Greg Olear, author and blogger, saw Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey at a matinee on the first day it was released. His review is informed, thoughtful, and incisive. if you never read The Odyssey, you will enjoy reading Olear’s review and learning about it; if you have read it, even long ago, you will enjoy his review.

I saw the film two days ago in the one movie house in the village of Greenport, NY. No IMAX 70 theater. The Odyssey is spectacular. If it doesn’t win the Academy Award, I willl be astonished. So too for Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, both of whom are wonderful.

The critical reviews that I read were picky and insubstantial. Elon Musk was outraged by the film’s ethnic diversity. Helen of Troy is portrayed by a Black woman, Athena is brown-skinned. One character, a soldier in Odysseus’ army, is well-known as trans (Elliott Page).

Musk allegedly has hired Mel Gibson to make a new film about Homer’s classic, one that is “historically accurate.” Bring it on. Homer never mentions the race or ethnicity of his characters.

The works attributed to Homer were created around the 8th to 7th century BCE, specifically between 725 and 675 BCE, as oral poetry. Who knows what is historically accurate?

The great effect of the film is that it is a great motivator to read the original. It may even contribute to a revival of the classics.

May the deities bless Christopher Nolan, who brought the film to life.

Greg Olear writes:

Dear Reader,

Past a certain point, recorded history recedes into darkness, just as our individual memories of early childhood vanish into a twilight oblivion. If the siege of Troy by the Mycenaean Greeks isn’t a false historical memory—and I don’t think it is; I think it’s an actual historical event—then the war took place in a past so remote that its events have merged with fiction, mythology, and dream so as to be indistinguishable.

How long ago was it? By the time Homer came along, some three thousand years ago, the Trojan War was already a distant memory. Between the fall of Troy and The Odyssey of Homer came the Late Bronze Age Collapse of 1200-1150 BCE, followed by the Greek Dark Ages, a gaping historical hole of some 400 years during which all of the ancient societies of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East abruptly and simultaneously went dark.

There is much we don’t know, may never know. Heck, we’re not even sure if Homer is real. The late academic and translator E.V. Rieu, who founded Penguin Classics, tells us that “[i]t is beyond question that he is the earliest surviving Greek writer; probable that he lived in the tenth century before Christ in one or other of those cities which the Greeks had established on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor; and quite likely that he actually committed his poems to writing, though the art was still perhaps hardly known save to the minstrel family to which he belonged. The rest, including his blindness, is legend or guesswork,” and there is nothing to be gleaned from the text that gives us any insight into the poet’s personality. Rieu wrote that in May of 1945. Since then, scholars have come to believe that Homer, if he lived at all, was active in the eighth, not the tenth, century BCE.

It was long assumed by scholars that Troy itself was mythical. Not so. Troy was a real place. It stood at the southern shores of the Dardanelles, at the entrance to the narrow strait connecting the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. And there is evidence that a sack of the city did take place, right around 1180 BCE—in the middle of the Collapse. Was there really a Trojan War? Like, why would a people invest so much time and energy in recounting the events of a world-altering conflict that was pure fiction?

I’ve read The Odyssey twice—once in high school, for English class; and once a year or two after college, to reacquaint myself with what is one of the foundational texts of Western civilization. I liked it better the second time; I no longer joked about wanting to hurl my copy into the wine-dark sea.

Odysseus is a cool cat. Unlike Frodo and company in Lord of the Rings, who survive their perilous travels by dumb luck—the miraculous intervention of an eagle or an elf or whatever—Odysseus relies on his cunning to make it through. He is, after all, the mastermind of the “hollow horse” stratagem that broke the stalemate and won the war. He’s not a big strong brute; he’s a smarty—a character I can get behind. And the themes of The Odyssey—homecoming, exile, fidelity, honor, memory, and the Mycenaean Greek iteration of PTSD—are evergreen.

When I heard that Christopher Nolan, the auteur filmmaker who brought us Inception, Tenet, and Oppenheimer, was making The Odyssey—and with Matt Damon, of all people, in the title role—I was puzzled. The trailers I saw looked meh. Would this be a big flop? How on earth would he pull it off?

Most importantly: what is Nolan’s vision for the source material? What novel take would he bring to literally the oldest plot known to man? And: why did he feel the need to make The Odyssey now, at this moment in history? I was less excited about the movie as I was curious. Not wanting it spoiled, I went to the Friday matinee—the first available showing.

First things first: The Odyssey is a lights-out, unequivocal masterpiece. It’s so good, on so many levels. But Anne Hathaway is the highlight. She plays Penelope—Odysseus’s wife, the Queen of Ithaca, who works dutifully at her loom waiting for her long-lost husband to come home, as a throng of uncouth, cruel, Hegsethian suitors commandeer the palace, in the hopes of winning her hand once it is determined that Odysseus is dead. (Spoiler alert: Unlike Mitch McConnell, he is not.) There is none of the warm, chipper, happy-go-lucky Prada-Devil assistant here; it’s a dark part, and she plays it dark. It’s an exquisite performance.

As usual, I underestimated Matt Damon. Oppenheimer got its share of critical flowers, but as I’ve written here, it’s basically two Wikipedia pages in film form. The problem, I realized on Friday, is that Oppenheimer, the character, is kind of dull. Only when Matt Damon shows up does Oppenheimer pick up the pace and become entertaining. In The Odyssey, Nolan makes the wise decision to dispense with the dull centerpiece guy entirely and make the whole film about the Matt Damon character.

Odysseus is no physical marvel. He’s a soldier, so he’s not soft, but he’s an archer, not a swordsman. Damon is Jason Bourne fit, but, although he’s actually 5’10”, he looks smaller on screen—he’s literally a short king!—whereas Agamemnon, the King of Mycenae and the leader of the Greeks, is a veritable giant, imposing and terrible. In Troy as in the NBA: size matters.

As for Nolan’s novel take, his original vision? He simply makes the story as realistic as possible—and, given the inherent challenges of making a tale involving Cyclopses and Circean pigs realistic, he pulls it off beautifully.

In an early scene, Odysseus and Penelope are in bed, their toddler son Telemachus asleep nearby, and he is lamenting the fact that he has to leave to go to a war he doesn’t particularly want to fight in. The official reason Agamemnon summoned all the vassal kings to sack Troy is because the Trojans have kidnapped his brother Menelaus’s wife. That would be Helen, whose face, as Menelaus notes in the film, launched a thousand ships (even though those lines were written by another British Christopher, Marlowe, in 1604). Duty and honor demand that the Greeks assemble to bring her home.

But the great Mycenaean king, Odysseus tells Penelope, has an ulterior motive. “He wants to control the trade routes.” In other words, the Dardanelles that Troy sits upon are the Late Bronze Age Straits of Hormuz. All that sacrifice, all that bloodshed, all that destruction—all for a little more coin. So “dedicated” is Agamemnon to his imperial designs that he sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to Artemis, for [checks notes] favorable winds. Yikes.

When I first read The Odyssey, I found the Penelope/Telemachus storyline dull. (I was too young to really get it). That’s not the case in the film. The father is gone and may never return; the mother is besieged like Troy itself by the same ilk of ruffians, and is holding out as long as she can; the son understands all of this, but is too raw and soft and young to do anything about it. No one takes him seriously. The kid needs to grow up, and grow up fast; if not, his mother will be taken by one of the odious suitors, and he, Telemachus, will surely be slain, so that the victor can assume the throne of Ithaca himself.

Those are the stakes.

Robert Pattinson, who plays the villainous lead suitor, Antinous, is not going to be denied. It is a delightfully “meta” moment when he contrives to be alone with Penelope, and tries to persuade her to abandon hope of Odysseus’s return and instead marry him; this is freakin’ Edward from Twilight, still one of the most attractive men alive, veritably catapulting pheromones at her; if she isn’t tempted by that, nothing will tempt her.

Agamemnon’s homecoming ends quickly and tragically—with his wife, Clytemnestra, murdering him, to avenge the sacrifice of their daughter to the gods. (In the mythology, Clytemnestra and Helen are half-sisters; in the film, they are twins, both played by Lupita Nyong’o—much to the dismay of MAGA nation, who cannot conceive of a Black woman’s face being worthy of launching even a couple of dinghies, let alone a thousand ships.) Hoping to avoid a similar fate, Odysseus, with the divine guidance of his patron Athene, returns to Ithaca in disguise as an old beggar, to assess the situation before he makes his move.

