Dear Commons Community,

NBC News reported yesterday that Miami Beach city leaders voted to extend emergency restrictions because of out-of-control spring break crowds that local officials believe are made up of more than just typical college students.

City commissioners voted to keep an 8 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew in their entertainment district, with an exception for restaurant delivery services, as well as restrictions on causeways beginning at 10 p.m.

The rules, which began Saturday in a 72-hour state-of-emergency order, will remain in effect through the end of the month, with the possibility that they could be extended to mid-April.

The city has made over 1,000 arrests since February, about half of them involving out-of-state-residents, and the influx has led to increasing crowd-control issues, Miami Beach officials said Sunday.

The types of crowds that have descended on the popular South Florida destination are not made up of the regular college-age students officials are used to, Mayor Dan Gelber and City Manager Raul Aguila said.

“I don’t see this is a sort of spring break thing, because I don’t think these are college kids,” Gelber said. “I think it changes the nature of what we’re in front of here. I think there are very few places that are open as we have been and as our state has been open. And there are even precious fewer places as beautiful as ours that is open.”

Aguila said Florida’s lax Covid-19 rules have encouraged people from outside the state to visit.

“This is a spring break like no other,” Aguila said.

Gov. Ron DeSantis agreed to help provide Florida Highway Patrol reinforcement and resources from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for the city, Gelber said.

In recent weeks, officers have taken over streets and sidewalks, Police Chief Richard Clements said, and officers have seized an “alarming” number of firearms.

“We’ve let our officers know that the frequency by which they’re encountering these weapons on the street are probably greater than we’ve seen in five years,” Clements said.

Officers have struggled to rein in large groups of people who have caused fights and stampedes.

Two officers were injured this month as authorities tried to disperse crowds and arrested a 19-year-old on suspicion of inciting a riot. The person is alleged to have yelled profanities at police and resisted an order to disperse as a crowd gathered.

He was arrested on charges of battery on a police officer, incitement to riot and disorderly conduct. Investigators said he failed to leave when officers asked.

Visitors continued to descend on the city despite efforts to restrict activity before the emergency order was approved Sunday.

Miami Beach had imposed a midnight curfew, and alcohol on the beach is forbidden. Tourists were getting cellphone messages warning, “Vacation responsibly or be arrested.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently released a special report, Rethinking Campus Spaces, that offers strategies for doing more with less space, to save money and prepare for an uncertain future.

One-way signs, sparsely furnished classrooms, and empty faculty offices are the norm now, but they won’t last forever. Still, the pandemic may have permanently altered campuses in other ways, accelerating changes that began years before.

The Chronicle asked more than 40 architects, campus planners, and leaders in student life and housing about how several categories of campus spaces might look different in the future. Below is a small excerpt from the report focusing on teaching and learning.  It comments that blended learning [hybrid learning] will reshape the  “classroom.”

Last Friday, I paired with Tanya Joosten of the University of Wisconsin at the OLC INNOVATE Conference on a presentation entitled Planning for a Blended Future.   We discussed not just blended courses or blended academic programs, but “the blended university.”  The Chronicle’s report supports fully our commentary.

Tony

 ———————————————————-

Classrooms

Even though online learning during the pandemic has had its hiccups, many of the experts The Chronicle spoke with expected hybrid classes to persist into the future. That trend will reshape the arrangement of classrooms.

Courses with at least some online, asynchronous components can be better for students who work or care for children during the day, who have health needs that are best taken care of at home, or who otherwise face barriers to coming to campus frequently. As students with more-diverse needs have enrolled in college, Doug Kozma, vice president and campus-planning director for the architecture firm SmithGroup, said he had seen “a really clear shift in space type.”

Even “traditional” students — those who are easily able to attend college full time — want a greater ability to do things when it’s convenient for them. “Everybody wants more flexibility,” said Elliot Felix, chief executive of the consultancy brightspot strategy, “and flexibility generally means a mix of synchronous and asynchronous activities and more online.”

Hybrid and online learning may also help colleges deal with shrinking budgets. When officials with the California State University system and Arizona State University spoke with The Chronicle in the fall of 2020, they expected their enrollments to grow but feared not having the funds available to build additional classrooms. Cal State saw a $299-million budget cut this year, a result of falling state revenues. Leaders at both institutions are looking to online learning to help fill the gap.

