Jean Hardisty founded Midwest Research Associates in 1981 to correct the misperception that the Political Right was led by uneducated, zealous buffoons. Jean and the early Midwest Research Associates team understood that the Right was, in fact, well-resourced, well-educated, and excellent political strategists. Midwest Research Associates relocated to Somerville, Massachusetts in the late 1980s and became Political Research Associates. 40 years later, we celebrate our founding story and the decades of incisive research, analysis, and strategy and rich partnerships that followed.
Join us for Strawberry Gin Smash the Patriarchies, Move-mint Juleps, and Fight the Right Margaritas on Tuesday, December 14 at 7pm ET to celebrate with us as we take a look back and ready ourselves to move forward into our next 40 years.
Cheers!
The PRA Team
P.S. RSVP today to receive your commemorative PRA's signature cocktail recipes in the mail
|
|
In Case You Missed It
“It’s difficult to imagine a world without policing…but the world of policing is relatively recent in human history…There is social control and there’s all sorts of different things. But policing, as we understand it, is relatively new. Maybe 150 years old…Which means that it can disappear. It can disappear relatively quickly.”
- Luis A. Fernandez, Northern Arizona University
|
|
The inhumane treatment and deportations of Haitian refugees from our southern border underscores what we already suspected: that the U.S. anti-immigration movement, which thrived under President Trump, has yet another champion in President Biden and his administration. And in hundreds of elected county sheriffs across the United States, this nativist movement has armed agents of the state working in concert to further support and expand systems of racialized social control and expulsion.
Watch our recent conversation with panelists Ethan Fauré, Felicia Arriaga and Luis A. Fernandez on right-wing aligned sheriffs and the far-right movements organizing them under the Biden administration.
|
|
Anti-Sex Work Feminism and the Lived Reality of Criminalization and State Violence |
|
Thursday, November 18 at 4PM ET
Join PRA for an important conversation with thinkers, advocates, and practitioners writing about and working in the sex work industry on the existential threat posed by the anti-sex work movement and the embrace of anti-sex work rhetoric by lawmakers and progressive movements alike.
Anti-Sex Work Feminists have a (deadly) listening problem: a problem listening to the people whose lives and livelihoods have been made economically and socially precarious by the state and made subject to daily violence by its carceral arm.
From the Christian Right institutions intent on dehumanizing Trans people to the exclusionary and anti-democratic radical feminists touting a narrow and violent definition of who feminism is for to mainstream women's and feminist organizations that dangerously differentiate between sex work and other forms of labor under extractive capitalism and, finally, to the Republican and Democratic lawmakers systematically depriving sex workers of safe access to their livelihoods; we will delve into the harms posed by these actors and the strategies of resistance rooted in safety, empowerment, and structural alternatives to policing.
|
|
New from PRA
The Koch network has worked to undermine the rights and liberties of non-white communities through a decades-long assault on public education, with Critical Race Theory most recently in its sights.
Conspiracy theories around 9/11 are some of the most widespread and longest lasting in U.S. history and represent the first wave of conspiracy to spread via a combination of new and old media at the dawn of the internet era.
HoSang talked to PRA this June about the limitations of liberal ideas of freedom, and what a wider conception of liberation means.
The anti-immigrant movement mobilized before 9/11 but used the fuel of the anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric post 9/11 to become the movement they are today.
No Department of Homeland Security. No paramilitarized border enforcement. No War on Terror. No Trump.
|
|
New From Religion Dispatches
Magid deploys a critique of Horn's book to demonstrate how the embrace of and enthusiasm for anti-antisemitism has come to define contemporary (and historical) Jewish identity, grounding Jewish belonging in "a kind of Negative Judaism."
Hindu nationalists attempt to silence those they deem to imperil their majoritarian political and cultural ambitions. In recent years, North American scholars have been primary targets of US-based Hindu Right groups with calls to cancel classes, conferences, books, and teaching contracts.
"In this case it’s a matter of life and death. You are free to believe whatever you want. But your right to believe does not include the right to risk the lives, health, and safety of anyone else."
|
|
For more analysis and resources, browse our most recent articles and 40-year archive on our website.
|
|
Get involved with PRA!
Work with Us
Our quarterly print magazine is one of the longest running of its kind! Subscribe today for $25 for one year or $45 for two years.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
