Russians Pummel Humanitarian Aid Center in Ukraine

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2026 //
0

It’s important to remember that there is a brutal ground and air war in Ukraine, which started with a Russian invasion in February 2022. The Ukrainians target their missiles and drones at military targets; the Russians target schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, shopping centers–making no distinction between military and civilian targets.

A few days ago, the Russians directed their fire at a Ukrainian humanitarian aid center.

CNN reported on the devastating results of the Russian attack:

Dozens of people were killed when Russia dropped at least nine bombs on a school building in southeastern Ukraine where they had taken shelter, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday, describing it as “one of the deadliest attacks of this war.”

At least 40 people have been confirmed dead and more than 30 are still unaccounted for after the attack on the building in Komyshuvakha in the Zaporizhzhia region, which local governor Mykhailo Semikin said was being used as a shelter and a humanitarian aid distribution center.

The attack on Monday caused such large scale damage that recovery efforts are still underway two days later.

Semikin said the victims were in a newly-built, EU-funded reinforced basement designed to withstand most strikes, but the massive force of the bombs caused the concrete structure to collapse and a fire broke out.

The scale of the damage is complicating the recovery works. Local authorities said that only some of the bodies recovered from the rubble as of Wednesday midday had been identified and that further identification will likely require DNA testing….

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine highlighted that the attack took place just as civilians from the area had gathered to receive humanitarian aid.

“The timing and location of the humanitarian distribution was well publicized,” said Danielle Bell, the head of the mission.

“Either the Russian armed forces knew that there was a humanitarian distribution taking place, or they failed to take the most basic steps to find out what was happening in this village they were planning to attack. In either case, this attack seems to have violated the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.”

The Russians laugh at humanitarian aid centers. Their goal is conquest and pillage.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, International

The Trump Administration Is Destroying America’s Leadership in Scientific Research

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2026 //
0

The Trump administration’s war on science is no secret. The actions taken to fire scientists, to cut back research funding to universities, the blatant efforts to censor and politicize research have been out in the open since the second disastrous Trump term began.

Why Trump and the top echelon of his team have done this is a secret. One of the greatest strengths of the U.S. has been its leadership in science and medicine. The Trump regime has squandered that leadership. Why? Is it malice? Stupidity? I can’t figure it out.

Of one thing, there is no doubt: Trump and his cronies are seeking to destroy America’s leadership in science and medicine.

A team of six reporters from The New York Times documented the damage done. What they cannot explain is why.

This is a gift article, meaning you don’t need a subscription to read it. Open the link to see photographs and graphs.

The story begins:

The warning, buried in an obscure government report this summer, was unflinching.

The Defense Department’s vaunted network of research laboratories — whose scientists helped develop satellite communication, radar technology, and even the computer mouse — was in trouble.

The labs lost a significant share of their staff last year, largely in response to the Trump administration’s efforts to thin the federal work force, the report found. Refilling critical positions was proving difficult due in part to President Trump’s demand that new hires be screened for their loyalty to his goals. The report, issued by the Pentagon, pointed to “potentially grave consequences for the future of national defense.”

The turmoil inside scientific research has extended beyond the Pentagon. The Energy Department, a key hub of nuclear and quantum research, has lost more than 1,000 scientists and technical staff. The National Science Foundation, for decades a primary backer of long-term, foundational research, has withheld more than $1 billion in funding. And at the National Institutes of Health, the biggest funder of medical research, officials delayed or canceled more than 2,000 grants to biomedical researchers focused on topics such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and other diseases.

Under Mr. Trump, the federal government is still spending roughly as much on research — about $200 billion this year — as the administrations that came before. Scientists across the country are still receiving grants; universities are still being funded. But beneath the surface, the system of federally funded science that helped make the United States a global superpower is under intense strain from Trump policies, jeopardizing the nation’s advantages in defense, medicine and technology, a New York Times examination has found.

The White House regularly proclaims that it is advancing American interests. Yet its actions are eroding the country’s scientific edge as global rivals challenge U.S. dominance in fields that will help define the 21st century, according to interviews with scientists, university leaders, government officials and analysts and a review of documents and budgets.

The damage is the byproduct of three pillars of Mr. Trump’s broader agenda.

One is the sweeping job cuts and grant cancellations engineered last year by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-led effort that viewed much of federal spending as wasteful and whose effects are still reverberating across the bureaucracy.

A second is the administration’s continued pressure on research universities, in which the White House used funding cuts to push schools into adhering to its demands for ideologically driven policy shifts.