Flipped classes, in which students watch recorded lectures on their own before coming to campus for guided hands-on and group activities, were widely discussed and put in use before the pandemic. They might become even more common in the years ahead, which could stoke demand for flexible classrooms that can be quickly rearranged for different activities.

Large lecture halls, with their immobile and tightly packed seating, might decline, or so many consultants hope, believing that they’re not ideal for learning. “I typically say that when you have a large lecture hall, distance learning starts at the 10th row,” said Persis C. Rickes, a higher-education space planner who runs her own firm. “You might as well not be in the classroom at that point, because you are not engaged.” The realization during the pandemic that large lectures can work well online might push colleges to keep at least some of those courses in that format, several planners said.

In an atmosphere of scarcity, institutions will examine closely whether they’re making the most out of their physical spaces and face-to-face time. “We’re going to go into every room and we’re going to say, ‘Is meaningful connection going to happen in this space? Is something going to happen in this space that cannot happen online, that cannot happen at Starbucks?’” said Shannon Dowling, an architect with the firm Ayers Saint Gross. If the answer’s no, the next question is whether the space is worth keeping.

Meanwhile, a move to more online learning might create the need for a different kind of space.

In 2014, the Georgia Institute of Technology started an online master’s-degree program in computer science that costs most students around $7,000. To date, the program has graduated 3,795 students, most of them over the age of 25 and already employed.

Although they were not required to meet in person, students liked to do so anyway. They organized meet-ups in cities including San Francisco, Austin, and Bangalore. They formed groups like Nerdy Bones, for women, who made up 19 percent of the students in the fall of 2020. Administrators found that as many as 80 percent of the U.S.-based students in each cohort lived within a two-hour drive of one of 10 major population centers. That gave the administrators an idea: Build co-working spaces in those cities, where online students could work and meet one another. Each space, called an atrium, would have career and advising services too.

The university is in the early stages of developing several atria, including one in Georgia. But the need has become more urgent as the pandemic has moved more Georgia Tech students online. Administrators are seeing that students are talking with their professors and with each other less than they did before.

“The sort of interactions that happen outside the classroom, those are all missing,” said Stephen Harmon, associate dean of research for Georgia Tech Professional Education. “Even the ones that happen five minutes before class and five minutes after class, those informal learning opportunities are really important to building learning communities.” Students report feeling isolated.

If more students take at least some classes online or in a hybrid format long after the threat of Covid-19 is over, Georgia Tech will want to find ways to make sure those students feel engaged, which just might mean creating more physical spaces for them.

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd in her column today looks at President Joe Biden and compares him to Barack Obama, and concludes that the old pro is demonstrating a lot of new tricks.  Here is an excerpt.

“So now comes a delicious twist: President Biden is being hailed as a transformational, once-in-a-generation progressive champion, with comparisons to L.B.J. and F.D.R. aplenty, while Obama has become a cautionary tale about what happens when Democrats get the keys to the car but don’t put their foot on the gas.

The collective smirk was wiped off the face of Obamaworld this past week, as former aides expressed their irritation at the retrospective dissing, and while Biden’s inner circle enjoyed an unfamiliar sensation: schadenfreude. Now the friendly fire once aimed at Biden is coming toward Obama.”

Provocative take on Biden especially the comparisons to FDR and LBJ.  The entire column is below.

Tony

————————————————————————

New York Times

Old Pol, New Tricks

Biden’s got the buzz. Who’s smirking now?

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

March 20, 2021

Joe Biden never had a seat at the cool kids’ table at the Obama White House.

Heading into 2016 and 2020, if you told the hotshots from Obamaworld that you thought Biden would be a good candidate, they would uniformly offer a look of infinite patience, tolerance and condescension and say something like, “Well, I could understand how someone would think that.”

The message was unmistakable: Biden was not part of the Obama entourage. He was sort of a goofball and windbag. He was a member of an older, outmoded generation. In other words, uncool.