One of the weaknesses of Nolan as a filmmaker is that, as great as his movies are, they lack emotional wallop. He can be cold and dispassionate, and when I watch the films, I rarely respond emotionally to them. For example, in Oppenheimer, when the test bomb explodes successfully, we are supposed to be emotionally moved; I wasn’t. That weakness is not on display here. Whether it’s the sublimity of the source material, or simply, as one review has it, that Nolan has finally “learnt to write women,” there are a number of moving sequences in The Odyssey. The moment when Penelope realizes, beyond all doubt, that the beggar in her dining hall is indeed Odysseus is the single best part of the movie.

(The runtime, incidentally, is two hours 52 minutes, which is about as long as it takes a lead-footed New Yorker to drive from Troy to Ithaca.)

Nolan brings out the inherent feminist elements of The Odyssey. In Homer’s world, the women—whether they are gods or mortals—are more powerful than the men. Whatever Agamemnon’s ambitions, the impetus of the Trojan War is the kidnapping of Helen of Troy (which, if we believe the mythology, was itself the result of a squabble among the goddesses Athene, Aphrodite, and Hera). The suitors in the hall at Ithaca are intimidating dudes, but they would fight to the death to claim Penelope’s hand; she has enormous influence over them. It is a nymph, Calypso, who rescues Odysseus and nurses him back to physical health—and helps ease him back into reality. (My theory is that the reason Odysseus dilly-dallied on Calypso’s island for seven years is because that’s how long it took him to come up with a plausible excuse for why he remained “stranded” for so long with his gumad Charlize Theron.) Athene is the goddess that gives him protection. In Mycenae, mighty Agamemnon, the king of kings, is felled by his wife. And as to the epic’s other men? They are pigs—as Circe well knew.

Why did Nolan make this movie now, at this moment in history? J. Robert Oppenheimer and Odysseus have something in common: both used their superior intelligence to devise a way to sack a city and, in so doing, win a war. Both men had to live with the consequences of that: the guilt, the weight of the responsibility for the lost lives and the mindless destruction, the glory, the infamy—all of it. Oppenheimer and The Odyssey are both about brilliant, complicated men coming to terms with their pivotal roles in a great war.

There are several mentions in the film of the Sea People. To Penelope, they are terrifying heralds of what feels to her like the end of the world. Odysseus feels the dread, too. His stratagem, brilliant as it was, was a trick that took advantage of the honor of the Trojan people. It worked, yes; but it was a dick move. He violated Zeus’s Law, as he says in the film—and without that, what remains? In the final analysis, what was really won?

Assuming the sack of Troy was real, the Late Bronze Age Collapse happened so soon after the Trojan War that one can reasonably conclude that the latter somehow led to the former. Petty squabbles among the Greeks and Troy weakened all the kingdoms, leaving them vulnerable to invasion by the Sea Peoples—or so the film intimates. Does Nolan see a parallel between then and now?

Traditionally, this kind of epic is populated by characters with British accents. But Nolan—who was born in London and speaks with a British accent himself—made a different choice. The characters all talk like Americans—as if Troy and Ithaca were in Upstate New York and not the Aegean.

This serves two purposes. First, it makes it seem like these characters, for U.S. audiences at least, exist in the here and now, heightening the realism. Second, it equates the Mycenaean Greeks on the verge of the Late Bronze Age Collapse with the United States in A.D. 2026.

We don’t know what caused the Collapse. Probably it was the result of a number of factors that happened simultaneously: plague; famine brought on by climate change; needless wars over trade routes; alliances breaking down; income inequality exacerbated by a ruling oligarchy; bad leadership; and, maybe, the Sea Peoples. Whatever the cause, the Collapse was the end—not of the world, as Penelope feared, but certainly of a long and fruitful chapter of history.

With the looming stock market crash brought on by speculation in AI and data centers; the burning-of-Library-of-Alexandria-level destruction of our government’s investment in medical research; the fracturing of NATO; the avarice of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the rest of the Epstein class; the irrevocable warming of the planet caused by manmade climate change; and the worst possible people governing the country, the end of our current chapter seems imminent.

How did we get here? How did it come to this?

Our enemies the Russians did not invade the United States. They were not strong enough to do so. Instead, they tricked the American electorate into installing a Kremlin stooge in the White House—not once, but twice.

Odysseus devised his famous stratagem three thousand years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Even those who haven’t heard of Homer, much less read his work, know of the trick. It’s been famous for thousands of years.

Trump may be more porcine than equine—a Circe product. Even so, after all this time, we should have been able to spot a Trojan horse.

Categories Art, History, Media

What Would Benjamin Franklin Say if He Were Here Today

By dianeravitch

July 31, 2026 //

L.C. Francis authors the blog “L.C. Francis Open Society for History and Civics.” In this post, he imagines how Benjamin Franklin would react if he could time-travel to the present day. He titled this one “A Republic in a Costly Costume.”

His subtitle is:

Benjamin Franklin visits Washington and finds the experiment alive, wounded, witty, dangerous, and leaning toward the very monarchy it was built to resist.

“Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.”
— Benjamin Franklin, writing as Silence Dogood, No. 8, published in The New-England Courant, July 1722.

Dear Friends,

Yesterday, I wrote about Adams and Jefferson, two bitter friends who died on the Fourth of July, fifty years after the Declaration. But for weeks, another question has been on my mind: what would one founder think if he returned for America’s 250th birthday?

On this Sunday morning, after the fireworks have quieted and the crowds have gone home, I did not want to hand you another stack of bad news. I did not want to build another time machine just for cleverness. I chose Benjamin Franklin because, of all the Founders, he might be the least surprised by what he found in Washington in 2026.

Franklin was intimately aware of monarchial tendencies because he had known kings, ministers, courtiers, printers, mobs, frauds, scientists, diplomats, and men who mistook applause for wisdom. He would not arrive appalled by our foolishness. He would arrive amused, worried, and already reaching for his pen, because sometimes a Republic needs to hear the truth from a man who understood both human weakness and the strange miracle of self-government.

I visualized him observing the ruined East Wing, the ballroom adjacent to the People’s House, the painted Reflecting Pool, attacks on the press, a craving for royal attention, and an occupant of the People’s House who is more eager to be admired than to serve our Republic.

Then Franklin writes home…Hope you find this insightful & enlightening.

Dispatch on the Status of Our Republic

Washington City
July 5, 2026

My Esteemed Friends,

Having been conveyed, by means I cannot explain, into a future age that corresponds to 250 years from our time, and finding myself in the city your posterity has raised for the administration of the Republic, I have thought it prudent to send you a few observations before I am returned, if I am permitted to be returned to our time.

Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson will be pleased to hear that our Republic still exists in form. Elections take place, courts at the national, state, and local levels continue to interpret the law, newspapers continue to publish, and the public debates with such fervor that I almost thought the entire nation was a printing press.

Yet I confess that the condition of the Executive office gave me pause.

We once quarreled with George III because no free people should be governed by the vanity of one man. I now find, to my astonishment, a chief magistrate who appears to regard that monarch not as a warning but as an interior decorator. He favors ceremony, obedience, personal loyalty, public flattery, and buildings large enough to persuade small minds that greatness has occurred.

I had hoped your descendants would remember that we rejected monarchy not because crowns were uncomfortable, but because men wearing them became so.

The President’s residence, also called the People’s House and meant as a duty-bound home, has been significantly transformed. A wing was removed, and a ballroom was added. Donors gather nearby, contractors appear pleased. The words reflect public service, but the atmosphere feels like courtly flattery. I’ve strolled through Versailles and seen men bow so deeply they could pick pockets unnoticed. Now, even the Potomac seems to have acquired a touch of French elegance.

I am told this is all done for greatness. I have found that when a man must constantly proclaim his greatness, the evidence is usually still under construction.

As a printer, I paid especially close attention to the press, and this issue grew more serious the longer I spent in this era. The current President doesn’t just dislike criticism; all public figures dislike it, though some handle it more gracefully. This gentleman, with a countenance the color of an apricot or a persimmon, seems to believe himself to be the reincarnation of the courts of France and, therefore, the press should praise him, obey him, change geography in his favor, and apologize whenever inconvenient facts emerge.

