As in a horror story in which some trusted institution becomes possessed by an evil force, something has changed in youth culture and our schools.
Youth media has long (always?) fostered doubt about whether parents could really understand what their children were going through (as opposed to glossy magazines, Hollywood, and pop stars). As the evil force engulfed the town, the heroes’ parents might not believe the kids’ testimony, but they remained a source of safety, often stepping up to help save the day. Meanwhile, teachers were parents’ allies, usually reinforcing the primary importance of Mom and Dad.
A dark turn has changed the message such that parents are apt to be painted as the greatest danger children face. As I write in an article for Accuracy in Media, this attitude has spread not only among magazines like Teen Vogue, but also into schools:
The consistent theme is that the government should not trust parents with their own children. Whereas Rummler worries about too much regulation of public schools, a Teen Vogue article by Eve Ettinger and Nylah Burton demands more regulation in a different area of education: “Homeschooling is a system that can enable abuse and must be practiced in a way that centers the needs of students.” Again, parents are a danger, and activists in government must have the power to interpret, decide, and mandate what students need.
Obviously, the growing parents’ movement is a threat to these folks, who are worried that it may limit the ability of teachers who identify as sexual minorities to help shape the sexuality of minors behind parents’ backs.
Featured image by Iluha Zavaley on Unsplash.
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General Assembly politics are a mystery to most Rhode Islanders. They don’t really understand why anybody wants the job, figuring that some people are just into that sort of thing. Yes, some people are really, really into it.
John G. Edwards, the Fourth, has been the Democrat representative from district 70 since 2008, having previously served on the Tiverton town council. When his son, John G. Edwards, the Fifth, came of age, he began pursuing the same path, with mixed success.
For some local flavor, when the Tiverton Board of Canvassers was reviewing the candidates for the last election and came across an unrelated Jay Edwards running for the council, a member of the board remarked that he was sure to win with a name like that. Sure enough, he did.
So, there was plenty of justification for knowing nods when in June 2020, Representative Dennis Canario, the Democrat from the neighboring district, announced he would not seek reelection later that year. Edwards the Fifth had bought a house in that district in spring 2019, and sure enough, he ran for the seat. He lost by an 80:20 a landslide in the primary to now-Representative Michelle McGaw; perhaps the power of the name fades quickly at the town’s border.
Knowing nods may be justified once again.
Currently, District 70 (turf of Edwards the Fifth) covers the northern half of Tiverton and a portion of Portsmouth right over the Sakonnet River Bridge. District 71, meanwhile, covers the southern half of Tiverton, all of Little Compton, and the portion of Portsmouth just south of District 70.
As the featured image of this post shows, the new districts proposed in the Rhode Island House’s latest plan would make a somewhat even trade of a portion of South Tiverton (but not all) for Edwards’s portion of Portsmouth. The red marker on that image indicates that the new border for district 70 would run right along the front of Edwards the Fifth’s property, making him eligible to inherit his father’s seat.
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Some readers may take this as inflammatory while others may take it as conciliatory, but as Rhode Island enters into this odd, uncomfortable moment of different expectations around masks, an opportunity for cultural sympathy emerges.
For context: I stopped in a mostly empty store to buy a household item after dropping off one of my children at school this morning. One of the few customers in the store was a young woman who appeared to be very attractive. I qualify that description because I couldn’t see most of her face, which was covered with a big black mask. It occurred to me that I was both the only man in the store and that I was the only one not wearing a mask.
At this point, if you have no COVID symptoms and are vaccinated, have already recovered from infection, or are young and healthy, there are only two reasons to wear a mask. The first is the incredibly small chance that you will unknowingly participate in the continuing spread the coronavirus, whether by giving it to others or receiving it from them. The second is that doing so will make some not-insignificant number of the people with whom you come into contact more comfortable.
We can generalize, at this moment, that Americans who are more politically liberal will be more likely to favor masking for either reason. People who are more politically conservative, in contrast, will be more likely to hold that it is their right to decide whether to wear masks and that others have the responsibility to address their own concerns, whether of health or of anxiety.
These general leanings flip, however, if we change the subject from COVID masks to modest attire. One needn’t go too far toward the extreme of the traditionalist scale to find Christians and others who will decry revealing clothes on grounds very similar to the arguments for masking, particularly for women. The response of feminists and libertines is that we have no right to limit others’ comfort and self-expression just because it makes us uncomfortable or causes sexual feelings that can become harmful. That, they say, is for the other person to resolve, and fair enough.
Yet, covering cleavage is less of an imposition than covering your nose and mouth and therefore is less of a concession to the feelings of others. And while the vast majority of people can be expected to encounter bare skin without much loss of self-control, there are undoubtedly some vulnerable people who are at higher risk of an adverse psychological and physical response.