The West Wing attitude was that Biden should simply be grateful that the Great Obama had handed him a ticket to ride. Biden was viewed as a past-his-sell-by-date pol who needed the president’s guiding hand to keep Uncle Joe from making a fool of himself as vice president.

In 2012, Biden faced “friendly fire” from the West Wing, as one outraged Biden family member put it to me back then. Obama aides were furious when Biden went on “Meet the Press” and made a glorious gaffe, blurting out support for gay marriage while his boss was still dragging his feet. They trashed him anonymously to reporters, froze him out of meetings and barred him from doing some national media.

“Being managed into a box by Obama’s cocky campaign team only exacerbated Biden’s innate insecurity and drive for independence,” Glenn Thrush wrote in Politico in 2014.

In eight years, Biden said in a recent reveal that stunned Anderson Cooper — and left Washington gasping — he and Jill were never invited by the Obamas to their private digs in the White House.

Despite a secret poll to see if he should be dropped as veep in favor of Hillary in 2012, despite being pushed aside by Barack Obama for Hillary in 2016, and despite not getting an endorsement from his erstwhile partner in his uphill primary fight in 2020 until he was the last candidate standing, Biden refused to go gentle into that good night, to quote one of his favorite lines of poetry.

With a boost from Black Democrats, if not the most famous one, Biden achieved what pretty much no one — especially bratty Obama disciples — had thought possible. At 78, nearly half a century after he arrived in D.C. as a senator, he became the oldest man ever sworn in as president.

So now comes a delicious twist: President Biden is being hailed as a transformational, once-in-a-generation progressive champion, with comparisons to L.B.J. and F.D.R. aplenty, while Obama has become a cautionary tale about what happens when Democrats get the keys to the car but don’t put their foot on the gas.

The collective smirk was wiped off the face of Obamaworld this past week, as former aides expressed their irritation at the retrospective dissing, and while Biden’s inner circle enjoyed an unfamiliar sensation: schadenfreude. Now the friendly fire once aimed at Biden is coming toward Obama.

All month long, Democrats have been trashing Obama for the size of his itty-bitty 2009 stimulus bill — Chuck Schumer called it “small” and “measly” — and his refusal to sell it to the public.

Now, after President Biden passed the $1.9 trillion cornucopia of liberal delights, Democrats are thinking that if he keeps it up, they’ll soon be picking up their chisels to carve his face on Mount Rushmore, right in the spot Obama must have been picturing for himself.

Creaky, old-fashioned Joe moved fast and broke things. Unlike the sleek, modern Obama, who kept trying to work with obstructionist Republicans, Biden blew them off, calling it “an easy choice.”

Progressives, who had fretted that Biden would govern in a centrist hell, trapped in a sepia, split-the-difference Washington where Mitch McConnell would eat his lunch, were pleasantly surprised.

The lackluster Democratic response to the Great Recession, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The Times’s Astead Herndon, “created so much damage economically, for people, but it also created a lot of political damage for the party.”

Obama’s failure to go big and to send the tumbrels rolling down Wall Street certainly greased the runway for Donald Trump. The paradox of Obama is that Americans embraced radical change by electing him but then he held himself in check, mistakenly believing that he was all the change they could handle.

As vice president, Biden worried that the Obama and Valerie Jarrett crowd at the cool table were too cerebral sometimes, that they’d rather be right than win.

Once Obama had spoken, he expected others to come along. If the policies were good, they’d sell themselves. The president, as it turned out, hated politicking. The idea that he had to sell his agenda was so anathema to him that — shockingly — he had to get Bill Clinton to do it for him at the 2012 Democratic convention. Obama joked that his predecessor would be the new “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.”

Obama seems more comfortable as Netflix talent, sitting pretty with celebrities and chit-chatting with Bruce Springsteen in their new Spotify podcast, “Renegades: Born in the USA.”

Biden, by contrast, is a natural-born salesman, the son of a salesman, who loves nothing more than to mingle with the masses.

Democrats think it’s really kind of cool. Imagine that.

Dear Commons Community,

Mayor Dan Gelber of Miami Beach declared a state of emergency yesterday over spring break crowds that have descended on South Florida.  