The third is a campaign by Mr. Trump’s budget director, Russell T. Vought, to impose more political control over how the government spends money appropriated by Congress, further infusing politics into decisions around scientific research.

If not for the courts curbing the administration’s campaign against universities and lawmakers in both parties rejecting cuts to research funding, the impact on science would have been far deeper. Still, the effects of the broader agenda have rippled through nearly every facet of the nation’s research machine.

Aspiring scientists have seen their career paths thwarted, with fewer available spots for Ph.D. students. The number of Ph.D. applications from foreign students, typically a significant share of U.S. science programs, shrank by 21 percent this year at leading universities, according to data gathered for the Association of American Universities. Total Ph.D. admissions at those schools have dropped as universities try to make do with less resources.

Even the agencies working on topics that Mr. Trump and his aides have called priorities — including national defense, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and nuclear energy — have been depleted.

Taken together, the changes underscore how Mr. Trump’s policies have disrupted scientific research beyond the areas the administration has targeted more directly, such as vaccines and climate science, endangering U.S. power and pre-eminence.

By many measures, China is closing the gap with the United States as the world’s research leader. Some organizations that rank global universities show China’s best schools increasingly displacing American universities at the top. And the impact of Chinese research papers, as measured by citations from other scientists, has caught up with the United States, according to Clarivate, a data and analytics company.

By the time the full consequences of the administration’s actions become apparent, experts warn, it could be too late to fix. That’s because basic research funded by federal grants often takes decades to mature into the technology, medical treatments and consumer products that change American life.

Federally funded work on atomic clocks starting in the late 1940s, for example, paved the way for GPS technology. In 1976, federally funded research yielded a major discovery about the origins of cancer-causing genes, which led to a Nobel Prize and, two decades later, lifesaving cancer drugs. Some of the early precursors to artificial intelligence date to U.S.-backed research in the 1980s, which used an algorithm to teach neural networks to learn from mistakes.

“Science is the long game,” said Marcia McNutt, who was president of the National Academy of Sciences, the country’s top scientific advisory body, until this summer. “By the time we no longer win any Nobel Prizes, we will have lost the capacity to ever recover.”

In response to The Times’ reporting, officials from the White House, Pentagon and other science agencies disputed that administration policies were hampering science. Rather, said White House spokeswoman Liz Huston, the administration is reinvigorating American science by transforming organizations in need of change.

“President Trump is ushering in a new golden age of American science by modernizing our research institutions, refocusing on ambitious national missions, and fully leveraging super intelligence for scientific discovery,” Ms. Huston said in a statement, using Mr. Trump’s preferred term for artificial intelligence. “Revitalizing our national scientific enterprise requires supporting the best American scientists and funding the best research based on merit.”

The White House said the administration has expanded a number of programs that support young researchers, and noted that the decision to reduce Ph.D. admissions this year was made by the universities themselves. The Association of American Universities said schools’ decisions to reduce admissions were largely the result of “federal research funding uncertainties.”

The White House also said that most of the scientists who have stopped working for the federal government since Mr. Trump came back to office were not fired, but instead left voluntarily. And it noted that the methodologies for ranking universities, such as comparisons between the United States and China, are limited.

The rest of the world now sees an opportunity.

Australia, for example, announced its “global talent attraction program,” calling it “an urgent and unparalleled opportunity to attract the smartest minds leaving the United States.” Canada dedicated more than $1 billion to bring in 1,000 international researchers, drawing American leaders in fields such as biochemistry and neuroscience.

Even China, a country not known for academic freedoms, has been luring researchers away. A winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry left the University of California, Berkeley, to lead an institute in Beijing using artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new materials — two fields the Trump administration has said it wants to dominate.

The roots of the United States’ science empire can be traced to a landmark 1945 report issued during the Truman administration, “Science: The Endless Frontier.” It described a vision, inspired in part by the Manhattan Project that led to the atomic bomb, for how science would power U.S. dominance in the world.

The federal government went on to establish a network of science agencies with distinct missions. The National Science Foundation supports theoretical or experimental work, which often lays the groundwork for future technologies years or even decades later. The Department of Energy was established to pursue advances related to power generation, as well as managing the nation’s nuclear arsenal. NASA, created in response to Soviet advances in space, put a man on the moon. The National Institutes of Health, which traces its roots to 1887, funds biomedical advances.

The federal government also provides tens of billions of dollars each year to the nation’s research universities while funding national labs, private industry and other institutions — a system built up over 80 years by presidents and lawmakers from both parties.

In less than two years, Mr. Trump has shaken that system to the core.

The upheaval began early in the administration.