One news service was punished for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico on command, as though a president could improve geography by signing it in a larger hand. Broadcasters have been threatened. Reporters are treated as enemies when they ask questions rather than bring incense. Lawsuits are brandished like royal decrees. It reminded me of old George III, though fairness requires this confession: George was born into a monarchy. He did not have to assemble one from wounded vanity, public entertainments, donor money, and several coats of gold paint.

Permit an old printer to be plain: a free press is not an ornament of liberty. It is one of its tools. A government that fears printers has already confessed more than printers have written.

I also observed that nearly every citizen carries a small glowing glass into which he may speak a question and receive an answer before his own judgment has had time to put on its shoes. This instrument is astonishing. It fetches a fact, composes a letter, translates a tongue, summarizes a book, and offers counsel with the confidence of a lawyer who has not yet found the statute. Much of what it provides is helpful, though some is incorrect. Its rapid delivery might lead a lazy mind to equate speed with wisdom.

I say this as one who loved invention: no machine, however clever, can spare a Republic the burden of discernment. A device may gather the lightning, but only judgment can make the rod.

Nevertheless, I do not lose hope.

I observed citizens carefully counting votes. I saw judges trying to keep the law from becoming a command. I saw teachers, librarians, clerks, veterans, reporters, and ordinary Americans doing the quiet work no ballroom can replace. They receive little applause, which may be why their service remains valuable.

When we gave the people a Republic, I warned that keeping it would be their burden. Upon further reflection, after visiting our Republic for the first time in 250 years, I would only add this: beware the man who loves the symbols of our country more than its restraints. Beware the patriot who attacks the press, flatters himself with marble, and treats public office as family property. George III lost America by misunderstanding Americans. It would be a poor anniversary indeed if Americans returned the favor by misunderstanding George III.

Tell our friends in Philadelphia that the Republic has not failed. The forms remain: elections, courts, printers, laws, and that blessed American habit of arguing with everyone within reach.

But the balance has shifted toward one man’s office in a manner that would please Mr. Hamilton, satisfy much of Mr. Adams, send Mr. Jefferson searching for ink and a quill, and prompt Paul Revere to get back on horseback. The President now stands so enlarged that many citizens seem less interested in restraining him than in being near enough to admire the glow.

This is the warning I carry home: a Republic may keep its papers and still lose its posture. If the people do not soon pull power back toward Congress, the courts, the press, the states, and themselves, they may wake to find they have not crowned a king but have trained themselves to obey one.

Our democratic experiment continues, but it now dangerously leans toward the very thing we crossed an ocean of trouble to resist.

I remain, as ever,
Your affectionate friend and humble servant,
B. Franklin

P.S. I hope this dispatch finds you in good health and, if possible, in better shade than I presently enjoy, for the heat here is dreadful. I am told the current chief magistrate has intellectual doubts that the climate itself can change, which is a curious position in an age that can weigh the stars, split the atom, and yet still offends itself by consulting a thermometer.

Vivat Constitution!

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, History

Trump Gutted the Kennedy Center. Everything He Touches, Dies.

By dianeravitch

July 31, 2026 //

The story of the John F.Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is tragic. It was one of the nation’s finest venues for the arts. It contained an opera company, an orchestra, performances of all kind, and a beautiful art collection.

Soon after he was elected, Trump decided to impose his ideas, his board, his leadership on the Kennedy Center.

He quickly replaced the board, his board made him its president, and installed his own people. He fired the professional arts administrators and named Richard Grennell as its executive director, despite his lack of any experience in arts management.

Grennell laid off hundreds of employees. The board voted to add Trump ‘s name to the facade of the Center. Overnight, it became the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The rank politicization of the Center’s programming was deeply polarizing. Ticket sales plummeted. Artists cancelled their performances.

Where once the Kennedy Center was proudly nonpartisan, Trump purged anyone not aligned with his views and his cult.

Faced with a dwindling audience and boycotts by artists, the board announced that the Center would close for two years for”renovations.” Observers worried that Trump intended to tear the building down.

In response to a lawsuit followed by a Congressionally appointed member of the board, a federal judge ordered the board to remove Trump’s name from the facade, the signage, and everything else.

Today, the once vibrant Kennedy Center is mostly empty. The opera left. The symphony has no schedule. Few people visit.

Trump gutted the Kennedy Center. Did he do it on purpose or was it the result of incompetence? Was he envious of John F. Kennedy? Or did he miscalculate his ability to manage a performing arts center?

This article is an interview with long-serving volunteer tour guide. After it appeared, the Kennedy Center suspended the tours.

Categories Art, Disruption, Evil, Failure, Fraud, Trump, Washington, DC

Michael Hiltzik: Why Dr. Fauci Took the Fifth Amendment in Congressiknal Hearing

By dianeravitch

July 30, 2026 //

Michael Hiltzik, Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for the Los Angeles Times, explains why Dr. Anthony Fauci took the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify when questioned by Senator Rand Paul’s committee. It wasn’t because he’s guilty of Senator Paul’s charges against him.

Hiltzik writes:

There’s a comic trope beloved by playwrights, novelists and screenwriters about the fighters all suited up for battle, only to discover that their adversary refuses to play.

A real-life example of this stratagem unfolded Wednesday on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) convened a committee hearing aimed at trapping Dr. Anthony Fauci into saying something under oath that Paul could use to prosecute him for perjury.

Fauci, who was appearing before Paul’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under subpoena, took the weapon out of Paul’s hands by simply refusing to answer a single question other than to state — 116 times by my count — “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the 5th Amendment to the Constitution.”

During the nearly three-hour hearing, Fauci’s response left Paul and his seven GOP colleagues on the panel confronting a brick wall. They resorted to the common, if infantile tactic of asking repeated simple but irrelevant questions in an attempt to embarrass their target.

“What day of the week is it today?” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked. “What color tie are you wearing?” He elicited the same boilerplate response.

Presumably most of the senators were aware that protocol requires a witness pleading the Fifth to plead it to all questions. Certainly Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who participated in this performative charade, knew that. During a 2000 civil deposition in a lawsuit related to the healthcare firm Columbia/HCA, of which he was chief executive until 1997, he pleaded the Fifth at least 55 times, using phraseology almost identical to Fauci’s.

(Scott left his post after it was learned that his company was under investigation for filing false claims with Medicare and other government healthcare programs. By 2000, it had paid $1.7 billion in fines, penalties and restitution, which the Justice Department called “by far the largest recovery ever reached by the government in a healthcare fraud investigation.” Scott wasn’t charged personally with wrongdoing.)

Fauci, 85, and his lawyers presumably knew they had no choice but to turn away all questions. Experience told him that engaging with Paul would merely feed what Fauci, in a brief opening statement, labeled Paul’s “unhinged obsession” with blaming him for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump knows too. At a civil deposition in 2022, he invoked the Fifth more than 440 times.
They all know too that the Supreme Court has upheld the idea that the Fifth protects not only the guilty but also the innocent. So their shtick about how Fauci wouldn’t be pleading the Fifth unless he had something to hide is sheer duplicity.

It was left to the Republicans to fulminate into the wind about how Fauci is a “megalomaniac” (Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio) or “a villain” (Scott), or worse. Early in the proceedings, Paul ordered Fauci’s lawyer, David Schertler, from the hearing room for trying to make a statement on his client’s behalf.

Let’s examine the backdrop to Wednesday’s farce.
As I have documented many times over the last five years, Republicans and right-wingers are fixated on the notion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, escaped from a Chinese lab to infect the rest of the world.

There is not a speck of evidence to validate that theory. Rather, it’s the overwhelming consensus of epidemiologists and virologists that COVID originated in wildlife, probably bats, and migrated to humankind via the illicit trade in wildlife in China and other south Asian territories, a process known as zoonosis.

The case against Fauci, who retired in 2022, rests on several false claims. One is that as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he manipulated scientists into downplaying the lab-leak theory in favor of zoonosis.
His accusers base this idea on questions raised by the first scientists who examined the virus in early 2021, literally days and weeks after it appeared and it was a pathogen new to everybody. Some hadn’t seen some features of the virus in the wild, so they pondered whether it was man-made.

But they were wrong — the features were familiar to virologists, just not to the ones examining SARS-CoV-2. Following the science, they came to discard the lab-leak theory as nothing more than an exceptionally remote possibility; that conclusion has held up over time.

Fauci didn’t downplay the possibility of a lab leak in his discussions with scientists, as his enemies claim, but instead urged them repeatedly to follow their research wherever it took them.