During an afternoon news conference (see video above), Mayor Gelber announced an 8 p.m. curfew for the South Beach entertainment district. He also said shore-bound traffic on the city’s causeways would be shuttered.  Both measures will be in effect for at least 72 hours while extending the emergency is debated by officials.  As reported by NBC News.

“As we hit the peak of the peak of spring break, we are quite simply overwhelmed,” City Manager Raul Aguila said.

Crowds last night resembled those of a rock concert, according to officials.

“You couldn’t see pavement and you couldn’t see grass,” Aguila said.

State figures indicate parts of South Florida have continued to be hot spots for Covid-19 transmission. The state has surpassed 2 million coronavirus cases.

Amid this backdrop, authorities have had to grapple with throngs of college students and young people who have flocked to the warm shores of Miami Beach.

On Thursday night, along the city’s famed Ocean Drive, police used pepper balls in an effort to break up a restaurant brawl, according to NBC South Florida.

Citing the crowds, the Clevelander South Beach hotel said it was temporarily shutting down its bar and restaurant services.

“Recently, we have grown increasingly concerned with the safety of our dedicated employees and valued customers and the ability of the City to maintain a safe environment in the surrounding area,” the hotel said in a statement.

Police Chief Rick Clements said his officers responded to multiple fights on South Beach on Friday night. Tables and chairs were used as impromptu weapons, according to the chief.”

This is a good move on the part of Mayor Gelber!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, in his newsletter earlier this week, described things that we can take away from this pandemic that are positives or epiphanies.  Here is an excerpt.

“The way in which shuttered schools, canceled extracurricular activities and closed offices compelled them and their children to spend more time together? There was stress in this, often proportional to a home’s square footage, but there was also intimacy. They liked how many nights everyone ate dinner together.

The halt to commuting? That was all upside and, along with the cessation of business travel, it produced a revelation: In-person meetings and the logistics that went into them weren’t as necessary as everyone thought. There were cheaper and easier alternatives.

Now these people brace for a resumption of social overkill, activity bloat, rush hours, staggered dinner times and airport metal detectors. They seem to regard that as inevitable.

But it’s not. At least it doesn’t need to be. From the unfathomable loss and grinding horror of this pandemic, shouldn’t we wring some positives, including a recognition that we don’t have to do everything as we once did, that bits of what was imposed on us over the past 12 months amounted to improvements and that some of the alternate routes, contingency plans and risk-conscious behavior that we latched on to have lasting merit?

I’m talking about big stuff like remote working — and the flexibility that it affords — but also small stuff, like hand washing. It shouldn’t take a pandemic to prompt us to do that repeatedly throughout the day, just as it shouldn’t take a pandemic to make us more conscious of our ability to spread illness. Why not wear masks when we leave the house with bad and contagious colds? (This has long been customary in parts of Asia.) Definitely, we should stay away from the office if we have any sort of potentially communicable bug and retire the idea that it’s stoic — valorous — to show up and soldier through our sneezing, coughing and such. No, it’s inconsiderate. Bosses must make that clear.

Did you find that extended contact and deep conversations with a tiny bubble of people was more fulfilling to you than brief contact and shallow chitchat with a huge, rotating cast of them? You can structure your life that way by choice going forward.

Did you discover that daily walks outside and more quiet, contemplative time did your soul good? Then don’t jettison them when the world whirls back into frenzied motion….”

…. Most of us have made significant sacrifices during this extraordinary and harrowing period. Some have made profound, acutely painful ones. There may be more of those to come.

But while the trade-off isn’t in the vicinity of equal, we’ve also learned something (I hope) about our responsibilities to one another and what matters most to us. It would be a shame not to heed those lessons.”

I agree fully with Bruni.  My wife and I are about to get our second vaccine shot next week after a year of social distancing, wearing masks, and taking more walks.  While we miss seeing our children and grandchildren, we have never been so close.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a heated exchange (see video above) in the Senate yesterday, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) challenged Dr. Anthony Fauci on his understanding of whether people can get reinfected with COVID-19, telling the nation’s top infectious disease expert that wearing two masks is “just theater.”

Fauci was quick to give a lesson on the dangers of different coronavirus strains.

“If you’ve had the vaccine and you’re wearing two masks, isn’t that theater?” Paul asked Fauci, who has been vaccinated and has advised people to wear two masks to better prevent the spread of the virus. Paul and Fauci have previously faced off in the Senate.