DOGE engineered staff firings, and encouraged others to resign across the federal bureaucracy. Within a year, N.I.H. staffing had shrunk by one-fifth. The N.S.F.’s ranks were reduced by a third. Even NASA, which shrank less than other science agencies, lost 20 percent of its employees with Ph.D.s. Those who left included its chief scientist, a climate science expert whose job the administration eliminated.

NASA said it will keep recruiting staff as needed. In a statement, Nicky Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the agency is working to get “more science into space for lower cost.”

DOGE and the White House directed agencies to search for terms in grant descriptions that might reveal science the administration viewed as liberal, including anything that appeared to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

The cuts cascaded through the country.

Ann D. Cohen, a neuroscientist who co-directs an Alzheimer’s research center at the University of Pittsburgh, had been working on a five-year study looking at how people’s exposure to stress and health problems earlier in life can affect their odds of developing the disease.

The research was critical to developing better treatments and health interventions, Dr. Cohen said. “If the triggering event is poor cardiovascular health in midlife, we can actually deploy public health strategies to improve those things, and potentially have an effect on Alzheimer’s,” she said.

Recruiting people from different backgrounds was difficult, because people who volunteer for scientific studies tend to have higher than average incomes and education levels. So Dr. Cohen and her colleagues recruited from rural Western Pennsylvania, whose residents were more likely to be white and low-income, as well as from Black communities in Pittsburgh.

This past August, the N.I.H. terminated the grant, effective immediately, on the grounds that the project was focused on structural racism — an argument that fundamentally misunderstood the work, Dr. Cohen said.

Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the N.I.H., did not comment on specific grants. In a statement, she said N.I.H.’s commitment to Alzheimer’s research has not decreased.

“N.I.H. is focused on funding innovative projects led by a new generation of health researchers, and on allocating funds for research that will lead to better health for the American people,” Ms. Hilliard said.

Some researchers who lost funding acknowledged having framed their projects in the language of D.E.I. But, they argued, that was what the Biden administration had emphasized.

Jessica L. Rosenberg, director of education for the Quantum Science and Engineering Center at George Mason University, had received N.S.F. funding to research ways to encourage more American students to seek careers in quantum technology, an emerging field that has led to innovation by vastly expanding computing power.

The N.S.F. canceled the grant last year, about four months after the project started. Dr. Rosenberg said she suspects the grant was targeted because her application mentioned students from diverse backgrounds.

“That was what we were supposed to be doing at the time,” she said in an interview.

Trump administration officials argue that the push to incorporate D.E.I. degraded science, and that scientists who embraced the approach had themselves to blame for losing support.

“We cannot afford for America’s scientists to be in the business of scoring points for an ideological agenda,” Michael Kratsios, Mr. Trump’s science adviser, told a meeting of scientists last year.

Mr. Trump and his aides returned to the White House wanting to punish elite schools like Columbia and Harvard, ostensibly for transgressions like tolerating antisemitism.

But when cuts to research funding became the White House’s weapon of choice, professors and administrators had to decide whether to fight or acquiesce.

Harvard sued. Other schools negotiated. And even at universities that were not explicitly targeted, researchers made changes in hopes of keeping federal money that was foundational to their work — softening the language in their proposals, narrowing their projects and debating the line between fair-game government oversight and improper political interference.

The cuts fell across disciplines. Projects on epilepsy, Lou Gehrig’s disease, tuberculosis and even astronomy outreach and education sputtered. Work on cancer and heart rhythms was imperiled.

The administration ultimately restored billions of dollars in funding, either because of court orders or settlements with universities. But researchers said the interruptions and changing priorities delayed or derailed experiments.

“You can’t run a research operation when you have to constantly pivot,” said Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, vice chancellor for research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which was swept up in the administration’s funding cuts and participated in more than a dozen legal challenges.

“The current state of affairs is that it’s really very hard to plan long term,” she added, “and research is a long-term kind of enterprise.”

May Mailman, a former White House aide who helped lead the pressure campaign against universities, said the administration wasn’t overly concerned about the effects on research. Funds taken away from one university could eventually make their way to other schools whose behavior and ideology the White House approved of, she said. In the meantime, Ms. Mailman said, the administration tried to minimize the disruption to fields of research it supported, including artificial intelligence and some types of energy.

But much of the work coming out of universities, she said, may not have merited the taxpayer money going into it.

“There’s a feeling that there is more spent on research than comes out of it — that the system is a little bit broken,” Ms. Mailman said.

The administration also sought deep funding cuts to federal science agencies. Last year, when Mr. Vought presented the administration’s annual budget request to Congress, he called for reducing research funds at the National Institutes of Health by 41 percent; cutting the National Science Foundation by 55 percent; and reducing NASA’s budget for science by almost half. No previous administration, from either party, had sought such deep cuts.

