Independent News
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Nuance catches up with hot takes
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Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
Democrats can’t keep ignoring the culture war. They should fight it — and win
The GOP’s “culture war” on hot button issues like race in schools is trumping Democrat’s emphasis on economics. It’s time to fight back.
In 2021, Biden-era Democrats like Terry McAuliffe, the party’s tired retread for governor in Virginia, literally tried to talk better mileage with the voters as their climate change and fix-road-and-bridges promises slowly ground through the sausage maker on Capitol Hill. Over the western mountains and at the edge of suburban sprawl in the Old Dominion State, angry voters searching for their pitchforks after imbibing days of propaganda about what their kids are taught about racism didn’t want to hear about fuel efficiency. They were out for blood.
Just like Reagan in 1980, Republican Glenn Youngkin’s “Kill the Bastards” message carried the day in a state that had seemed to be trending Democratic blue for much of the 2010s. Once again, the Democrats showed up to a culture war gunfight brandishing a 2,000-page piece of legislation.
Mark Glaze, Influential Gun Control Advocate, Dies at 51
As the executive director of Everytown for Gun Safety, he took on the National Rifle Association and helped make gun violence a winning issue.
Jeff Stein/WaPo with a balanced, nuanced piece:
Patience and persistence pay off as Biden gets infrastructure deal across finish line
Bipartisan bill would have ramifications across the country and delivers on a campaign promise
Past Democratic and Republican administrations have failed to secure such an infrastructure deal despite growing calls for action from labor leaders, the business community and experts alarmed by degrading public works. Trump had long talked about passing a massive infrastructure package, but his advisers never coalesced around a strategy and “Infrastructure Week” became a running joke among his aides. While those efforts languished, infrastructure problems grew, with the United States eventually ranking behind a dozen other developed countries, raising concerns about safety and the economic competitiveness of the country.
John Harwood/CNN:
Jayapal on why progressives chose pragmatism: ‘We need to keep our eyes on the prize’
Their choices under pressure show the unusual role the progressives are now playing as a self-identified ideological subset of the Democratic caucus. Instead of challenging their party’s priorities, progressives are advancing them; instead of battling their party’s leaders, progressives are helping them cope with intra-party dissidents.
That’s not the role ideological factions within Congress typically play.
Matt Ford/TNR:
Biden’s Vaccine Mandate Isn’t Really a Vaccine Mandate
The new OSHA pandemic regulations that just dropped are a work of semantic art with a conservative Supreme Court in mind
In nearly every statement other than Biden’s, and in many news reports on the matter, the OSHA rule was described as a “vaccine mandate.” But this is not actually correct. The new rule is better understood as a testing mandate with a vaccine exception—and that distinction could be crucial as it works its way through courts of law and public opinion.
What did OSHA actually do? The agency unveiled what is known as an “emergency temporary standard,” or ETS, on Covid-19 vaccination and testing for most companies with more than 100 workers. The ETS is roughly 490 pages long, with fewer than two dozen pages dedicated to the rule itself and the rest devoted to its justification. It requires eligible companies to do a few things to make vaccinations easier for their employees to obtain: provide paid time off so workers can get vaccinated and recover from any side effects, maintain lists of which workers have already been vaccinated, establish a notification system for workers who test positive, and other administrative requirements. It also generally requires employers to tell unvaccinated employees to wear masks.
My unofficial count was 7 Republicans from the Problem Solvers caucus who voted for the bill (out of 13 total R votes). They may actually have solved a problem for once.
Holly Otterbein/Politico:
Democrats sweat midterm fallout from Nevada party crack-up
A bitter feud has divided Dems in a key swing state — and dragged in the national party.
The Nevada feud, which erupted earlier this year when insurgent Sanders supporters took over the state party from allies of the former Senate majority leader, has spiraled into a flurry of resignations, embarrassing headlines and the creation of a fully operating shadow party.
Great. Exactly what we needed.
Lydia DePillis/Twitter:
It’s past 5pm on a Friday, so I’ve cracked a beer and started reading the reconciliation bill. It starts with the U.S. Forest Service, and I already like this thing rules.house.gov/sites/democrat…Substantial civil penalties for unfair labor practices! That would be a game changer.
Expected stuff about child care, elder care, workforce development … and I guess here’s the climate conservation corps at $6.9b, lower than the $10b Biden asked for.
Couple billion for replacing super-polluting heavy-duty vehicles with cleaner ones would super-charge efforts to clean up ports in particular:
Jordan Weissmann/Slate:
Joe Manchin Might Be a Sentient Brick of Coal, but There’s Still a Chance Democrats Will Pass a Decent Climate Plan
In the end, the Biden administration appears to have little choice but to cave on Manchin’s demands. As one of the party’s 50 votes in the Senate, he technically has the same power as any other Democrat to single-handedly veto the White House’s climate and social spending agenda. But as a moderate from a state practically synonymous with coal mining who has just spent months staring down the rest of his caucus, Manchin can actually lob a credible threat to walk from negotiations if he doesn’t get his way. Just on Wednesday, a thinly sourced rumor that he was planning to potentially switch parties managed to devour a whole news cycle. Manchin called it “bullshit”—but the attention it generated was nothing if not a sign of the power that Mr. Bituminous wields during these talks.
All of which raises a question that’s confounding some progressives: Can Democrats still produce a decent climate bill without crossing any of the red lines Manchin has drawn? Thankfully, the answer may be yes. It will no doubt be disappointing and less ambitious than what the ecological catastrophe we’re facing calls for. But the proposals that are still in play, particularly a massive load of tax credits for renewable energy and electric vehicles, could make unprecedented and meaningful progress toward curbing emissions. Even after the cuts Manchin has demanded, “you’d still have the single biggest action to target climate change that the government has ever done,” John Larsen, an analyst specializing in clean energy policy and markets at the Rhodium Group, told me.
Jonathan V Last/Bulwark:
What’s Wrong with Glenn Youngkin?
About the newest Good Republican.
So why not Youngkin? What makes him dangerous?
All politicians tell lies. It’s part of the job. Donald Trump was never going to build The Wall. Joe Biden was never going to create a public option. Overpromising and underdelivering is a normal—if regrettable—feature of American politics.
