FILE 1 – Body shaming Document 2 Document 3 - "Love Is Blind" Highlights Reality TV's Fatphobia Problem Teen Vogue, March 5, 2020, by Mathew Rodriguez

Not having any plus-size people as part of the experiment undercuts any thesis the show purports to test.

In this op-ed, writer Mathew Rodriguez unpacks how Netflix’s dating reality show "Love Is Blind" purports to test whether sparks can fly between people who have never seen each other before — yet doesn’t include fat people. Within the first few minutes of Love Is Blind on Netflix, host Vanessa Lachey, standing next to her husband, 98 Degrees frontman Nick Lachey, delivers the show’s premise. She says to the participating women, “Everyone wants to be loved for who they are. Not for their looks, their race, their background or their income.” To counteract the world of Tinder, Grindr, and other dating apps, which give users the chance to reject or accept a person based solely on a photo, Blind challenges people to fall in love without ever having seen their potential partners. Couples will date and forge connections in furnished pods from opposite sides of a wall.

The show does make good on at least three of those promises: It does have couples that are from different economic backgrounds, different upbringings, and across races. But, for all the differences the show derives drama from, it leaves one notable exception to its experiment: weight. Love Is Blind features all average-bodied people. And while it does want to test how people find love regardless of race and class, it never even nods to people’s size.

As the show tells us several times, its premise separates itself from the premise of something like a dating app, where a small square profile picture can be do or die for a potential love match. And fat people face plenty of discrimination on these apps. Plus-size dating app WooPlus released a survey in 2016 that showed that 71 percent of its users faced fatshaming from men on “normal” dating apps. And it’s not just women or heterosexual people. Infamously, on gay dating apps, the ubiquitous phrase “no fats, no fems” shows that big men are often persona non grata when it comes to dating or hooking up. The prevailing narrative for the fat body is that it is a joke. It is completely dehumanized and desexualized. This is evident across different media and was even a running joke in Avengers: Endgame, one of 2019’s biggest films. In the movie, Thor — the bulkiest and hunkiest of the superhero squad — is played for laughs because he has become “lazy” and fat. Characters in the film laugh at him, point out his sloppy presentation, and tell him to eat a salad. All of this underlines an idea that is persistent when it comes to fatness: fat people cannot be heroes.

Cut back to Love Is Blind and the show says something similar by not casting fat participants. The show asks us to forge our own deeply human connections with each of its characters. We’re supposed to feel something for Lauren as she navigates her first white boyfriend. We’re supposed to feel something, positive or negative, for Amber as she tries to reform indecisive Barrett, all the while looking over her shoulder as Jessica eyes him from across the room. And we feel for Mark as he’s oblivious to Jessica’s ambivalence toward their engagement. While the omission stings personally, as a fat person who has navigated finding love and being rejected solely for my body type, it also stings of structural anti-fat bias. Research has shown that children learn anti-fat bias by age three. Implicit weight bias is as present in children ages nine to 11 as implicit racial bias in adults. A recent Yes! Magazine article declared anti-fatness to be the last widely-acceptable phobia.

If the show’s ultimate thesis is that Love Is Blind and that anyone can fall in love with anyone, then not having any plus-size people as part of the experiment undercuts any thesis the show purports to test. In fact, the show not only isn’t inclusive of fat bodies, but the show also focuses solely on normative bodies, which includes erasing fat people and people living with disabilities.

On Wednesday, people flooded social media with fat positive images for World Obesity Day. It was a stark reminder of just how uncomfortable fat bodies often make non-fat people. And, by extension, how few positive attributes and scenarios we ascribe to fat people. Fat people can be jokesters or book worms or best friends. But there aren’t a ton of models when it comes to fat people finding love in mainstream media. Some romance films have plus-size leads, like Real Women Have Curves, Just Wright, Hairspray, and Isn’t It Romantic? But the people leading the charge are people who are fat and fat positive.

There is another small part of me that is happy that a fat person was not sent up for laughs or sympathy on Love Is Blind. On Netflix’s The Circle, one contestant, Sean, catfished her housemates with a picture of a skinny friend, rather than enter the game with her real body. She eventually outed herself as fat to everyone and shared photos of herself. The show garnered a lot of praise for addressing fatphobia, though The Circle, despite a kiss here or there, was not a dating show. Sure, it helped to humanize a fat person and show the day-to-day mental wear and tear it takes just to be fat and present yourself to the world. Fat people deserve to not only be thought of as sexual beings and romantic prospects, but normative-bodied people also need to challenge their own conceptions of fatphobia, just as white people must be challenged on implicit bias, and wealthy people must confront their implicit classism.

As is now the trend with Netflix shows, Love Is Blind is a “social experiment.” And while it is a super entertaining one, it lacks some bite because it failed to address anti fatness, one of the biases that is heavily visual and right at home with the show’s thesis. Because the show is already a runaway hit, let’s hope the next season doesn’t turn a blind eye to fat people who have faced rejection on dating apps because our bodies challenge other people’s ideas of beauty. You say, Netflix, that love is blind – but until fat people, and people with any type of non-normative body, are cast on the show, we’ll never know for sure. Document 4 - 'Helping no one': The role we all play in the obesity epidemic The Sydney Morning Herald, March 5, 2020, by Sarah Berry

Today is World Obesity Day and if current trends continue, one in five adults around the world will be obese in the next five years.

In fact, according to the new report by the World Obesity Federation, all countries around the world are unlikely to meet the 2025 obesity targets set by the World Health Organisation. In Australia, the picture is already worrying, with one in three Australian adults obese in 2017-18.

While the impact of obesity and the challenge it brings are significant (it’s estimated to cost global health services AU$1.5 trillion per year and is linked to spikes in diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and cancer), I can’t help thinking that we’re all perpetuating the problem.

Personally, in more than a decade writing about health and nutrition, I’ve become more conscious about the impact of what I write. There is an insatiable appetite for weight and diet-related articles and yet, I fear, delivering them is the equivalent of indulging an urge for fast food. That is, just because we want something doesn’t mean it’s good for us.

In the case of weight and diet articles, they feed the focus we have as a society on these issues. And the focus we all have on these issues is markedly unhealthy, for people of every weight.

Why? Partly because if we prioritise our weight then we can be susceptible to compromising our health (for example, by crash dieting), and partly because if we make weight our primary value then it becomes easy to devalue those who don’t conform to those ideals. Weight stigma and "fat-phobia" are rampant, not only within our community, but within the medical profession and the effect is devastating; driving further weight-gain, self-hatred and mental ill-health, including depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, eating disorders and exercise avoidance.

Through our unhealthy focus and through our communal judgment, we are helping no one and exacerbating an escalating public health epidemic. And that is before we even consider the impact of those in the food industry knowingly selling us processed foods that make us sick or those profiting off peddling diets that don’t work to the vulnerable.

While many diets can accurately claim to work – at least initially, because if we restrict calories we will lose weight – they hook us into a cycle because firstly they are unsustainable and secondly we are hard-wired to put on more weight when they inevitably come to an end.

When we diet, we lose both fat and muscle. But when we stop the diet, we typically just gain back the fat, unless we are exercising particularly intensely to preserve muscle. “With each of those cycles you shift your body composition more and more towards a higher fat percentage, which is a less metabolically efficient machine,” Mark Bittman and Dr David Katz explain in their new book, How to Eat. “Fat requires fewer calories to maintain its size than muscle does. So essentially, you create a pathway by which you need fewer calories each time to maintain fat and require even more severe calorie restriction to lose it.” Blaming individuals for finding themselves stuck in this spiral is as futile as it is short- sighted.

“The choices any one of us make are always subordinate to the choices all of us have,” Bittman and Katz argue. “We live in a food supply willfully designed by experts to maximise eating for the sake of corporate profits... blaming overweight people and those with diabetes is all wrong. Bathroom scales and glucometers do not measure character or worth, and we have to unbundle disease and ‘personal responsibility’... to confront the health threat of obesity without blaming the victims of the condition for it.”

So how do we do this?

We have to recognise our collective role in contributing to the problem we all face, our subconscious or conscious weight biases. We have to reject the weight stigma that diet culture relies on and redirect our frustration at a food system that willfully promotes foods that make us ill.

One thing we can all do is shift the conversation from weight to health, and we all deserve both health and to be cared for in our bodies.

“I think everybody should think about ‘What is health for? What is weight control for?’” Dr David Katz suggested when we chatted earlier in the week. “I think if they pushed on that, they would realise, well the answer is to have the best possible life and it really doesn’t help you have the best possible life if you’re fixated on your weight or a number on the scale.

“Focus on what you’re trying to gain – vitality, energy, the ability to do the things you’d like to do with gusto – and it turns out if you get that formula right your weight will sort itself out too.”

In their report, the World Obesity Federation said that the “cycle of shame and blame” needs to be broken: “[We need] to re-evaluate our approach for addressing this complex, chronic disease that affects over 650 million adults and more than 125 million children worldwide.”

I couldn’t agree more and that change starts with the attitudes of us all and where we direct our attention. Document 5 - Body-shaming should be regulated as online harm, says top ballet star and academic The Telegraph, March 9, 2020, by Charles Hymes

Body shaming should be a protected characteristic like racism or sexism to protect children and vulnerable adults online, says Baroness Bull

Body shaming should be treated like racism and sexism and regulated by new laws on online harms, says one of Britain’s leading ballet dancers.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Baroness Deborah Bull said research showed teasing and harassing fat or obese people led them to put on more weight and increased their risk of eating disorders.

Even when it was well-intended to nudge them into healthier eating, it could be counter- productive with the shame leading to increased anxiety which overweight children soothed by eating more.

As a leading dancer with the Royal Ballet for 20 years, Baroness Bull, vice-principal at King’s College, London, said she understood the pressures on young people of body image - and the negative consequences of even well-meaning comments about weight.

She said body image should be a “protected characteristic” like race, age, gender, disability or religion because of evidence that it leads to “longer term eating disorders.”

“I am particularly keen to ensure that whatever legislation or regulatory oversight for online harms is put in place to make sure that it covers the specific issues around body shaming or weight harassment,” said Baroness Bull who has discussed her proposals with ministers.

“There is a growing body of evidence that we, as a society, discriminate against people who are obese. It’s reflected in who gets jobs, who gets promoted and who gets pay rises. It’s associated with issues about how our body type is a characteristic that is not protected in law.”

The Government is due this Spring to publish its updated plans to place a statutory duty of care tech firms to protect children from online harms, which will set out the key areas to be regulated by the new online watchdog Ofcom.

Terrorism and child abuse will be included but it is unclear yet whether regulation will extend to “legal but harmful” online content such as cyber-bullying, self-harm and eating disorders.

She said it was not just children who needed to be protected but also “vulnerable” adults as “body shaming does not stop after the age of 18.”

Her appeal coincides with a letter published in Nature by 100 leading academics and organisations, led by Professor Francesco Rubino, from King's College, which warned weight-based prejudice and discrimination is as unacceptable as sexism or racism but is endemic in society including the NHS. They want a rethink of health campaigns which they say stigmatise obese people by fat shaming. A Freedom of Information request uncovered 332 cases last year where overweight people filed complaints against NHS staff for insulting them over their weight in the previous three years.

Professor Rubino said social media accentuated body shaming because people felt they could say what they liked. "We would support any regulation that would deter discrimination against people who are obese," he said. About one in five children are overweight or obese when they start primary school, rising to one in three by secondary school, NHS data shows. Some 64 per cent of adults are overweight or obese.

Evidence that fat shaming leads to increased weight is supported by a UCL study of 2,944 adults which found those who experienced weight discrimination gained on average 0.95kgs over four years, compared with a loss of 0.7kgs by those who did not face discrimination.

A study by Florida State University College of Medicine of 6,157 people found those who suffered weight discrimination were 2.5 times more likely to become obese.

Baroness Bull said social media had intensified problems with body shaming because of the time children spent on it and its capability for people to feel “empowered or unleashed to say things they would not say to your face.”

She said there needed to be not only regulation but also education to improve “digital literacy” and teach people that “the notion of citizenship extends to responsibility in a digital domain.” FILE 2 - Parenting

Document 1 – Digitally distracted parenting : a modern day hang-up The Age, Melissa Cunningham, October 24, 2019

Most parents have felt the twang of guilt that comes with scrolling a mobile phone in the presence of their children and now there is a term for it - digitally distracted parenting.

The perennial conversation about how much screen time is too much shifted sharply this week from teenagers and children to their parents.

First, Victorian parents were told to put away their phones when their children were in the water at public pools as part of a campaign to stop drownings. Brunswick Baths put up a sign: ‘Watch Your Child, Not Your Phone’.

