Culture Warriors category archive

At the Tampa Bay Times, Stephanie Hayes notes the Florida’s Governor DeSantis isn’t interested with draining any swamps. Rather, he wants to fill one–the Everglades–with immigrants imprisoned for being, well, immigrants.

Florida is building a so-called “Alligator Alcatraz.” As we speak, work crews are rolling onto environmentally delicate land owned by Miami-Dade County. Turning an abandoned airfield into a detention center for undocumented immigrants panders to the Trump administration’s obsession with disappearing people to scary, remote locations.

Aside:

Sounds awfully like a concentration camp to me.

A diller, a dollar,
No funding for scholars.

Andreas Kluth examines the maliciousness of what he calls “the petty purges of Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio” and concluces that

If this administration really thinks that national security is threatened by a refueling vessel named after a gay sailor, it deserves to enter history books as not just petty, but dangerously so.

Follow the link for his path to that conclusion.

Via Job’s Anger.

The Arizona Republic’s Laurie Roberts writes about Arizona’ state Superintendent of Schools Tom Horne, who’s position on a history book that contains actual history can be summarized as “I haven’t read the book, and you shouldn’t either.”

I commend her article to your attention.

Aside:

As one who trained as an historian, I find today’s Republican Party’s efforts to claim that history wasn’t to be particularly offensive. And stupid. And insidiously, invidiously harmful to the polity.

Thom argues that Trump has given a green light to racists to act like racists.

At the Washington Monthly, Garrett Epps hears a rhyme:

Trump’s experiment in rapid national disassembly echoes America’s near-death experiment in the years before the Civil War. In the past few days, we have passed what might be called the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 mark.

The struggle in the 1850s arose out of the federal government’s determination to return Black Americans to slavery (via the Fugitive Slave Act–ed.) even after they had escaped to the free North. What is happening on the streets of American cities—and most particularly, now, on the streets of Los Angeles—carries uncanny echoes of that decade-long battle, which ended in secession and Civil War.

Follow the link for his reasoning.

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*Mark Twain.