Through the screen, I can hear the feminists and libertarians scoff (although for different reasons), but there is enough to this comparison that thoughtful people might find it worth considering as a test for their own approach to either question. For my part, I come down in nearly the same place on both. I have a right to make my own decisions and to vary them based on my own understanding of the circumstances, but I will take the vulnerability and feelings of others into account as I do so.
Featured image by Auguste Racinet (Early 19th Century Switzerland, pg 651) from The Costume History.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Is there more to McKee’s mask timing?
- Is there hope in legislators’ handling of emergencies?
- Is there a reason to keep a GOP gubernatorial candidate in a box?
- How cynical is the governor’s bonus plan for state workers?
- How are Congressional District 2 candidates doing?
Featured image by Dima Pechurin on Unsplash.
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Watchers of the mainstream narrative may be a little surprised that there hasn’t been much coverage of an incident on February 1 at Mount Pleasant High School in Providence during which a school resource officer (SRO) was caught on video being aggressive with a student. These incidents are difficult to judge from video clips, and one can be sure of two things: parents will have an emotional response when their children are involved, and activists will pounce on the opportunity to push their causes.
Just so, a group of 21 organizations signed on to a letter expanding concerns about a particular incident into a broad proclamation:
Simultaneously, we must remember that this is not an isolated incident, but rather placed within a broader pattern and system of state violence that targets and endangers our students of color. This is not just about Jay-Juan, but about all young people that have experienced violence – filmed or not – at the hands of police and school resource officers. With the presence of SROs, combined with zero-tolerance policies, minor infractions that are normally handled by educators are defaulted to the police. This system of criminalization leads to suspensions, arrests, and abuses of power, which are both detrimental to their futures and deeply traumatizing. …
The evidence shows that police, both in Providence and the United States widely, disproportionately criminalize Black, Indigenous, Latinx and students of color, as well as students with disabilities. In Providence: from the 2016-17 to 2019-20 school years, boys of color made up nearly 65% of student arrests, and Black students were targeted by 30% of all student arrests, while only making up 16% of the student population. There is no evidence that SROs improve student safety. Instead research shows that the majority of students feel unsafe with SROs. At the worst extreme, as in Jay’s cause, the police are known to physically traumatize students – in the United States, there have been 152 documented assaults on students of color by police officers between 2007-2021.
To be sure, the question of police presence in schools is a subject worthy of debate, and even more so are zero-tolerance policies. Inasmuch as these problems emerge most conspicuously in the public schools of cities with progressive governments, robust research will likely find that ideology prevents districts from succeeding with a softer discipline, which pushes them toward more-stringent law enforcement, which escalates the problem further. The solutions are, first, school choice, and second, reconsideration of urban political alignment.
Policy specifics aside, we should hesitate to accept the letter writers’ simple storyline. Injecting law-and-crime dynamics into schools may draw some students into the infamous “school-to-prison pipeline,” but that doesn’t mean there aren’t dangerous criminals who are also students. Ignoring actual dangers because statistics are disproportionate along racial lines can therefore harm the very communities for which activists claim concern.
And those activists can do additional harm when they bring their ideology to different communities where their assumptions really don’t apply. Observe that one of the signatories is the Equity Institute, which the suburban Portsmouth school department has hired to do an “equity audit.” Whatever the content of the activists’ letter, residents should be concerned when their schools begin hiring those activists as if they are objective analysts.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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John talks with Christopher Leonard, author of The Lords of Easy Money, General Reginald Centraccio, on military affairs in RI, and Tony Lemonde, of Senior’s Choice RI.
Featured image by Jp Valery on Unsplash.
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The headline of this post is genuinely meant. I’m entirely withholding judgement and am mainly curious what now-candidate Fung is planning.
You may have heard that Allan Fung has entered the race for Rhode Island’s second district seat in Congress with this tweet:
It’s a great logo that will look cool on t-shirts and other promotional items, with subtext indicating some thought. The image is from arguably the most iconic work of oriental art in history (albeit Japanese, whereas Fung is of Chinese ancestry), giving a slight heritage-inspired twist to the theme of the Ocean State while invoking the notion that he could be part of the Republican wave that analysts generally expect in November.
Conspicuously, Fung’s wife, state representative Barabara Ann Fenton-Fung (R, Cranston) was in the news just yesterday promoting her legislation to require Asian-American history to be taught in all Rhode Island schools. Her bill has its own intriguing political complications. Beyond the peculiarity of a Republican promoting identity politics, conservatives won’t miss the emphasis she puts on “the horrible things that happened in [American] history,” like the true, divisive progressive that she has proven to be. One might also note that Fenton-Fung has no similar bill touting the achievements of her own lineage, Irish Americans, who could make their own claims about “horrible things” in American history.
