Republicans Are Trying to Suppress More Than Votes

[Celerity]

The proliferation of restrictive laws—from school curriculum to the ballot box—continues.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/01/critical-race-theory-voting-rights-gop/621383/

https://archive.fo/T4iEt



The accelerating red-state offensive to censor what public-school students are taught about racism is emerging as a critical companion measure to proliferating race-based voter restrictions in many of the same states. The two-pronged fight captures how aggressively Republicans are moving to entrench their current advantages in red states, even as many areas grow significantly more racially and culturally diverse. Voting laws are intended to reconfigure the composition of today’s electorate; the teaching bans aim to shape the attitudes of tomorrow’s.

“This is the next wave of voters, so the indoctrination that we see occurring right now is planting the seeds for the control of that electorate as they become voters,” Janai Nelson, the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told me recently. “They are trying to manipulate power and exert their influence at both ends of the spectrum by limiting those who can cast ballots now, and by indoctrinating those who can cast ballots later.” Proposals to limit how public K–12 schools—and even public colleges and universities—talk about race are exploding.

They represent the latest battlefield between what I’ve called the Republican “coalition of restoration,” centered on the places and people most uneasy about the way America is changing, and the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation,” revolving around those most comfortable with these changes. The bills are usually promoted as a response to “critical race theory,” but generally impose much broader prohibitions by barring educators from teaching that racism either has been or remains endemic in America. A law approved last year in Texas, for instance, prohibits schools from teaching that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.”

In 2021, nine Republican-controlled states approved laws limiting the discussion of racism (and in many cases gender inequity), and four others imposed restrictions through the state’s board of education. This year, the pace “has clearly accelerated,” Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist at Acadia University, in Nova Scotia, told me. Of the 122 state bills that Sachs has tracked for PEN America, a free-speech organization, since January 2021, more than half have been introduced just in the past three weeks as state legislatures have reconvened for this year’s session. So many proposals are surfacing so fast that Sachs said his “gut instinct” is that all 23 states where Republicans control both the governorship and the state legislature eventually “will see a [censorship] bill passed.”

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[uponit7771]

1. Yep, going full on NAZI and don't give a shit who knows. Red states are hardest places to vote

https://newsroom.niu.edu/2020/10/13/how-hard-is-it-to-vote-in-your-state/