Congress rejected those cuts. But Mr. Vought began finding novel ways to slow grants and redirect funds.

One of the offices that Mr. Vought targeted in his budget request was the N.S.F.’s “woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences” — an apparent reference to an N.S.F. division that funded social science. Not long after, the division began reducing its grants. 

An N.S.F. spokesman, Michael England, said in a statement that the agency’s funding decisions “reflect a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment.”

The loss of those funds affected researchers like Priti Shah, chair of the University of Michigan’s psychology department. Dr. Shah had applied for a grant to study how people evaluate and make decisions based on scientific information. In the summer of 2025, the N.S.F. told her that her application had been put on hold because of funding issues. It was later rejected entirely.

“It is so important to understand what people assume and what errors they make when they’re thinking about science,” Dr. Shah said. “People are very poor at reasoning about scientific evidence.”

The administration’s actions also hurt agencies central to its political agenda.

The Defense Department’s assessment of science and research capabilities published this summer said changes during the first year of the Trump administration had degraded the department’s highly regarded network of research laboratories, due largely to DOGE cuts and obstacles to hiring.

“Without a swift and sustained reversal of these policies,” the report warned, the Defense Department’s “innovation engine is at risk of stalling.”

The labs lost about 14 percent of their staff, the report found. Among those mentioned were the Naval Sea Systems Command, charged with developing ships and weapons; the Air Force Research Laboratory, which helped develop stealth aircraft and laser systems; and the Army’s Aviation & Missile Center.

External research laboratories, which are funded by the Pentagon but staffed by civilian researchers and develop technology for use by the military, were also suffering from the administration’s policies, the report said.

To finish reading this important article, open the link.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, Medicine, Research, Scandal, Science, Trump

Harmeet Dhillon Resigns as Chief of Civil Rights Division

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2026 //
3

The rats begin to leave the sinking ship. Lots of rumors about who will leave the administration and who might be impeached.

Harmeet Dillon announced today that she was stepping down as head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Before her appointment, Dillon had established her reputation as a litigator against civil rights. So Trump brought her on to reorient the agency.

Under her leadership, half the agent’s lawyers resigned, being loath to follow her lead.

The Washington Post reported:

During her more than 18 months running the Civil Rights Division, Dhillon oversaw the departure of hundreds of career staffers, more than half the attorneys in the division.

She dramatically reshaped the office to propel President Donald Trump’s social agenda, redirecting attorneys to focus on combating antisemitism, prosecuting noncitizens who voted, expanding gun rights and taking aim at what Trump and his allies have described as anti-Christian bias and Democrats’ “woke ideology.”
To tackle those priorities, the division focused fewer resources addressing its historic mission of fighting discrimination of minority groups and those most vulnerable in society.

She opposed affirmative action and other programs intended to expand opportunities for nonwhites and women.

Dhillon reversed the priorities of the Civil Rights Division. She opposed programs that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion and treated them as deviant activities. She scorned the traditional and customary values of the Civil Rights Division.

When asked about the mass exit of lawyers from her division, she responded:

“I think that’s fine,” Dhillon said on a podcast about the mass departures in her office. “We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute police departments based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence.”

She added: “The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws — not woke ideology.”

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Racism, Trump

Tennessee: White Guy Defeats Black Guy Despite White Guy Scandal

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2026 //
8

In Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District, Brent Taylor (R) ran against Justin Pearson (D). Taylor is white. Pearson is Black. Pearson intended to run in Memphis, which has a large Black vote. But the ultra rightwing legislature gerrymandered Memphis, dividing it in 3 and adding each piece to a largely white rural district. The intent was to remove a seat that would elect a Black. The district was designed by the Legislature to elect a white person.

Republican Brent Taylor won the Tennessee 9th Congressional District race, defeating Democrat Justin Pearson. Brent Taylor (Republican): had 111,968 votes (49.63%) Justin Pearson (Democrat) had approximately 109,500 votes (48.5%)

Taylor’s margin was about 2,500 votes. 

About a week before the election, Taylor was at the center of a scandal. He had allegedly sent “dick pics” to women he didn’t know. For most candidates, a scandal of this magnitude would doom their candidacy (think Anthony Weiner of New York, who did the same thing and lost his political career).

Brent Taylor admitted that he had engaged in this practice as late as 2021. He said it was “youthful indiscretion.” He was 53 in 2021.

The white rural voters who elected Taylor made it clear that they were not bothered by candidates who share “dick pics.”