The reports likely inspired Michael Leunig's cartoon published in The Age on Wednesday that suggested some mothers love their smartphones more than their children and set off a social media storm.

The cartoon prompted a quick and fierce backlash with many dubbing it sexist, condescending and judgemental of mothers.

Author of Raising Your Child in a Digital World Kirsty Goodwin said the cartoon did not acknowledge the increasing pressures parents face and their reliance on digital technology as a means of human connection and support.

“To be perfectly frank it’s techno shaming and making people feel guilty for their digital behaviour,” Dr Goodwin, said. “If we see a mother on her phone we are only seeing a snapshot. They could be dealing with a personal crisis or responding to an appointment for an employment opportunity."

But Dr Goodwin also cautioned there were dangers of over-using digital technology and parents needed to enforce boundaries.

Numerous studies have shown eye contact and facial interaction, particularly during feeding times, was an essential form of non-verbal communication for babies and critical for their brain and behavioural development, she said.

In a statement to The Age, Mr Leunig said he did not want to weigh in on the debate.

"The message is, that for the moment I have nothing to say - even though there is much to be said. I simply want to step back and let the thing take its course."

Alarmingly, Dr Goodwin also noted there was emerging evidence that linked children presenting to doctors with playground injuries to parents distracted by their phones.

Dr Goodwin said Australian paediatricians had anecdotally suggested two theories to account for increased injury rate; children were spending less time outdoors so they lacked the physical skills to navigate playground equipment and parents paying too much attention to digital devices. “My strategy is that if you are going to use technology do it minimally in the presence of kids and make sure your children are safe to begin with,” she said. “Nominate specific times for use, have boundaries so it’s not encroaching on your child’s wellbeing. Be accountable for it. As your children get older, let them know what you are using it for, whether it be coordinating a play date for them or responding to a work email."

In 2015, a University of Washington study of almost 500 people found smartphone use at playgrounds was a significant source of parental guilt. Researchers found caregivers absorbed in their phones were much less attentive to children’s needs than when they were chatting with friends or caring for other children.

A child can feel deprived of attention and vital interactions when a parent is constantly immersed in digital technology and Queensland University of Technology parenting expert Professor Marilyn Campbell said parents needed to take responsibility for the care of their children and not blame a device.

"If you ignore your children and their needs because you're on your mobile phone all the time then that's being as neglectful as just leaving them because you're not paying attention to them at all," Professor Campbell said.

"As adults, we have been thrown into this digital world without having any guidance from our parents. We are still learning and working out how to engage sensibly with technology. What we need to be doing is modelling the behaviour with our phones that we want our children to be doing."

It is not the first time Leunig's cartoons have courted controversy. He previously came under fire for creating cartoons that challenge the science behind vaccinations, including a 2015 cartoon which depicted a mother pushing her baby away from a volley of syringes raining down from the sky.

Another Leunig cartoon, with a baby in childcare wondering why it had been abandoned, albeit temporarily, sparked similar outrage.

In an interview with The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald in 2014, Leunig said: "I've hurt people inadvertently, I know that. But I never set out to cause hurt. With childcare, I'm so respectful of women's rights and roles ... it's the complexity of it that we face as a society." Document 2 – Saying ‘No’ is self-care for parents The New York Times, Pooja Lakshmin, October 18, 2019

Facing parental burnout? Use the magic word.

While swapping horror stories of PTA wars, overscheduling and toddler meltdowns, parents these days will inevitably ask one another, “But, are you taking care of yourself?”

Self-care has become the panacea for an over-exhausted, workaholic American culture. And if there’s one job that spells constant fatigue, it’s being a parent. But how does self- care happen in a country where more than half of married couples with children have two parents working full time, and mothers are not only spending more time at work but also more time taking care of children?

It doesn’t help that the images we’re sold of self-care include meditation apps and Peloton binges. For mothers in particular, with self-care just an app click or exercise class away, there is a haunting sense that if you feel burnt out, you must not be taking care of yourself. Cue more stress and guilt.

[Read our guide on how to avoid burnout when you have little ones.]

For parents, a healthy approach to self-care does not mean adding more tasks to your family to-do list — it means firmly deciding what you will not do and setting boundaries. As a psychiatrist specializing in women’s mental health and perinatal psychiatry, I take care of new moms who are struggling with the transition to motherhood and suffering from perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. I’m seeing more mothers who feel an overwhelming pressure to live up to not only the crushing expectations of motherhood but also the obligations of performative self-care.

This pressure originates within the fabric of our society and has become internalized. We live in a system where maternity leave is not mandated and child care costs are prohibitive, with some families forking over one-third of their yearly income for care. We’ve made up for this lack of structural support by placing the burden on families — largely mothers — to do it all.

The demands placed on parents to protect, teach and entertain their children have risen tremendously in the past 50 years. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, it’s now up to parents to make sure that baby is breastfed and sleeps in his parents’ room until age 1, has no screen time before 18 months, and that up until age 6 his one hour a day of approved screen time is supervised by a parent in the role of “media mentor.” As a physician, I am all for evidence-based recommendations, but these guidelines feel draconian, especially for perfectionist mothers plagued by guilt that they are not doing enough.

Particularly vexing for parents is that it’s impossible to follow all the rules simultaneously. Your psychiatrist tells you to get more sleep to reduce your risk of postpartum depression, but your pediatrician wants you to pump every hour to keep up your milk supply. There is no way to reconcile these demands, and no amount of self-care can make these decisions for you.

Our consumerist and convenience-obsessed culture will try to convince you otherwise. You really can do it all for your baby! New gadgets like in-home infant pulse oximeters and bath-temperature monitors inundate parents. While on the surface these products are easy to brush off as superfluous, they are symbolic of the idea that as a parent, 100 percent of your attention should be spent on your child. Do you really need to measure your baby’s oxygen level while she sleeps? Unless you have an infant with a respiratory condition, the answer is no.

Some have described this philosophy of domestic simplification as doing less is more. As a psychiatrist, I prefer recognizing limits and setting boundaries because it calls attention to the internal struggle parents face when making difficult decisions. Baby wipe warmers and gluten free diapers play to our fantasy that the more we do for them, the better off our children will be. It’s tough to reconcile this with healthy boundaries, which are a natural consequence of internalizing that you’ve done enough.

The backbone of healthy boundaries is the capacity to tolerate difficult feelings like uncertainty, guilt and fear. It’s easier to pencil in a manicure than to think critically about which tasks can be taken off the to-do-list, and to acknowledge that no parenting manual can guarantee your child will be safe and successful. To be fair, this business of resisting the parenting industrial complex is daunting, partially due to a growing income inequality that has American parents feeling like every advantage is critical.

In my clinical work treating women suffering from perinatal depression and anxiety, I see mothers fight an even more tortuous battle against the tyranny of intensive parenting. The problem with self-care as an antidote to the demands of parenthood is that in becoming part of the parenting to-do-list, it still requires an already empty adult to give more. This is particularly true for mothers who have internalized our cultural meme of mother as martyr and for whom the transition to motherhood can feel like an erasure of womanhood. Making yourself smaller and smaller in the service of your child may feel noble at first but ultimately can lead to resentment, bitterness and mental health issues of your own.

Pregnancy-related mood and anxiety disorders themselves also wreak havoc on a mothers’ agency. Postpartum depression has my patients feeling like no matter what choices they make, they’re terrible moms. Postpartum anxiety robs my patients of perspective, leading to difficulty with decision-making. Pre-existing mental health issues like childhood trauma or neglect cause adults to struggle with regulating uncomfortable feelings that arise when setting boundaries. For these parents, the idea of saying no feels existentially untenable. Over the course of treatment my patients slowly reclaim parental agency. I tell them that saying no is like growing a new muscle. It hurts in the beginning, but the more you train, the easier it gets.

Imagine a country where women were guaranteed paid maternity leave and families had affordable, high-quality child care options. In this world, setting boundaries as a parent would not require a steely force of will, because American families would have support in raising their children. But as it stands, if you’re a parent who’s at your wits’ end, instead of beating yourself up for your failure to self-care, try shortening your family to-do list and setting some boundaries. Document 3 - The Rise of Location Trackers for Kids as Young as 3 The New York Times, by Jessica Grose, March 6, 2020

Devices like the Gizmo are meant to calm parents’ fears — but they hamper children’s growing senses of freedom.

One of my fondest memories from late elementary school is walking a mile home with a pack of friends. It’s a composite of many days when we’d stop at a park next to the train station on our way home and play tag or swing, our legs pumping in the cool fall air. Our parents didn’t know our exact coordinates, and they didn’t seem to care that we didn’t come home at the same time every day. I recall feeling high on that freedom — it’s a feeling I want my kids to have, too.

This vision of childhood seems harder and harder to realize today.

Take the Gizmo, a smartwatch marketed to parents of children as young as 3 as a safety tool, which allows parents to track their children using GPS. There’s also the Wizard Watch, the dokiPal and the Tick Talk, among others. The smartwatch market as a whole is nearly $5 billion in the United States, and it’s projected to grow 18 percent in 2020, said Ben Arnold, a consumer technology industry analyst at NPD Group, a market research company.

Many of the products marketed to parents include some texting, phone call and pedometer features, but one of their major selling points is safety. For example: “The Wizard lets kids be kids and gives parents the confidence to allow their children to explore the world outside, without the stress and fear of wondering where they are or if they are safe.” Parents in online reviews echo the latter sentiment, about assuaging parental anxiety — “Nowadays you just can’t be too safe!” these parents are saying, and, “You want to know where they are and that they are safe at every moment.”

But these products miss the point of what it means to be a kid, hampering children on the road to independence. And more heartbreakingly, trackers may prevent our kids from feeling truly free.

Still, the appeal of Gizmo is strong, even for parents who are ambivalent about overprotection. I didn’t know what a Gizmo was until I had coffee with one of my saner friends. He was describing this smartwatch his 11-year-old daughter has, which enables him to track her movements as she walks several blocks to school. The watch also has the functionality to alert him if she goes outside a predetermined geographic area, which he doesn’t use. He said he checks her location about once a week, usually only when she doesn’t text him after she’s arrived at school.

She’s a rule-abiding, neurotypical kid; he’s not concerned that she’ll abuse her new freedom, and he’s not worried that she’s not up to the responsibilities she has been granted. I expressed surprise that he felt the need to essentially LoJack such a child. But he told me the tracker is to assuage his fears; he described it as “training wheels for me, for my anxiety.” What’s he afraid of? He’s not really sure. He’s not afraid she’ll get kidnapped; they live in a very safe neighborhood. He’s not afraid she’ll get lost — the city is a grid.

He described his fear as a “vague paranoia,” something deep within his lizard brain that’s calmed by knowing where she is. To him, the Gizmo provides a compromise for his family. Deep down he does want to give his daughter freedom like he had, because he started walking to school in second grade, but he still feels the need to find “a middle way” between giving her total independence and keeping her on the parental leash. “I think helicopter parenting has a real cost” for children, he said.

GPS tracking of such young children is so new, there isn’t reliable research on it — most of the research about children and smartwatches is about weight loss using the pedometer function. With that caveat in mind, the child development experts I spoke to were concerned that tracking young children may get in the way of their developing autonomy and responsibility, and it may also make them more anxious. After all, adults feel completely freaked out when they discover their location is being tracked without their active consent — why wouldn’t kids?

During the elementary school years, children should become more and more responsible and independent, and we need to give them appropriate boundaries. If you tell them that they’re not allowed to leave the neighborhood, and they need to be home at a certain time but you’re still monitoring their movements, that’s a problem.

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“You’re trusting a device instead of trusting your child,” said Sally Beville Hunter, assistant clinical professor in child and family studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

They might not be learning critical skills like knowing where they are and keeping track of time, if they know their parents will be yelling at them through a smartwatch to come home for dinner, Dr. Hunter said. Children’s brains are still developing. If you don’t let them develop these skills, she said, “The part of their brain that’s supposed to be maturing in a more responsible way has shifted.”

Dr. Joseph F. Hagan Jr., a clinical professor in pediatrics at the University of Vermont, was also concerned about the subliminal messages this kind of monitoring may be sending children. The risk to their social and emotional development isn’t just about threats to their autonomy; it’s also about the anxiety that can arise from “being exposed to a world being painted to them as dangerous, when it’s not all that dangerous,” Dr. Hagan said. There is some evidence that anxiety among children is on the rise — a study published in 2018 showed that diagnoses of anxiety for children 6 to 17 rose nearly 20 percent from 2003 to 2012 — and we don’t need to add to it, especially considering that children are far safer by many measures than they were 50 years ago.