Paul’s particular hobby horse in this debate is the claim that Fauci downplayed the lab-leak theory because NIAID had provided funding for “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same teeming city where COVID was first seen, which made it complicit in the pandemic. For Paul’s purposes, “gain-of-function” is a shibboleth, akin to conservative attacks on “DEI” and “critical race theory”—useful because laypersons don’t know what it is but it sure sounds sinister.

Generically, the term refers to laboratory work that augments natural qualities of a microbe to facilitate experimental scrutiny or achieve a necessary goal, such as allowing microbes to produce a flu vaccine or bacteria to produce artificial insulin.

From 2014 to 2017, the U.S. suspended gain-of-function experiments to develop a standard identifying research that might produce “potential pandemic pathogens.”

The lab-leak camp asserts that NIAID-funded experiments created a virus in the Chinese lab with features making it infectious for humans.

Professional virologists say that nothing like that is possible given the state of science. A declassified report issued in 2023 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the U.S. had no evidence that any genetic engineering at the Wuhan lab “involved SARS-CoV-2, a close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely-related enough to have been the source of the pandemic.”

NIAID examined the work it funded in China against the post-2017 standard and determined it did not breach that standard. Paul raised that very issue with Fauci at a contentious July 2021 hearing, but Fauci rejected it forthrightly.

“Sen. Paul, you do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly,” Fauci told him.

The other brief against Fauci aired by the GOP majority on Paul’s committee is that Fauci is somehow responsible for the anti-pandemic steps undertaken by states and localities across the U.S. in the heat of the pandemic. The absurdity of this contention is manifest, since Fauci never had any authority to impose any regulations on anybody.

No, the damage was done by the virus, not Fauci, and it unquestionably was mitigated by the measures he recommended. Even so, some 1.2 million Americans have died from the disease — many of them succumbing because anti-vaccine agitators have discouraged them from getting COVID shots.

For the right wing, “Fauci” is just a slogan. Here’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, boasting in a 2021 fundraising appeal, “I refused to blindly follow Dr. Fauci … and allow him to strip Floridians of their God-given freedoms” by resisting lockdowns and school closures. Never mind that Florida emerged from the pandemic with one of the worst COVID mortality rates in the country.

The truth is that while school closures wreaked damage on children’s learning opportunities, they almost certainly saved the lives of thousands of children and their family members.
“What would have happened had schools remained open without any mitigation measures?” New York neurologist and psychiatrist Jonathan Howard has asked.

The number of deaths among children younger than 18, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has pegged at about 2,000, “would have been higher had 60-70 million unvaccinated children contracted the virus over several months’ time in 2020,” Howard reckoned. “It’s reasonable to assume that several thousand children would have died.”

Fauci plainly understood that anything he said at the hearing would only be weaponized against him through selective disclosure — as happened when Paul this week released about 1,000 pages from Fauci’s personal diary dating from the pandemic era.

None of it validated Paul’s accusations. And nothing at Wednesday’s hearing told us anything new about COVID’s origins or the course of the pandemic. That’s a dangerous shame, because the GOP’s obsession with falsely blaming Fauci for a tragic global natural event for purely partisan purposes will only make it harder to fight the next pandemic, which inevitably will arrive, someday.

While they’re distracted with their witch hunt, important work will have to be done to stave it off. But doing it while the GOP goes off on its malevolent persecution of Fauci and other scientists will be like trying to swim upstream against a torrent of slime.

Categories Health, Medicine, Science

Heather Cox Richardson on the GOP Vendetta Against Dr. Fauci

By dianeravitch

July 30, 2026 //

Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the GOP hearings on Dr. Anthony Fauci, led by Senator Rand Paul. Why attack Dr. Fauci? It’s a useful distraction from pressing issues of this day: Trump’s flailing war on Iran; rising inflation; the Epstein files; cuts to Medicaid and Medicare.

During the pandemic, Dr. Fauci was the voice of reason and the voice of science.

What were Republicans doing during the pandemic? Trump was their voice, and he told people to relax, COVID would simply disappear on its own. He suggested that people could protect themselves by injecting bleach or taking Ivermectin pills. He is as qualified to offer medical advice as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Trump deserves credit for investing in the development of a vaccine for COVID. Dr. Fauci oversaw the race to create an effective vaccine.

Once available, Dr. Fauci urged people to get the shot. Trump, instead of taking credit for the rapid production of the vaccine, allied himself with anti-Vaxxers. Be it noted, however, that Trump and his family received the vaccine.

In this post, Richardson wrote about Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and the military quagmire in Iran, then wrote about the attacks on Dr. Fauci:

And so, Republicans are devoting themselves to serving red meat to their MAGA base, ginning up sound bites for distribution on social media.

On the menu today was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases who, serving in that capacity for 38 years, advised seven different presidents of both parties. President George W. Bush awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in creating the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has saved an estimated 26 million lives. Trump named Fauci to the President’s Coronavirus Task Force in January 2020.

But, as Savannah Behrmann and Jeanine Santucci of USA Today reported in October 2020, Trump turned on Fauci as he cautioned against Trump’s confident predictions that the disease would disappear quickly. By February 28, Trump insisted that Democrats were “politicizing” covid, and by April 26, news broke that Trump wanted to sideline Fauci, although Fauci was considered trustworthy and viewed favorably by a 3:1 margin.

By the summer, as Trump’s panic over how the economic crisis caused by the pandemic might hurt his reelection prospects, he turned on Fauci, who continued to support measures to stop the spread of the disease. Trump worked to undermine Fauci’s warnings, saying that the doctors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were “lying” about covid.

By July, he mused about why Fauci had a high approval rating and he didn’t. When Fauci testified to Congress that U.S. cases were spiking while European countries were seeing sharp drops in covid cases because European countries had shut down 95% of their economies while the U.S. had shut down only 50%, Trump posted: “Wrong! We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country…. If we tested less, there would be less cases.”

As Trump continued to criticize Fauci and yet ran a campaign ad suggesting Fauci endorsed his reelection, the doctor continued to emphasize that he was “not a political person.” He added: “And I have never—either directly or indirectly—endorsed a political candidate.” In October he dismissed Trump’s attacks, saying: “They don’t bother me. I know what my job is, and I’ve gotta do it and I’m going to do it. So that kind of—whatever you want to call it—is to me, I just, it’s noise.”

As Aaron Rupar reminded us today, Trump himself awarded a presidential commendation to Fauci “in recognition of [his] exceptional effort on Operation Warp Speed.”

But with the arrival of a vaccine that helped to put the worst of the pandemic behind us, MAGA Republicans began to demonize Dr. Fauci not only as the source of the mask mandates and school shutdowns they hated, but also as the source of the virus itself, alleging—without evidence—that the disease had escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, for which the U.S. National Institutes of Health provided funding.

After voters reelected Trump to the presidency in 2024, he and his loyalists vowed to prosecute Fauci. Trump ally Steve Bannon called for “rough Roman justice” for Fauci, as well as special counsel Jack Smith and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Before he left office, former president Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci—and others—to protect them from political prosecution, saying: “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”

But Republicans have continued to demonize Fauci, ginning up anger against him in their base even as the rest of the country has moved on. Now, with the political tides running so strongly against the Republicans before the 2026 midterm elections, they are clearly trying to rekindle the fury of the last presidential election.

As the Associated Press reported today, for years, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has accused Fauci of lying about the origins of covid, an accusation Fauci has called “preposterous” in testimony before Congress. Paul has repeatedly called for Fauci’s arrest and imprisonment and, in 2023, published a book with Fauci on the cover, explicating what he called the “Great Covid Cover-Up.”

The Trump administration has fed Paul’s crusade, with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. searching for eight months to find Fauci’s private diary on government computers, then handing the files over to Paul and to Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). Neither Kennedy, Paul, nor Johnson told Fauci they had obtained his 1,000-page diary before they published it, in full, last week.

In July 2021, Fauci wrote in his diary that an analysis of the viruses used in the Wuhan lab “clearly indicate(s) that it is molecularly impossible for the viruses under the auspices of the NIH grant to have been manipulated into or evolved into” the covid virus.

Now chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Paul subpoenaed Fauci in June to appear before the committee. Unwillingly, as his lawyers noted Paul’s many statements calling for Fauci to be jailed, Fauci did so today.

In an opening statement, Fauci said that he believed “the sole reason [Paul] is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something—anything—that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote.”

