July, 05 2017, 03:15pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Malik Russell, mrussell@naacpnet.org, 410-580-5761, Ronald E. Childs, rchilds@burrell.com, 312-361-4796
NAACP To Host 'Six Months Into the Trump Presidency: Strategies of Progressive Legal Organizations
33rd annual Continuing Legal Education seminar to be among must-see highlights of organization’s 108th national convention in Baltimore.
Baltimore, MD
The NAACP is set to present the engaging Continuing Legal Education (CLE) seminar: "Six Months Into the Trump Presidency: Strategies of Progressive Legal Organizations," as part of its upcoming 108th national convention in Baltimore. The seminar takes place on Sunday, July 23rd beginning from 9:30 - 11:30 a.m. ET at the Baltimore Convention Center, and is expected to be one of the most highly-anticipated events of the robust five-day conference schedule.
Featured guests of this, the 33rd annual CLE seminar include Kristen Clarke, president, and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). Clarke, formerly of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), is known for her groundbreaking work in voting rights and election law, while Saenz is lauded nationally for his legacy as a civil rights attorney, and work as counsel to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Against the backdrop of a contentious Trump presidency, the duo, along with Fatima Goss Graves of the National Women's Law Center and Sarah Warbelow, Legal Director for the Human Rights Campaign, will discuss wins and losses and offer strategies for countering this administration relentless attacks on civil rights protections.
"The NAACP refuses to sit passively by while this administration reduces to ash decades of struggle and progress in expanding civil rights protections," said Leon Russell, chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors. "We're excited to host this seminar, which will offer important updates, dialogue and strategic solutions that attendees will be able to take with them and implement in urban centers across the country."
Registration for the seminar is open now, and additional information may be obtained by contacting Tia Lawson at tlawson@naacpnet.org, or visiting the CLE Registration link found at www.naacpconvention.org.
Founded Feb. 12. 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest, largest and most widely recognized grassroots-based civil rights organization. Its more than half-million members and supporters throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.
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Lonsdale then added that "our society needs balance," and said that "it's time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable."
Lonsdale's views on public hangings being necessary to restore "masculine leadership" drew swift criticism.
Gil Durán, a journalist who documents the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley in his newsletter "The Nerd Reich," argued in a Saturday post that Lonsdale's call for public hangings showed that US tech elites are "entering a more dangerous and desperate phase of radicalization."
"For months, Peter Thiel guru Curtis Yarvin has been squawking about the need for more severe measures to cement Trump's authoritarian rule," Durán explained. "Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist in a global tour. And now Lonsdale—a Thiel protégé—is fantasizing about a future in which he will have the power to unleash state violence at mass scale."
Taulby Edmondson, an adjunct professor of history, religion, and culture at Virginia Tech, wrote in a post on Bluesky that the rhetoric Lonsdale uses to justify the return of public hangings has even darker intonations than calls for state-backed violence.
"A point of nuance here: 'masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable' is how lynch mobs are described, not state-sanctioned executions," he observed.
Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll argued that Lonsdale's remarks were symbolic of a kind of performative masculinity that has infected US culture.
"Immaturity masquerading as strength is the defining personal characteristic of our age," he wrote.
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