Indeed, the risk of a child being kidnapped by someone they don’t know — the most extreme parental fear meant to be soothed by a GPS tracker — is vanishingly small in the United States. The vast majority of missing children are runaways, and children running away are not going to take their smartwatches with them. Furthermore, even in that rare case of kidnapping by a stranger, a GPS tracking watch cannot guarantee a child’s safety. The kidnapper could turn off the watch or throw it out the window. Motivated kidnappers aren’t even deterred by GPS tracking microchips implanted in a person’s body; there was a case in Mexico in 2010 where kidnappers reportedly dug a microchip out of a man’s arm with scissors.

I asked my friend’s daughter how she felt about the fact that her father checked in on her location from time to time. “Well, I am a little creeped out by it, because my dad can know where I am,” she said. “But also, it makes me feel a bit safer. I doubt I’m going to get kidnapped, but if I do get kidnapped, he could find me and call the police.” When I asked her if she thought about getting kidnapped before she got her Gizmo, she said not really — perhaps illustrating Dr. Hagan’s point about making the world seem more dangerous. Many of her friends have Gizmos and a few already have phones. “I don’t think my dad would really let me walk to school if I didn’t have one,” she said, but over all, the tracking doesn’t bother her — she has accepted the digital tether; it’s her normal. “I don’t really care because he’s not looking at it that much.”

This is not to say that smartwatches for kids don’t have any benefits. As Heather Kirkorian, associate professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that, for example, their texting and phone call functionality can be useful in a world where pay phones aren’t available the way they used to be. My friend’s daughter loved the fact that she could call her friends using the Gizmo and that it opened up a new mode of communication with her family. And certainly for children with special needs who may not be as independent as other children their age, the GPS tracking feature makes more sense. (Indeed, there is a tracker designed especially for children with autism: AngelSense.)

“Whenever I’m talking to parents about using technology, I’m always focused on what the goal is,” Dr. Kirkorian said. The most important thing is the relationship between the parent and the child. If the monitoring is temporary and given along with new responsibilities, that’s one thing. But if it’s a permanent invasion of privacy — that’s far from ideal. As kids get into their teen years, being tracked can undermine trust between parents and children, as Lisa Damour, a psychologist, pointed out in the Times in 2018.

There has always been tension, Dr. Kirkorian said, between the promise of safety for a parent and allowing independence for a child. My friend said he feels less stress since getting his daughter that Gizmo. But is it at the cost of breathless, joyful freedom? Document 4 – Parental burnout Document 5 – Parenting approaches and concerns FILE 3 – Education

Document 1 – To pay tuition, some college men become sugar babies Men’s Variety, by Rico Woods, October 1, 2019

Young college men, desperate to pay tuition and other costs associated with school, appear to be turning to sugar daddies more and more.

According to numerous online reports, including a piece that ran in Fusion, college guys are hitting up specific websites to snag generous men that are willing to help them avoid debt.

In fact, a recent survey conducted by the popular website Seeking Arrangement (SA) shows the number of college students signing up for the service in Canada alone has risen to a whopping 206,000. That’s up from 150,000 in 2015 (37%) rise.

According to data appearing on SA, Nevada and New York are hold the highest concentrations of “sugar daddy” activity. And the average age of a U.S. Sugar Daddy is 40 years old.

And we know from company released data that around 10% of that site’s membership consists of gay men. But college boys looking for generous sugar daddies don’t just have SA to turn to.

That’s right – there’s a full-on gay version that’s been around since 2008 called Gay Arrangement. This web portal boasts thousands of users made up of men who identify as “Daddies” and others (of legal age) who call themselves “boys”.

MV, on the condition of anonymity, spoke to several men who offer and buy Sugar Daddy services about what motivates them.

You think McDonald’s is going to cut it?

Mikey*, a 21-year old student at New York State University, shared with us that he doesn’t think of himself as a prostitute. “Many of the guys that hire me are just looking for someone to hang out with.

Sometimes we hook up and sometimes we don’t. Either way, they get their needs met and so do I. What’s wrong with that?”

He shared with us that several nights each month, he provides “overnight companionship” at a rate of $1000.00.

“For a three-credit course, I’m paying around $4,700.00. That’s a lot of money. You think working at McDonald’s is going to cut it? For a night or two a week, I can sell my services and at the end of the month know my tuition is paid.” And then he adds, “I’m not going to be one of those guys who graduates and is loaded with student debt!”

In recent years, researchers who study the sex economy have recorded a significant rise in gay men who sell companion services while attending school. Kevin Walby, a Professor of Criminal Justice at Winnipeg University and author of the book, Touching Encounters: Sex Work and Male for Male Escorting, shares the following:

“Previously, men had to go to an outdoor venue, work for an agency, or advertise in the back pages of magazines and phone books to sell sex, now they can do it right from their phone.”

The rise in college students who turn to gay sugar daddies is in part due to the explosive growth of social media apps. Additionally, rising tuition costs make affording a higher education difficult.

A quick check of the website Student Load Hero reveals that the average student debt a college graduate carried in 2018 was an unbelievable $30,000.00. On average, monthly payments hover around $400.00

Byron*, a mid-forties executive in Chicago, explained to us his motivations for hiring male “sugar babies”.

“My job requires that I work upwards of 80 hours per week. That doesn’t leave room for much else. I barely have time to eat, let alone exercise.

The services these young men provide are invaluable. Everyone needs companionship. They need the money. I’ve got the resources. What’s the problem?”

When we asked Byron about how some people might consider what he’s doing as “exploitive”, he responded by saying the following.

“What’s exploitive is the tuition some of these colleges charge. One guy I work with who attends U of C [University of Chicago] is paying nearly $75,000 a year for tuition. By the time he graduates, he will owe over $300,000 in student debt.

You tell me who’s being exploitive?”

I Won’t Be Some Broke B!

Contrell*, a college student enrolled in an English degree program at a school in the Los Angeles area offered the following to MV.

“I don’t come from a family with money. In fact, my parents didn’t graduate from school and neither did my grandparents. I could have saddled myself up with tons of student debt but I’m not playing it like that.”

He then adds.

“I can earn $350.00 an hour and more if I overnight. And because I’ve got certain assets, I get a lot of repeat clients. At least when I’m done with my degree, I won’t be some broke bitch!”

Joe*, an early 50’s executive who resides in Los Angeles County, explained why he hires college boys off sites like Rent.Men and Gay Arrangement. “You know exactly what you are getting. In my case, I really just want someone attractive around to spend time with. In a strange way, I also get to mentor some of these college guys. Believe it or not, a few of them do it for more than just the money.”

Why the rise among gay college men?

There are a number of reasons why sex work among gay college students appears to be on the rise. Research suggests it may be a combination of increasing tuition, coupled with less fear around HIV in the age of PREP.

Obviously, there are legitimate concerns about physical danger, according to Mikey – the sugar baby attending NYU.

“Unless I really know the daddy, I’m careful. I try to screen my clients as best I can. And that means when I overnight at his place the first time, I sleep with one eye open. It is what it is and I fully accept the risk.”

Male Sugar Babies and Private Lives

When we asked Mikey and Contrell if they had boyfriends, both of them said no. Although Contrell did mention he had recently started dating someone who also is a male sugar baby.

We know from previous interviews with male escorts that some men turn to this line of work as a matter of survival.

For example, a long term couple shared how running an unlicensed massage service helped keep them from becoming homeless.

None of the men we spoke with who purchase or provide companionship expressed any feelings of shame. And they didn’t seem all that worried about stereotypes.

“Do you think I give a flying rat’s a** about people judging me? I’m not shouting it with a megaphone but people close to me know,” says Michael.

“Do you know how many cops, attorneys and judges have hired me? You’d be surprised. I’ve even offered companionship to monsignors.

Contrell expressed gratitude for the work, sprinkled with a touch of pride.

“I provide a very real service to men. There’s no shame in that. My calendar is full and so far, I’m college debt free. And the best part is I’m making the daddies who hire me happy.

He paused and then added:

“You’re paying for it one way or another, rather you think you are or not. At least what I do is clear cut.” Document 2 – Beyond the headlines : is student debt strangling millenials ? www.bentley.edu

It’s no secret that the rising cost of student debt is a growing national crisis: the latest numbers suggest that seven of 10 college seniors last year graduated in debt; the total student loan burden in America today currently tops $1.2 trillion, a number that has tripled in the last decade, and at an interest rate of up to 12 percent. Everyone from Senator Elizabeth Warren to comedian John Oliver is taking to the activist soapbox (a/k/a late-night television) to bring national attention to the issues in the hopes of putting solutions in place.

The generation hardest hit is millennials. Student debt “now comprises 69 percent of the debt side of their balance sheets” for an average 25- to 30-year-old American, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — and it may already have strangled their chances for success in the prime earning years of their lives, according to new research. This is certainly adding insult to injury given that slightly more than half of those surveyed by Bentley University blamed higher education for millennials’ lack of preparedness for their first job and slightly less than half extended that complaint to millennials’ entire career.

The Washington Post reports that many life milestones are now out of millennials’ reach — marriage, a secure job, home ownership (or even a stable rental) — due to the “arrested development” experienced by their generation in the face of high student-loan debt and low employment rates.

Many have used entrepreneurship as the beacon of hope for the millennial generation, who have philosophically embraced the ideas and aspirations of starting their own businesses. This option holds special attraction to many as the solution to jumpstarting a career in the face of “a lack of career prospects.” Yet Forbes cites a “paradox” between millennials’ entrepreneurship potential and their exorbitant student-debt burden.

Sadly, getting out of debt and creating wealth is an uphill battle for millennials, who as a generation are far less trusting of financial institutions than Generation X or their own parents, according to a new study from Bank of New York Mellon and the University of Oxford, featured in this story recently from The Chicago Tribune.

But, millennials should also create a realistic financial road map based on their own generation’s financial reality. According to finance editors at Yahoo! and The Guardian, the actual financial benchmarks for adulthood have changed at their core for millennials, who “if they have a net worth of $10,400 means they are richer and far(ther) ahead of most of [their] generation.” How should millennials proceed? Prioritizing and paying off your student loans. “The more aggressively you pay them down, the closer you’ll be to participating more [in the global economy] as a financial citizen.” (Read the story and watch the Yahoo video here.)

More advice is available in an extensive money guide published by AOL Daily Finance. It seeks to help this “unfortunate generation” with custom tips in 29 Money Moves That Millennials Need to Start Making Now — including “#17: Visualizing what debt-free will look like.” Document 3 - Yes, a Progressive President Could Cancel Student Debt on Day One — by Following the Grassroots www.theintercept.com, by Natasha Lennard, February 8, 2020

ON FRIDAY,the group Debt Collective began its second mass student loan debt strike. The leftist organizers’ put student debt jubilee on the map during Occupy Wall Street and their legacy shines throughout progressive politics. Even serious presidential hopefuls like Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have taken up the mantle of erasing student debt.

The organizers with Debt Collective offer more than just grassroots support for debt forgiveness: The group has come up with an actionable legal blueprint for making it happen — and fast. “The next president can cancel all student debt on day one,” said a statement from the Debt Collective. “Congress built a self-destruct button into the heart of the student debt system. This means we could win a debt jubilee months from now!”

Debt Collective’s approach to erasing student debt is based on using a Department of Education legal authority, under the 1965 Higher Education Act, to “compromise, waive or release” any claims it has against student debtors. A willing president could, without new legislation, immediately enact the cancellation of at least all public student debt.

While supposed pragmatists deem such plans as impractical and idealistic, progressive candidates are taking notice: This year, Warren became the first presidential hopeful to vow to use this exact executive authority to wipe away the majority of U.S. student debt.

We are closer than ever to making student debt erasure happen not because of policy wonks at think tanks or Senate offices, but rather because a grassroots movement organized behind an aim and then set about figuring out how to make it a reality.

“It is critical for people to understand that the grassroots does not just take ideas from on high and build support for them,” Ann Larson, a Debt Collective member currently on student debt strike told me by email. “Law and policy are just not that complicated, though elites like us to think that they are and that we should leave the real thinking up to the professionals. We refuse to do so.”

AS FOR WHICH presidential candidates might be up to the task, there seem to be two strong contenders: Warren and Sanders. While Warren has already pledged to use the authority, her debt forgiveness proposal is less robust than Sanders’s. In January, Sanders introduced a bill that would automatically cancel student loans that were made, insured, or guaranteed by the federal government. The different approaches are unsurprising; Warren has long supported a mode of governance through executive powers.

It’s nonetheless striking that a Democratic presidential candidate famed for detailed policy planning is proposing to use the little-known legal provision that the Debt Collective’s legal research helped bring to light. And the organizers are keen for Sanders to embrace a possible executive action plan, in recognition that a Republican majority in Congress will stymie progressive student debt legislation.