Meanwhile, the Fungs are building this Asian-candidate theme even as a controversial Olympics is being held in Communist China, during the winding down of a disruptive pandemic for which many Americans, especially within Fung’s political party, blame those same communists — whose curious relationship with the Democrat President may very well be an issue during the election.
Again, I’m not insinuating a conclusion here. What makes this fascinating is that Fung’s deliberate political positioning is a bit like choosing to throw your kayak in the river right in the midst of rapids. I have no idea how this plays out.
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Matt Margolis has some fresh details:
[Open full post]Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) revealed on Tuesday that in November, Capitol Police entered his office without his knowledge or consent, photographed confidential legislative documents, and later returned dressed as construction workers and questioned a member of his staff.
I have to chuckle when I see a progressive like Steve Ahlquist pen an article with a headline like, “A corrupt process from the core, Rhode Island redistricting wraps up.”
I mean, a corrupt redistricting process is about as surprising as a hangover after a long night of drinking without water breaks, and progressives are all about that big government bender. Notice the number of words Steve spends faulting Republicans for not pushing back on Democrats enough, even as he’s silent about anything at all his progressive Democrat allies might have done.
Why is this so difficult to understand? Three things — and only three things — will limit corruption in government. One, reduce its power to the point that moral incentives have a chance against corrupt incentives. Two, tolerate a split political system in which the powerful know their opponents may soon wield the power they assert right now. And three, foster countervailing powers in society with their own incentives to keep government in check.
Progressives oppose all three, because their guiding light is a world in which they have the power to do everything as they believe it should be done. That is also why we can be sure they’d be just as corrupt (or worse) if they ever take control.
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COVID-19 can be a nasty disease, even when it’s not a killer, which it most definitely can be. The coronavirus is not, however, the only killer, and disease is not the only nasty thing that can happen to your life.
As we look out across the landscape of continuing fear, ramped up to an irrational level, and observe, aghast, the willingness of many of our neighbors to throw away our rights liberally in exchange for the promise that somebody else will take responsibility for our well-being, we should give due consideration to Eli Sherman’s article on WPRI, “2021 was one of the deadliest years on record in Rhode Island.”
If the news story has any practical utility, it can only be to assess the decisions of those who claimed such extraordinary power when the pandemic arrived in our state and, thereby, to foster accountability and readjustment. Yet, the question of whether the response was justified or well managed is not even asked. The implied answer is, “of course!”
Wherever that angle might come up, Sherman gives the government’s public health architects the floor:
“While preliminary data suggest that our overall fatalities for 2021 were lower than our total for 2020, COVID-19 still tragically took the lives of more than 1,000 Rhode Islanders last year,” interim health director Dr. James McDonald told Target 12.
That statement simply isn’t true. If we wish to be generous, perhaps we could say only that it is not precise, but the 1,157 deaths that the state puts on the board for COVID were people who died with the disease, not from it. We do not know what the overlap truly is, and we will never know how much this loose definition covered up deaths that would best be attributed to the government’s response to the disease.
WPRI leads with a chart that shows nothing in history like 2020’s 1,542-death spike in Rhode Island since the 2,897-death spike resulting from the 1918 flu — before we had even penicillin to fight diseases. Tracing that line, readers might reasonably wonder whether the lockdowns had any justification at all, given that the Spanish Flu was so much more deadly than the Chinese Communist Flu.
The answer is not open-and-shut in either direction. Supporters of the regime might next turn to Sherman’s chart of historical death rates, which show the COVID spike in a much less dramatic light. This takes into account, most notably, the larger population, and here lockdown advocates might insist we can see the benefit of their policy. Fair enough; but this picture doesn’t justify Sherman’s scary headline about “the deadliest years on record.” He tries to have it both ways.
Those of us who argue that the lockdowns were too destructive might also notice that Sherman is incorrect to assert that “the death toll from drug overdoses… has grown each year since 2018.” His own chart shows that overdoses were down in 2019, as part of a downward trend every year since 2016. The year of the COVID lockdowns, 2020, brought a 25% leap, with an additional 76 deaths.
Tragically, 2021 brought another increase, albeit a smaller one. So, if we return to Sherman’s scary headline, the context is quite different. Comparing 2021 to 2019, we see an increase of 835 deaths from all causes. Eighty-eight of those (11%) were from overdoses. If suicides followed a similar trend, they’d account for another 4% of the overall increase. Homicides were also up about 20% in 2020 (although that trend began the year before, perhaps for policy reasons). Now factor in deaths because people skipped hospital visits, were more sedentary, were more anxious, and so on, and the idea that the response to COVID played a significant role becomes plausible, indeed.
For the sake of our rights and our health, these are topics that require thorough public scrutiny. Unfortunately, the news media seems disinclined to help in that effort.
Featured image by Daniel Adesina on Unsplash.
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