They elected Brent Taylor.

One other notable fact: Taylor is white. Pearson is Black.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Politics, Tennessee

Pete Hegseth Is Incompetent: Impeach Him!

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2026 //
6

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie proposed impeaching Pete Hegseth on September 15, 2026. The very next day, House Speaker Mike Johnson adjourned the House until after the November election. Massie accused Johnson of adjourning a day early to be sure his resolution of impeachment would be ignored. He said he would bring it up again during the lame-duck session. Massie won’t be a member of Congress in the next term. Trump helped to oust him because Massie demanded the full release of the Epstein files.

If Massie’s proposal fails, the Democratic majority should hold impeachment hearings. Hegseth has been a destructive force as Secretary of Defense, which he insisted be changed to Secretary of War.

Here are Massie’s proposed Articles of Impeachment:

Waging war against Iran without congressional authorization.

Disregarding laws intended to protect civilians in wartime.

Ordering unlawful killings of suspected drug traffickers at sea.

Retaliating against Senator Mark Kelly for constitutionally protected speech.

Participating in the unauthorized capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

Conducting an unlawful bombing campaign in Yemen.

That’s a beginning. Hegseth should also be impeached for firing highly qualified generals and admirals without cause and thus harming the military’s leadership and readiness.

Hegseth should be impeached for denying promotions to well-qualified officers who had been recommended by review panels. A disproportionate number of those denied promotion were women or Blacks. Hegseth seems to assume that only straight white men like himself are fit to lead.

The fact is that Hegseth had no qualifications to lead the Departnent of Defense, which has a bigger budget and more personnel than any other Department. He had no managerial experience. His highest military rank was Major in the U.S. National Guard. He seemed to love humiliating generals and admirals and anyone with higher rank.

Remember when he called all the highest-ranking military leaders in the world to a meeting where he lectured them about manliness and told them that he would not tolerate military people who were overweight or had facial hair? How demeaning to his audience! They listened in stony silence.

Hegseth led a crusade against transgender members of the military and pushed them out even if they had exemplary service records and had the approval of their leaders and colleagues. Thousands of service members were expelled or left voluntarily to satisfy his contempt for them.

Hegseth is best at leading culture wars, not actual wars.

He should be impeached and removed.

His successor, of course, would have to be approved by the Democratic-led Senate so Trump would be compelled to find a better candidate.

Categories Accountability, Character, Cruelty, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Politics, Race

RFK Jr. Peddles Ludicrous Conspiracy Theories. Impeach Him!

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2026 //
5

How can the new Democrat-controlled Congress rein in Trump’s worst appointees? Impeach them. The House should hold impeachment hearings for dangerously unqualified members of Trump’s Cabinet. The obvious ones–the most unqualified–are those who not only lack the qualifications for their position but actually are a clear and present danger to the American people. The two Cabinet members who come to mind are Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense.

This post considers RFK Jr.’s nutty conspiracy theories. It was written by Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology. He is Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases.

He is also the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and a professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Offit writes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s views reflect ignorance of science, as well as his personal paranoia. As the nation’s top public health official, he is in a position to set back medical research and is a danger to the public.

Dr. Offit writes:

RFK Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has always been an avid conspiracy theorist. He believes the CIA was behind the assassination of his uncle, John F. Kennedy; that SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered in a Chinese laboratory to kill Whites and Black people but spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese; that Bill Gates secretly put microchips in COVID vaccines so the government could monitor who hadn’t received them; that pharmaceutical companies and medical journals conspired to suppress the truth about drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to treat COVID and that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates were part of the conspiracy; that malaria and meningitis vaccines in Africa were designed to sterilize women; and that Lyme disease was a military weapon developed at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.

On September 17, 2026, RFK Jr. gave the keynote address at a Children’s Health Defense conference, an anti-vaccine group he had founded 10 years earlier. RFK Jr. announced that he has called for public comments on the health effects of fifth generation wireless (i.e., 5G) networks, which includes cell towers, smart phones, and laptops. For years, RFK Jr. has believed that electromagnetic radiation from these networks cause cancer. “Generally speaking, electromagnetic radiation is a major health concern… I’m very concerned about it.”

Was RFK Jr. right to be concerned about 5G networks? In truth, only ionizing radiation (e.g., X-rays, gamma rays, and ultraviolet radiation) has been shown to damage DNA and cause cancer. Because electromagnetic radiation from 5G wireless networks is non-ionizing, it doesn’t damage DNA or cause cancer. Major international health and safety organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration(FDA), and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation have all reviewed decades of research and concluded that 5G technology poses no known health risks. Ironically, RFK Jr. is a frequent user of tanning beds which, because they emit an intense amount of ionizing ultraviolet radiation, can cause cancer. 