“A bold executive could instruct the secretary of education to immediately free 45 million people from the burden of student debt without having to ask Mitch McConnell’s permission,” Debt Collective’s Larson told me, referring to the Senate’s Republican leader. “We all know that the Senate in particular is as corrupt and racist and useless for anybody but the rich as any governing body on earth. The left should be looking for solutions that can help us win real gains without having to go through Congress.”

In 2015, the Debt Collective launched the first U.S. student-debt strike in history, collaborating with former student debtors who had attended predatory for-profit colleges. The 2015 debt strikers deployed a legal strategy enabling thousands of people to apply for and receive debt relief from the Department of Education, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars and counting. Approximately 25 million people are already not paying their student debts; the collective urges that people “politicize” this nonpayment and reject a logic that sees noncompliance with the debt system as moral and personal failure.

Yet this debt resistance movement has always been as committed to navigating the strictures of the given political, economic, and legal system as it has been to rhetorically rejecting its claims to legitimacy. The new strike campaign, initiated on Friday with a launch event at the University of California, Los Angeles, aims to support individuals in debt nonpayment, but again recognizes that a strike is only one tactic in the push for jubilee. “That is what it means to organize within already existing conditions,” Larson noted.

There are undeniably huge risks in staking a movement’s success on the election of the right president and putting full faith in any politician to deliver economic justice. That’s why the work of spreading the collective debt strike is as — if not more — crucial than delivering elegant and efficient solutions to elected and would-be elected officials.

In their two-pronged approach of economic disobedience combined with realpolitik know- how, the movement for debt resistance promotes a politics of critical realism, working within and against a rotten system. As a statement from Debt Collective this week put it, “if we leave this up to politicians, it is never going to happen. We need a mass movement to ensure student debt cancellation.” But the statement also emphasized that “we need to elect a president who will push the button.” Document 3 Document 4 – A look into the double lives of America’s homeless college students FILE 4 - Housing

Document 1 - Hong Kong: The people forced to live in homes the size of a coffin Sky News, by Alex Crawford, November 7, 2019

In the world's most expensive city, a casket-sized sleeping space costs hundreds of pounds a month - and the bed bugs are free.

At first glance, the room looks like a collection of MDF cupboards, stacked from floor to ceiling.

These are the places known as coffin homes in Hong Kong - and there are 15 of them in a room which takes a mere couple of strides to cover.

They are tiny, cramped, windowless boxes where Hong Kong's most poor and desperate end up living.

And here, in the most expensive city in the world; in one of the world's top financial hubs, there are an estimated 200,000 people existing in conditions like this, below the poverty line.

Each small box, roughly 24 inches wide (60cm) and 67 inches long (170cm) and packed side by side, is someone's home.

Statistically, an actual average-sized casket is bigger - by several inches. In many parts of the privileged Western world, these wouldn't be considered suitable for animals to live in.

And for this, they'll pay around $2,400 Hong Kong dollars a month. That's around £230. The bed bugs come free.

Sky News visited one of the high-rise blocks and found the coffin-home people are ashamed of their conditions and circumstances.

But they're proud too and shirk sympathy and, understandably, shun outsiders.

The landlords, who are often illegally exploiting their vulnerable customers, aren't too keen on foreigners investigating either.

Cramming human beings into as confined a space as possible, in high-rise apartments, presents a range of health and safety dangers, not least fire and disease.

But with the help of social workers, Sky News managed to gain the trust of some of the residents who agreed to talk to us and let us film their pitiful conditions.

It's staggering that this is the city considered the most expensive in the world for those looking to buy a new home.

According to one report, the average price of a home in Hong Kong this year was more than $1.2m.

It's also one of the most unequal societies in the world - meaning affordable housing is plain out of reach for a lot of Hong Kongers. The former British territory has been gripped by violence for months now with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets demanding more democratic rights and universal suffrage.

The protests have led to widespread vandalism as well as claims of police brutality. There's also a lot of anger and resentment towards Chinese businesses and outfits with connections to Beijing.

There are widespread beliefs that many of the subsidised housing has been set aside for people coming over to Hong Kong from the mainland and this further fuels the bitterness felt by many towards China.

The city's authorities have tried to blame the pro-democracy unrest on social problems and the housing crisis - rather than focus on the issue of more votes and more freedoms.

But democracy is viewed very differently when you spend every waking hour wondering how you're going to eat.

Voting rights don't hold the same allure when you're consumed with fear over your own safety, or you're sick, or you're struggling with addiction and depression.

The residents we spoke to weren't so much against democracy, they just didn't see how the street protests were going to materially alter their lives. If anything, the chaos and anarchy has impacted them negatively.

The small work opportunities they have had, have dried up as the economy's been hit; travel has become harder and food more expensive; and businesses all across the territory have been affected as the tourism industry has slumped.

Most were very critical of the vandalism and violence associated with the demonstrations, with one coffin-home dweller remarking: "I don't ever hear the protesters talking about the housing problems. For me, the most important thing is I just need somewhere to live."

Another told us how they supported the drive for more rights but drew the line at the violence.

"If it carries on like this, I won't be able to do any work," he said, "And I won't be able to buy any food."

He's the father of a six-month-old baby boy. He, his wife and their baby all sleep, and pretty much live, on a bed together.

They have slightly better surroundings than the boarded tombs. Their home has been built in the space between a lift shaft and the building's outer walls. And for this they're paying the equivalent of around £1,500 per month to rent.

Many of the residents have lived like this for years. One man in a wooden coffin home which had been tacked on to and suspended from the ceiling told us how he'd been on the housing waiting list for 10 years.

He'd lived in this tiny tomb for three of them. "No-one cares about us," he said matter-of-factly. "We are just forgotten."

Document 2 - Oregon Woman Turns School Buses Into Tiny Homes for Working Homeless Families www.people.com, by Wendy Grosman Kantor, September 1, 2019

“They want to have a place to live that is their own, that’s safe — and they want to be mobile, so they can get better jobs,” says Julie Akins

Julie Akins, a freelance journalist based in Ashland, Oregon, began a life-changing road trip in August 2016. Off and on over the course of the next two years, she pitched her tent and lived among homeless people from Portland to Denver.

Fascinated by the working homeless, Akins asked what they needed to get off the streets as she chronicled their stories for the book she’s writing, One Paycheck Away.

Then Akins noticed families living in school buses. Curious, she knocked on the door of an old blue school bus and met a family with seven children living inside. They had ripped out the seats and put down floors. There were mattresses on the floor, tubs full of clothes and a stacked bookcase.

“It was in disarray,” says Akins, 58. “There was no toilet, shower or kitchen.”

The father had gotten too sick before he could complete the renovation and was in hospice care when Akins met the family.

After meeting other families who found homes in the buses, she came up with the idea to take retired school buses and convert them into nice, livable spaces with kitchens and bathrooms for working homeless families.

“They want to have a place to live that is their own, that’s safe — and they want to be mobile, so they can get better jobs,” says Akins.

Akins launched the non-profit Vehicles for Changes about 18 months ago. The first family moved into a converted, tricked-out “Skoolie” about nine months later.

“This is a project that I really think can have an impact,” says Alex Daniell, 57, who has spent years designing and building tiny houses for the homeless in Eugene, Oregon, where he helped develop Opportunity Village and Emerald Village.

But Daniell believes refitting retired school buses may be a better idea than tiny houses. It’s more cost-effective, he says, because there’s less to build from the ground-up. Plus, the buses are mobile and won’t have to be hauled on a truck, so families looking for work can relocate.

“I’m hopeful,” he says of the concept.

He liked Vehicles for Changes so much, he asked if he could help. Now he’s working on designing and building their next two buses with the assistance of a team of volunteers. The Flood family had fallen behind on their rent. David Flood, 63, was working as a substitute teacher and finishing a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies at Southern Oregon University. (Flood says he holds master’s degrees in both language arts and mental health counseling.) Due to a series of health issues, his wife wasn’t working. They had lived in their two-bedroom, two-bath trailer for about 10 years, he says, and their landlord had been “very gracious” in the past about late rent. But this time she said no, and the family became homeless on June 24, 2018.

“What people don’t understand, is that even if someone has a little bit of income, they can end up on the street — even families,” says Flood.

He and his 37-year-old wife, Jennifer, and their three kids — Raylee, 11, David Jr., 9, and Noah, 2 — lived in a tent at a campground through the summer, until it closed for repairs.

Then they lived in their silver 2006 Mercury Grand Marquis, alternating between a Walmart parking lot and rest stops. Worried as winter grew closer, he started thinking about driving to southern California.

Instead, his wife saw Akins on the news talking about her new non-profit and remembered that they had met Akins a few years ago, when they were all riding a city bus while Akins’ car was in the shop. The Floods applied, and on Thanksgiving Day last year, the family moved into their new home. Akins offered to paint the bus any color they wanted, but they insisted it stay yellow. They call it their “Yellow Submarine.”

“As a family, we used to always sing, ‘We all live in a Yellow Submarine,’” Flood says. “And that came true.”

The bus changed their lives, he tells PEOPLE. “It made the little money we had stronger,” he says. “It took the stress off of our lives. It allows us to breathe for a moment.”

His wife, Flood says, looks visibly less stressed. Looking forward, he hopes to finish his degree and get a job as an adjunct professor.

“It really is The Magic School Bus,” Akins says. “They’re in there learning all the time. David’s always learning a new thing and teaching his kids.”

They’ve planted an organic garden beside the bus, currently parked in a mobile home park in Ashland.

Rising third-grader David Jr., known to family and friends as “The Private,” enjoys playing basketball and running track. He loves hot dogs and catching crawdads. And he really loves his home.

“On the outside, it looks very small — and just like a plain school bus,” the boy says. “But it opens up on the inside. On the inside, it’s a mansion.”

When Akins blogged about her idea of starting a non-profit, a woman in Michigan — whom Akins has never met — asked for more information and eventually funded the non-profit for five years, giving $25,000 a year.

The current plan is to make one “Skoolie” a year. “But if I could raise more money and awareness, there’s no reason why we can’t make a lot more,” she says. “What I’m pushing toward,” says Akins, is to make five per year.

Two more retired buses have been donated by a school district, and Daniell is working on them in Eugene.

“The idea of getting used, donated buses from schools and then converting them with volunteer labor — it’s very appealing to me,” Daniell says. “It’s so community-oriented.”

He plans to bring in volunteers from various church groups and ask artists and artisans to donate their time and talents to reimagine the insides.

“The end product results from keeping a family from breaking apart,” says Daniell, who wants to create a design that can be replicated by other organizations around the country. “My experience with the homeless is: if the families don’t get split apart, and the kids stay in school, they don’t end up on the street. Once somebody’s been on the street for a while, it’s hard to find their way back in.” Document 3 - Trump moves to gut Obama housing discrimination rules www.politico.com, by Katy O’Donnell & Victoria Guida, January 25, 2020

New rules may make it easier to deny loans to people of color.

The Trump administration is working to roll back former President Barack Obama’s efforts to combat racial segregation — potentially making it easier for banks to deny loans to black and Hispanic people or for cities to confine poor families to minority neighborhoods.

One Trump Cabinet member, Housing secretary Ben Carson, is moving to scrap an Obama policy withholding federal funds from cities if they don’t address segregation. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed cutting back on collecting data that helps track discrimination in the mortgage market. And activists warn that a Trump financial regulator could encourage banks to invest in inner-city projects benefiting outsiders instead of local residents.

Trump officials say they’re trying to cut red tape. But all these actions across the government could collectively reverse hard-won progress in curbing discrimination, civil rights advocates and Democrats say. They’re pushing back on the proposed changes with a flood of public comments, litigation and hearings — including one scheduled for Wednesday where House Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) plans to grill the financial regulator.

“They’re trying to eliminate the ability to enforce fair housing,” said Lisa Rice, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance. “They do not want to promote fair housing. They do not want to eliminate the vestiges of discrimination.”

One of President Donald Trump’s targets is the same law — the Fair Housing Act — that his family real estate company was accused of violating in the 1970s for trying to keep black people from renting Trump apartments. The Trump Organization settled the case, brought by former President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department, and Trump himself has always denied the charges of racial bias.

Carson says he’s trying to improve the fair housing system, not undermine it.

“To insinuate that Secretary Carson is trying to roll back or weaken the Fair Housing Act is misleading at best,” HUD spokesperson Brad Bishop said, adding that HUD has brought in nearly $28 million for discrimination victims under Carson.

Obama tried to add teeth to the fair housing law, which passed in 1968 within a week of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. as deadly riots swept through largely black neighborhoods in cities across the country.