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he said. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

More than 100 times he did exactly that as Republicans berated him, calling him “a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar,” mocking him, and asking him, “Do you feel like you’re in deep sh*t?” What Republicans did not do is introduce any evidence that the 85-year-old lifelong public servant had broken any laws.

More to the point was Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) yelling at Fauci about closings during the pandemic, blustering: “Who the f*ck do you think you were?” F-bombs are rare on the Senate floor, and the outburst has gotten significant media attention.

That attention has distracted from the other reason Moreno is in the news. As Abby Vesoulis of Mother Jones reported, Moreno has said nothing as his daughter’s ex-husband, Representative Max Miller (R-OH), has been credibly charged with the violent abuse of her and their 2-year-old daughter. As the Republicans struggle to hold on to their congressional majorities, Republican leaders have refused to call for Miller, who is running for a third term, to resign.

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Categories Ethics, Extremism, Health, Medicine, Science, Trump

Signs of a Dying Democracy?

By dianeravitch

July 30, 2026 //

Three speeches by public figures on the same day alarmed Dr. Robert B. Shpiner, a clinical professor of medicine in pulmonary and critical care at the UCLA medical school. He wrote about what he perceived as signals of the decay of our democracy. He was stunned by what he heard from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President Trump, and Trump’s policy advisor Stephen Miller. He thought he heard the death knells of democracy.

Is our democracy dying? I am not prepared to say that it is. For sure, it is in mortal peril. It is led by incompetent fools who seem determined to crush dissent, sow doubt and fear, and abandon our ideals and values. Their goal is power, not the protection of our Constitution.

Yet, with every protest, with every court ruling against this cabal, I see resistance and I see hope. In case after case, federal judges have ruled against Trump’s efforts to undermine and destroy our democracy.

Which side are you on?

Dr. Shpiner wrote in The Guardian:

The presumption that US elections are legitimate died last week in Washington. It was 237 years old. It did not die of one wound. It died of three, inflicted in a single day, in daylight, on the record. And the country, running to the loudest of them, never examined the one most likely to kill.

In critical care we distinguish the mechanism of death from its cause. The mechanism was a Thursday. The cause was chronic, progressive and untreated.

The morning belonged to the secretary of state. Before officials of more than 60 countries, he announced that the counterterrorism architecture of the free world, built over a generation against jihadist mass murder, should be rebuilt and aimed at the domestic left. He named a transnational enemy defined by hatred of the west, “a revolt of the worst against the best”. He tied it to Iran and to Cuba and offered no evidence for either link. He said the journalists and thinktanks who might check the claims often agree with the enemy’s goals. The move is old and reliable: discredit the second opinion in advance.

Midday belonged to the White House deputy chief of staff. What he said deserves to be quoted rather than summarized, because summary is a mercy it has not earned. He called “leftwing political terrorism” a “fatal cancer of civilization”. He said that its politics, left to run its course, “always becomes a gulag”. He said antifa demonstrators are “all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism”, that “their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred”, and he asked why there is “not one normal-looking person among them”. He said that when the leftist protests that his rights are being violated, those appeals “must fall on deaf ears”. He urged the assembled governments to be “completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization”. And he described the work already under way in six verbs: “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest and prosecute”.

I have been practicing medicine for four decades. Cancer is my vocabulary, not his. And I know what happened the last time a government borrowed it. The Nazi state’s central perversion was the medicalization of killing: the enemy as tumor, as bacillus, the nation as patient, extermination as cure. Robert Jay Lifton called it the biomedical vision. It recruited my profession first, and my profession answered willingly. When a government describes citizens as a cancer, it has written the first line of a treatment plan. On Thursday, the plan was read aloud, from a state department podium, in six verbs.

One disclosure belongs in the chart. My family left Russia in 1917. My relatives left Germany in 1933. In both generations, leaving was called excessive; staying was the reasonable position. But an alarm that was right both times it sounded is not overcaution. On Thursday, it sounded a third time.

The evening belonged to the president. In primetime he called the American election system indefensible, claimed a foreign power held 220 million voter files, declared mail voting inherently corrupt, accused his own intelligence services of concealment, and told Congress that the only reason to oppose his bill is the intent to cheat. That framework converts every future outcome into evidence. Pass the bill and win: the bill worked. Fail and lose: the cheaters blocked it. A presumption of legitimacy cannot survive inside a belief system engineered to be unfalsifiable.

It was just a Thursday. Netflix’s forecast disappointed Wall Street. A rocket aborted on the pad. No sirens sounded, because this is not how they sound. Democracies do not die to soundtracks. They die on ordinary weekdays, between the earnings reports, while the country is at work.

Then came the response, and the response was a triage error. Nearly all of it ran to the evening. The factcheckers parsed the voter files. The law professors graded the bombshells. Real work, spent on the loudest injury. The morning’s remarks, the ones that declared a class of Americans a cancer and read enmity on their bodies, drew the attention of an ordinary news cycle: straight coverage in the mainstream, horror at the margins, and in a portion of the press, open applause. I have watched teams run to the dramatic patient while the quiet one, the one not crying out, exsanguinates behind a curtain. The most dangerous words spoken in Washington on Thursday were not spoken in primetime. They were spoken before lunch, to more than 60 countries. The official transcript records the applause.

The decedent is survived by the federal courts, still open. By 50 secretaries of state, still certifying. By a general election, still on the calendar, 108 days out. And by an electorate that has not yet been asked the only question that matters, which is whether it will accept a count its president has pre-declared corrupt, counted among citizens its government has pre-declared malignant.

In 40 years of intensive care, I have pronounced death many times. The criteria are strict because the declaration is irreversible, and so we are taught to be certain before we speak. I have also, more than once, seen a rhythm return after the room had gone quiet, when someone refused to stop compressions on schedule. This notice is filed in the knowledge that pronouncements can be premature. It is filed in the fear that this one is not.

Categories Democracy

Peter Greene: Will the Federal Voucher Program Put Private Schools at Risk?

By dianeravitch

July 30, 2026 //

Some years back, I was invited to lecture at Notre Dame University. My views of charter schools and vouchers were well known. I wasn’t sure how to frame my critique of school choice at this great Catholic university. When I spoke, I warned that public support for vouchers might eventually lead to public accountability, meaning regulations. Independence, I argued, mattered more than money.

I doubt that anyone who believes in vouchers for religious schools changed their mind. But I was treated with great warmth and appreciation. Notre Dame is simply an awesome university.

At the time, I couldn’t imagine that the federal government would ever adopt a voucher program.

Yet here we are, and Peter Greene has a warning for private schools.

He wrote in Forbes:

State level school vouchers have enjoyed a period of growth largely free from regulation and oversight, but the advent of federal vouchers has the potential to change that.

Most states have voucher laws that explicitly forbid the state from interfering in any way with how a voucher-receiving school conducts business. Education Savings Account style vouchers provide parents with a grant of funding they can spend on many sorts of education-related expenses, but again, these programs often come with little oversight. As the Florida Department of Education announces on their website:

The Florida Department of Education does not have jurisdiction over private schools. Legislative intent not to regulate, control, approve, or accredit private educational institutions, churches, their ministries, religious instruction, freedoms, or rites, is explicit. The owners of private elementary and secondary schools in Florida are solely responsible for all aspects of their educational programs,

The One Big Beautiful Bill created a federal voucher program, a program that may help further the goal of pushing voucher programs into states that have resisted vouchers. Yet those states may move to insure that federal vouchers do not bring with them the fraud and abuse seen in other states.

In Arkansas, the LEARNS Act allowed students to qualify for a voucher for students with disabilities with nothing more than a note from a doctor.Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen reported for ProPublica on a private school that had students attack a fellow student, under the direction of a school leader whose only qualification is a degree in occupational therapy. Arkansas does not review private school curriculum or the qualifications of the school leaders; anyone is free to open a private school.

In Florida, ProPublica found that the state of Florida had stripped a teacher of her license for sexual abuse of a 16-tear-old boy a decade ago, then, last year allowed her to open a private school.

Arizona’s taxpayer-funded school vouchers have been plagued with reports of misuse. State auditors found in 2018 that $700K in voucher money being spent on cosmetics, clothing, and other inappropriate items. Craig Harris reported at 12News that the level of fraud and unallowable purchases was not the 1% declared by voucher supporters like state Schools Chief Tom Horne, but closer to 20%. According to the Department of Education’s own records, of 385,000 purchases made with voucher dollars, 84,000 violated the rules governing what is allowed.

