Huckleberry Sanders

Sarah Huckster Sanders, our current governor, spent yesterday bragging about how she is going to force every public university and public school in Arkansas to install a Turning Point USA club. For the students.

(Student clubs are usually asked for, organized and run by students. This, clearly, will be something else -- enforced, organized, and run by the state. You know. Like Hitler Youth.)

In case you forgot what Turning Point USA is, it's a giant grift formerly run by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated by a high powered rifle just at the very moment he was claiming gun violence was not a problem, and if it was a problem, it was only because a couple of trans people had shot people.

Turning Point USA exists to make money for those who are running it, to support Trump, and to hurt education. To be clear, they want to turn education into indoctrination for the MAGA point of view, with all its bigotry and hatred. 

They claim to be Christian, but it's a specific kind of Christianity: one that hates the poor, despises the immigrant, and wants to erase from existence anyone who isn't pretty much exactly what Kirk was: a podgy, smug, reactionary white cis guy. (Or "white male man," as Erica Kirk phrased it yesterday.)

Charlie Kirk, the grifter, is now dead. So now his wife, Erica, has abandoned her two children, ages four and two, to continue the grift. Sarah Huckster Sanders, who is grift all the way down herself, has happily joined hands with Erica.

After Trump is gone, all these losers will fall back into oblivion, their natural state.

The Real Attack on Free Speech?

Fox News does a lot of shrieking, but the real oppression -- as all of us who work on campuses know -- lands on the usual suspects: the poor, the brown, women, and the powerless.

The Right -- or rather, certain members of the Right, those with a lot of power -- are just good at playing the Refs; and at getting attention from the media.

For more see here.

You should especially notice this:

....four Republican-controlled state governments have set up new rules for political speech in public universities in response to concerns about free speech. At least seven other state legislatures are considering doing the same, efforts that the New York Times reports are “funded in part by big-money Republican donors” in a “growing and well-organized campaign that has put academia squarely in the crosshairs of the American right.”

Our state is one of those considering such a law. They have already disposed of our ability to create a designated a free speech forum -- we can no longer restrict the area of campus where people can make speeches.

Why would we want to restrict free speech to a specific area?

Well, imagine trying to teach grammar when some angry incel is standing outside your classroom with a megaphone shouting about how feminism is cancer and all these girls in short skirts are agents of Satan, and yes, this actually happened to me.

The thing is, when state legislatures start interfering with the governing of university campuses, they usually have no idea how campuses work or how they should be run. They have no idea why we want a designated free speech forum area, for instance; or why we don't want guns in our classroom. (They know quite well why they don't want guns in their workplace, but that is somehow different.) They make rules without understanding the situation, in other words.

So they will almost certainly make rules that don't work well for our campuses.

There is a reason university campuses have traditionally been self-governing. You need to leave the running of universities to those who know how universities work. And that's not some guy who hasn't been on one since he was twenty-two  years old and who wasn't really paying attention even then.

Trump Among the Razorbacks

So here in NW Arkansas we have a certain percentage of people who are supporting Trump. And many of these people have kids who go to my kid's school.

My kid's school is pretty much a bastion of Far-Right Evangelical Christian culture as it is; so, you know, I'm not that surprised to find a fat wodge of Trumpeters there. However, also not surprisingly, there's a lot of pushback against Trump, even among the conservative kids.

Toxic Ignorance

So a town not far from my town has finally -- finally -- made the decision to add fluoride to its water supply.

This is a big deal for Arkansas.  In 2011, our governor made it a law that all cities and towns with populations over 5,000 people had to add fluoride to their water. (A great many did not, up to then, including my charming city of residence: we're supposed to have it starting in November 2015.)

Giving the appalling lack of dental care in Arkansas -- this is partly due to poverty, and partly due to a serious lack of dentists -- you'd think anything that improved people's teeth would be welcome.

But that just shows you don't know Arkansasans.