capitol riot was not the language of the unheard - Business Insider - Business Insider