Free Speech Fights, Foster Care Failures, Fake Voter Fraud
KTF Weekly Newsletter
Hi everybody,
Happy New Year! We hope you got to enjoy a bit of rest and restoration over the holidays. We’re getting back into it this week with highlights about:
How we misuse the idea of free speech
The hardest cases in the foster care system
Trump’s non-existent election fraud
A song from a famous hip-hop artist and Jonathan’s accompanying prayer
A Christmas Eve sermon from Palestine
And debates over mining in one of America’s most untouched ecosystems
Also, quick announcement: we have a YouTube channel now! Please subscribe and share widely. We will be adding more and more content in the coming months to reach the many, many of you out there who prefer video to audio content. Sy can safely say he does not personally understand this tendency, but we want to reach as many people as we can with our message about the difference between Jesus and the idols of western Christianity. Check out one of our first videos, Jonathan reading his recent essay about addressing the shame he feels around his upbringing:
Alright, without further ado, let’s get into it.
Sy’s recommendations:
While we were on our holiday break, writer and critic Andrea Long Chu wrote a very helpful article on common ways people misunderstand and weaponize the idea of free speech. She correctly points out that the constitutional right to free speech only applies to government action; private institutions can and always do legally censor viewpoints they don’t like. Using Israel and Palestine as an example, she argues those opposing the occupation should concede no ground to the notion that we should give equal airtime to opinions promoting Israel’s ethnic cleansing. Disaffiliating with or disinviting people with pro-colonialist views is not a violation of a sacred democratic principle, but a perfectly acceptable tactic in cultural conflicts which pro-occupation forces deploy all the time without hesitation. Chu’s position is refreshingly realistic, clear, and evenhanded. I hope you all read the article.
When I was a defense attorney for parents in the child welfare system, many of my clients had a history in foster care. In the worst of these cases, they had spent time in residential treatment facilities, campuses where older foster kids go when agencies have a particularly hard time placing them with foster families. The children there all have horrifying trauma in their past, often accompanied by significant mental health symptoms and/or substance use. But the facilities are unequipped to support the residents in any meaningful way. I often thought that they were simply the place agencies warehoused “difficult” kids until they aged out of the system. One of the facilities where clients of mine had lived was in Pleasantville, New York, the subject of a recent investigation into the understaffed and underfunded world of last-resort foster care placements. The article also covers the mostly White surrounding town’s racist attempts to rid themselves of the largely Black and brown children. I share all this in the hopes that you will pray against the prevailing attitude toward our most vulnerable children, which is to push them out of sight and out of mind for as little money as possible. Nothing could be further from Jesus’ posture toward marginalized people.
Since former President Trump’s claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election from him has become orthodoxy for the Republican base, six red state governments established offices to combat election fraud. After more than a year of operation and many millions of tax dollars, three of those offices have brought no cases at all, while the remaining three brought charges in just over a hundred cases versus tens of millions of votes cast. The majority of those cases ended in prosecutors dropping the case or juries acquitting the defendants. And, unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of cases were against BIPOC and Democrats. You can read all about it in this comprehensive overview of Republican election “integrity” efforts. I am always immensely thankful for reporting like this that patiently details disinformation’s slow demise. It’s not a flashy story, but it’s an important story for us to know as we engage in discussions about increasingly common political conspiracy theories.
Jonathan’s recommendations:
Tobe Nwigwe is a Nigerian-American hip-hop artist from Houston. His song “Make it Home” is about finding a way to safety and to Jesus in a world that is trying to oppress and kill so many people. One of my prayers for 2024 is that we will all be able to make it home. Protests will fill the streets for lives downstream of suffering, oppression, over policing, and empowered prejudice, and I pray everyone protesting and everyone facing the evils being protested will make it home. Amen!
“Christ in the Rubble: A Liturgy of Lament” was the title of the sermon Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac delivered on Christmas Eve from his Bethlehem church in Palestine(in addition to the linked video, you can also read a transcript of the sermon). It’s the most important message for Christians about the genocide in Palestine I have heard. With sincere conviction, honesty, and tact in the face of such profound suffering, Dr. Isaac’s prophetic faithfulness challenged me in ways I am still processing. I pray you will listen, learn, and act in accordance with the Holy Spirit and Dr. Isaac’s appeal. And of course, for more, you can listen to our interview with Dr. Isaac on Palestinian theology and the global church’s role in Israel’s occupation, or read the transcript.
Washington Post reporter Lillian Cunningham’s podcast series Field Trip covers the past and future of America’s national parks. The series finale took her to America’s largest and least-visited park: Alaska’s Gates of the Arctic. There, mining companies, Native tribes, and politicians are wrestling with whether to disturb the ecosystem to make copper mining in surrounding land easier. The twist is that the copper is a necessary component of technology used in green, alternative energy. The desire to leave fossil fuels behind is meeting the limits of the environment, the exploitative history of extraction, and all the interests of the affected parties.
Thanks so much for reading, and see you next week!
Jonathan and Sy