It’s time once again for news and views that you can peruse. It’s another issue of Weekly Reader. As always, if you have anything you’d like to share, drop it in the comments.
Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows (from Politico): “Deliberations on controversial cases have in the past been fluid. Justices can and sometimes do change their votes as draft opinions circulate and major decisions can be subject to multiple drafts and vote-trading, sometimes until just days before a decision is unveiled. The court’s holding will not be final until it is published, likely in the next two months.”
I’m a Parkland Shooting Survivor. QAnon Convinced My Dad It Was All a Hoax. (from Vice): “But Bill also had to deal with his father’s daily accusations that the shooting was a hoax and that the shooter, Bill, and all his classmates were paid pawns in a grand conspiracy orchestrated by some shadowy force.”
The Hidden Costs of Dollar General (from Slate): “About 10 years ago, Vanessa Hall-Harper started to notice something strange going on in her neighborhood in north Tulsa, Oklahoma: “I was just driving around in my community, and you would see development taking place, you would see dirt being moved. And then it just got to the point where every damn time you felt like, ‘Hey, I wonder what’s going there,’ it’d end up being a damn dollar store. I’m like, what? Why do we need a dollar store down the street from another dollar store?””
Inside one network cashing in on vaccine disinformation (from the Associated Press): “The Bollingers are part of an ecosystem of for-profit companies, nonprofit groups, YouTube channels and other social media accounts that stoke fear and distrust of COVID-19 vaccines, resorting to what medical experts say is often misleading and false information.”
They’re Coming for Griswold, and Obergefell, and Lawrence, and Loving (from Esquire): “Alito, of course, elides the fact that these laws are being passed through gerrymandered legislatures and signed by Republican governors, and that their position is a minority one all over the country. But Alito has never cared about the little people affected by his legal genius. Women are going to die. Politics is going to get immeasurably uglier. The reputation of the Supreme Court is going deeper into the dumpster. But Justice Samuel Alito, the sole occupant of his own universe, is the smartest guy in the room, so that’s all that matters.”
Options For a Do-It-Yourself Abortion: Disclaimer — this is NOT medical advice (from Medium): “In this context, it’s time to have more open and serious conversations about what we may be forced to do, legally or illegally, to make the right choices for ourselves. That must include learning how to induce our own abortions as safely as possible— and how to support other women who choose to do the same.”
The original Roe v. Wade ruling was leaked, too (from NPR): “There have indeed been leaks at the court before, albeit of a different scale. One of them actually was about the case at the heart of today’s conversation: In 1973, the original Roe decision was leaked to the press before the court had formally announced it.”
The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It (from the New Yorker): “This doesn’t mean that it is unimportant who wins the Presidency or who is appointed to the Supreme Court. What it does mean is that ordinary people are not powerless to challenge the political and economic élite who have such disproportionate authority over our lives. But our power is often located outside of the institutions of tradition and influence. It is through acts of solidarity and struggle that we have been able to secure our rights and liberties in the United States, and, from the shape of things to come, that is how those rights and liberties will have to be defended. This means building movements to pressure an increasingly right-wing Supreme Court, making it more difficult for that body to further usurp the rights of regular people. It also means calling into question the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Court. If Trump is successful in adding another right-wing Justice, he will only continue to erode the Court’s legitimacy, adding further evidence that it can be brazenly used to achieve what could not be accomplished through legislative means. The multiplying failures of our existing society have led many of us to reconsider institutions, policies, and practices that have continued to reproduce racial and economic inequalities. In this moment of exalting uprisings and reëmergent social movements, we cannot overlook the disturbing history of the Supreme Court and its regressive role in American society.”
That’s all for this week. But we’ll be back next time with more articles for you to read. Until then, stay safe.
Iacon East 