The act outlawed discrimination in housing. It also required communities to work to end segregation, but a government audit in 2010 found that HUD’s enforcement of the law was largely ineffective. Obama addressed that in 2015 by requiring local governments to track patterns of poverty and segregation with a checklist of 92 questions to gain access to federal housing funds.

Carson called Obama’s system too burdensome and said last year that it was “actually suffocating investment in some of our most distressed neighborhoods.” This month, he moved toward scrapping the tracking system with a proposal that doesn’t include the term segregation.

Separately, Carson’s also finalizing a policy rolling back the Obama administration’s efforts to combat discrimination even when it isn’t intentional — such as when mortgage lenders use computer algorithms to determine creditworthiness that disproportionately reject minority applicants.

HUD says its proposal brings the policy in line with a 2015 Supreme Court decision that said liability for unintentional discrimination “must be limited" to ensure employers can make "practical business choices."

But housing activists see the shift away from proactive racial integration as an abdication of the agency’s responsibility under the Fair Housing Act, even as black homeownership hovers near its lowest rate since segregation was legal. The white rate is about 73 percent, compared with a little under 43 percent among black people.

“This idea that pretending that housing discrimination based on race and other protected characteristics doesn’t exist is very dangerous,” said Nikitra Bailey, executive vice president of the Center for Responsible Lending.

“One of the things that I want to be careful with is pretending this is yesterday; we know this is ongoing,” Bailey said.

Every Senate Democrat signed onto a letter Senate Banking Committee ranking member Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) wrote to Carson in November saying they were “deeply troubled by the direction this administration is heading in relation to fair lending and fair housing protections."

The administration’s attempts to rewrite the enforcement of laws on housing discrimination and segregation aren’t limited to HUD. Joseph Otting, the Trump appointee who heads the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, wants to change the rules governing the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 law designed to reverse decades of discriminatory government policy discouraging lending and investment in poor neighborhoods.

To counteract that discriminatory policy, known as redlining, banks are now required to lend and invest in lower-income communities. But to the dismay of Waters and housing advocates, Otting wants to evaluate banks' compliance based on the amount of money spent within lower-income neighborhoods, a method that they say could ignore residents’ input.

Otting says he’s trying to give banks more certainty about how the law will be enforced, to ensure more money flows to lower-income and minority borrowers.

But community groups and Democrats say his proposed overhaul might allow banks to meet their obligations under the CRA by funding construction projects, such as hospitals or sports stadiums, that aren’t explicitly designed to serve local residents.

Waters has called Otting to the Hill this week to testify before her committee at a hearing she titled, “The Community Reinvestment Act: Is the OCC undermining the law’s purpose and intent?” Housing advocates say they’re also worried about a dropoff in fair lending enforcement. Housing discrimination complaints rose 8 percent in 2018, according to the National Fair Housing Alliance, to the highest level since the group started tracking the data in 1995.

The Consumer Bureau has filed only one fair lending enforcement case in the two years since Trump appointees took over the agency, down from 14 over the five-year tenure of former director Richard Cordray. That record, coupled with a reorganization downgrading the agency’s Office of Fair Lending, spurred Brown and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) last month to request a Government Accountability Office investigation.

Consumer Bureau Director Kathy Kraninger has also proposed taking aim at a regulation that tracks discriminatory lending, calling for public comment on the “costs and benefits” of collecting additional data as a 2015 agency rule requires.

A Consumer Bureau spokesperson said a proposed change to the rule would give regulatory “relief to smaller community banks and credit unions” without altering the broader underlying law. Activists are raising alarms that that proposal could exempt up to 85 percent of lenders from reporting any lending data at all.

“I think there’s an effort by this administration to narrow the scope and the sort of meaning of civil rights protections so there’s just a hollowed-out husk of what’s actually protected,” said Thomas Silverstein of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Document 4 - Document 5 FILE 5 – The Woke Culture

Document 1 - Trump campaign’s plan to woo black voters: Retail stores www.politico.com, by Gaby Orr & Alex Isenstadt, February 26, 2020

The centers will distribute pamphlets and sell merchandise, including hats and sweatshirts embroidered with the word “woke.”

President Donald Trump’s outreach to African American voters is coming to a storefront near you.

As part of an ongoing effort to increase Trump’s share of the black vote this fall, the president’s reelection campaign unveiled plans on Wednesday to open a series of “community centers” in empty retail spaces across the U.S. where paid staffers and volunteers will spend the next several months courting black voters with literature, celebrity meet-and-greets and “woke”-branded attire.

The sleek new storefronts — a design rendering shared with POLITICO showed a bright interior outfitted with midcentury furniture and state-of-the-art wall graphics — will begin opening in March and are expected to span seven battleground states: Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

The goal is not necessarily to win the African American vote in 2020 — an implausible outcome — but to simply raise Trump’s share a few percentage points from the 8 percent he received in 2016. If Trump can take his African American vote share from single digits to the low teens, it could give him a boost in key states that are likely to decide the outcome of the election.

Each center will double as a field office and a home base for the campaign’s “Black Voices for Trump” coalition, which has already started advertising with African American-operated radio stations and newspapers. Trump traveled to Atlanta last November to kick off the coalition alongside his campaign’s most high-profile black surrogates, some of whom will be dispatched to these new spaces for meet-and-greets and outreach events.

“These are, kind of, unprecedented structural layout designs to get us into the community so you can … have a center spot where the black community can come in and learn about what the president has done and help push forward his agenda,” said a senior Trump campaign official.

The centers will distribute pamphlets and sell merchandise, including hats and sweatshirts embroidered with the word “woke.” Asked to define “woke culture” as it relates to the president’s bid for reelection, a second campaign official — who is African American — said reporters should “ask a black person.”

“This concept by itself is a woke concept in the fact that for decades you have had a community that has been controlled by the Democratic Party," said Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign. "Republicans haven't even gone into deliver their message. Now, we have a Republican who is actually going to the community to deliver the message and ask for the vote." Trump’s advisers contend that the current political landscape is ripe for Republican gains this cycle — including at the presidential level. So far, the campaign has focused its efforts in urban areas like Miami, Cleveland, Detroit and Charlotte.

“There’s been no activity in these markets for Republicans for a very long time and this is really more than a toe in the water. It’s a whole foot in the water,’ said a third senior campaign official.

Much of the Trump campaign’s outreach to black voters has come on the heels of polls that show rising dissatisfaction among black voters with the current candidates running for president. A survey released this week by the political action committee BlackPAC, a left- leaning political group, found that more than one in three black voters wished “someone else” had made a play for the White House, and 12 percent said they plan to vote for Trump. Two additional polls by Emerson and Rasmussen showed the president earning 30 percent support among black voters earlier this year, though both outlets have faced questions about their methods.

"At minimum, we're double from where we were in 2016," said campaign manager Brad Parscale at a briefing with reporters on Wednesday, insisting that the president’s approval among African Americans goes up “40 to 50 points” when poll tested “directly” instead of “through a media filter.

Democrats have expressed immense skepticism that Trump can make serious inroads with black voters, who, they insist, will not forget that about the president’s track record of racially-charged remarks — such as his contention that Baltimore is a “rat and rodent infested mess” or that good people existed on “both sides” of the white nationalist march that left one person dead in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017.

At the White House, senior adviser Jared Kushner has served as the architect of the Trump campaign’s strategy to woo African American voters. Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, was a driving force behind the administration’s push to pass bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation last year and has been urging Trump to make a serious play for black voters in 2020. Kushner and his allies argue that economic conditions — most notably, the historically low black unemployment rate — have the potential to shepherd new voters into the GOP.

As recently as last week, Kushner was behind a flurry presidential pardons and commutations issued that included Tynice Nichole Hall, an African American woman who served 14 years in prison on non-violent drug charges. The Trump campaign also ran a 30-second spot during this year’s Super Bowl featuring Alice Marie Johnson, another non- violent drug offender freed by the president.

“Thanks to President Trump, people like Alice are getting a second chance,” read part of a pamphlet that the campaign plans to distribute at its “black voices” community centers. Document 2 - Students who complain about abuse on campus are being ‘wokesmeared’ The Guardian, by Nesrine Malik, February 16, 2020

Far from being hotbeds of political correctness, universities are ignoring victims of sexual harassment, racism and bullying

As the Windrush scandal was breaking, it became clear that there were two parallel perceptions of the UK’s immigration system. Those who had been mangled by the Home Office machine knew the truth: that the system was cruel and broken. The other view, more popular but fabricated, was that the country’s immigration policy was lax, gullible and open to abuse.

The same now applies to life on Britain’s university campuses. Last week a report found a culture of non-disclosure agreement abuse. NDAs, originally designed to prevent departing university staff from sharing professional secrets, are now being used to gag victims of sexual harassment, bullying and poor teaching in order to protect the abusers and, by extension, the universities themselves. Freedom of information requests by the BBC in 2019 revealed that UK universities had paid about £87m in NDA payoffs in the previous two years. This suggests a nationwide and institutional failure to protect students from predatory abusers, a culture of exploitation of those who are vulnerable, and a failure to meet the needs of those with disabilities. In other cases, when universities failed to adequately investigate sexual assault allegations, students were pressured into signing NDAs without even receiving a payout, the BBC report found. This is likely to be only the latest instalment in a series of revelations exposing an unregulated culture of thuggery and malpractice in academic establishments. In October, an inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) found that about a quarter of minority ethnic students, including non-British white students, said they had experienced racial harassment since the start of their course, and that not only did British universities not tackle the thousands of racist incidents experienced, they also refused to acknowledge the scale of the problem.

It is also likely that students’ negative experiences and any potential measures to address their widespread concerns will continue to be submerged by a fictional, popular narrative of British universities as a hotbed of woke culture populated by a snowflake generation wanting to eject from jobs or the public space anyone who in their sensitive eyes has offended them. Another word for this alleged behaviour is “cancel culture”. The term now has its own entry in the urban dictionary, which calls it a phenomenon perpetrated by those “quick to judge and slow to question”.

Little is said of what is arguably more prevalent and more effective: what I call wokesmearing – the stigmatising and shaming of someone for crimes of extreme political correctness. Wokesmearing has a more powerful engine than worthy students. The rightwing press and tabloid media will fix on any incident that looks like it may be an example of progressive values overstepping the mark. If none or few of these incidents are found, they are made up. Scant details are tortured into solid stories, and before those stories can be challenged or even corrected, they have passed into the mainstream narrative.

Take the case of Lola Olufemi. All she and her fellow Cambridge students wanted to do was introduce some new writers into their syllabus. In 2017, they sent an open letter to the literature faculty requesting that non-white authors be added to the curriculum. Four months later, after precisely zero complaints from fellow students or members of the faculty, and before any decision had been made, the Telegraph published Olufemi’s picture on its front page with the headline: “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors”. Within days the story was given credibility when it was debated in earnest on BBC Radio 4. The very channel that broke the NDA story is frequently a useful tool for the promotion of stories that originate in less responsible outlets, a gullible eager consumer of fake outrage. When I spoke to Olufemi a few months later, she said the most frustrating thing, other than “being called upon to address the lies as if they were legitimate”, was that the artificial outrage obscured what was actually happening on the ground on campus, the abuse she was receiving and the chill that had been sent down the spines of other black students – many of whom were from disadvantaged backgrounds and could not afford loss of future employment prospects if they were seen as troublemakers. The whole effort to simply add more authors to a syllabus, not to replace any, had been successfully wokesmeared.

And on it goes. As university campuses become increasingly unsafe for students and employees, a carousel of mythical stories is confected, amplified and recycled. So rich has this genre of reporting become that it now has its own formula: big, flashy, pearl-clutching headline followed by a quote from someone scandalised by the latest liberty-taking, then rounded off by a tiny detail, one buried at the end, that invalidates the whole story. One such example is a BBC news dispatch from October 2017. It starts with “Cambridge Uni students get Shakespeare trigger warnings”, only to end with: “Some lecturers indicate that some sensitive material will be covered in a lecture … this is entirely at the lecturer’s own discretion and is in no way indicative of a faculty-wide policy.”

The same principle is applied to all the developments we now take as an integral part of British campus culture, such as safe spaces and no-platforming and terrified administrators cowed by leftie students. No-platforming in particular is frequently presented as a simple case of mob rule and of frightened faculties placating students, when they often, far less contentiously, involve college bureaucrats lacking the resources to responsibly curate controversial union debates and the associated right of protest that comes with that.