What marked Youngkin as still being part of the sickness that has infected the Republican party was his refusal to admit to basic, irrefutable facts concerning the 2020 election. These were not matters of opinion or preference, but raw facts of life. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. By quite a lot. The election was free and fair. Period. The end.
Glenn Youngkin danced around this fact for a very long time. Then he tried to finesse it. Then he backed away from it again.
What this revealed was that Youngkin was not willing to say that 2+2=4. And that if his voters demanded that he pretend that 2+2=🍌, then he would do it.
News Roundup: Ted Cruz picks a fight with a bird; Border Patrol 'shadow' unit covered up abuses
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In the news today: A sitting U.S. senator is picking a fight with a Muppet because the Muppet tweeted about vaccinations and, apparently, that counts as “propaganda” to the toad-breathed kultureklowns who believe Trump secretly “won” an election he lost, books about racism are the real racism, and making the smallest concessions to public health during a pandemic that’s killed 700,000 Americans counts as “socialism.”
It’s not Sesame Street that’s breaking new ground here, though. It’s Republicanism that’s changed. Ted Cruz couldn’t stand up to Donald Trump, so instead he’s directing his impotent frustrations at an imaginary bird that teaches children how to read and express emotions ‘n stuff.
Here’s some of what you may have missed:
• Anti-vaccination Ted Cruz takes on Big Bird
• Border Patrol ‘shadow police unit’ has helped cover up abuses for years, human rights groups say
• Guess which city is about to have a majority LGBTQ city council?
• U.S. launches private group sponsorship program for Afghan refugees. Will it help?
• It’s about time: Set those clocks back, and enjoy an extra hour of Black music
Community Spotlight:
• Community Spotlight: Making the political personal is more effective than you may think
• Post-mortem on Virginia General Election 2021 – Canvasser’s Edition
• My baby boy gets his first dose of the COVID vaccine today
Also trending from the community:
• What scares the shit out of Republicans?
• Book banning attempts: The current attack on our schools’ libraries (and librarians)
Bus drivers' saga lays bare the divide between unionized and nonunionized public sector workers
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After a long slump, more drivers are winning the right to collective bargaining. Now the threat of privatization looms.
By Mike Elk for Capital & Main
“We have been here through the coronavirus, through the major snowstorms, we were here on Aug. 11 and Aug. 12, we were on the road,” says Charlottesville bus driver Matt Ray, who was driving his routes while the white supremacist riots engulfed the city on those dark days in 2017.
Now Charlottesville bus drivers are facing a new challenge: fighting for their first union contract after the Commonwealth of Virginia finally granted public sector workers the right to collectively bargain in 2020.
“The need for the transit union, for representation, is long overdue. A lot of guys feel that they are underpaid,” says Ray. “Living in Charlottesville is difficult with the housing and everything. Most of our operators don’t live in Charlottesville.”
Mary Pettis, a 35-year-old Black bus driver for Charlottesville Area Transit, says she can no longer afford to live in Charlottesville, where wages start at only $16 an hour and top out at $22 an hour.
In general, local government workers’ weekly earnings are 14.1% lower than that of similar private sector workers, but the gap is much larger for public sector workers who have no or weak bargaining rights.
“I personally had to move from Charlottesville to Waynesboro [30 minutes away] because I couldn’t afford to live in Charlottesville,” says Pettis. “I have three jobs because I couldn’t make enough money driving the bus, and I am a single parent. And I am not the only driver who has had to do these things—so I feel like a union would speak for us and give us a voice.”
For decades, many bus drivers and other public employees in southern states like Virginia have been denied the right to collective bargaining. They have endured wages and working conditions that are dramatically worse than elsewhere in the country.
Now Charlottesville is moving toward adopting a collective bargaining ordinance that lays out how the city can legally negotiate with its unions. It’s part of a broader trend of municipal employees winning collective bargaining rights in Virginia and across the South. And it’s reversing a trend that saw union representation decline among public sector workers across the country in recent decades. More than half the states lack comprehensive collective bargaining laws for public employees.
It’s also laying bare the stark divide between unionized and nonunionized municipal employees. In general, local government workers’ weekly earnings are 14.1% lower than that of similar private sector workers, but the gap is much larger for public sector workers who have no or weak bargaining rights, especially in Virginia (29% gap), according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute.
In Alexandria, bus drivers won a union contract this year that saw some workers get as much as $12-an-hour raises.
“Because of this union contract, more of these workers will actually be able to live in the community that they serve,” says Raymond Jackson, Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689 president and business agent.
“It’s a very special moment right now for organizing. The pandemic has really laid bare the ugliness of this industry.“
– John Ertl, trustee of ATU Local 1764 in Washington, D.C.
Union leaders like Jackson say they are seeing new momentum for organizing following the pandemic. In places like Savannah, Birmingham, and DeKalb County, Georgia, bus drivers have gone on wildcat, sometimes illegal strikes that improve their working conditions.
“It’s a very special moment right now for organizing. The pandemic has really laid bare the ugliness of this industry,” says John Ertl, trustee of ATU Local 1764 in Washington, D.C. “We have organized bus drivers that are literally homeless and sleeping out of their cars and people want change now.”
Ertl points to the safety record of unionized bus lines versus nonunion businesses during the pandemic. Unionized bus lines have been able to secure personal protective equipment, COVID-19 safety protocols, and paid sick leave so that bus drivers didn’t have to come in when sick.
The threat of privatization
However, while unions are making progress in the South in securing collective bargaining rights for bus drivers, many recently organized bus drivers across the country face a new threat: privatization. In many states, the ATU has organized drivers only to see their work outsourced to private contractors who don’t recognize the union.
“You know we negotiate a contract and then the contract is sold to a [private contractor], who didn’t sign the contract and the first thing they come in and do is fight the contract and want to take things away,” says ATU President John Costa. “These private bus companies tell governments that they can save money, but at the end of the day, where is that savings coming from? And it comes off the workers.”
Experts say that elected officials routinely outsource public services to private contractors because it lets them avoid responsibility for unpopular actions like busting unions and cutting workers’ wages.
“It’s very much easier for private contractors to union bust because they’re not democratically accountable,” says Donald Cohen, founder of In the Public Interest and co-author of the new book The Privatization of Everything.
While unions are making progress in the South in securing collective bargaining rights for bus drivers, many recently organized bus drivers across the country face a new threat: privatization.
