Linkage

My inquisitor had come to CPAC to see what people were saying about school choice and was disappointed to discover that the answer to that question was nothing. Education policy, he lamented, was nowhere to be found at this event. Indeed, what passed for policy discussions at CPAC this year was largely limited to mass deportations and attacks on trans athletes. The sober panels about the national debt, balancing the budget, or Social Security reform that once commanded top billing were a relic of another era before CPAC became an extension of Trump Inc., devoted to all the MAGA grievances like racial equity, the evils of windmills, or bans on gas stoves. When I finally was able to explain that I was a reporter who’d been denied a press pass, the man launched into an earnest yet incomprehensible spiel about how the government is censoring people. Politely, I fled into the crowd watching Bannon.

After two days of passing as a CPAC attendee, I marveled at how weird it was to be on the other side like this. Over the past 15 years, I have attended dozens of right-wing conferences and events, even in the Trump White House, and always as a credentialed reporter. This time, instead of being treated like the enemy, I was briefly embraced as part of the tribe, and it became clear how seductive this could be for some people. I saw up close how people felt liberated to be their worst deplorable selves in what they believed was a safe space, surrounded by supportive, like-minded enablers.

There’s basically two reasons someone transitioning gets made into a Big Deal: the trans person excitedly making it a big deal, and someone who doesn’t believe trans people should exist gets upset about it.

Trans people usually make a big deal out of our transitions because a lot of us have suppressed this part of ourselves for a long time, and it feels really good to let that part of ourselves out for everyone else to see. Some of us might have known we were trans for most of our lives. Some of us, like me, might not have known until recently. Either way, we had to hold that part of ourselves in, essentially telling ourselves a lie about who we thought we were, or were trying with all our heart to be.

And living like that? Wow, it sucks.

In principle, there is no reason why population growth must push up the cost of shelter. Immigrants need homes — but they are also disproportionately likely to work in construction and, thus, increase the economy’s home-building capacity.

The problem arises when governments effectively prohibit the supply of housing from rising in line with demand. Between 2012 and 2022, Americans formed 15.6 million new households but built only 11.9 million new housing units. As a result, even before the post-lockdown surge in migration, there were more aspiring households than homes in America’s thriving metro areas.

This was largely a consequence of zoning restrictions. Municipal governments have collectively made it illegal to erect an apartment building on about 75 percent of our country’s residential land. In large swaths of the country, there are households eager to rent or buy a modest apartment, and developers eager to provide them, but zoning restrictions have blocked such transactions from taking place.

This creates a housing shortage. You can house 32 families much more quickly and cheaply by building a single apartment building than by erecting 32 separate houses. To require all of your community’s housing units to be single-family homes isn’t all that different from prohibiting the manufacture of all non-luxury cars. In both cases, you end up with artificial scarcity and unaffordability.

In short: Housing advocates fear the social housing sector is buckling under strain as more and more people are priced out of the private rental market.
The body representing tenants in housing disputes says its workload has almost doubled year-on-year.
What's next: The state government says it's tackling need with record investment in the sector.

The presence of these individuals has been a persistent issue at CPAC. In previous years, conference organizers have ejected well-known Nazis and white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes.

But this year, racist conspiracy theorists didn’t meet any perceptible resistance at the conference where Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker since 2017.

At the Young Republican mixer Friday evening, a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed “race science” and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

One member of the group, Greg Conte, who attended the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, said that his group showed up to talk to the media. He said that the group was prepared to be ejected if CPAC organizers were tipped off, but that never happened.

By blaming poor children’s school learning failure on their brains, the billionaires are continuing a long pseudoscientific charade extending back to 19th century “craniology,” which used head shape-and-size to explain the intellectual inferiority of “lesser” groups, such as southern Europeans and blacks. When craniology finally was debunked in the early 20thcentury, psychologists devised the IQ test, which sustained the mental classification business. Purportedly a more scientific instrument, it was heavily used not only to continue craniology’s identification of intellectually inferior ethnic and racial groups, but also to “explain” the educational underachievement of black and poor-white students.

After decades of use, IQ tests were substantially debunked from the 1960s onward, but new, more neurologically complex, so-called brain-based explanations emerged for differing educational outcomes. These explanations conceived of the overall brain as normal, but contended that brain glitches impeded school learning and success. Thus entered “learning disabilities,” “dyslexia,”and “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)” as major neuropsychological concepts to (1) explain school failure, particularly for poor children, although the labels also extended to many middle-class students; and (2) serve as “scientific” justification for scripted, narrow, pedagogy in which teachers seemingly reigned in the classroom, but in fact, were themselves controlled by the prefabricated curricula.

Bannon went on to claim Trump “will go down as the best president since Abraham Lincoln” and hoped he will win in “a massive frickin’ landslide” come November. Bannon was joined by other far-right influencers on Wednesday, including Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. Trump is set to address the conference on Saturday.

“Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it,” Posobiec told the crowd as Bannon added, “Amen”

The federal government last year announced it would triple the incentives paid to doctors who bulk-bill children under the age of 16, pensioners and Commonwealth concession card holders.

Health Minister Mark Butler said the national bulk-billing rate rose by 2.1 percentage points in the first two months of the initiative.

He said the incentives applied to three in every five consultations with a general practitioner.

WA GP Damian Zilm said industry professionals welcomed the subsidies, but said the scheme excluded a large cohort of people struggling with cost-of-living pressures.

Dr Zilm said more patients were delaying care as a result.

"We're seeing a lot of conditions presenting later than they should be," he said.

"These have long-term health consequences which end up costing the Australian government and Australian health care system more money in the long run."

This is one of the best summaries of the problems of car dependency I've seen (and I've seen many).

I’ve loved cars since I was a kid. I’ve owned 60 cars in my life and currently own 9. How did I go from being an absolute car fanatic to someone that can’t stand car dependency? In this video, we delve deep into the issues surrounding our automobile-centric society:

• The endless hours lost to traffic congestion.
• The threats posed to our children.
• The alarming fatalities from distracted driving and flawed vehicle designs.
• The troubling reasons behind bigger cars and the higher risks they pose.
• The questionable decisions of traffic engineers and the infrastructure built for speed over safety.
• Unveiling how the auto industry actively promoted car dependency.
• The disturbing history of how low-income neighborhoods bore the brunt of freeway constructions.
• The alarming shift from pedestrian rights to vehicle dominance.
• How the car industry redefined 'crashes' as 'accidents'.
• How other nations are getting public transportation right.
• And importantly, the crucial role car enthusiasts can play in reshaping this narrative.

Discussion with Prof Roger Griffin on fascism and neo-fascism, comparative fascist studies and his lecture "'What's in a name?': Fascism's value as a taxonomic term in interwar and contemporary history"  held online at the Faculty of Political Science and International Relations / Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica (Slovakia) on 11 March 2021 (moderated by Anton Hruboň).