During that September meeting before Children’s Health Defense, RFK Jr. also told the crowd, “We are also looking at chemtrails…emissions from aircraft.” The chemtrail conspiracy, which dates to 1996, holds that white streaks from airplane exhaust at high altitudes is evidence that the government is secretly spraying toxic chemicals and biological agents causing respiratory symptoms, brain fog, autoimmune diseases, and cancer among other problems. Again, RFK Jr.’s claims are nonsensical. At high altitudes, the air is cold. Hot humid air from the engine exhaust mixes with the cold surrounding air causing water vapors to condense into ice crystals that form visible clouds. These are called contrails, not chemtrails. The same condensation caused by contrails, which can be seen on a window after a cold morning, is similarly harmless.

At the Children’s Health Defense conference, RFK Jr. embraced two prominent conspiracy theories. This could easily be dismissed save for one thing—RFK Jr. IS THE NATION’S NUMBER ONE PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICIAL. HE IS DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR MAKING PUBLIC POLICY AND ASSIGNING RESEARCH PRIORITIES. What will it take for Congress to realize the depth of this man’s paranoia? Maybe they’ll act when he requires all members of the Public Health Service to wear tin foil hats to work for protection. Maybe not.

Kennedy deserves to be impeached because his actions imperil the health of the public. Not only is his hostility to proven vaccines dangerous and deadly, but his choices for leadership roles are affected by his ignorance and his hostility towards science.

In addition, Kennedy has gone along with the gutting of research funding and fired outstanding scientists.

He may be the least qualified of Trump’s Cabinet due to his hardened ideology and his disregard of science.

Categories Accountability, Extremism, Health, Ignorance, Medicine, Propaganda, Safety

Vice-Admiral Fired by Hegseth Flipped South Carolina Seat–Revenge is Sweet

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2026 //
3

Nancy Lacore served in the Navy and earned the rank of Vice-Admiral. She was chief of the Naval Reserve when Hegseth purged a bunch of highly experienced admirals and generals.

Lacore moved to South Carolina and decided to run for Congress. She ran in a reliable red district, the First Congressional District, which had been held by Nancy Mace, who gave up her seat for an unsuccessful run for Governor.

Lacore’s Republican opponent was Jenny Costa Honeycutt.

The results were close; after votes were counted, Lacore led by 1 point and claimed victory. The district had been gerrymandered in 2020 to make it a safe Republican seat.

As she campaigned, Lacore focused her remarks on Hegseth’s incompetence and his role in getting us into the Iran war.

As a member of Congress, she will have the opportunity to grill Hegseth and possibly to vote for his impeachment if the majority takes that route.

Revenge is sweet.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Character, Elections, Ethics, Gender, Justice, South Carolina

Carol Burris: A Big Night for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2026 //
6

Last night was a big night, a great night for public schools, writes Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. Carol was a teacher of Spanish for many years, then a high school principal on Long Island in New York. She was selected as New York State Principal of the Year by her statewide colleagues. As executive director of NPE, she excels as an organizer, a researcher, a writer, and an analyst of statistical data. We are so fortunate to have her leadership in the battle to preserve public schools against privatization and corporate interests. And, at the same time, to advocate for ways to improve our public schools.

She writes:

Last night was an extraordinary night for those who love public education.

For me, the highlight was Gina Hinojosa’s election as governor of Texas. Gina came into politics as a mom. She ran for the Austin school board to keep her son’s school, and other neighborhood schools, from closing. In the Texas House, no one has defended public schools more fiercely, fought vouchers harder, or been more skeptical of charter schools. She has promised to fire Education Commissioner Mike Morath on day one and end state takeovers of school districts, including takeovers like Houston’s, where the failure of a single school was used to seize an entire district. You can hear Gina’s address at the 2025 Network for Public Education Conference here.

James Talarico’s Senate victory drew more of the headlines, but Gina’s win should not be overlooked. She beat a three-term incumbent who had never lost a general election and who outspent her by tens of millions of dollars. Talarico’s opponent was Ken Paxton, a scandal-plagued attorney general. I suspect Gina helped bring Latino voters to Talarico as much as he helped bring a broader electorate to her.

Talarico’s win is also good news for public schools. He is soft on charters, but he is a fierce opponent of vouchers and has publicly opposed the federal tax-credit voucher. His arrival should add momentum to Senator Mark Kelly’s Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act, which would repeal it.