This week in Reno, Nevada, bus drivers are celebrating a major victory in a strike against a private bus contractor as they reach a tentative agreement. After first walking off the job in August for 10 days against the contractor, Keolis, over attempts to cut their long-standing union contract, drivers went on strike for another 25 days beginning in late September.
The August strike helped Reno bus drivers, members of Teamsters Local 533, defeat the company’s proposal to take away union-provided health care and force workers to opt in to an inferior plan. Keolis attempted to do away with a seniority bidding system that gave workers the freedom to choose when they worked, making lives difficult for many bus drivers in Reno.
“Keolis hasn’t changed its stripes and is still doing everything in its power to take rights away from your city bus drivers,” said Teamsters Local 533 President Gary Watson. “They have bid routes so poorly that drivers have to choose if they go to the bathroom or keep the route on time. Working [parents] under their bid system will not be able to get off and take care of their children.”
Keolis did not respond to a request for comment from Capital & Main. However, Keolis previously denied that its bidding system harmed its workers. Instead, Keolis took to the press repeatedly to accuse the union of lying and claim it wasn’t bargaining in good faith.
The Teamsters dug in and mobilized public support behind a campaign to get the local transit agency, the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County, to drop Keolis as a contractor. Teamsters Local 533 convinced nearby South Lake Tahoe to do away with using private transit contractors in 2017.
After 35 days of striking, the drivers won a major achievement this week when they reached a tentative agreement on scheduling, time off, and other issues. They celebrated the tentative agreement as a victory reflecting the union’s ability to mobilize the public behind it.
“Working class people need to know: It’s time for us to unite. Not only unite individually into unions, but unite as a whole to beat down this corporate attitude that they can just walk all over everybody.”
– Reno bus driver and Teamsters Local 533 Shop Steward Michael Lansborough
“Working class people need to know: It’s time for us to unite,” said Reno bus driver and Teamsters Local 533 Shop Steward Michael Lansborough. “Not only unite individually into unions, but unite as a whole to beat down this corporate attitude that they can just walk all over everybody.”
On Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, much like in Charlottesville, bus drivers couldn’t afford to live in the wealthy community on their wages. They won a historic first contract following a five-year battle with Florida-based contractor Transit Connection Inc. that ended with 28-day strikes that brought sightseeing almost to a halt in the tourist mecca in the summer of 2019.
The union contract raised wages for new hires from $16.50 an hour to $19.50 an hour effective Aug. 1 and then raised starting wages up to $20.50 an hour as of Aug. 1, 2021. The top rate on the contract also raised the highest wages that bus drivers could earn from $23.50 an hour to $25.00 as of Aug. 1, 2019, and to $27.50 an hour as of Aug. 1, 2021.
The contract also doubled pay for drivers on holidays, when tourism booms on the island. In addition, the contract included strong language reassuring workers that their jobs wouldn’t be outsourced in the future.
Given the role of public transit on Martha’s Vineyard, drivers say that they found allies even among some of the wealthiest people in the United States.
“We wouldn’t have won if it wasn’t for the solidarity of our neighbors and other allies, who rely on and support us year-round,” said bus driver Richard Townes.
This story first appeared at Capital & Main.
Refusal to moderate social media misinformation in global languages harms communities of color
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by Nick Nguyen and Carmen Scurato
This story was originally published at Prism.
So far the Facebook Papers have led to dozens of stories about how the company knew it was failing to remove hate speech, misinformation, and calls to violence in languages across the globe. As much as this focus on Facebook’s global harm is vital, we shouldn’t overlook the role that the social media language gap plays in harming communities within the United States.
On a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver discussed online platforms’ failure to curb the spread of misinformation that wasn’t in English. While companies like Facebook and YouTube have made a few inroads to address the problem in English, they’ve allowed misinformation to spread unchecked in other languages—with disastrous results. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, disinformation campaigns targeted marginalized communities to suppress voter turnout. And during the pandemic, cruel disinformants have blanketed the Latino community with blatant falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine. The community already makes up a higher percentage of the essential workforce, and Latino people are four times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than the general population.
Oliver’s report of how the targeting of misinformation at diaspora communities in the United States is “exacerbated by the fact that there aren’t alternative sources of news” for these communities in their own languages isn’t a new revelation. This vital gap is one that our organizations, Viet Fact Check and Free Press, have long been fighting to fill. Those efforts include pushing social media platforms to crack down on misinformation not in English: Viet Fact Check has drawn attention to YouTube’s indifference to Vietnamese-language misinformation, and Free Press—along with the National Hispanic Media Coalition and the Center for American Progress—has urged Facebook to remedy the way the spread of Spanish-language conspiracy theories and other lies are fueling hate and discrimination.
We’ve examined how election and health misinformation have harmed our respective communities in the United States. The results confirm a clear pattern of neglect; while the platforms still have a ways to go in enforcing their own policies in English, it is far worse in other languages. Even though YouTube banned InfoWars, it ignored the Vietnamese-American version of Alex Jones for months—the company only took action after John Oliver’s segment aired. And despite our efforts to directly flag Spanish-language posts with explicit calls to violence, Facebook’s moderators relied on a shoddy translation to English to justify their inaction. To put it simply, these companies are not doing nearly enough to keep our people safe.
Facebook and YouTube roadblocks
Public pressure and awareness of this issue are critical to finding a path forward, but they’re not enough. Our efforts to engage directly with the platforms have been frustrated at every turn—both YouTube and Facebook have failed to be transparent about the full extent of the problem. Facebook is also systematically shutting down access to academics and researchers studying the way misinformation spreads across the platform.
We’ve run into roadblocks when speaking with staff at the two companies. No one has acknowledged whether anyone is in charge of moderating content that’s not in English within the United States. In our interactions, the companies tried to portray misinformation in other languages solely as an international issue and therefore none of our concern. Meetings that we pursued for months turned into basic presentations that did little to address whether YouTube or Facebook have built any systems to protect people from misinformation in languages other than English. We kept asking questions, but it was clear the companies were stalling and we wouldn’t get any straight answers.
As misinformation escalates about crucial matters like COVID-19 vaccines, a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue identified major gaps in Facebook’s fact-checking program when it comes to other languages. The report found that a higher number of fact checkers are dedicated to English, leaving the same viral content to spread in other languages. The platforms have refused to share any details about what they’re doing to limit the spread of toxic content in other languages. Facebook and YouTube’s responses to a series of letters sent by Sen. Ben Ray Luján, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and dozens of other members of Congress were evasive, incomplete, and just plain disrespectful.
