Here are this week’s SWAJ Research Links, compiled by SWAJ Team Member Mark Kurth.
National Inquiries
After backlash, Scholastic says it will stop separating diverse books at school book fairs
Scholastic on Wednesday said it would end the "Share Every Story" collection beginning in January, acknowledging that the separate group of diverse books "caused confusion and feelings of exclusion."
"The 'Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice' collection will not be offered with our next season in January," the company said in its statement. "As we reconsider how to make our book fairs available to all kids, we will keep in mind the needs of our educators facing local content restrictions and the children we serve."
‘It Feels Like the New McCarthyism’: How the Israel-Hamas War Is Redefining the Limits of Free Speech
Artforum’s top editor David Velasco was fired by his publisher, Penske Media, after posting an open letter on the site calling for a cease-fire and suggesting Israel is responsible for the beginning of a genocide; Michael Eisen was removed as editor-in-chief of the science journal eLife after retweeting a satirical article critical of Israel; and Maha Dakhil, a top executive at the Hollywood talent firm Creative Artists Agency, stepped back from leadership roles after reposting an Instagram story that implied Israel was committing genocide. That’s in addition to multiple law students who had job offers revoked after publicly criticizing Israeli actions. The statements range from expressions of sympathy for Palestinians to strident anti-Israel criticisms that seem to minimize Israeli loss of life.
'Go home!': GOP crowd boos Trump criticism; lawmakers flip from DeSantis at Orlando summit
Dueling video backdrops during their speeches at a Florida GOP event in Orlando declared “Florida is DeSantis Country” and “Florida is Trump Country.”
Both received rapturous receptions from the crowd of GOP activists.
Before either man took the stage, though, it was clear there was considerable support for Trump among the crowd. A pair of GOP presidential candidates ‒ Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie ‒ who are critical of Trump were booed during their remarks.
Republicans Can’t Figure It Out
Even as many Democrats have been driven to a near panic by a succession of recent polls showing President Joe Biden’s extreme vulnerability, the party in yesterday’s elections swept almost all the most closely watched contests. Democrats won the Kentucky governorship by a comfortable margin, romped to a lopsided victory in an Ohio ballot initiative ensuring abortion rights, and easily captured an open Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat. Most impressive, Democrats held the Virginia state Senate and were projected to regain control of the Virginia state House, despite an all-out campaign from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin to win both chambers.
Moms For Liberty's School Board Takeover Attempts Fizzled Out On Election Day
Moms for Liberty, the right-wing extremist group that aims to bring a conservative agenda to public education, set out to take over school boards across the country in Tuesday’s elections. But instead of installing like-minded candidates in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Iowa school districts, its attempt fell flat.
Mike Johnson’s Favorite Anti-Porn App Has a Dark, Creepy History
Covenant Eyes doesn’t merely capture screenshots of whatever it is you might think would be categorized as pornography. Even Mike Johnson joked that his son’s Covenant Eyes report showed a “clean bill of health,” despite one screenshot it flagged as problematic, which the speaker reviewed and said was just a picture of women talking. But the experience of one Indiana family using the software was much more frightening: Covenant Eyes captured screenshots of everything they viewed on their devices, from “images of YouTube videos watched by her 14-year-old daughter to online underwear purchases made by her 80-year-old mother-in-law,” according to an investigation from Wired earlier this year. They learned this after one family member was ordered to install the software by his probation officers, who served as the “accountability partner.” While Covenant Eyes’ terms of service forbid this kind of use in a “premediated legal setting,” Wired’s reporting showed that courts in at least five states were using Covenant Eyes in just this way, monitoring people awaiting trial or on parole.
Marjorie Taylor Greene praises Donald Trump’s plan to force kids to learn traditional gender roles
Now she’s praising Donald Trump for his plan to make life harder for LGBTQ+ people and to ensure that children are indoctrinated at school on “the things that make men and women different and unique” as part of his 2024 campaign platform.