When Harris followed up in 2025, he found voucher money still being spent on a variety of items such as iPhones, smart TVs, jewelry, hotel stays, airline tickets, diapers, gift cards, lingerie, and other unallowable expenses. In November 2025, the Department of Education began automatically approving all voucher spending requests because it had become swamped with a backlog of such requests.

Utah’s brand new program was just audited, with Carmen Nesbitt reporting for the Salt Lake Tribune that some spending was found to be “wasteful and extravagant.”

Utah has already added some guardrails to its program, and other states are also seeing a push for greater accountability and transparency. In Arizona, a proposed ballot initiative will likely call for greater accountability for the state’s voucher program. In Pennsylvania, the House passed a bill that left voucher funding untouched, but add transparency and accountability.

State Rep. Matt Bradford said, “No one should ever fear transparency,” and has argued for more oversight, according to Maddie Hanna and Gillian McGoldrick at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Vouchers also bring with them questions of taxpayer-funded schools that pick and choose which students to accept, what Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center has called an “outsourcing of discrimination.” Voucher-funded schools have, in some states, reserved the right to reject students for coming from homes have an atmosphere “that is counter to or in opposition to the biblical lifestyle.” There are also examples of schools that reject students with academic or behavioral struggles. There are at least two cases currently working through the courts that seek to establish a private school entitlement to state funding even as they violate the state’s laws forbidding discrimination against LGBTQ persons.

All of this serves as an indication to governors considering signing on for the federal voucher system may want to make sure that they put legislative guardrails in place to protect both the academic integrity of the education system as well as the rights of marginalized student communities.

Some voucher supporters are already anticipating that outcome. It would not be the first time; as Jennifer Berkshire reported in In These Times, some of the strongest opponents to Governor Greg Abbott’s Texas school vouchers were conservatives, who see in vouchers a way for government to extend control over schools.

That may go double for federal vouchers. Writes American Enterprise Institute fellow Daniel Buck,“The greatest risk in my mind is that in time this program will become a stick that the federal government can wield to thwack private schools into submission.”

Yet currently, there are no sticks attached to the federal voucher program. When Governor Tony Evers vetoed the Wisconsin legislature’s attempt to force participation in the federal voucher program, he stated

This nationwide voucher program has no student achievement metrics, no school accountability measures, no minimum or maximum scholarship size, no certain end date, and no cap on how much the federal government can spend. Republicans in Washington have given private voucher expansion carte blanche to run roughshod over public education in this country — and a blank check to do so at taxpayer expense, clearly without any regard for whether it actually does what is best for kids.

School vouchers occupy a unique policy position; no voucher program has ever been put into place by the voters. Instead, these programs have always been installed by legislatures working around the voters. Now the federal government has launched a voucher program by making an end run around state legislatures. It will be up to those legislatures to install guard rails to protect the interest of their taxpayers and students.

Categories Education Reform

Carol Burris: The Hoax of “School Choice”

By dianeravitch

July 29, 2026 //

I posted the link to Carol Burris’s terrific article about school choice yesterday but was unable to copy the text. Carol sent the text to me.

Here it is:

Advocates of a rightwing, billionaire-funded campaign to replace public education with a privatized education marketplace have been candid about their goals and disciplined in pursuing them. A new reportfrom the organization I lead, the Network for Public Education, provides an accounting of how far state lawmakers across the nation, in both red and blue states, have advanced this campaign and have put at grave risk access to the current system of education that is free and available to all families.

For nearly a decade, the Network for Public Education has issued statehouse-by-statehouse report cards holding legislators accountable for how they treat public schools and the children who depend on them. And over the years, we have seen a ramp up in school privatization and continuous neglect of public school students and teachers.

This 2026 Report Card is our most expansive to date, evaluating all fifty states and the District of Columbia across four categories: privatization of public education, protections for homeschooled students, school funding, and conditions for teaching and learning based on thirty-nine factors. Some of those factors include charter school expansion, discrimination, and student-to-teacher ratio.

In 2022, when we issued our second report card, ten states achieved 80 percent or more of a possible 102 points. By 2024, the number of states achieving 80 percent of all possible points had dropped to four. Two years later, only two states, Nebraska and Vermont, hit the 80 percent mark.

Over the past four years, privatization efforts have seen heightened success across the country. Voucher programs (which began in the mid-1990s) have expanded from twenty-seven programs in 2022 to seventy-three programs in thirty-four states as of 2026, with multiple programs in several states. Vouchers pay for tuition at both secular and religious schools, and in some states, the purchase of goods and services by homeschoolers and microschoolers. Schools accepting vouchers also typically face little of the academic, financial, or civil rights accountability required of public schools, and many can reject or expel students based on disability, religion, sexual orientation, or academic record. And because voucher amounts frequently fall short of full private school tuition, the benefits flow disproportionately to families who could already afford private school without public dollars.

Charter schools, which began in 1992 as experimental schools controlled by school districts, have been privatized to include large chains of schools, some of which span across multiple states. Nearly one in five charter school students attends a charter run by a for-profit corporation. It is an unstable sector of schooling, with more than one in four closing by year five.

Only Nebraska and Kentucky are now the only remaining states free of both charter schools and state voucher programs. But the 2026 report card reveals a troubling and consistent pattern beyond the expansion of school privatization. The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives—charter schools, voucher programs, and home schools—are the same states that fund privatization at the direct expense of investment in public schools.

In fact, our analysis found a strong and statistically significant negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and other indicators of public school support. Privatization and public school disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.

Seventeen states earned a grade of F, meaning they failed to meet even 40 percent of the thirty-nine standards we set for responsible stewardship of public schools. Standards that included equitable school funding, teacher satisfaction, protections for homeschooled students, and class size. Florida ranked dead last, scoring just fourteen out of 102 possible points, with Arizona following closely behind. These are not struggling states making hard choices with thin budgets. They are states that have made deliberate decisions to defund neighborhood schools while directing public money toward private alternatives with minimal oversight, weak accountability, and documented records of fraud and mismanagement.

The appeal of “school choice,” in which families are permitted to use state funds that would’ve been otherwise spent on public education on non-traditional programs like charter or private schools, is easy to understand. The promise of options and tailored education sounds reasonable in the abstract. But in practice, choice works best for families with the time, information, and flexibility to navigate it, and whose children the private school is willing to choose. For a family in rural Florida or a child with complex disabilities whose needs most private schools won’t accommodate, the marketplace of options is theoretical. The public school is the only institution legally required to educate every child who walks through the door. When it is weakened through funding cuts, the diversion of students and dollars, or a hollowed-out teaching workforce, the consequences fall hardest on the children least able to find alternatives.

Meanwhile, many of these states that have expanded privatization are the same states that fail to uphold school policies that support teaching and learning.

You cannot systematically eliminate teachers’ job protections, freeze wages, and inject heavy political pressure into classrooms, then be surprised when talented people leave the profession. States like Arizona and Florida, which we rank at the bottom for teacher working conditions, are the same states reporting severe shortages of teachers and the highest rates of underqualified instructors. That is a direct consequence of policy choices, not a demographic inevitability.

The top of the rankings offers a useful counterpoint. States like Nebraska and Vermont demonstrate that it is possible to adequately fund public schools, support teachers as professionals, and resist privatization pressure. The distance between them and the bottom-ranked states reflects not differences in wealth or circumstance, but differences in political priorities.

None of this means public school systems are beyond criticism. They have real failures and persistent inequities worth addressing. But the solution is not to defund the institution and redirect money to private alternatives that face no equivalent accountability. Charter schools limit enrollment. Voucher schools can turn away students. Education savings accounts, which give taxpayer funds to parents to buy private services in lieu of public schooling, can be misused with little consequence. Public schools cannot do any of these things—and that constraint is precisely what makes them worth protecting.

What happens next depends on whether parents, teachers, and the communities built around our public schools engage with the same urgency as forces on the right wing who work to dismantle them.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Meet Cassandra Williamson, the “Transgender Terrorist”

By dianeravitch

July 29, 2026 //

What is life like for a military veteran who is transgender, caring for her Trump-loving relatives, living in Trump country? The Washington Post recently featured this interview of Cassandra Williamson, who lives a life of contradictions and faces it with equanimity.