Most recently, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen provided documents detailing why the safety of our communities is not a priority, testifying before Congress about the company’s profits-before-people approach: “It seems that Facebook invests more in the users that make more money, even though the danger may not be evenly distributed based on profitability.” The disparity in moderation practices across languages reflects Facebook’s tunnel vision when it comes to prioritizing growth and profits. And this isn’t the first time Facebook’s failures and unwillingness to protect its users has come to light. Months before Haugen came forward, Sophie Zhang, a Facebook data scientist, spoke publicly about her work combating fake accounts and political unrest in other parts of the globe, while leadership at Facebook looked the other way simply because there was little risk of a public relations blowback. The Facebook Papers are further confirmation of the company’s inability to prevent hate and misinformation in other parts of the globe.
In other words, Facebook spends little time and effort protecting users who don’t directly contribute to the company’s profits or to negative press coverage in the United States.
Keeping all communities safe
In the face of mounting evidence, it’s clear these companies have no interest in solving this problem on their own. Solutions to misinformation require that platforms like Facebook and YouTube reject business models that are designed to profit from attention, regardless of how users and their wider communities are affected.
The way misinformation has been allowed to spread on social media is a perfect storm of willful neglect, social engineering, and prioritization of profit. The platforms constantly collect our personal and demographic data to hyperpersonalize our news feeds and video recommendations. Misinformation is created to appeal to the anxieties and vulnerabilities of specific groups with stunning accuracy to drive more clicks, more comments, and therefore more views. This engagement in turn feeds the algorithms designed solely to spread content regardless of whether or not it’s truthful. As we’ve seen in recent days, the lack of oversight and even the most basic investment in content in other languages creates a vulnerability that allows bad actors to profit—often flouting the rules the platforms claim to enforce for everyone.
To fully understand the cost of this disinformation on a democratic and open society, we need more clarity on how these algorithms determine what we see. Right now, Facebook and YouTube don’t train their algorithms to tell the difference between a truth and a lie. Every click is an amplifier of content that will keep us more engaged. And when clicks and engagement translate directly to dollars, the problem is greater than people posting lies online. The system is built for disinformers—and if their content is compelling enough, it can quickly reach millions. This engagement turns into ad dollars for the platforms and accelerates audience engagement. Our communities suffer because lies create profits.
So what’s next? If the platforms want to operate on a global scale, then language shouldn’t be a barrier to keeping communities safe. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission must work together to adopt a privacy framework that protects the civil rights of people living within our multilingual and diverse democracy.
Platforms must also produce regular transparency reports and allow access to independent researchers seeking to understand the depth and breadth of the harms caused by these companies’ engagement-driven business model. Legislation addressing some of these issues already exists in Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Doris Matsui’s Algorithmic Justice and Online Platform Transparency Act.
Now more than ever, it should be obvious that language discrimination hurts all people in the United States. The health and safety of our communities is not something that should get lost in translation.
Nick Nguyen is a Viet Fact Check co-founder and PIVOT board member.
Carmen Scurato is the associate legal director and senior counsel at Free Press and Free Press Action.
Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Nuts & Bolts—Inside a Democratic campaign: We learn lessons every election
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Welcome back to the weekly Nuts & Bolts Guide to small campaigns. Every week I try to tackle issues I’ve been asked about. With the help of other campaign workers and notes, we address how to improve and build better campaigns or explain issues that impact our party.
For people who remember in-person Nuts & Bolts panels at Netroots Nation—and trust me, I missed having a fifth and sixth the last two years—we put forward candidates there who talked about their experience so they could go back over their results and discuss what they would do differently, and the campaign moments they were most proud of looking back at their race. A few years ago, I sat in a panel discussing the outcome of elections. On the panel were a few fantastic political scientists, myself, and a few activists. I said at the time, and I still mean it: Political science is often not a science, it’s an art. The ability to understand the electorate and what can motivate them doesn’t come from a data perspective at all times, and some of the most effective campaigners in history have been people who were, well, not exactly steeped in college-level science coursework. Even with that being true, everyone will tell you that we learn something from every election. I’m not talking about “hot takes” or forecasting for the future immediately. I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of campaigning we learn in every single race.
Identify your strongest volunteers and support system
A win is a win, a loss is a loss. The discussion of issues that motivated people and the candidate who ran will always come up and should come up when you look at election results. Something else that should be addressed? Who were the volunteers and support system that put in the most work? Who was most effective at reaching voters?
A few state parties and county parties around the country have established an award system that rewards volunteers who work the hardest. It can be a plaque, a nice public recognition at a party dinner, or their place on a wall as “Volunteer of the Year.” Identifying successful volunteers also helps candidates in the next cycle know where to start, to recognize what motivated volunteers in successful campaigns, and gives staff a reason to look at how they can involve the right community to build their election efforts.
Outside groups and their success
There are many Democratic organizations that put a lot of work into an election. They can help raise money, build name recognition, or help drive a topic narrative. Campaigns should remember which groups have a loud voice among supporters, but donors should especially pay attention.
In the last 24 hours of the Virginia campaign, I received 13 emails asking me to donate to the McAuliffe campaign. Outside activism groups in Virginia built up war chests in the year beforehand, and when the time was coming down to the wire, they weren’t busy trying to burn money in a fire— they were out spending the money they had, or they had already spent it in the best way possible.
Outside organizations are often a better investment to win races, especially if you invest early before you have a candidate. You give a district or a state an opportunity to build up the voter base they need to win.
Go through campaign finance reports
One of the most underappreciated acts that donors should pay attention to is the campaign finance report. After an election, whether a candidate wins or loses, take a look at the campaign finance report once it is available. You can learn a lot about the district. What does it take to win, financially? Did a campaign that lost raise too little money? Did they spend the money they had poorly? Did a campaign that spent significantly less prevail over a campaign with a large amount of money in the bank? Did someone raise funds by asking repeatedly for money and then let it sit in the bank through an election cycle?
These are all questions that donors should make themselves aware of so that they know how they should invest in the next election. If you know the answers to some of these questions, you can ask a future campaign more informed questions before you give money and have better insight as to what it takes to win an election near you.
