Slacking a little

Sorry this week's newsletter is late

This week has been my roughest week in the motivation department for a little while. That’s why the newsletter isn’t out until Friday this week. I am sorry about that and I will try to get it out before Wednesday every week.

Sunday’s episode with Kamilah Harris ended up being more about the present than the future than I had planned, but we had a good discussion about the 2024 Green Party presidential primaries and potential conflicts of interest and questions of policy there. I am definitely looking forward to Kamilah coming on again!

This coming Sunday, 08/06, my scheduled guest is co-founder of Atlanta Mosaic Rachel Kahn! I realized how long it has been since the last time rachel and I were on a stream together and I actually teared up a little thinking about doing a stream together again this weekend.

I am still doing a lot of research on the topic of the classical school movement, and my research thread is growing. I am continuing the deep dive into the CLT board one board member at a time, and it’s really impressed upon me how important the concept of education really is. It’s not just that the far right is making a concerted attack on public education that is constantly seeing fruit. There’s also the fact that the liberal right and their think tanks are pretty much aligned with the far right on ends (privatization of education) and only disagree on the methods. Then there’s the fact that center left progressives don’t have any programmatic plan for public education because they have been focused on (admittedly important!) things like healthcare and climate crisis. Education is a weak point on the left, where the right has clear plans.

Assata Shakur said that no one would teach us what we need to know to overthrow them. With this in mind, we need to understand that education is going to be something that a movement has to pay attention to. Because revolutionary education and thinking does matter even if every revolutionist doesn’t have to be a theorist. People need to be able to go somewhere to learn civics and media literacy. This is a natural part of revolutionary organizing. The thing to remember is that counter-revolutionary education already exists. The movement to teach ethnic studies, women’s studies, and queer studies in high school and college starts with the knowledge that mainstream education is already counter-revolutionary and must be subverted. This needs to be followed with both an educational organizing agenda and well developed educational policy. My media project is intended to be a non-partisan source for basic education and information.

The far right has an organized movement to replace public education with Christian schools and an organized plan to do it. The far left is a handful of tiny political parties and a ragtag collection of independent thinkers. Big progressive media names like The Young Turks, The Majority Report, and Jimmy Dore are mostly shepherding people to the liberal right or even the far right. They either normalize reactionary ideas or they normalize compromise with liberals who normalize compromise with reactionaries. It’s a never ending slippery slope into a big tent where we marginalize ourselves in larger organizations led by people who don’t support our goals. The Democratic Party is just the biggest and most obnoxious example.

A left vision for public education should be easily communicated to the electorate and should offer a clear and egalitarian alternative to both public education as it exists now, and to the privatized institutions of religious and class segregation envisioned by the right. I am sure there is something radical out there that I am just not aware of, but it’s a topic that is frequently lost in our discourse today.

On 08/13 I will be joined by Justine Barron, author of “They Killed Freddie Gray: The Anatomy Of A Police Cover Up” to talk about the book! She’s got some great live events in Baltimore, with names like Kim Brown and Chuck Modiano moderating panel discussions, and I am really glad to have her on the show!

On 8/20, I hope to run part three of “A Green New Deal” and have Green Party NJ Senate candidate Christina Khalil on the show! Christina will be running against Bingo Bob Menendez, arguably one of the crookedest Dems in the Senate. I am hoping this goes according to plan!