“Here we go again with the theater. Let’s get down to the facts,” Fauci said before breaking down the potential risks that mutated versions of the virus can have on all people ― including those who have already been vaccinated or infected with the original virus strain of SARS-CoV-2, which Fauci referred to as the “wild type.”

“I agree with you that you very likely would have protection from wild type, for at least six months, if you’re infected,” Fauci said. “But we, in our country, now have variants that are circulating.”

“When you talk about reinfection, and you don’t key in the concept of variants, that’s an entirely different ball game, that’s a good reason for a mask,” he added. He went on to cite a study out of South Africa that found people were becoming reinfected after being exposed to one of these new variants.

“It was as if they had never been infected before,” he explained. “They had no protection.”

Paul challenged the current risk of variants in the U.S., however, arguing that there have been no deaths among people being reinfected.

Fauci responded that there have been no deaths from reinfection in the U.S. because there isn’t a prevalent variant in the country, though one is gaining ground.

Paul accused Fauci of basing his view on conjecture and then circled back to his original expressed belief ― that Fauci did not need to wear a mask.

“You’ve been vaccinated and you parade around in two masks for show. You can’t get it again. There’s virtually zero percent chance you’re going to get it,” Paul told Fauci, while pushing him to “reward” vaccinated people by telling them they don’t have to wear a mask.

“Let me just state for the record: Masks are not theater,” Fauci said. “Masks are protective.” 

Paul, a physician and once self-certified ophthalmologist, has long argued that people who have contracted the coronavirus are immune to it and do not need to get vaccinated — which goes against guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because Paul tested positive for the virus early on in the pandemic, he has refused to wear a mask in the Capitol and has even advised others like him to “throw your mask away.” 

The COVID-19 variants carry different known consequences, according to the CDC. One is able to spread more quickly in human cells; one is associated with an increased risk of death; one is able to evade detection in specific viral diagnostic tests; and another is able to evade natural or vaccine-induced immunity. 

As of Tuesday, the most common variant in the U.S. was the B.1.1.7 strain, which originated in the U.K. There have been more than 4,600 reported cases of it in the U.S., according to the CDC. This variant is believed to lead to more severe cases, based on hospitalizations and case fatality rates.

While answering a follow-up question from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Fauci explained that those who have been vaccinated “get a certain level of antibody that’s specific to a particular viral strain.” But he said that doesn’t necessarily mean you are protected against a different variant.

“You have some spillover immunity, to be sure, but you diminish by anywhere from two- to eightfold, the protection,” he said.

Rand Paul’s questioning prompted CNN’s Brianna Keilar to refer to the senator as an “ass!”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The United States Department of Education has ended a rule that limited debt relief for 72,000 borrowers who had graduated from fraudulent for-profit colleges.  The previous rule, which was put in place in December 2019 by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, limited how much debt relief a defrauded borrower would get for their borrower defense claim. The Trump-era rule was a response to an Obama-era rule in the wake of for-profit giant Corinthian Colleges shutting down in 2015, which led to tens of thousands of claims made by students. As reported by Yahoo Finance,

“We conducted a review of the partial relief methodology that was in place and determined that it was not granting appropriate levels of relief to borrowers given the degree of harm they witnessed,” a senior department official stated on a call with reporters. “The feeling was that [the methodology] didn’t quite go far enough.”

Full debt relief will be applied “for claims that have been approved to date,” the official added, meaning that defrauded borrowers who have already received partial forgiveness will get a full discharge. This process will be “rolled out over a couple of weeks.”

“For more than four years, defrauded borrowers and their families have lived under a cloud of education debt that they should not have to repay,” House Committee on Education and Labor Chairman Bobby Scott (D-VA) stated. “I applaud the Biden Administration for doing the right thing by making these borrowers whole, and I can only imagine the mixture of joy and relief they are feeling today. This announcement is lifechanging for tens of thousands of people across the country.”

Under existing law, borrowers with federal loans are eligible for loan forgiveness if a college or a university has misled them or engaged in other misconduct in violation of certain state laws. USDOE faced an onslaught of these claims, and the DeVos-led USDOE formula consequently developed a program to offer partial relief based on how much money they were earning at the time of filing the claim.