He will be joined by other strong allies of public education: Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and Sherrod Brown, who returns to the Senate from Ohio and has always stood with public schools. This matters. Corporate Democrats such as Cory Booker and Michael Bennet have too often sided with Republicans on school choice. The new Senate Democrats can help move good bills forward and block further expansion of the federal Charter Schools Program.

Ohio delivered another big win: Governor-elect Amy Acton, a strong supporter of public schools who earned the endorsement of the Ohio Education Association.

In the House, I don’t yet know where many of the newly elected members stand. But a larger Democratic majority should help us build support for reining in the federal Charter Schools Program and outvote the minority of pro-charter Democrats.

A pro-public education agenda for the new Congress

  1. Repeal the federal tax-credit voucher.
  2. Pass the CHARTER Act to end federal funding for charter schools run by for-profit operators.
  3. Hold the Department of Education accountable:
    • Release the program funds it has frozen.
    • Cut the federal Charter Schools Program.
    • Rescind its anti-DEI policies.

As more results come in, I hope more pro-public education state legislatures will emerge as well.

~Carol Burris

Gina Hinojosa, Diane, and Carol Burris at the Conference of the Network for Public Education in Columbus, Ohio, in 2025
Categories Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Politics, Resistance, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Gina Hinojosa: For the People

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2026 //
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Gina Hinojosa beat Governor Greg Abbott, defying most of the polls. She was outspent at least 10-1. Elon Musk poured millions into Abbott’s campaign. She won by 7 points.

Her number one issue was supporting public schools and opposing privatization of public money. She opposes vouchers. She opposes the state takeover of public school districts. She served on the Austin school board. She got into politics because her own child’s school was threatened with closure.

Gina said at her victory party last night:

I am grateful and in awe of the incredible grace and power of God and of Texas.

Texas, I am humbled to be your next Governor.

When we started this campaign a little over a year ago, I asked a simple question:

Does Texas belong to the people of Texas: who live here, who work here, who raise their families here? Or is this the billionaires’ world and the rest of us just live here?

Does Texas belong to parents and their children, or the billionaires trying to dismantle our schools?

Does Texas belong to the farmers and ranchers who have worked this land for generations, or the corporations buying it up?

Does Texas belong to the working families who pay their taxes, and do everything right, or the wealthy and well-connected who play by different rules?

Does Texas belong to the people who rise before the sun, who work two jobs, and who put everything they have into small businesses and big dreams? Or does it belong to the people who write the biggest checks to politicians?

Tonight, Texas answered. And we didn’t whisper. We answered loud enough for every billionaire, every lobbyist, and every corrupt politician in Austin to hear.

Texas belongs to us.

We answered in McAllen and Corpus Christi. Dallas and in Temple. In San Antonio and Lubbock. From the neighborhoods of Austin to the wide-open skies of West Texas, all the way out to Big Bend.

We answered in our big cities, where they tried to silence your voice with gerrymandered maps and closed polling sites only to see turnout like never before, and you answered in small towns, where people had been told their vote was already spoken for.

We answered in communities that politicians visit every four years to ask for your vote, only to forget about you the minute they get to Austin.

We answered in places that have been overlooked, underestimated, and left behind for far too long. And we answered across party lines.

Because this campaign was always about whether the people of Texas ought to have a government that belongs to them. Not the highest bidder. Not the biggest donor. Not the most powerful lobbyist. You.

In January, I will take the oath of office ready to lead a government by the people, and for the people again.

Not for the people who donated the most. Not for the people who know the right people, but for every single Texan.

Because the governor’s office does not belong to me. It doesn’t belong to my party. It belongs to you.

This is our Texas. This is our government. And this is our one fight.

And tonight, we won.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being a part of this campaign. This victory is because of you.

– Gina

Categories Courage, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Politics, Supporting public schools, Texas

The Night Texas Turned Blue, Really, Truly Blue

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2026 //
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As a native Texan, I am beyond thrilled by the election results. It was a night for the history books. All the statewide offices were won by Democrats–Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Comptroller, and “Railroad Commissioner” (who regulates the powerful oil and gas industry).

No Democrat had been elected to the U.S. Senate since 1988. No Democrat had won a statewide office since 1994. The gerrymander that Trump asked for and got was washed away in a tide of blue. Four of the five gerrymandered Congressional districts–designed to be safe Republican seats–were captured by Democrats. The races that were supposed to be close–for US Senate and for Governor–were total blowouts. The only unknown is whether one or both houses of the legislature remain in Republican hands.