What lessons do you take from an election win or loss?
Fox News freaks viewers out with fire hose of piffling nonsense, because fear is all the GOP has
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The entire raison d’être of the Republican Party is now to scare white people into voting for them so they can continue to wield power (on behalf of billionaires, of course) with the backing of a craven minority of the U.S. population.
Indeed, the only problems conservatives seem interested in solving are ones that clearly do not exist. A killer virus is on the rampage and the planet is overheating like Donald Trump’s toilet seat on the McRib’s annual rerelease date? Meh. Oh, but wait! Here’s a new buzzword that sounds super scary! We’ve thoroughly focus-grouped this, so we know it will fill every hog-shit lagoon in Iowa with white people’s blazing hot fear-diarrhea. (By the way, I’m a white native Midwesterner, so I don’t want to hear it. Come at me, bro!)
We’re less than a year out from a former Republican pr*sident’s attempt to overthrow a free and fair election, and since that date, Republicans have been furiously flushing that off-the-charts outrage down the memory hole while elevating utter nonsense. And based on Tuesday night’s results in Virginia, it worked like a charm—because too many of the people who grew up in lily-white redoubts (like the one that briefly succored me before spitting me out) fall for stupid shit like the following.
Exhibit 1: The biggest problem in Florida right now is not rampant death. It’s kids getting cranky over wearing masks. Pfft. Wake the fuck up, cuck
Wednesday on Fox & Friends—which is what the Algonquin Round Table would have looked like if they’d all written for the Walmart Sunday circular instead of The New Yorker—Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis trotted out a little girl who doesn’t like wearing masks in school. Uh-huh. I hated being served creamed corn during hot lunch and I couldn’t even get an audience with the principal. But I guess the world has changed.
Anyway, the student is a second-grader in Palm Beach County named Fiona Lashells, and she was suspended for 36 days for not wearing a mask. Her mother, who is in no way influencing her, told Tampa’s The Free Press that Fiona “has been steadfast in her unwavering decision to not back down to tyranny and lunacy, vowing to do everything she can for every child going through these lawless mandates.”
Yeah, sure she did. Ever thus to sensible public health measures, huh? Per Crooks and Liars:
When the cameras cued on DeSantis and the child, the governor prompted her and said, “Go ahead.” …
Fiona on cue said, “I’m not wearing a mask because you touch it, and you have germs on your hand, and then you put it on your face and breath all the germs.”
The co-host agreed, “That’s right.”
Yup, that totally checks out. Let’s be afraid of the fake oppression of 7 year olds, not a virus that’s killed nearly 60,000 Floridians. We’ve got our priorities sorted out, that’s for sure.
The video, if you really want to see it, is at the above link.
Exhibit 2: Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican (duh), is warning parents that Biden could send them to Guantanamo Bay if they keep protesting at school board meetings
(This fake controversy is a response to a Department of Justice memo intended to address violence and violent threats toward teachers and school board members.)
BRNOVICH: Just because parents are exercising their First Amendment rights to speak out against critical race theory or even vaccine mandates does not make them domestic terrorists, and if we allow the Biden administration to continue this, God forbid, you’re going to end up with Mom and Pop at Gitmo. Think about how outrageous that is, Harris, to think about.
HARRIS FAULKNER (HOST): That is outrageous. Could that really happen?
No, Harris. It couldn’t really happen. But really nice journalamism there. Just aces. If there’s a Pulitzer Prize for weakest follow-up question, you’re a lock.
Exhibit 3: Greg Gutfeld, whose Fox News “comedy” show is to comedy what the Exxon Valdez was to ducks, thinks we’re teaching white kids that they’re “bad.” Because … well, isn’t it fucking obvious?
Reported via Media Matters for America:
GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): So the—while the media and the Democrats were focused on microaggressions, parents were experiencing macroaggressions through education. Politics is a tug of war, as you know, between the people who go too far and the people who don’t go far enough. Right now, it’s the leftists that are realizing how far they’ve gone and they need—somebody needs to pull them back in.
And you see that how that they’ve turned, you know, the police into defunding and demoralizing the police and now you have this CRT stuff and you know, being white at birth is bad. So, they’re the one that have gone too far. It’s now time for the Republicans to pull that back in.
I’ve been white my whole life, and I never thought being white at birth was bad. Being white kind of sucks now sometimes because I get tired of apologizing for my relatives. But, no. The messages I grew up with did not lead me to believe I was “bad.” Quite the opposite. I got loads of unearned merit for no discernible reason. And so I guess at the very first sign that that dynamic might be changing, I should freak the fuck out. But I don’t—because I choose not to be a frightened, delicate little snowflake who can’t bear to see traditionally marginalized people make strides. That doesn’t make me extraordinary in any way, of course. It just makes me not an asshole. That’s a very, very low bar.
So, yeah, this is what Fox News does. While one party tries to deliver meaningful change to hundreds of millions of Americans through President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, the other is busy freaking out its core constituency so billionaires can keep their loot.
I’d say they should be ashamed of themselves, but you have to have shame to begin with for that to mean anything.
It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.
Guess which city is about to have a majority LGBTQ city council?
This post was originally published on this site
As we dig into results from Tuesday’s election, we have a lot to celebrate. No, not everything went our way, but we had a lot of victories on the local level, and that’s truly amazing. For example, as covered by my colleagues, Cincinnati has elected its first Asian American mayor, New York City elected five Asian Americans onto its city council, Boston elected its first Asian American mayor, and Michigan elected three Muslim American mayors. We’ve also seen some great wins when it comes to openly LGBTQ+ folks.
One victory comes to us out of Salt Lake City, Utah, where thanks to Nov. 2’s election, four of seven people serving in the city council will be openly LGBTQ+, according to LGBTQ Nation. This is perhaps initially surprising given Utah’s reputation as a profoundly red, religiously conservative state. But Salt Lake City is relatively progressive, and the state as a whole has made some significant progress in the right direction, despite its conservative stronghold. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, this is the first time the council will be a majority of people of color.
Incumbents Amy Fowler (who serves as City Council chair) and Chris Wharton won their reelection campaigns. Darin Mano and Alejandro Puy won their seats on the city council and also broke glass ceilings themselves; Mano is the first openly LGBTQ+ Asian person to serve on the council, and Puy is the first openly LGBTQ+ Latin person to do so. Both Mano and Puy are openly gay men.
