Black Conservatism and the Peril for the Democratic Party — Tori Douglass, Host – White Homework — #162

Tori Douglass is an ex-evangelical, ex-conservative anti-racist educator. She was born and raised in the Portland Area and since 2015 has been an outspoken critic of American evangelicalism and the racism present in many evangelical communities. We brought her on for a conversation about Black conservatism. We tried to categorize the varieties of Black conservative activism we are seeing in US politics.  In segment two, Tori addressed the electoral peril the Democratic Party faces if it can’t better address the needs of Black communities across the country.

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Protecting Your Online Privacy — Bill Fitzgerald, Privacy Activist — #161

Big tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are swimming in an absolute ocean of our private data. In any ways, we have been worn down and lulled into a sense of helplessness about it. They track our searches, to sell us ads; they track our movement, to aggregate our location data; they track our purchases, sharing them with God knows who. But it’s more than that. Many tech companies share info about us with us with law enforcement agencies and other questionable actors, oftentimes without a warrant or our explicit consent. We tacitly agree to all this, when we accept the Terms of Service for online platforms, but who ever actually reads those? Is that really informed consent?

This is something I have been thinking a lot about lately, so I hollered at Bill Fitzgerald. Bill is a a former teacher an online privacy activist. We welcomed him on the show to help us all think about how to reduce our digital data footprint.

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What Everyone (Especially Teachers) Should Know About Ramadan — Amy Daraiseh — #160

Ramadan begins April 3. Millions of Americans and millions of students in the US will be fasting during daylight hours for a month.

We invited on Amy Daraiseh, a teacher and life coach from Chicago, as a Jordanian-American and observant Muslim, she’s offering her perspective on how we can do our best to support people in our lives who are fasting during Ramadan.

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Wrapping the 2022 State Legislative Session – Melissa Santos, Crosscut – #159

Melissa Santos is a political reporter for Crosscut and a regular guest on the show. She joined us this week to talk about what passed and what didn’t in the 2022 Washington State Legislative Session.

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The State of Teaching, Burnout, and His Latest Book, Raising Ollie – Tom Rademacher – #158

Tom Rademacher is the 2014 Minnesota Teacher of the Year and the author of two books: It Won’t Be Easy, An Exceedingly Honest (and slightly unprofessional) Love Letter to Teaching and Raising Ollie. The last time we spoke to him was in the early days of the pandemic for a conversation about anti-racist teaching.

He returned to the show to talk about the state of the teaching profession, burnout, and his most recent book. 

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An Expert’s Read on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine – Jeff Hawn, London School of Economics – #157

  1. Jeff Hawn is a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics with an area of expertise in US/Russia relations. He previously joined us in October on episode 143 to talk about democratic erosion in Russia in the post-Soviet era. In light of events, we invited him back on the show to discuss the rapidly evolving situation in Ukraine.

Note: During the show, Jeff accidentally mixed up the cities of Kursk and Kharkiv, one of which is in Ukraine, the other is located in Russia 

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Bigger than a Rivalry: the Abuse Scandals in Portland Football – Sheba Rawson, 107IST – #156

The Portland Timbers are a men’s professional soccer team playing in Major League Soccer (MLS). The Portland Thorns are literally their sister club, a women’s team, playing in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). Both teams are owned by millionaire Merritt Paulson, son of former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and both teams have recently been rocked by scandals. In each incident, women were harmed by people employed by the team and in each the team was less than forthright with supporters and the public, arguably engaging in a cover-up. 

The teams’ most passionate fans are members of two supporters groups: the Timbers Army and Rose City Riveters. We brought on one of the leaders of those groups, Sheba Rawson, to talk about the scandals, the lack of transparency from team management, and how the club’s actions are souring the relationship with their most committed fans. 

Recommended Reading:

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Let’s Talk about Safe Seattle and their New Offspring Tacoma Safe  – #155

Tacoma Safe is a new group spearheaded by Angela Connoly. Connoly is a wealthy, socially conservative, activist, who previously led and funded an anti-LGBT effort called the Just Want Privacy Campaign. That campaign sought to restrict access to public bathrooms for transgender people, forcing them to use the restrooms of their sex at birth. 

She is now targeting our local homeless population, leading Tacoma Safe, an apparent copycat of Safe Seattle. Both groups think we can “cop homelessness away” and see increased law enforcement budgets and patrols as the only solutions to current public safety issues.

Safe Seattle was established in 2015, but came to prominence in 2017. Safe Seattle is an anti-homeless, rather than an anti-homelessness organization. It has been criticized by many in the Seattle community as an anti-homeless hate group and has encouraged increased sweeps and the harassment of homeless people, rather than addressing the causes of homelessness.   

Below are Tacoma Safe’s policy recommendations, they largely mirror Safe Seattle’s, and center mainly around policing, offering nothing to address the escalating housing issues in our region. In this episode, we discussed why this is all wrong-headed and ultimately dangerous.

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Why We Need Regional Housing Solutions – Rep. Jessica Bateman, Washington State Legislature, 22nd District – #154

Jessica Bateman is a former planning commissioner and former member of the Olympia City Council. She currently represents the cities of Olympia, Tumwater, and Lacey in the Washington State Legislature.

She joined us on the pod as a follow-up to our conversation last episode with Joe Tovar about “middle housing”. She talked in-depth about why we need regional solutions and why cities fighting against HB 1782 are being counter-productive.

She also makes a convincing plea to self-styled conservatives and libertarians about how the status-quo actually violates their property rights.

Housing is a deeply important issue to our community and one we’ve returned and returned to repeatedly on this show:

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The Missing Middle in Housing – Joseph Tovar, American Planning Association – #153

Joseph Tovar helped draft Washington State’s growth management act and has served as lead planner for cities across Western Washington. He has a theory: we’ve gotten good at building condos, we’ve always been good at building detached single-family housing, but to meet the coming population growth in the region we need to build what he calls “middle housing.” Middle housing includes duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes. These homes put more people on a smaller footprint and will help us increase density, reduce road miles, and help create more housing in cities across Puget Sound.

Housing is a deeply important issue and one we’ve returned and returned to repeatedly on this show:

This episode is brought to you by the generous support of Microsoft and their campaign to support civic conversations in Washington and Libro FM.

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