“The previous administration turned borrower defense into a total sham that was rigged to deny claims without any true consideration,” Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Lending, and an attorney representing some of the debtors who have filed suit against USDOE, said in a statement. “The Biden-Harris administration must now address these failings or else perpetuate a system that is stacked against the very students they are supposed to protect.”

The USDOE officially undid the DeVos-era rule yesterday morning, and the “more streamlined approach” will fully cancel $1 billion in student loans. According to Merrill, about 13,572 claims for debt relief were approved under the partial relief formula.

“Borrowers deserve a simplified and fair path to relief when they have been harmed by their institution’s misconduct,” USDOE Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “A close review of these claims and the associated evidence showed these borrowers have been harmed and we will grant them a fresh start from their debt.”

Alexis Goldstein, a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, added that it “should not have taken so many years, so much tenacity from attorneys defending these defrauded borrowers, and the resilience of thousands of former for-profit college students who were not willing to give up, to get here.”

The borrower defense claims submitted by affected students — for loan forgiveness — was created in 1995 and barely used until the Corinthian Colleges closed in 2015, triggering a flood of claims.

“For years, Corinthian profited off the backs of poor people — now they have to pay,” then-California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris said in a 2016 statement. “This judgment sends a clear message: there is a cost to this kind of predatory conduct … My office will continue to do everything in our power to help these vulnerable students obtain all available relief, as they work to achieve their academic and professional goals.”

The Obama administration created special rules to address the problem, making it easier for defrauded students to get their loans cleared — with some getting automatic loan forgiveness if they qualified.

This was a good move on the part of Cardona and the USDOE.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Asian Americans were already worn down by a year of pandemic-fueled racist attacks when a white gunman was charged with attacking three Atlanta-area massage parlors and killing eight people, most of them Asian women.

Hundreds of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders turned to social media to air their anger, sadness, fear and hopelessness. The hashtag #StopAsianHate was a top trending topic on Twitter hours after the shootings that happened Tuesday evening.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“I think the reason why people are feeling so hopeless is because Asian Americans have been ringing the bell on this issue for so long … We’ve been raising the red flag,” said Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood, executive director of the Atlanta-based Asian American Advocacy Fund, which does political and advocacy work across Georgia.

Many were also outraged that the suspect, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, was not immediately charged with hate crimes. Authorities said Long told police the attack was not racially motivated, and he claimed that he targeted the spas because of a “sex addiction.” Six of the seven slain women were identified as Asian.

Law enforcement needs “some training understanding what a hate crime is. This man identified targets owned by Asians,” said Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. The gunman “was very clearly going after a targeted group of people.”

Being Asian American herself, Huang said the shootings felt personal. She is worried that not classifying the attack as a hate crime will “absolutely discourage others from coming forward and seeking help.”

She also cringed at the comments of a sheriff’s captain who said of the gunman, “It was a really bad day for him.”

The remark “appeared to be trying to explain and justify” the suspect’s actions. “Hopefully it was a misstatement,” Huang said.

Mahmood said Asian American business owners in the Atlanta area were already fearful because of incidents like graffiti and break-ins. The shootings will raise that worry to new heights.

“A lot of Asian American business owners in the beauty parlor industry and food service — these are often the most visible front-line faces in the community,” Mahmood said.

Her organization is partnering with other groups like the Atlanta chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice to offer resources in multiple languages, including mental health assistance, self-defense training and bystander training.

Meanwhile, from Phoenix to Philadelphia, Asian American organizations nationwide organized events aimed at showing unity.

Asian Americans United, the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance and several other partner groups held a vigil Wednesday afternoon in Philadelphia’s Chinatown neighborhood.

“After the month and year we had, we knew our folks needed the time to come together safely just to grieve and heal and mourn and speak to what’s happening,” said Mohan Seshadri, Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance co-executive director.

As much despair as Asian Americans feel, Seshadri said, the shootings also mark a flashpoint.

“Our folks are pissed off and ready to fight,” Seshadri said. “The way we get through this is together by organizing our people and feeling solidarity.”

