Weekly Grounding #40
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
“American Politics Is Undergoing a Racial Realignment”
Building on the first item featured in last week’s Weekly Grounding, John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times observes that “the Democrats are going backwards faster with voters of colour than any other demographic.” Burn-Murdoch’s data suggests that “many of America’s non-white voters have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest. The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realising they’ve been voting for the wrong party.” The phenomenon holds across a range of non-white demographics:
“Some Black Voters Are Souring on Democrats. It May Be Part of a Natural Drift”
New York Times columnist Charles Blow reports on a recent trip to Georgia, where he “encountered enthusiastic Black Biden voters in Atlanta, but [was]…struck by how soft support for the president is among many Black voters and how few spoke of the possibility of a second Trump presidency in apocalyptic terms.”
Blow continues: “Like many others, I used to believe that Black defections from the Democratic Party, incremental as they are, were solely the manifestation of a failure of messaging and constituency caretaking. But I’m coming to see some of this as a natural drift that inches Black people closer to the patterns of other racial and ethnic groups.”
“UNRWA Report Says Israel Coerced Some Agency Employees to Falsely Admit Hamas Links”
A new report by UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, states that the Israeli Defense Forces used various torture techniques to pressure aid workers into falsely admitting participation in Hamas’ October 7th attack. Reuters reports that “several UNRWA Palestinian staffers had been detained by the Israeli army, and added that the ill-treatment and abuse they said they had experienced included severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members…Palestinian detainees more broadly described allegations of abuse, including beatings, humiliation, threats, dog attacks, sexual violence, and deaths of detainees denied medical treatment.”
This is an extremely significant report, not least because many countries (including the United States) cut off funding to the UNRWA in response to Israel’s claims that 12 of the agency’s members participated in the October 7th attack.
“Oscars Speech Smear Campaign Shows Lying for Israel Is a Good Career Move”
discusses film director Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars speech to highlight the “difference between the universal moral impulse found in Jews like Glazer, and the particularist Zionist impulse found in the people who noisily claim to speak for the Jewish community – and are readily given a bullhorn to do so by western establishments.” He writes that “Over many decades, a universal ethics that drew on the lessons of the Holocaust – and solidified into international law – was intentionally undermined, sidelined and replaced by a particularist Zionist ‘ethics.’”Cook then reports that “Batya Ungar-Sargon, opinion editor at Newsweek, broke with all journalistic norms to completely misrepresent Glazer’s speech, accusing him of ‘moral rot’ for supposedly disavowing his Jewishness. Rather, as he made all too clear, he was rejecting how his Jewishness and the Holocaust were being hijacked by genocide apologists such as Ungar-Sargon to promote a violent ideological agenda…Lying about his remarks should have been an act of professional self-harm. It should have been a dark stain on her journalistic credibility. And yet Ungar-Sargon proudly left up her tweet, even as it received X’s humiliating ‘Readers added…’ footnote exposing her deception…She did so because that tweet is her calling card. It declares her not a talented or careful journalist but as something far more useful: one who will do whatever is required to get ahead…[S]he was projecting – in her case, with the accusation of ‘moral rot.’ She was advertising that she lacks a moral compass, and that she is willing to do whatever is needed to advance establishment interests.”
“‘You Can Hear a Pin Drop’: The Rise of Super Strict Schools in England”
New York Times reporter Emma Bubola visits “the Michaela Community School opened in northwest London, the publicly funded but independently run secondary school has emerged as a leader of a movement convinced that children from disadvantaged backgrounds need strict discipline, rote learning and controlled environments to succeed.” At Michaela, “When a digital bell beeped (traditional clocks are ‘not precise enough,’ the principal said) the students walked quickly and silently to the cafeteria in a single line. There they yelled a poem — ‘Ozymandias,’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley — in unison, then ate for 13 minutes as they discussed that day’s mandatory lunch topic: how to survive a superintelligent killer snail.”
Reading an article like this, I was struck by how the same dehumanizing ideas that were used to justify the initial imposition of mass schooling on the poor and working class are rebranded as something new and innovative. For historical context on this topic, see my 2019 article in Truthout, “John Taylor Gatto Challenged the Ideas Inherent in US Mass Schooling.”
“When Reactionary Feminism Ain't It”
draws on ’s concept of “luxury beliefs” to analyze competing forms of contemporary feminism in a guest post at ’s Substack, . This is interesting reading in conjunction with Ginevra Davis’ essay, “How Feminism Ends,” featured last week in Weekly Grounding #39.Tsantekidou compares the social environment for young women in London with her hometown of Thessaloniki in Greece to argue that “it is my reactionary feminism, not the girl-boss liberal feminism, that is a luxury belief.” In response, Harrington writes that “while women are women everywhere, obviously so much of what makes up the fabric of our everyday life is a function of culture, local material conditions, and other factors which are not universal. From this it follows, as the book puts it, that our interests will differ: ‘the same policy can serve women’s interests in one material context and undermine them elsewhere.’”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.