It begins:

The day that a gunman killed Charlie Kirk in Utah, Cassandra Williamson was at home in rural Kentucky, washing laundry and checking her mom’s vital signs. Williamson, 66, is a veteran of both the Marine Corps and the Navy, and for the last few years, she has been the primary caregiver for her mother and two siblings. Williamson is also transgender — a fact that has put her at odds with her Trump-loving family and a growing network of conservatives who want to strip trans people of rights.

Kirk was an outspoken part of that network. He described trans people as “one of the most destructive social contagions in human history” and said transgender troops damage the nation’s security.

When prosecutors and public officials said Kirk’s alleged shooter was in a romantic relationshipwith a person who is transitioning from male to female, prominent Republicans called for trans activists to be institutionalized and labeled terrorists. For Williamson, the suggestion felt ludicrous. How could she be a threat to the nation she fought to protect?

Williamson started a satirical blog called “A Day in the Life of a Transgender Terrorist” in which she recounts the activities of her daily life as a caretaker. (Video: Cassandra Williamson)

She decided to start a satirical blog.

In “A Day in the Life of a Transgender Terrorist,’ Williamson recounts in intimate and often humorous detail the chores and conversations that make up her days. She changes soiled bedsheets. She deploys “a full-scale tactical assault on the laundry pile with extreme prejudice (and a little bit of OxiClean).” She pushes Ensure on her ailing mom, and she makes sure her sister’s Trump hat sits just right on her head as she watches Fox News. In one entry, Williamson writes, “Good to know the best and brightest minds in D.C. are focused on the real threat: a veteran from coal country who can operate a glucometer and a washing machine. Sometimes simultaneously.”

The Washington Post interviewed Williamson about her life, this tumultuous political moment and what she sees as the way forward in an increasingly divided nation. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What were you thinking when you heard Charlie Kirk had been shot?

The first thought that occurred to me when Charlie Kirk had been shot was that I hoped this was not in any way associated with transgender people. I was really sad about it all because I hate seeing someone killed over their political beliefs. It just goes against everything I believe in. And even though he and I would disagree on everything, I don’t want to see people killed over their beliefs. He has a family, he’s got children, he’s got a wife, he’s got a sister. And it pains me enormously the loss that they are feeling now.. Those are all the things that went through my head all within a matter of a couple of seconds.

Why were you scared that it might have a connection to the trans community?

I didn’t want there to be an association because I knew that it would be weaponized against the entire community. And they already have a bull’s eye on our back, essentially, without this.

You posted a video the day after Kirk was shot, and you called for a moment of silence for him, his family and his supporters. Tell me about that.

He’s an American. His family is American. And in that moment of tragedy, it was important for me to show my community, my part of this American community, another life had been lost. I think that we needed to have that moment of silence, recognizing that there are people who do agree with him. We don’t agree with him or them, but they’re still Americans and they deserve that respect.

And you’re someone who has served this country.

I served for everyone, even the ones I disagree with, even the ones who want to kill me, even the ones who see me as less than. And I would go to the grave defending their right to believe those things. They might not do that for me, but that’s on them, not on me.

Republican lawmakers Nancy Mace and Ronny Jackson have called for trans people to be treated as “terrorists” and institutionalized. You decided to start a blog called “A Day in the Life of a Transgender Terrorist.” Why?

Well, I didn’t know how else to address what they were trying to say. I know that I cannot persuade people to come along with anything that I’m trying to tell them. I can give them numbers. They don’t care. I can give them a mountain of evidence. They don’t care. The only thing left is trying to find some humor in all of this, at least, satirically.

You’re calling me a terrorist and here I am, getting up at 7 a.m., making sure my mom gets her shots and her medicine and breakfast, making sure my brother’s all right, sister’s all right. And then mom pees in the bed.

Look, there’s a lot of humor in what I’m doing here. I mean, there’s a lot that can be used to show people we can laugh even though you want to traumatize us. I can let this thing beat me up. But I decided that somebody’s got to be the example that says there is a way through this, and here it is.

Tell me what’s going on with your family.

Mom is almost 87 years old. She’s been losing the battle with her cognitive abilities. She can’t see real well. She can’t hear real well. And her mobility is extremely limited. Brother has COPD, very severe. He worked in the coal mines for all of his life. And it’s difficult for him to breathe. And he has to keep oxygen around. He’s very weak. My sister has some physical mobility issues, as well as educational deficiencies. She doesn’t have the ability to talk in any way that you can understand her. You really have to listen closely to the sounds that she makes to kind of interpret what she wants to eat.

You have posted some pictures of them wearing Trump hats.

This whole area is Trump country. This whole region of Pike County, eastern Kentucky, it is Trump country, period. And when I came here, the first thing I noticed is that Fox News was on all the time in every room and loud.

I had to go to my granddaughter’s graduation in Texas this past year. So I stopped at this place down in Tennessee on the way back. It’s called the Trump Superstore. I go in and buy [my sister] Irma a pair of short pants that says Trump. And I got my brother a shirt that says Trump, and I got my sister one of those gold-plated $50 bills for five bucks. And it has Trump on it. They’re entitled to believe what they want, and it does not hurt me or offend me in any way, even though I know that what they are supporting is harmful to me and those like me. I can’t demand that they treat me another way from how they’ve always done things. So I don’t worry about all of that. If I did, I would be one sour person. I wouldn’t be able to exist here. So you have to find a way to survive.

Do you all talk about transgender issues?

My brother and I had a good conversation just a couple days ago. He had seen what was going on with Jackson and Mace and the Heritage Foundation wanting to institutionalize all of us. And he knows that it doesn’t apply to me. Right now, I am the one who represents all transgender people. And he noticed that I’m not like any of those things that he hears. He puts more faith in what they’re saying about it in a broader perspective. And I’m not gonna change his mind on a lot of that. We can have those conversations, but it’s a very slow process. The more they get to interact with me as just being a normal person, like anyone else here in this community, the more they see that we’re just as real as they are.

You came out in 2016. You were in your mid-50s. How did you decide it was time?

I was living with this girl. She had this tube of Premarin in her bathroom. The warning label said men should not touch this thing because it can cause breast development. I think I passed out. I saw that and I went, “Oh, my God, there’s a way.” That was in 2004. It took me another five years to study and think through all these things. And then in 2009, I decided I’m going to order this stuff from overseas. I would get that stuff in. I’d get scared. I’d flush it down the toilet. I’d go buy more.

I have known who I am for a long, long, long, long, long time. But that little box with that warning label was the key that said, “There is a way.”

I ended up taking a picture with family, and I’m in a big, baggy shirt, trying to scrunch. I’d been hiding completely. I decided then that I couldn’t hide anymore. I went to my therapist and they said, “You’re gonna have to help me write a letter.” I took the letter, gave it to all my kids, my ex-wife. I posted it on Facebook. The kids came to me within like four hours and said, “What do you want us to call you?” And I said, “Whatever you want. I’m good with it.” My ex-wife, it took her about 12 hours.

So, I’d sent that letter to my brothers and sisters. I’m the oldest of six. And they let me know that they didn’t want mom to know. They thought it would probably kill her. And so, I waited, but then on a Monday, I called mom, and I said, “Mom, I’ve got something to tell you, but, but I’m not going to tell you today. I want you to go into your prayer closet and pray. And then I’m going to call you back in a couple of days.” So I called back Wednesday and said, “Mom, have you prayed? You ready?” She’s Southern Baptist. And she said, “I think I’m ready.” And I said, “So I’m one of those transgender people you’ve heard of, Mom.” She said, “Oh, I thought it was worse than that.” And we just carried on a conversation after that. And she didn’t die, thank goodness.

Did she accept you?

No, she did not accept me. Her faith wouldn’t allow for that. And even today, she gets confused sometimes because I’ll come through in a really low-cut dress. And she’s asked me, “So, who are you?” And I said, “I’m Cassandra, your oldest child.”

But I’m good with that. I am really thrilled to be able to spend time with my mom, brother and sister here. That’s important to me, regardless of how they feel.

How do things feel for you now compared to when you first came out?

If I take a global perspective, we’ve come a long way. But we’ve also experienced a lot more difficulties since then, too. When [former defense secretary] Ash Carter announced [in 2016] that he was lifting the trans ban for service in the military, it was like a whole new world was in front of us. It was exciting. Little did we know, in just a few months, Trump would take office and send out his infamous tweets on trans people serving in the military. It was really devastating when he started trying to strip trans military people of their rights.