Arizona Asian Chamber of Commerce CEO Vicente Reid is planning a vigil next week in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, which has a high concentration of Asian American-owned shops and restaurants. He thinks the slayings have galvanized the local community to go beyond vigils.

“I think there is this whole outlet of this younger generation who’s passionate and has the energy. They just need someone to step up and lead them,” Reid said.

For the past several weeks, Asian Americans have questioned how to deal with a recent wave of assaults — many on the elderly — that coincided with the pandemic. The virus was first identified in China, and then-President Donald Trump and others have used racial terms to describe it.

Numerous Asian American organizations say Trump’s rhetoric has emboldened people to express anti-Asian or anti-immigrant views. Nearly 3,800 incidents have been reported to Stop AAPI Hate, a California-based reporting center for Asian American Pacific Islanders, and its partner groups, since March 2020. Nationally, women reported hate crimes 2.3 times more than men.

Following the release Wednesday of a report showing a surge in white supremacist propaganda in 2020, the Anti-Defamation League told The Associated Press that a significant amount of the propaganda included anti-immigrant rhetoric.

The anti-hate group said 10% of propaganda descriptions in its inventory contained negative references to immigration, multiculturalism or diversity. The 522 physical flyers, stickers or banners included the use of words such as “invasion, deport, disease, illegal, infection and virus,” the ADL said.

There were also seven propaganda incidents with direct anti-China references to COVID-19.

Meanwhile, the shootings have drawn support for Asian Americans from many non-Asians. Asian Americans need allies to continue speaking out against racism, Mahmood said.

“The path forward for us is really just standing together and making sure we don’t let these types of tragedies divide our communities.”

Amen!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Violent extremists motivated by a range of political grievances and racial biases pose an “elevated threat” to the United States, officials said yesterday in an unclassified intelligence report released two months after a mob of insurrectionists (above)  stormed the U.S. Capitol. The blunt assessment, in a report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, echoes warnings made by US officials, including the FBI director, Christopher Wray, who testified earlier this month that the threat from domestic violent extremism was “metastasizing” across the country.

Merrick Garland, the attorney general, has also described it as a top priority as his justice department works to prosecute hundreds of people who participated in the mob attack on the US Congress in January.

The riot laid bare the threat posed by domestic extremists and led Joe Biden to assign his intelligence officials the task of studying the scope of the problems. A brief and unclassified summary of that threat assessment was made public Wednesday; a full classified report was presented to the White House and Congress.  As reported by the Associated Press and The Guardian.

“Today’s report underscores how we face the greatest threat from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, especially white supremacists, and militia violent extremists,” said the Democratic representative Adam Schiff of California, the chair of the House intelligence committee.

Intelligence officials said in their assessment that extremists seen as risks for violence are motivated by a range of ideologies.

Developments such as the anger over restrictions imposed during the coronavirus pandemic and a belief in the debunked narrative that November’s presidential election was fraudulent “will almost certainly” spur additional violence in 2021, the report said. Numerous courts and Donald Trump’s own justice department upheld the integrity of the election.

The report says the most lethal threat is presented by racially motivated violent extremists, who officials say are most likely to conduct mass attacks against American civilians, and militia groups, who are seen as likely to target law enforcement and government officials. The threat from militias increased in 2020 and is expected to increase again this year, according to the report’s summary.

The report says white supremacists display what officials say is “the most persistent and concerning transnational connections”.

Other domestic extremist categories that concern government investigators include animal rights and environmental activists, anti-abortion protesters, anarchists and people who call themselves sovereign citizens who “believe they are immune from government authority and laws”.

Earlier yesterday, the  Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said that distribution of white supremacist propaganda nearly doubled across America in 2020, with 5,125 reported incidents of racist, antisemitic and other hateful messages.

The ADL said that 2020 had the “highest level” of cases of such propaganda since it started monitoring the phenomenon – an average of about 14 cases daily.

The reports came hours after a gunman fatally shot eight people at several Atlanta-area massage parlors – six of the victims killed were of Asian descent, and seven were women – spurring fears the spree was racially motivated. The shootings were carried out amid an increase in anti-Asian bigotry across the US, which has included harassment and physical attacks.”

Tony