“I absolutely love President Trump because he believes in protecting children from the radical lefts and gender lies and genital mutilation surgeries,” Greene wrote on X, sharing a screenshot from Trump’s “Agenda 47,” or what he promises to do if elected president next year. “I support his Agenda 47 and have a bill all ready to go to PROTECT CHILDREN!”
States Fights
Youngkin’s disastrous night shows the right’s culture war has fizzled
But the GOP governor’s comeuppance isn’t just about the durability of abortion rights as a political winner for Democrats. It also shows that right-wing culture-warring on education — built around a “parents’ rights” agenda limiting school discussion of race and gender — has utterly lost its political potency, allowing Democrats to respond with their own affirmative liberal cultural agenda.
Danica Roem to become Virginia's 1st transgender state senator
She is the first out transgender person elected to Virginia’s upper chamber and only the second trans person elected to any state Senate in the United States, following Delaware’s Sarah McBride in 2020.
Roem, a Democrat, defeated her Republican opponent, Bill Woolf, by more than 3 percentage points. Woolf, a former Fairfax County police officer, was endorsed by the state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin.
“The voters have shown they want a leader who will prioritize fixing roads, feeding kids and protecting our land instead of stigmatizing trans kids or taking away your civil rights.”
The Scandal That
Never Happened
The answer to those questions would come years later, in the suicide note of a high-level court employee who disclosed that the judges of the 5th Circuit had decided, in secret, to ignore the petitions of prisoners who could not afford an attorney. It was a shocking revelation. In a state where police and prosecutorial misconduct frequently make national headlines and a stream of exonerations has revealed a criminal justice system still functioning in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow, a group of white judges had decided that the claims of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of inmates — most of them Black — were not worth taking the time to read.
Pennsylvania school board ‘high stakes’ elections carve a path for 2024
Pennsylvania conservatives are about to test the voltage of education politics.
School board elections are set to occur across the country on Tuesday. But few of these once-quiet contests have become as vicious, sophisticated, expensive and injected with dueling endorsements from political committees and national organizations quite like campaigns in the Keystone State.
Why a bucolic Tennessee suburb is a hotbed of ‘Christian Nashville-ism’
Williamson County is Tennessee’s wealthiest community and has some of the highest-rated schools in the state, some of the biggest churches, a host of Christian nonprofits and a whole bunch of country music stars who call it home.
It’s not the place you expect to find neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Democrats Take Control of Virginia Legislature
The Democratic Party not only maintained its narrow hold on the State Senate, but also captured control of the House of Delegates, where Republicans had held a 48-to-46 majority, with six vacancies.
The legislative races had drawn national attention — and millions of dollars in out-of-state contributions and independent expenditures — as a barometer of both Mr. Youngkin’s star power and national sentiment heading into next year’s presidential election.
Democrats romp, Youngkin flops: 4 takeaways from Tuesday’s election
In Tuesday night’s off-year elections, the incumbent Democratic governor in Kentucky — a state President Joe Biden lost by 26 points — handily won reelection. Democrats not only rebuffed Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s bid for total control of the state legislature by keeping the state Senate — they flipped the state House, too. And the party held a state Supreme Court seat in the nation’s largest Electoral College battleground of Pennsylvania.
But for now, the results on Tuesday — taken together with a string of special elections throughout the year that showed Democratic candidates outperforming Biden’s vote shares in districts across the country — serve as a powerful counterpoint to the party’s doom-and-gloom over the president’s poll numbers.
Vocal Locals
He left his White evangelical bubble. Here’s what he says it would take for others to do the same
One former evangelical, though, has done something rare: He’s written a new memoir that illustrates how White evangelicals were led astray by their thirst for political power but also depicts many of them as earnest spiritual strivers who still retain “immense power for good.”
The book is titled “Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation,” and it’s by Jon Ward, the chief national correspondent at Yahoo! News. Ward describes being raised in a Christian bubble where watching secular television shows like “Sesame Street” was forbidden. He attended churches where people were “slain in the spirit” while singing songs with choruses such as, “all of us deserve to die.”