“I didn’t get all of the politicians’ endorsements,” Puy, who immigrated from Argentina and moved to Utah for college, told the Salt Lake Tribune, “but I spent my time knocking on doors, and I think that makes a difference.”
“LGBTQ people are severely underrepresented in governments across Utah, so holding a majority of seats on the Salt Lake City Council is a milestone moment for the city and the state,” Mayor Annise Parker, who serves as President & CEO of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, said in a statement. Parker described Salt Lake as one of “just a handful” of city councils in the nation with a majority of openly queer people.
“The lived experiences of the LGBTQ members will ensure more inclusive policymaking,” Parker added.
In total, more than 80 openly LGBTQ+ candidates won elections on Tuesday, which is a huge deal. Right now, there are just over 990 openly queer people holding public office in the nation, but not all of those folks ran for reelection. According to The Advocate, when the new set of candidates are sworn in, we’ll still have more than 1,000 openly queer elected officials, however, which is huge.
To get a deeper idea of where Puy and Mano stand on issues, you can check out some debate clips from earlier this October. I especially recommend listening in if you’re interested in how some progressives want to help unhoused folks.
Here is Puy.
And here is Mano.
Anti-vaccination Ted Cruz takes on Big Bird
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Sen. Ted Cruz is going after Big Bird. Yeah, that’s a sentence that’s perfectly at home here in 2021. We’re just going to have to pause and bask in this one for a moment:
What happened here is self-explanatory. Big Bird, as in the man-plus sized feathered Sesame Street character that helps teach children about kindness and sharing and how to cross the street without getting your innards tattooed with the over-chromed grill patterns of modern sport utility vehicles, tweeted about getting vaccinated. Because Ted Cruz, an actual sitting senator thanks to low standards and Texas, had not a damn thing better to do, he took offense to this, and we were off to the races.
Lest you think that this was just Ted Cruz having a momentary mind burp after his sixth can of vodka-spiked evening soup, yelling at Big Bird quickly became an actual thing. Weird-ass Fox News hosts were by the next morning attacking Big Bird, Sanjay Gupta, and Sesame Street for the “creepy” “propaganda” that is “targeting” children. The segment included several Enormous Damn Lies about children and COVID-19 that we will not repeat here, but which are considered holy gospel to anyone sitting on the greasy Fox News morning couch.
But let’s get back to Ted Cruz, because Ted Cruz is the devil’s personal coatrack. To believe that a Muppet telling children about COVID-19 vaccination in a non-frightening way is “propaganda,” you have to believe that vaccine advocacy is “propaganda” in general. There isn’t much nuance for Ted to have picked out of this, but he swooped in from his Senate-high perch to declare a pro-vaccine tweet from a Muppet “government propaganda.”
Ruper is right on this one: The only way you get from point A to point B is if you’re politicizing basic public health as matter of reflex. And Cruz and other Republicans aren’t even bothering to pretend they’re not doing that. Getting vaccinated, according to Republicans from Ted Cruz to Ron DeSantis, is a political decision. Not getting vaccinated is not a matter of endangering public health, but of expressing your contempt for not-Republican health experts and political figures. “Dying to own the libs” is now a belief that’s filling hospitals to capacity even as near-universal vaccine availability should have brought the pandemic close to its end.
Big Bird is trying to familiarize the topic of vaccination, as new FDA approval allows children as young as 5 to get vaccinated against the disease that is omnipresent in their communities and that has upended their schooling, their playtime, and countless other aspects of their lives. Big Bird, and Sesame Street, are trying to talk to children about pandemic experiences in ways that will not terrify them.
Oh-ho, says freakin’ Ted Cruz. Eep, say the couch-loungers speaking to their septuagenarian morning audience. There’s government propaganda afoot.
But this is something new to Republicanism, not to Sesame Street. Sesame Street has addressed childhood fears like vaccination for a half-century. Ted Cruz may have watched this segment the day it was first broadcast, though his toddler brain may not have absorbed much of it:
Nor is the notion of turning to well-known characters of popular culture to promote public immunization drives confined to the socialist hellscape of children’s television:
What is new here isn’t Big Bird. It’s Ted Cruz. Past Republican generations did not consider vaccinations against polio, against measles, against rubella, and other diseases that once filled American cemeteries with child-sized graves to be a conspiracy against their freedoms; it was a given that American children should be protected against any death we could so trivially protect them from. There were cranks, to be sure, but the notion of an American political party reflexively opposing vaccinations as major plank in their political agenda—purely, that is, because their political rivals were boosting it—would have previously been considered bizarre.
With the advent of new Republicanism, sporting such intellectual leading lights as Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and whoever else can shout themselves hoarse in front of an unmasked pandemic crowd, doing anything to tamp down on pandemic deaths is now considered suspect. It was considered suspect because, in the beginning, the most incompetent president to have ever been shoved into the Oval Office oversaw a complete breakdown in government readiness and pandemic response and, rather than admitting failure, claimed that he simply didn’t need to do anything because the pandemic would not come here, or would not be severe, or was not really resulting in deaths, or was only resulting in deaths in states Republicans didn’t like, or could be cured with a miracle cure one of his advisers saw on the internet, or with a different one, or that a deadly pandemic was something that we just needed to work through by getting on with our lives and The Economy and accepting that the most vulnerable among us were probably going to die but it’s not like they were important to The Economy to begin with.
Once a Dear Leader figure had declared that a worldwide and deadly pandemic was merely a politically motivated attack meant to dent his own greatness, Ted Cruz and the rest of Republicanism was duct-taped to that position and obliged to defend it. It was that or admit the emperor was nude, and for all but literally a handful of Republican leaders that choice turned out to be easy.
That said, conservatives have always had it out for Big Bird and Sesame Street, so it’s not too surprising that Cruz, who is nothing if not lazy, thought this would be an easy way to boost himself via longstanding Republican zeitgeist. Have you looked, really looked, at the sort of things children’s television programs have been teaching our children?
Sharing? What is sharing, but an introduction to communist thought?
Compassion? Republicans have firmly declared what should be done with your feelings, and compassion has no role in it.
Coping with intimidating situations? Republicanism already has that. It’s called “have an absolute fit.” Bonus points if it’s on an airplane and your fellow passengers have to band together to hogtie you while the pilot radios that your flight will be making an emergency landing.