This year has been horrendous on a global scale for rights for every minority in the country and the world, really. This is a conservative reset. And through history, you can actually see that in the 50s, they got tired of all of the LGB people in federal government. They kicked 20,000 people out of the federal government in the 50s for security reasons. Same argument they used today for the military.

You have sent your blog to many prominent right-wing pundits and officials. Have you heard back from any of the politicians like Nancy Mace or anyone else that you’ve tweeted at?

No, and I’m not going to. You know why? They don’t want to be Loomered. Laura Loomer, she’s the one who will go, “You talked to a trans person. We want you fired now.” Or LibsofTikTok: “We want you fired because you had a picture of a trans person standing beside you. We don’t want that.” I know people in the military have been chased out. People will send it to Pete Hegseth for their removal. They’re not going to talk to me because they don’t want the ire of their base raised up against them.

Do you think Charlie Kirk would have talked to you?

Charlie probably would have. That’s the thing that he actually believed in. But I do think that he would have tried to bully me with his vast knowledge. He was a very smart person. I will talk to anyone, whether you agree with me or not.

And that makes me the biggest “terrorist” in the world to people like Trump and Jackson and Mace and the Heritage Foundation. Because I’m changing minds here at the local level. I’m affecting their base in a way they don’t want their base to move. It’s one person at a time, one greeter at Walmart at a time.

Categories Bigotry, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Freedom, Gender, Kentucky, Trump

Audrey Watters: More Ed-Tech Hoaxes

By dianeravitch

July 29, 2026 //

Audrey Watters says in this post that she never wanted to be the Cassandra of Ed-tech, but she can’t help herself. There are simply too many for-profit phonies that are coming on to the market and too many dupes willing to buy them.

She writes on her blog “Second Breakfast”:

“The future is here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” This quotation, attributed to science fiction author William Gibson, is often used to imply that some lucky few, particularly those surrounded by silicon gadgetry, live in some glorious high-tech promised land; while the rest of us, without access to that machinery, remain stuck in an industrial, even pre-industrial past.

That always strikes me as a huge misread — not just of the fictional tomorrows that Gibson has imagined, but of the realities of various technologies today. The uneven distribution isn’t simply about the “haves” and “have-nots” of the latest in fancy consumer electronics. Rather, it’s about what sorts of possibilities, what sorts of agency, what sorts of freedoms these technologies might afford us. Who even gets to have a future.

“The future is here” — and let’s just say that “the future” is some sort of automated classroom – what exactly does it look like? What’s the distribution of that future? And for the community in and around that classroom, what sort of future, whose future, does the robot teacher enable?

“The future is here.” Or at least, some version of a rather Gibson-esque dystopia looms threateningly: “Rural NY School District Will Be One of First to Bring Humanoid Robot Into Classroom,” Melissa Manno reported this week for New York Focus. The Salamanca City Central School District, located on the Seneca Nation reservation, has agreed to purchase a robot from Realbotix for use in the upcoming school year. “The female robot, named Sally, will have a “lifelike appearance” with silicone skin and long brown hair. … Students will use a unique identification code when interacting with the robot during class, allowing it to access their learning data and provide personalized support based on their past communication with the avatar, [Realbotix CEO Andrew] Kiguel said. ‘They’ll be able to say, “Hey, I’m student number 1234,” and then the robot will be like, “Hey, we were talking about this yesterday, do you want to continue that conversation?”’

“Hey, I’m student number 1234” – number 1234 in a district where about 80% of the students are classified as “economically disadvantaged” and almost 32% live in poverty. Number 1234 in a district where 32% of students identify as indigenous. Uneven distribution indeed.

And Sally, ah Sally. Sally “will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions.” The district reportedly will pay $57,590 for the robot, which “unlike other Realbotix robots … will not have advanced features such as facial recognition and recording.” Realbotix, “previously known as Tokens.com,” Kotaku’s John Walker informs us, “a crypto company that has since pivoted to the latest fad, after purchasing sex doll maker Simulacra.”

Realbotix, for its part, insists that this new education-focused product and the old, sex companion robot RealDoll “do not share employees, payroll, physical locations, or technology.” But as robotics researcher Julie Walker notes on Bluesky, “a ‘teacher’ robot built by a company whose core embodiment expertise is companion and sex robots is going to carry that design logic into the classroom, whether anyone intends it or not.” And as all the AI-in-education evangelists keep insisting – and have insisted now for one hundred years – the automation of the classroom means that the teacher can focus more on caring for her students, the very gendered practices that these robots (both embodied and as chatbots) also promise.

“We anticipate benefits we cannot yet fully foresee,” the Realbotix press release insists. It gestures at a future that’s both here and not-yet-so. What’s being distributed unevenly in this future isn’t simply gadgetry: it’s surveillance, ideology, racism, patriarchy, control. Dystopia. The sexbot just embodies, makes explicit, what’s a more subtle message encoded into the rest of AI-in-education.

The future that’s promised is a return to some imagined, idyllic past, others try to tell us. “Bring back testing,” we hear over and over and over, as though the polycrises faced by schools and students and communities are because too many people balked at bubble-sheets.

“The Debate Over Standardized Testing Is About to Converge With Two Scary On-Campus Realities” Nick Ripatrazone writes in Slate. Those scary realities that demand a return to more standardized testing and, by extension, better “standards,” he implies. The latest college students – those who’ve somehow made it to campus without adequate SAT scores – simply aren’t “college-ready,” he argues. “Already hampered with budgets cuts and bloated class sizes, professors will now regularly be tasked with remedial instruction in all subject areas, not merely in unique situations. Without standardized testing as a reasonable barometer of student skill, colleges will be flooded with students of unknown abilities. American higher education might not be able to withstand such a crisis.”

And of course, plenty of the pressures to keep and expand testing don’t simply come from the tsk-tsking professoriate or contributors to The Atlantic. They come from tech companies, who’ve profited from the push to digitize not just teaching but testing. (These two are, as education psychologists insisted a century ago, inseparable – that is, if you see the classroom as simply a laboratory where students can be trained and tracked and measured like mice in mazes.)

Meanwhile…

“Teachers save time with AI. Their students may pay the price,” Jill Barshay reports. (I’m not sure I really even believe the “save time” bit, to be honest.)

“The End of Homework? Teachers Grapple With Cheating in the Age of AI” by Greg Toppo. (Obligatory reminder: Generative AI is itself built on data theft and plagiarism. It’s pretty rich to expect young people to look at a world rife with fraud and exploitation and then notcheat. These are the values one implicitly encourage when one tells them they must use “AI” to secure their future.)

“To AI-Proof Lawyers, Some Law Schools Restrict Technology,” Kathryn Palmer writes.

I’m willing to retire the “ed-tech’s Cassandra” title – trust me, I’ve never really wanted it – because damn, I would not have predicted that Colin Kaepernick, of all people, would become an ed-tech villain. And yet here we are, with Kaepernick and his AI company Lumi Story AI engaged in some awfully shady shit across multiple school districts.

I mean, it’s bad enough to sell schools a product in which students’ imagination is co-opted and corralled by “AI.” But to use his celebrity as a marketing gimmick to quite literally buy students’ and shape superintendents’ support is pretty gross.

Back in May, 404 Media wrote, in horror, that “Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI.” Parents too were angry that their children might be recorded – audio and video – in order to “develop and evaluate AI models for assessing classroom interaction quality.” What about privacy protections? How would this data be used? What rights did families have to consent or to refuse, and what would be the implications of the latter – that is, how would those children who opted out retain access to their classmates and teachers?

None of these sorts of questions come up in a similar sort of research scenario, described in a story this week in The 74– a reminder that too often, education technology journalism gets far too excited about the education technology at the expense of the very humans involved: “Nebraska Head Starts Use Vests With ‘Talk Pedometers’ to Boost Early Literacy.” In this particular project, preschoolers’ conversations are recorded; their vocalizations quantified, analyzed. But here, rather than a privacy invasion, the technology is framed as a superpower.

The reference to the pedometer in the headline should immediately give us pause because those fitness devices sold the world on the importance of “10,000 steps” – a figure that was always more about marketing than an indicator of some threshold for actual health. (Indeed, the “30 million word gap” is a problematic and questionable framing in and of itself.)

To finish the post, open the link.

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Audrey Watters: More Ed-Tech Hoaxes

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