The repercussions of the campaign by the cynical and the credulous are not just limited to point scoring in a culture war. The overall result is a climate unreceptive to the anxiety of students on British campuses. The fact that report after report states that universities are failing to act is down to more than just denial; it is a complacency and an impunity fostered by a rightwing culture that reinforces and perpetuates the myth that liberal spaces, especially universities, are dangerous, progressive playgrounds undermining tradition and common sense. Until that propaganda is acknowledged and combated, the calls of distressed students from the UK’s campuses will continue to go unheard. Document 3 - What Does The Term 'Woke' Really Mean? www.graziadaily.co.uk, by Bridget Minamore, January 20, 2020

From woke baes to woke-o-meters, the meaning of woke has shifted greatly.

How woke are you? Added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, it’s clear that the word ‘woke’ has both meaning and history. The question, perhaps, is more what, exactly, that meaning is?

What does woke mean - what's the woke definition?

In its modern-day, politicised context, ‘woke’ is defined by the OED as ‘originally: well- informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’. The Urban Dictionary, meanwhile, explains that ‘being woke means being aware… knowing what’s going on in the community (related to racism and social injustice)’.

The history of the word 'Woke'

‘Woke’ follows a long history of words and phrases that relate the gaining of knowledge to sleep and/or sight. Everyone from angry politicians to conspiracy theorists has told the world they’re ‘blind to the truth’ or that they need to ‘open their eyes’, and rap music with a political message is widely known as ‘conscious’ hip-hop. ‘Woke’ is a natural successor to these, but its grammatical quirk is a product of AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) which through the ambiguity of its tense, implies being woke is a state of mind rooted in the past. The implication is that once someone has become woke, they can’t easily go back to sleep. For instance, people describe themselves as ‘being woke’ as opposed to ‘being awake’ or having ‘woke up’.

Like most words, the history of woke is a surprisingly long one. The word was first used in the 1800s but back then, it only meant the act of not being asleep. Fast forward a few centuries and the first recorded use of ‘woke’ in its politically conscious incarnation was via a N.Y. Times Magazine glossary of ‘phrases and words you might hear today in Harlem’ in 1962. The glossary was alongside an article on African-American street slang by black novelist William Melvin Kelley, and his explanation of ‘woke’ was the ‘well-informed, up-to- date’ definition the OED uses today. In 1972, Barry Beckham’s play Garvey Lives! includes a character claiming he’ll ‘stay woke’ using the work of Jamaican activist leader Marcus Garvey: ‘I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon stay woke. And I’m gon' help him wake up other black folk’.

For years ‘woke’ was widely used as slang by African-American communities. Then, in 2008, singer Erykah Badu brought it back into mainstream public consciousness when she used ‘I stay woke’ in her song Master Teacher. The #staywoke hashtag was first used on Twitter in 2009, although it took two more years before anyone used ‘stay woke’ to mean something beyond not being asleep. In the years since, both the word and the phrase ‘stay woke’ have taken on a life of their own. Coinciding with high profile deaths of African- Americans at the hands of the police, the rise of Black Lives Matter, and a growing sense of racial injustice across the US, ‘woke’ became a proclamation of awareness—a word that recognised that the political system isn’t fair. Staying woke was a way for people of all races to use shorthand in calling out society’s racial ills, but also served as a one-word way of encouraging people to pay political attention. Erykah herself used ‘stay woke’ in a tweet supporting Russian feminist dissidents Pussy Riot. Woke in popular culture - how is woke used?

Over time however, the usage of ‘woke’ has shifted. On the one hand, the word has been appropriated and subsequently watered down by people who aren’t the politicised African American communities who originated the term. You can find ‘How Woke Are You?’ quizzes, famous white men christened ‘woke baes’ for speaking up against sexism or racism, and ‘woke-o-meter’ rankings of those celebrities deemed particularly woke (all of whom, of course, are white).

There’s something galling about well-meaning white people and (mosty-white) media organisations using ‘woke’ as a catch-all term to refer to fellow white people, and the word’s widespread use has consequently led to it feeling fairly meaningless. Middle class white people around the world call themselves ‘woke’ because they send out the occasional tweet calling for peace and love, not because they’re trying to make any concrete effort to change the racist status quo. Calling yourself woke simply isn’t enough— you need to act. But a word that’s been diluted to the extent this one has is not necessarily going to get you there.

On the other hand, ‘woke’ has also veered into joke territory—primarily by people of colour —as a way of mocking people and ideas that over-analyse relatively benign things and topics. The chorus of Donald Glover’s ‘Redbone’ uses ‘stay woke’ as a reference to being aware you’re being cheated on, while ’stay woke’ jokes and memes run riot online. The most famous of these must be comedian Desus Nice’s long-running series of tweets where the #staywoke hashtag is added to various pop-culture related hyperbolic conspiracies, e.g. ‘the Halloween whopper is fastfood blackface’. These jokes are flippant, by virtue of being good, clever jokes, they are also acknowledge ‘wokeness’ as a concept. They are still pointing out that something is wrong, and that one must remain aware. The thing is, people also want to make fun of how aware they actually are. Being ‘switched on’ all the time can be exhausting, and making light of the way we think about racial inequality or political unrest is often what enables many activists to keep on going.

In the UK, there are questions around the validity of using African-American slang for both white people and amongst Black British communities. Can ‘their’ slang also be our slang? Racism is distinct and distinctive on both sides of the Atlantic, and you could argue that appropriation of slang by people outside of a specific culture is appropriation, regardless of whether you share the same skin colour or not.

Then again, there’s a case to be made that the African diaspora is linked by more than skin and cultural heritage, but also through the ongoing sharing of culture, customs, music, media, and of course, language. Slang is a constantly evolving way of speaking and if black people use the word ‘woke’ worldwide then perhaps it can foster a global community and, by extension, a global approach to combating racial injustice. Being truly woke is thinking beyond yourself and being aware of how you fit into a global eco system that is bigger than you.

One of the first steps in combating racism is acknowledging how widespread the problem is. If a four letter word like ‘woke’ has the potential to help do that, then perhaps it’s worth us all trying to #staywoke after all. Document 4 – Katy Perry’s controversial shoes evoking blackface Document 5 – Europe’s Young are not that Woke FILE 6 – Call Out Culture

Document 1 - Call-out culture is not woke - it's like a public execution The Independent, by Katie Byrne, by February 27, 2020

History is littered with examples of public shaming. Criminals were restrained in pillories and pelted with rotten fruit. Adulteresses were paraded through villages. Thieves' hands were amputated as crowds whooped and jeered.

In the western world at least, we like to think we've put our dark history of public shaming behind us. We are appalled when we read about the barbaric punishments that were meted out to criminals - but perhaps not so horrified by the public nature of them.

Our savage compulsion for public shaming hasn't really gone away - it has just mutated into something else. It now takes place largely on Twitter, where social justice warriors are the modern-day judge, jury and executioner.

Say the wrong thing on the social platform and you'll incur the full wrath of call-out culture. Your mistake will be exposed by the morally righteous and crowds will soon gather to watch as your punishment is meted out. It may not be as barbaric as public shamings of the past, but make no mistake, it's just as merciless.

In the last five years or so, call-out culture has metamorphosed into cancel culture. A grovelling apology no longer cuts it on Twitter, where the baying mob now dole out life sentences on their lunch breaks.

Saying the wrong thing on Twitter can now cost you your livelihood.

Caroline Flack was the victim of cancel culture in the weeks before she took her own life. Over a million people have since signed the 'Caroline's Law' petition that calls for laws regulating press intrusion on those in the public eye. Less has been said about the petitions that were posted shortly after she was charged with common assault on her boyfriend. There were calls for the presenter to be sacked from Love Island, which no doubt influenced her decision to step down a few days later.

There is an argument that call-out culture is ultimately progressive. It exposes sexist, racist and homophobic remarks and highlights unconscious biases that might otherwise go unnoticed.

The problem, however, is that the Woke Brigade make little attempt to call a person in before they call them out. So used are we to the public nature of Twitter discourse that we seem to have forgotten that there is another, much more civilised, way of taking a person to task.

We don't always need an audience when we highlight a person's mistake. Indeed, if we really want a person to listen, learn and do better, we'd be much better off communicating with them privately.

Consider for a moment how people behave when they are under attack or, in this case, on the receiving end of a Twitter pile-on. Stunned by the sudden onslaught, they go into fight- or-flight mode. Some hide out from the twitchfork mob, hoping that the outrage will subdue if they don't rise to it. Others, sensing the inherent unfairness of public shaming and mob rule, decide to fight back, which of course just backs them further into their ideological bunker.

Call-out culture is everywhere these days. It's the boss who gives you a scolding in front of your colleagues, but who can barely make eye contact in the lift. It's the mum on the parent WhatsApp group who passes not-so-subtle remarks about a certain child's behaviour.

It's often dressed up as righteous indignation and moral outrage but peel away the Simon- pure conceit and you're left with something much more vindictive.

Call-out culture gives us an opportunity to virtue-signal our moral superiority while feeding our much more savage urge for public shaming.

If you've ever been an active participant or silent bystander to public shaming, it's worth considering what you're actually hoping to achieve. Are you trying to highlight sexism or showcase your deep understanding of gender politics? Are you trying to expose bigotry or get likes?

Crucially, are you striving to effect social change or are you subscribing to the fundamental belief that people don't change and should therefore be shamed into obscurity?

Call-out culture has its place but perhaps it's time we reconsidered how - and why - we do it Document 2 - Call-out culture: how to get it right (and wrong) The Guardian, November 1, 2019, by Adrienne Matei

It’s a defining feature of our online conversations – but, as Obama noted, the point of highlighting someone else’s mistakes is not just to feel good about yourself

Even if you’re not that active on social media, you’ve probably experienced it: the sudden wave of dread that overwhelms you when you realize you’ve said something you shouldn’t have – and someone has noticed.

Barack Obama thinks 'woke' kids want purity. They don't: they want progress Malaika Jabali Read more You’ve been called out: your mistake suddenly feels grave and irreparable; you may even worry that this one episode could affect your whole life.

A version of call-out culture has been functioning for centuries as a tool for the marginalized and their allies to reveal injustice and the need for reform. The practise of directly addressing inequality underpins countless social justice movements, from civil rights to Standing Rock.

The contemporary idea of a “call-out”, however, generally refers to interpersonal confrontations occurring between individuals on social media. In theory, call-outs should be very simple – someone does something wrong, people tell them, and they avoid doing it again in the future. Yet you only need to spend a short amount of time on the internet to know that call-out culture is in fact extremely divisive.

Former president Obama pointed out this week at the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago that call-outs can give the illusion that you’re effecting change, even if that is not true. “If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right, or used the wrong word or verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, because, ‘Man, you see how woke I was. I called you out.’ That’s not activism,” Obama said.

A reason call-outs can be polarizing is they often challenge the status quo. They can spark discomfort and offense, as when Canadian activist Nora Loreto went on Twitter to suggest that the C$15.2m raised to support the Humboldt Broncos junior ice hockey team after a deadly bus crash last year was donated so generously in part because victims of the accident were young, male and white. Or earlier this month when, in response to Ellen DeGeneres tweeting about her friendship with George W Bush and kumbaya policy of being nice to everyone, critics pointed out that niceness is not an unalloyed good.

Some people feel that call-outs are an excuse for petty drama – a way to stir up gossip more than to promote social justice. Think of when Coleen Rooney launched a real-life soap opera by accusing fellow British football wife Rebekah Vardy of subterfuge last month, or the heady influencer drama that escalated between YouTubers Tati Westbrook and James Charles this summer.

Yet the most potent critiques of call-out culture come from those who feel it is an excuse for crude vigilante justice – “zealotry … fueled by people working out their psychological wounds”, as the New York Times columnist David Brooks called it earlier this year. A “trial by fire” method of responding to any alleged violation of propriety, writes the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf. A frequently cited problem with call-outs is that it’s all too easy to get carried away and overpunish people, turning alleged perpetrators of upsetting acts into victims themselves. “What can often start out as well-intentioned and necessary criticism far too quickly devolves into brutish displays of virtual tar-and-feathering,” writes the activist and writer Ruby Hamad.

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This leaves one question: how can we benefit from the social good call-out culture can help achieve, without succumbing to the toxicity and futility that has come to be associated with it?

Some advocate a softer approach to call-outs. By ganging up on an individual, “you’re taking this moral high ground, with a lot of righteous indignation, and inviting others to participate in a public shaming exercise”, which is rarely productive, says Anna Richards, a therapist specializing in conflict mediation.

Richards cautions against taking a “reductionist approach” when calling out an individual. When we rationalize our own mistakes, “we tend to give ourselves really high context”, she says. “We think, well I was going through something, and there were certain norms at the time, I was following everybody else,” but when someone offends us we’re less willing to see what contributed to their behavior, aside from inherent badness.