Learning your letters? A gateway to book-reading, then book-learning, then academia.
Learning your numbers? Numbers are for the elites. When numbers are important, a Republican leader will tell you what the numbers are. They will tell you which numbers are bigger than which other numbers, and why, and don’t worry your tiny little head about how any of these divinations are made.
Ernie and Bert are just The Odd Couple for children, and The Odd Couple was a play, and playwrights are notorious promotors of counterculture beliefs. Elmo is what happens when you let your child run wild in their own imagination rather than sitting their asses down in front of their Ted Cruz coloring books to learn what Americanism is. Sesame Street has taken on subjects like death, like hunger, like homelessness—and it is all slanted, slanted maliciously against Republican lawmakers who have fought like hell to make sure death, hunger, and homelessness are meted out to whatever Americans might deserve such fates.
Teach children about going hungry, and they’ll grow up to support free school lunch programs. Teach children about homelessness, and they might treat their homeless peers with compassion and respect.
Teach children that even though there’s a pandemic going on that’s the reason their whole world has turned upside down, there is hope in the form of a vaccine that can help keep them safe in exchange for a momentary hurt and a sore arm, and you may be running afoul of Republican politicians who have instead insisted that the pandemic is a fiction invented by liberal elites.
Vaccination? Vaccination seems by far the most harmless of subjects, compared to any of that. And it would have been, if Ted Cruz had at any point in the last four years been able to grow a human spine. If he and the rest of his party were able to reject the notion that “a crapload of nothing” was a legitimate government response to a new planet-wide pandemic, even if Dear Incompetent Leader was insisting upon it, then the rapidly produced actual miracle cure would not today be the politically tuned and plotted culture war that it has become.
All it would have required was a moment of middling courage. At any point.
Didn’t happen.
Republicanism is devoted to pushing falsehoods and fictions out to their base for the sake of stoking whatever fears can be stoked. It is a movement that now rejects election results, rejects medicine, and rejects anything else that comes from “elites” whose expertise contradicts the stories fascist liars would prefer to tell.
Big Bird may be taking on Republicanism’s most well-known leaders, but it’s not a fair fight. The bird has them outclassed by a wide margin.
Anti-vaxx Chronicles: COVID disinformation creates yet another orphan
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Facebook is a menace. COVID-19 is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. We can talk about all those things in the abstract, look at the numbers and statistics, and catch the occasional whiff of seditionist right-wing rhetoric. But I hadn’t really fully understood just how horrifying that combination of right-wing extremism, Facebook, and a killer virus was until I became a regular at the Herman Cain Awards subreddit. This series will document some of those stories, so we are aware of what the other side is doing to our country.
Today’s cautionary tale was a pregnant Louisiana woman.
Yeah, not breathing COVID onto people as you walk past their tables is so dumb!
Look, no one is going to claim that indoor dining rules are perfect. They are a poor compromise between keeping people safe and not fully shutting down the economy. If the price to keep a restaurant in business is wearing a mask for an extra 10 seconds, who cares? The alternative is to fully shut it down.
No one said that, but if they did, we’d know who the real Karen was.
Who doesn’t want to be on that road! If the assholes vaccinated, we would’ve arrived by now.
I’ll never understand why masks broke conservatives. They think they’re so tough, accusing others of being snowflakes, yet a simple strip of cloth broke them.
Barbarians.
There’s always that one ironic foreshadowing slide, isn’t there?
Research complete: Vaccinated people stay alive. Their children continue to have parents.
Gay couple: “We’d like a cake for our wedding.”
Conservatives: “NO. You don’t get to be treated differently!”
Gay couple: “Differently? But, we just want the exact same cake a straight couple would get.”
Conservatives: “Being gay doesn’t make you special!”
Then they fly the Confederate traitor flag because they think being white makes them special.
Smoking pot should not disqualify anyone from the Olympics, and the issue of trans athletes and the Olympics is complicated. But of course, Ben Shapiro isn’t trying to engage in a complex and evolving debate, but to be an anti-trans asshole.
She spent 6 years trying to get pregnant.
1) Donald Trump made bank off his presidency. We just saw how toothless the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause was.
2) He didn’t even donate all his salary, quitting in his last year because he didn’t get enough praise for his empty gesture.
3) The problem with Trump had nothing to do with whether he got paid or not. What a stupid notion. If Joe Biden donated his entire salary, would conservatives suddenly be like “okay, I’m aboard the Biden agenda!”
Oh no. Her mom has a timeline:
One day after shit-talking Biden for “doing nothing,” purposefully ignoring the successful rollout of the COVID vaccines, she tests positive for COVID. And by the timeline, she caught it at her high-turnout baby shower, likely attended by an entire crew of people bought into the “burn your mask” propaganda. And given their utter disregard for the effects of the pandemic, these reckless people showed up to a baby shower, with a pregnant woman, without taking any precautions.
As a result, they had to C-Section the baby, while mom fought for her life. And entire medical system mobilized trying to save her life, even airlifting her to a hospital with an ECMO machine.
The obligatory GoFundMe.
I can’t imagine spending SIX years trying to get pregnant, finally doing so, and then being so obtusely reckless in your behavior that you never get to hold that child, and that child will never get to know her mom.
I keep marveling at this dis- and misinformation machine, so powerful and effective that it has overridden parental instincts to protect their children at all costs. We’ve gone from “I will do anything to protect my child,” to “FREEDOM BILL GATES MICROCHIP BIG PHARMA GARBLE GARBLE” as yet another child is left orphaned.
It wouldn’t be hard to retain those parental protection instincts. So she doesn’t believe in masks. Okay! Then stay home! Acknowledge that there’s a deadly pathogen sweeping through your community (Louisiana has been hit particularly hard, the fourth highest COVID death rate in the country) and stay home. Then you don’t need to worry about any masks. You’re pregnant and have a doting mom. She can hook you up with groceries and other necessities. DON’T HAVE A BIG PARTY JUST BEFORE THE DUE DATE. In a pandemic, cavorting with other humans carries inherent risk. If you’re a bunch of Trump conservatives who refuse to vaccinate or mask, that risk is higher. Avoid it!
But no, she wouldn’t do any of that. And as a result, she never got to see her baby girl. What a stupidly avoidable end to an unnecessarily tragic story.
