Born to be Brave

Parents and teachers in Canada will now have an “educational toolkit” to help them if they notice a child being groomed by a hate group.

The new resource, launched by the Canadian government in partnership with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, intends to combat the growing prevalence of hate groups online. Members of those groups, most of whom were raised in the digital age, are becoming more adept at recruiting. For example, the neo-Nazi terror group The Base, as well as other neo-Nazi groups, have used meme websites to recruit young people, usually male teenagers, into their movement.

Authorities are still figuring out ways to effectively combat the problem.

The toolkit can be found online free of charge here and contains modules that run teachers and parents through a variety of subjects related to hate groups, such as ideologies and recruitment techniques. One of the sections presents scenarios and offers ways to handle to them from a variety of perspectives. Elizabeth Simons, the deputy director for the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said that the examples were all taken from real-world events that had occurred in Canada.

"The scenarios in the toolkit deal with increasing severity of what hate might look like within the school community, said Simons.“You start out with anonymous hate promotion—so that could be graffiti, that could be a swastika on a desk.

“It starts from there and then it escalates all the way to overt hate organizing within the school community and outside the school community” she added.

The project is one of the latest anti-racism initiatives rolled out by Canada’s government. In a Wednesday press conference announcing the project, Ahmed Hussen, the minister of housing diversity and inclusion, said that in total the government "has invested $35 million to fund 175 anti-racism projects across the country."

Again, the link to the toolkit is https://www.antihate.school . I haven't read through the whole thing yet, but knowing the CAHN, it should be a good start. Of course, a tool can only serve its purpose if people use it, so I'm hoping this will be part of curriculum in schools across the country.

that's not great. but it's not the whole story.

a few things got worse right before the vote too. the language that explicitly protected encryption, saying the bill couldn't be used to force platforms to weaken it, got quietly stripped out on Friday. that safeguard just doesn't exist anymore.

but this isn't over. it heads to the senate next, and the senate is genuinely not on board. blumenthal and cantwell, two of the senators who wrote the original KOSA, are saying they don't want this version near a markup. blackburn, a republican and the other original author, called the missing duty of care provision a red line.

worth being clear here, blackburn isn't on our side. she wants the policy stronger, not gone. but that's still a crack we can use. her opposition means the house version has zero guaranteed path through the senate as written, and a stalled bill is a bill that isn't law yet. use her objection, don't trust her motive.

senate commerce hasn't even scheduled a markup yet. that's the next pressure point. this thing has died or gotten majorly rewritten at this stage before.

contact your senators: find yours here. tell them you don't want the house version anywhere near a vote.

and remember, if you have to, contact your senators scared. anything helps.

We're having our turn in the heat wave and reports from the National Mall are brutal already this week. That screenshot is today's forecast (courtesy of the Capital Weather Gang) and tomorrow and Saturday are confidently going to be worse than this is.

The national Mall has no shade on the grass and you will be exposed to the sun constantly while also experiencing extremely high humidity. You will not be allowed a bag over a certain size to enter the mall and it has to be clear. You cannot have an insulated water bottle, it has to be clear. Reports are that there are two entrances to the area so you'll have to wait in line to even get in. I cannot find a number on how many cooling stations there are, except that it's "few" to "none" depending on what accounts I read online. Vendors are allegedly charging more than the posted prices and seem to be unprepared for actual crowds - these are the official vendors not the scam food trucks that park all around the edges of the mall. And that's the extent of the planning done because it was not a priority to make sure attendees don't pass out.

My local friends and I have reached a consensus that tourists are going to get extremely sick and none of us know what the EMT response or planning is on the mall this year. People are going to die.

There is historically an assumption that attendees will have access to planned amenities. It's not in place this year of all years. There is a very real risk here and I'm trying to warn people, because people simply don't know how awful this is about to be.