While there is no one absolute right way to call someone out, Richards believes that learning to analyze our own motivations when offering criticism, and considering the context and possible consequences of the situation we’re contributing to helps call-out culture work productively.

Of course, it’s also up to the individual whose behavior has been called into question to be open, humble and willing to see such incidents as opportunities to learn, rather than a one- way ticket into a cartoon dust ball fight. After all, one tried and true way to begin resolving interpersonal conflict is to sincerely apologize when you have, intentionally or not, caused harm.

Unfortunately, apologizing can be challenging for some. According to Richards, in order for someone to apologize they need to have a fairly robust sense of self-worth, and often people are insecure and pathologically afraid of being wrong.

“People feel as though they’re already on shaky ground and if they have some sort of mistake highlighted it would be drawing from an empty cup,” she says. “Generally what I see is just a total collapse, where the person’s sense of self is eroded, or a kind of counter- attack, where they double down on their position and don’t want to learn.”

In other cases, a self-preservation instinct will lead people to offer a submission—a calculated, face-saving apology that doesn’t suggest true accountability. (Such as, most believe, those offered by actor Gina Rodriguez earlier this month, and comedian Shane Gillis this summer, both for using offensive racial epithets.)

Richards may believe in an empathetic approach to conflict resolution, yet she is wary of putting the onus of peacekeeping and politesse on the injured party. Rather, she suggests anger may be better channeled at the root of the systemic forces that give individuals the entitlement to behave in a way that’s uncaring of others. What that means is that there are circumstances when it may be better to confront not individuals, but political or corporate institutions able to implement change or influence others on a larger scale. After all, Richards mediates conflict all day long, and she says that an individual changing their behavior is “not as common as we would like”.

As the old saying goes: choose your battles wisely.

Still, positive outcomes are possible. According to writer and activist Kitty Stryker, the recent backlash to the Netflix animated series Big Mouth’s inaccurate definition of bisexuality is an example of functional call-out culture. Members of the queer community voiced their anger when the show misrepresented bisexuals as not being attracted to trans individuals. Producer Andrew Goldberg responded with an apology and pledge to do better in the future.

Could Goldberg have done more? Sure, his critics have suggested he hire a more diverse writing room, for one, and it remains to be seen how he’ll make his work more inclusive. Yet atonement is a process; the only way to begin it is by acknowledging a mistake and expressing the sincere intent to learn from it.

“I think what differentiates a call-out from bullying is that it shouldn’t be about punishing someone for something they have done, rather it should be about establishing a new pattern of behavior,” says Stryker, who has been on both the giving and receiving ends of call-outs throughout her career. “Basically, when someone calls you out they want you to start showing through your actions that you care about the issue you’ve been called out on.”

If you’re confronted about something offensive you may have said or done, Stryker acknowledges making an effort to listen and learn may be difficult. “You are going to get petty at times, you’re going to get mad, you’re going to be like, ‘why should I listen to this person?’ But you have to take a deep breath and not tweet when you’re in that state, and be like ‘OK, they are very mad at me, but what is the fundamental seed in here that I can take away?’

“When I get called out, I think, ‘awesome this is a chance for me to learn,’” says Stryker. “I don’t need forgiveness on top of that. I just don’t want to hurt my friends.” Document 3 - Cancel culture: how social media has stopped us from holding the rich and powerful to account The South China Morning Post, by Abid Rahman, February 17, 2020

Once a useful tool wielded by ordinary folk, boycotting people is now being exploited by hysterical online die hards. Is it time to cancel the cancellers?

What is the one thing that links Johnny Depp, Ivanka Trump and The Simpsons ’ Apu Nahasapeemapetilon ? No, it’s not that one plays cartoon-like characters, one comes across as a cartoon villain and the other is a literal cartoon. Rather, at some point in their existence, all three have been cancelled.

You may have heard the term “cancel culture”; barely a day goes by without some prominent person falling victim to it. It has become something of a cottage industry, particularly when it comes to fashion, beauty and celeb-stalking social media accounts. There are whole Twitter and Instagram accounts dedicated to calling out people and companies, notably beauty Instagramers Estée Laundry and the new fashion police Diet Prada (those rapscallions who got Dolce & Gabbana cancelled, momentarily, in China for that execrable chopsticks video and ensuing racist comments from designer Stefano Gabbana).

Just like the phrases “triggered”, “snowflake” and “safe space”, being cancelledis an unwanted gift from the social media age – the very reason we can’t have nice things like the internet without ruining it. But for the uninitiated, cancel culture is when the public (or at least a motivated minority with big social media followings) withdraws its support for a person, group or company over objectionable behaviour, comments or even outfits. If that sounds a bit arbitrary, it is.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not against the weak and powerless holding the rich and powerful to account, which not too long ago was the basis of cancel culture. If anything we need more of that. It was once good and righteous. Nowadays, I am more just sick of where we have ended up with cancelling, and how performative and meaningless it has become and how it adds yet more grist to the outrage mill online. Heck, cancelling has become such a joke that I am constantly cancelling friends and family over WhatsApp in the name of humour. Admittedly, they rarely speak to me these days, but they are busy as it has been a roller-coaster start to 2020. Probably.

What triggered (ha!) my recent antipathy to cancel culture was the supposed cancelling of actor Vince Vaughn. He hasn’t done anything illegal or terrible – aside from Delivery Man (2013) and Unfinished Business (2015) – but he made the news a few weeks ago for shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with Donald and Melania Trump at a college- football game. To read the stories about this incident on sites such as CNN.com, you’d think Vaughn was the latest bête noire, but take it from someone who is “very online”, the reality is no one, besides a few always angry yahoos, cared.

Unlike most Hollywood stars, Vaughn is a staunch libertarian and that fact is well known, and who cares if he is? So Vaughn briefly acknowledging Trump isn’t news. But because a few Twitter wags made the entirely obvious meta joke, “Sorry, but Vince Vaughn is cancelled”, off to the outrage races we went. Pretty soon there was a right-wing pundit pile-on about cancel culture going too far and an entirely fabricated bad-faith narrative about how conservatives were being persecuted, all based on joke tweets. Yes, the very people who complain about others being “triggered” were themselves triggered by, at best, a pretty weak joke.

It. Was. All. So. Dumb.

The problem is that the masses who don’t spend an unhealthy amount of time on Twitter have no idea it was all just hot garbage. So when ordinary people read the “news” reports, they think it’s true that Vaughn is persona non grata and it’s all silly and getting out of hand. And thus things become even more meaningless and stupid.

To reiterate, I am annoyed about the conversation around cancelling rather than the notion of cancelling itself. The people who have genuinely been cancelled, if we must use that word – the likes of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly – are facing criminal allegations. These people haven’t merely been cancelled, they have been arrested and charged. To boycott their output so they no longer profit seems to me an entirely fine and moral thing to do.

What the Vaughn incident does is conflate things and cheapen the concept. Alas, because social media algorithms reward outrage, bad faith and surface-level understanding, this is only likely to get worse. Cancelling, once a noble endeavour, will become just another weapon in the mindless culture war we all have to suffer. If only we could cancel the fake cancellers who have made us want to cancel cancel culture, maybe we could get back to holding the powerful to account. Also, Vince Vaughn, make some funny movies again, I’m not going to cancel you but my patience is wearing thin, buddy. Document 4 Document 5 FILE 7 – Mediocracy

Document 1 - Is meritocracy making everyone miserable ? The New Yorker, Louis Menand, September 23, 2019