U.S. launches private group sponsorship program for Afghan refugees. Will it help?
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by Natasha Ishak
This story was originally published at Prism.
In late October, the U.S. State Department announced a new sponsorship program for incoming refugees from Afghanistan. Modeled after a similar community sponsorship program in Canada, the Sponsor Circle for Afghans allows groups of U.S. citizens to sponsor a family of refugees. The program is meant to involve American community members in the resettlement process for refugees while, at the same time, providing relief to the U.S. resettlement infrastructure, which has been stretched thin in response to the crisis in Afghanistan.
Tens of thousands of Afghans fled their home country and have relocated abroad after Kabul, the Afghanistan capital, was captured under the Taliban regime following the withdrawal of U.S. troops in August. According to the Biden administration, roughly 7,000 Afghans have since been flown out and resettled in communities across the U.S.. The government’s shrunken resettlement system—which was reduced under former President Donald Trump—has not been able to withstand the sudden influx of incoming Afghan refugees.
But Hamidullah Noori, an Afghan chef who came to the U.S. as a refugee in 2015, says the resettlement system in the U.S. has been overburdened for years, even before the crisis in Afghanistan. Refugees are the ones who ultimately bear the brunt of the overwhelmed system.
“We really need more support because nonprofit organizations, they are slammed,” said Noori, who now owns an Afghan restaurant called Mantu in Richmond, Virginia. “They always say they have some management issues, their top management are not hiring more people and … most of them are working like 16 to 20 hours [a day],” he added.
The U.S. refugee resettlement infrastructure involves a network of government agencies and national nonprofits. As the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. declined drastically—falling from an admissions cap of 110,000 during President Barack Obama’s final year in office to 45,000 under Trump, with just 20,000 refugees ultimately resettled in 2018—resettlement organizations cut their operation size, leaving a dwindled network. Biden committed to processing 62,500 refugees in his first year but resettled just 11,411 refugees by the end of fiscal year 2021, which his administration attributed to the decimated resettlement infrastructure under the previous government. Now, following the Afghanistan crisis, tens of thousands more Afghan refugees are undergoing vetting at U.S. military bases and other sites abroad before they will be brought to the U.S.
Noori experienced a lack of support when he resettled with his family in the small Virginian town of Newport News after being approved for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), a visa program specifically for Afghans who worked with U.S. entities in Afghanistan. Afghans who go through the SIV program do not require sponsors and instead are provided with a case manager from nonprofit partners assisting with families’ resettlement. But Noori recalled the feeling of helplessness that he experienced when he could not reach his case manager for a week while unable to access food and groceries for his family. He said the nonprofit he worked with could not find him a kitchen job that matched his skills, instead offering him a job in construction. Determined to stay in his profession, Noori rented a bike for $25 and knocked on restaurant doors around town. He eventually found a job at a Mediterranean restaurant.
Now a restaurateur himself, Noori provides free meals for his community’s unhoused residents and refugees. He emphasized the need for nonprofits and sponsors to prioritize the needs and wants of the refugees who are coming here, instead of deciding for them.
“The Afghans, they should decide what they need, not the organization,” he said.
With the new community model of sponsorship, the government hopes to ensure that incoming refugees receive consistent support as they rebuild their new lives in the U.S. Under the Sponsor Circle program, groups of five private individuals join together to form a sponsor group, which then must go through a certification process where each member is vetted and trained by the Community Sponsorship Hub (CSH), a project under government partner Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Inc. After they are certified, sponsor groups can submit their sponsorship application. (As of this writing, the background check portion for the certification process had not been fully set up online, which means potential sponsors cannot complete their applications yet.)
“This program showcases the powerful role that individuals can play in coming together to welcome and integrate Afghans into American society, reflecting our spirit of goodwill and generosity,” read the U.S. State Department’s statement. The community-based model empowers a group of private individuals to act as surrogates for nonprofit partners that have become overwhelmed by the quick swell of Afghan refugees in the last month.
For three months, the Sponsor Circles will help their sponsoree with things like securing housing and employment, providing living funds, and helping them in their application for government benefits, among other responsibilities. As such, Sponsor Circles must secure at least $2,275 per individual refugee to cover costs.
While sponsor groups receive resettlement assistance training from partner nonprofits, some may face real-life challenges in helping refugees during the early relocation phase. For example, resettlement nonprofits in California—the state that holds the largest concentration of Afghan immigrants in the U.S.—have encountered issues in securing affordable housing for recent Afghan refugees due to the state’s skyrocketing housing prices. As a result, according to a report by LAist, refugees are only relocated to the state if they have family or relations who can provide housing.
But the needs of refugees also go beyond technical assistance.
“I think that one of the things that will really make an incredible sponsor is anyone that explains the culture,” said Walid Azami, a photographer and creative director based in Los Angeles. Azami came to the U.S. as a refugee with his parents and siblings during Afghanistan’s conflict with the then-USSR in the 1980s. A big challenge during his family’s resettlement process was dealing with culture shock.
He recalled one example where his family had been confused after receiving a notice from the school informing them about ice cream sundae giveaways on Friday, which they had mistaken for a day off—Sunday. His mother had to walk his siblings to school to get an explanation of what it was about.
“I remember that, thinking, ‘Well, that was so easy to solve,’ and I was in second grade. But what a wrench that throws into a family’s operation just figuring out things,” which for a traditional American family would not be a big deal, he said. “Yes, we’ll learn the [English language] words. Yes, there’s a lot of apps and smartphones and the internet and everything. But learning the culture is really difficult, especially for parents that have multiple kids, and they might be working double jobs. They don’t have time to learn that.”
Regardless of the potential challenges, becoming a sponsor for Afghan families is a unique opportunity to help people directly, providing them with community and a fresh start to their lives, after they’ve lost nearly everything. Khalid Ahmadzai, the director for economic advancement at Canopy Northwest Arkansas, an organization that provides long-term resettlement assistance for refugees, emphasized the importance of community involvement—particularly from other community members of color—in welcoming refugees to the U.S.
Ahmadzai hopes that news of the need for more support for resettlement assistance for refugees will inspire community members to “check out their refugee resettlement agencies and say, ‘Hey I want to volunteer, I want to be a mentor.’ Just play a part.”
Natasha Ishak is a New York City-based journalist who covers politics, public policy, and social justice issues.
Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.