Forrest Wilder of Texas Monthly has the story:

I’ve covered every election in Texas since 2006. Tuesday night’s results are, by far, the most shocking I’ve ever seen. For my whole adult life, the script has been more or less the same for Texas elections: Republicans win, Democrats lose. In recent years, the story has been about the GOP civil war: the far right winning and the Republican establishment retreating in defeat. The governance story was also predictable: Those in power did what they wanted and everyone else suffered what they must. That timeworn script was ripped up in just a few hours. 

A good night for Democrats was certainly indicated by the usual metrics—polling, prediction markets, reporting, and vibes. I thought Talarico would win by a few percentage points. But I’m not sure anyone was prepared for the alternative universe we’ve just entered. Texas went to bed as a red state—the red state. Wednesday morning, it will wake up as something very, very different. 

Republicans are on track to lose every statewide race. Governor Greg Abbott, a fundraising juggernaut who was on the verge of becoming the longest-serving governor? Trounced by state representative Gina Hinojosa. Ken Paxton, who seemed to possess some kind of superpower? Devastated by James Talarico, now an instant superstar and presidential contender. Mayes Middleton, who insisted on calling himself “MAGA” Mayes? Whupped by Dallas state senator Nathan Johnson, a virtual unknown. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, one of the most adept politicians in modern Texas history? Humiliated by Austin-based state representative Vikki Goodwin, who barely had a profile in her hometown. Openly racist edgelord Bo French? Beaten by Jon Rosenthal. Democrats seem to be on track to flip all four of the Texas Supreme Court seats up for grabs, dramatically changing the balance of power on Texas’s highest civil court. As of right now, it looks like Democrats may have a majority in the Texas House for the first time since 2002. In short, they won everywhere.  

Democrats ran up the score in the big urban counties. They flipped longtime red suburban counties, including Denton and Collin (Paxton’s home county) and Brazoria. They ran riot through heavily Hispanic areas that Trump had flipped in 2024. Just as one example, Starr County—96 percent Hispanic—went from voting for a Republican for the first time since 1892, when they gave Trump 57 percent of the vote, to giving Talarico more than 75 percent of the vote. Paxton and Abbott and the other statewide candidates begged for rural Texas to turn out. But even in rural counties, Democrats did better than they normally do. The red wall was breached quite handily. Shit, they even won Brazos County in the heart of Aggieland.

Trump ordered up an aggressive gerrymander, to try to give the GOP five more winnable seats. But the dummymander seems to have gone bust. They tried to stimulate the lizard brains of voters, fearmongering about Muslims. But that tack fell flat. The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, wasted an ocean of cash—at least $212 million—trying to salvage Paxton. Now, he’s talking about taking his data centers to space.

It seems like Texans went into the voting booth with a vengeance, voting against anyone with an R next to their names. Let’s not take anything away from the winners. Talarico was a very strong candidate—charismatic, disciplined, an excellent fundraiser who had few, if any, major errors. Hinojosa, too, surprised a lot of observers with her creative attacks on Abbott. She was vastly outspent, but managed to land blows on Abbott over data centers, private school vouchers, and the cloud of corruption that seems to be parked over the Governor’s Mansion. But it’s also probably the case that just about any Democrat would’ve won in this environment. Trump was deeply unpopular in Texas—his approval rating was underwater by about twenty percentage points. There was a blue tsunami that swept over much of the nation, and Texas was part of it.

And yet, there likely were Texas-specific factors, too. Paxton and Hinojosa ran on an anti-corruption platform. They told a story about Texas: that the ruling political class had sold the state out to billionaires. Facts were not hard to marshal to drive the message home. Abbott’s signature policy during his twelve years as governor was private-school vouchers, which seemed to have little popular support but was a pet project of various billionaires, including Pennsylvania’s Jeff Yass, who gave Abbott at least $12 million. And just in the closing days of his campaign, Texas Monthly reported that Abbott’s Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission had discussed selling Boca Chica State Park to Musk. There were the data centers that Abbott welcomed with open arms, and the 765-kV transmission lines. And what more can be said about Ken Paxton? Corrupt, unethical, swagless. In retrospect, the question is, how did this man stay in power for so long? 

It will take some time to adjust to the new reality. The basic set of assumptions that have been operative in Texas for decades are now called into question. One is tempted to say one-party rule is over. Yet, somehow we’ve entered a new era of one-party rule. Regardless of your political persuasion, did you ever expect to see Democrats winning races in Texas from top to bottom in 2026? The parlor question—”when will Texas turn blue?”—had long ago become a cliche, a sick joke. And yet here we are. 

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Democrats, Education Reform, Republicans, Texas, Vouchers
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