In a renewed debate over élite higher education, the question is whether the system is broken or the whole idea was a terrible mistake. IIn recent years, we have been focussed on two problems, social mobility and income inequality, and the place these issues appear to meet is higher education. That’s because education in the United States is supposed to be meritocratic. If the educational system is reproducing existing class and status hierarchies—if most of the benefits are going to students who are privileged already—then either meritocracy isn’t working properly or it wasn’t the right approach in the first place. Paul Tough, in “The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), thinks that the problem is a broken system. Daniel Markovits, in “The Meritocracy Trap” (Penguin Press), thinks that the whole idea was a terrible mistake. The term “meritocracy” was invented in the nineteen-fifties with a satirical intent that has now mostly been lost. “Merit” was originally defined as “I.Q. plus effort,” but it has evolved to stand for a somewhat ineffable combination of cognitive abilities, extracurricular talents, and socially valuable personal qualities, like leadership and civic-mindedness. Attributes extraneous to merit, such as gender, skin color, physical ableness, and family income, are not supposed to constrain the choice of educational pathways. Educational sorting often begins very early in the United States, as when schoolchildren are selected for “gifted and talented” programs, and it continues in high school, where some students are pushed onto vocational tracks. But every American has the right to an elementary- and high-school education. You just need to show up. Until you are sixteen, you are required by law to show up. College is different. College is a bottleneck. You usually have to apply, and you almost always have to pay, and college admissions is a straight-up sorting mechanism. You are either selected or rejected. And it matters where. Research shows that the more selective a college’s admissions process the greater the economic value of the degree. The narrower the entryway, the broader the range of opportunities on the other side. College, in turn, sorts by qualifying some students for graduate and professional education (law, dentistry, architecture). And graduate and professional education then sorts for the labor market. It’s little gold stars all the way up. College is also a kind of dating service. You and your classmates have chosen and been chosen by the same school, which means that your classmates are typically people whose abilities and interests are comparable to your own. And, for many people, friendships with other students constitute the most valuable return on their investment in college education. One of the things they are buying is entrance into a network of classmates whose careers may intersect profitably with theirs, and alumni who can become references and open doors. We find it unseemly when someone is hired because his or her mom or dad made a phone call. We think that’s unmeritocratic. But we are not, usually, taken aback when we learn that someone got a job interview through a college roommate or an alumni connection, even though that is also unmeritocratic. We accept that those connections, along with connections that students make with their professors, are among the things you “earn” by getting into a college. It’s one of the rewards for merit. Education therefore plays an outsized role in people’s lives. It can vastly outweigh the effects of family and local community on people’s beliefs, values, tastes, and life paths. For the individual student, the investment in time and money, not to mention the stress, can be enormous. But, according to Steven Brint’s “Two Cheers for Higher Education” (Princeton), even though tuition and fees increased by more than four times the rate of inflation between 1980 and 2012, college and graduate-school enrollments grew every year. (There has been a dip in recent years.) Almost every study concludes that getting a college degree is worth it. What is known as the college wage premium—the difference in lifetime earnings between someone with only a high-school diploma and someone with a college degree—is now, by one calculation, a hundred and sixty-eight per cent. For people with an advanced degree, the wage premium is two hundred and thirteen per cent. (Of course, the more people who get a college degree—about a third of the population now has a bachelor’s degree—the greater the penalty for not having one. The decrease in earnings for non-degree holders raises the premium.) The investment is also substantial for society as a whole. Taxpayers spend a hundred and forty-eight billion dollars a year to support higher education through subsidies and grants. Total annual revenue at all colleges and universities—including public, private, and for- profit schools, from all sources, including tuition, grants, gifts, and endowment income—is more than six hundred and forty-nine billion dollars. The question of whether the system is working for everyone is therefore never an inappropriate one to ask. Fifty years ago, the worry about meritocracy centered on race and gender. In 1965, the student population in American colleges and universities was ninety-four per cent white and sixty-one per cent male. By one measure, this problem appears to have been solved, despite tireless resistance to the methods that colleges have used to get there. Today, fifty- six per cent of students are classified as non-Hispanic whites and forty-two per cent of students are male. A more fine-grained analysis suggests that this is not quite the victory for diversity that it seems. According to a report from the Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workforce, enrollment in the four hundred and sixty-eight best-funded and most selective four-year institutions is seventy-five per cent white, while enrollment in the thirty-two hundred and fifty lowest-funded community colleges and four-year universities is forty- three per cent black and Hispanic, a pattern of de-facto segregation which mirrors that of the country’s public schools. Nor does racial diversity necessarily correlate with economic diversity. That a student is nonwhite obviously does not mean he or she is from a disadvantaged background. Highly selective colleges tend to select from the best-off underrepresented minorities. And this feeds into our current focus on class and income. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the college wage premium was small or nonexistent. Americans did not have to go to college to enjoy a middle-class standard of living. And the income of Americans who did get a degree, even the most well-remunerated ones, was not exorbitantly greater than the income of the average worker. By 1980, though, it was clear that the economy was changing. The middle class was getting hollowed out, its less advantaged members taking service jobs that reduced their income relative to the top earners’. “The help-wanted ads are full of listings for executives and for dishwashers—but not much in between,” Walter Mondale said at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. Since then, the situation has grown worse. In a survey conducted in 2014, fifty-five per cent of Americans identified as lower class or working class. And, of the many differences between Trump and Clinton voters in 2016, the education gap seems to have been a key one. “The Years That Matter Most” is a journalist’s book. Paul Tough interviewed students, teachers, researchers, and administrators, trying to figure out why the higher-education system fails some Americans and what people are doing to fix it. He has fascinating stories about efforts to remediate class disparities in higher education, some of which have succeeded and some of which may have made matters worse. What’s best about the book, a fruit of all the time Tough spent with his subjects, is that it humanizes the process of higher education. People have different situations and different aspirations. Not everyone wants to go to Harvard or Stanford. Not everyone wants a job on Wall Street. People should be able to lead flourishing lives without a prestigious college degree, or any college degree at all. On the other hand, there are people who could go to Harvard or Stanford but don’t have the chance—because they are not given proper guidance in high school, because of family pressures and financial need, because their test scores do not accurately reflect their potential. Two standardized tests have been used nationally in college admissions since the fifties, the ACT and the SAT, and they are constantly duking it out for market share. Tough’s analysis focusses on the SAT, which is administered by the College Board. The SAT was originally designed as an I.Q. test, based on the idea that people are born with a certain quantum of smarts (g, as psychologists used to call it). The purpose of the SAT was not to expand the college population. It was just to make sure that innately bright people got to go. A lot of the debate over the SAT, therefore, has had to do with whether there really is such a thing as g, whether it can be measured by a multiple-choice test, whether smarts in the brute I.Q. sense is what we mean by “merit,” and whether the tests contain cultural biases that cause some groups to underperform. But the real problem with the SAT is much simpler: SAT scores are not very good at predicting college grades. What is very good at predicting college grades? High-school grades, at least for American applicants. (For international students, whose secondary schools can have inconsistent or hard-to-parse grading systems, the SAT may be a useful way for admissions offices to pick out promising recruits.) Submitting high-school grades costs the applicant nothing. Tough thinks that the College Board knows it has a problem and is trying to disguise it. In 2017, facing the fact that an increasing number of colleges were no longer requiring standardized-test scores, the company helped produce a report, “Grade Inflation and the Role of Standardized Testing,” which claimed that grade inflation favors well-off students. “Test-optional policies,” the report concluded, “may become unsustainable.” The College Board promoted this finding by, among other things, running an online advertorial in The Atlantic called “When Grades Don’t Show the Whole Picture.” “Submitting SAT scores as part of a college application can open doors of opportunity not just for a privileged few, but for all students,” the article said. The SAT is the disadvantaged student’s friend. It takes a bite out of privilege. The education press bought it. The trouble, Tough says, is that the report’s conclusion is contradicted by evidence contained in the report itself. Grade inflation has been consistent across racial and socioeconomic groups. What have not been consistent are SAT scores. Since 1998, the average score of students whose parents are well educated has increased by five points, while the average score of students whose parents have only an associate’s (two-year college) degree has dropped by twenty-seven points. It turns out that the SAT is, in fact, the friend of privilege. If you combine SAT scores with high-school G.P.A., you get a slightly better predictor of college grades than you do using G.P.A. alone. But the SAT, a highly stressful rite of passage for American teen-agers that has cost their parents, over the years, many millions of dollars in test-preparation schemes, is a largely worthless product. College does enable social mobility, but it’s not happening at the most selective schools. According to the Harvard economist Raj Chetty, children whose parents are in the top one per cent of the income distribution—roughly 1.6 million households—are seventy-seven times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than children whose parents are in the bottom income quintile (about twenty-five million households). At what are called the Ivy Plus colleges—the eight Ivies plus schools such as the University of Chicago, M.I.T., and Stanford—more than two-thirds of the students are from the top quintile and less than four per cent are from the bottom. The most extreme case, according to Tough, is Princeton, where seventy-two per cent are from the top quintile and 2.2 per cent are from the bottom. Such data suggest that higher education is not doing much to close the income gap, and that it may be helping to reproduce a class system that has grown dangerously fractured. This is the phenomenon that the man who coined the term “meritocracy,” Michael Young, predicted back in 1958, and it has been tracked by a number of writers since. In a classic history of meritocracy, “The Big Test,” published in 1999, Nicholas Lemann concluded, “You can’t undermine social rank by setting up an elaborate process of ranking.” This inversion of what meritocratic education sought to achieve is the subject of “The Meritocracy Trap.” Daniel Markovits thinks that meritocracy is responsible not only for the widening gap between the very rich and everyone else but for basically everything else that has gone wrong in the United States in the past forty years. “The afflictions that dominate American life,” he says, “arise not because meritocracy is imperfectly realized, but rather on account of meritocracy itself.” “The Meritocracy Trap” is an academic’s book. Markovits is a law professor at Yale. He draws his evidence from an impressive range of studies, by other researchers, of income inequality and its effects on the quality of American life. But the book completely lacks a human element. It is as though Markovits constructed simulacra of human beings out of his data: this is what the numbers tell you that people must be like. It is almost impossible to recognize anyone you actually know. “My students at Yale—the poster children for meritocracy—are more nearly overwhelmed and confounded by their apparent blessings than complacent or even just self-assured,” he writes. “They seek meaning that eludes their accomplishments and regard the intense education that constitutes their elevated caste with a diffidence that approaches despair.” I happen to know some current students and recent graduates of Yale Law School, and they don’t seem diffident or despairing to me at all. In fact, they seem, understandably, rather pleased with themselves. Document 2 - Political correctness transformed university culture to 'mediocracy' The Hill, Albert James Arnold, September 5, 2019

Following World War II, American society envisaged social promotion via a meritocratic system that would benefit underprivileged classes through public education. Republicans and Democrats agreed sufficiently on the general goals and enabled funding through state legislatures. When baby boomers entered post-secondary education in the 1960s, states were obliged to open many new public universities, and expand or broaden the mission of existing universities. The cost of attending these institutions was relatively modest, and government-subsidized loans opened college and university doors to previously excluded students. At the beginning of this period, 10 percent of the U.S. population had completed a four- year college or university program of study. Thirty years later, the figure had risen to 25 percent of the population, the Department of Education reported in 1993. When I taught French and comparative literature at the University of Virginia (1966-2007), the first 25 years of my tenure were a golden age of free expression and productive investigation of cultural problems. Classroom teaching and dissertation direction were marked by mutual respect and trust. The decisive turn in university culture dates to 1991 when, in a commencement speech at the University of Michigan, President George H.W. Bush — who, a year earlier, had declared his would be the “education presidency” — articulated the definition of political correctness that has prevailed ever since: “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the desire to sweep away the debris of racism, sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudices with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expressions off-limits, even certain gestures off- limits.” Quite rapidly, the political and cultural right wing in the United States succeeded in associating the faculties and administrative bodies of elite American colleges and universities with a new censorship of conduct, thought and expression. Rather than launching a spirited counter-attack against freedom of expression, faculties and administrations began to double down. A courageous stance would have involved an admittedly difficult, but necessary, historical reassessment of past gender and racial errors. Instead, universities across the country chose the path of least resistance, establishing breast-beating and guilt in the administrative heart of university culture. Discriminatory terms were to be banned to avoid placing them in historical context. Eventually, symbols, signs and statues were identified for removal. Obliterating the symbolism, it was thought, could make the problem go away. Quite to the contrary, lawsuits and removal of city councils have resulted from this initiative. Many institutions hired a new layer of administrators to assure that institutions satisfied federal regulations put in place to protect women and minorities. Within a decade, students began to complain if professors touched on “problematic” historical or cultural subjects that made them uncomfortable. Non-confrontational and often one-sided “conversations” replaced serious debate. The transition of the American university toward mediocracy — that is, a system that rewards mediocrity — is linked to these misguided decisions and administrative actions. Ultimately, it became clear that “political correctness” was the visible superstructure of a fundamental transformation of American higher education that has imposed new censorship on thought and speech. Many educators today live in fear of punishment for attempting to open the minds of their students. Through international conferences, visiting professorships and short-term research appointments, I engaged in stimulating exchanges with colleagues from universities in France, The Netherlands, Germany, Russia, England and Australia. A common thread of these conversations is consternation at the repression of free expression and the new puritanism that has replaced it. The problem is systemic; it results from a fundamental shift in the mission of the university. When new administrative echelons were put in place, the cost of public education spiraled upward. Convinced by right-wing critics that their universities were in the hands of a self- serving elite, state legislatures cut back drastically on contributions to university budgets. At the University of Virginia, for example, the state contribution to tuition and fees has fallen from 67 percent to 47 percent in the past 15 years. During that same period, meritocracy was dismantled and mediocracy took its place. Whose ends did this transformation serve, and what are the likely long-term results? At the structural level, universities imported from industry a managerial model that minimizes interpersonal conflict in the interest of maximum “product” output. Only “outcomes,” of the most immediate and quantifiable sort, are considered measurable and, therefore, legitimate. Our “product” was redefined as degrees conferred in a minimum amount of time, and in terms of jobs or careers directly related to the graduate’s degree program. At the University of Virginia, the undergraduate schools of Commerce and Nursing and the graduate faculties of law and medicine ranked high in this new management system. The faculty of arts and sciences did not; the departments of arts and humanities in which I labored made the worst possible showing. At present, the University of Virginia and others in the top tier of institutions have been able to maintain the relative autonomy of these departments. But for how long? Document 3 - Has Mediocracy Become the Acceptable Standard of Performance? https://cherokeenc.fetchyournews.com, March 4, 2020, by George McClellan

Why does it constantly seem that government, name any one but for this purpose our own Federal Government, appears to be so inept? It’s because it is inept! Within any organization where the worker bees are made comfortable with themselves, ineptitude and mediocrity becomes the acceptable standard of performance. Add mandated “affirmative action” programs to that mix and the worker bee class will habitually conform to fit their lowest level of incompetence within their comfort zone because they know they can almost never be fired for any reason. With that we will always end up with a Pelosi Congress.

A President, who has risen up out of the primordial swamp where their political careers have gestated over many years, like Joe Biden’s, is usually considered safe to maintain the status quo because they’re already surrounded by comfortable worker bees who will assure their Masters that the status quo isn’t altered, even accidentally or worse, by design. Campaign promises made are as quickly ignored once the successful candidate, be they Democrat or Republican, is safely ensconced in the Oval Office. And the con game goes on!

In 2016, America hesitatingly embarked on a new path to understanding the gifts our forefathers left for us by men who struggled to make it right, casting aside the original, but unworkable Articles of Confederation to arrive at what is now our enduring Constitution. It is for that very reason our always broken government was challenged by alarmed American who voted for the non-politician Donald Trump. And, he’s kept his promises. To the Progressive Left who thought they were on a continuing roll, Trump’s election was a blasphemous sacrilege to their lucrative elitism. Such a deal.

Predictably, the status quo crowd went berserk and launched a continuing hate campaign against Donald Trump. To maintain their self-serving posture, their tactics have become a laughable exercise in futility because the target of their ire, Donald Trump, is like an armadillo trashing all the old shibboleths that kept the Deep State viable. He not only deflects their assaults on his presidency, he counter-attacks as no president has ever done before and they don’t know how to handle it. The corruption has been exposed but, do we stand back in shock? Naw! We’ve become immune to their double standards!

A logical solution to dismantling the “status quo” that is the Deep State is to make it no longer a goal for incompetent job seeker’s while driving out those bottom feeders already comfortably ensconced there. First, lower the salaries to be competitive with outside industries. Distribute Wash. DC around the country. Make civil service positions rotatable including supervisors and forbid unionization of the civil service. What does rotatable mean? Just like the Dept. of Defense, many DoD civilians get PCS 蜉 transfers to different parts of the country, or world, within the same agency that hired them. Those who choose not to move, can seek compatible employment in their local private industry.

On the professional side of the Deep State, those bureaus and agencies that do not unionize like in the State Dept., DoJ, FBI, IRS and the several Intelligence agencies, already move their assets from time to time for promotions or occasionally punishment. But move they will if they are looking for a retirement. For the Justice Dept., the problem there is that they are staffed mostly by liberal thinking lawyers. In Obama’s DoJ it appears the corruption by Progressivism had deep roots. Honest lawyers won’t stick around. The same for the FBI. Why do we see more “former” FBI agents than retired ones? An honest man simply won’t abide the corruption. The FBI’s problem can be solved by never, ever, ever appointing a lawyer out of the DoJ to be Director. That job should exclusively go to a career agent who has risen up through the ranks and knows the agency inside and out. Solutions are easy, it just take the will. Trump has it. Let’s get cracking! Remember, freedom is the goal, the Constitution is the way. Now, go get ’em!

Document 4 – In Defense of Being Average Document 5 – In praise of mediocrity