Trump Posts Racist Video, Portraying Obamas as Apes, Later Withdraws the Post

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2026 //
8

It should come as no surprise that President Trump is racist and that he is insanely jealous of President Obama. Obama won the Nobel Prize, which is beyond Trump’s grasp. It rankles Trump that he can’t threaten or bribe the Nobel Prize committee. Trump can’t believe that there is one award that he can’t get no matter how hard he tries.

Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his racism, such as when he referred to African nations as “shithole countries.” He has made clear that he would welcome white immigrants, whether from South Africa or Scandinavia, as he expels immigrants of color. His vision of Make America Great Again seems to rely on depictions of a White America, a time preceding the Civil Rights movement. Norman Rockwell’s family has complained about the Trump administration’s misuse of Rockwell paintings to allude to an idyllic all-white America.

Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt was quick to denounce protests about the meme as “fake outage” and to urge journalists to focus on issues that “actually matter to the American public.” Like the Epstein files? Or the brutality of ICE?

In the early afternoon, about 1:30 pm, Trump deleted the post, having realized that no one thought it was funny, and many saw it as rank racism.

Erica L. Green and Isabella Kwai wrote in The New York Times:

President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, the latest in a long pattern by Mr. Trump of promoting offensive stereotypes about Black Americans and others.

The brief clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about anomalies in the 2020 presidential election.

The depiction of Mr. and Mrs. Obama as apes perpetuates a racist trope, used historically by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize Black people and justify lynchings and other atrocities. A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama declined to comment.

Mr. Trump has a history of making degrading remarks about people of color, women and immigrants. And in his second administration, official posts from the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department have posted images and slogans that echo white supremacist messaging.

In response to questions about the clip, which Mr. Trump posted Thursday during a late-night spree on social media, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said criticism of the video was “fake outrage.”

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” she said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — the Senate’s only Black Republican — wrote on X that he hoped the post was fake “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”

The latest clip appeared to have been taken from a video that was shared in October by a user on X with the caption “President Trump: King of the Jungle,” and an emoji of a lion.

In that video, several high-profile Democrats — including former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former vice president Kamala Harris — were shown as various animals, while Mr. Trump was depicted as a lion. The Obamas, in the clip, were shown as apes. The video ended with the animals bowing down to Mr. Trump.

Categories Education Reform

Ruth Marcus: Why I Left the Washington Post

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2026 //
1

Ruth Marcus started her career at The Washington Post in 1984. She rose through the ranks and eventually became an editorial writer, a columnist, and deputy editor of the editorial page.

She wrote in The New Yorker about why she ultimately quit:

I stayed until I no longer could—until the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, issued an edict that the Post’s opinion offerings would henceforth concentrate on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets,” and, even more worrisome, that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” I stayed until the Post‘s publisher, Will Lewis, killed a column I filed last week expressing my disagreement with this new direction. Lewis refused my request to meet. (You can read the column in full below, but—spoiler alert—if you’re craving red meat, brace for tofu. I wrote the piece in the hope of getting it published and registering a point, not to embarrass or provoke the paper’s management.)

Is it possible to love an institution the way you love a person, fiercely and without reservation? For me, and for many other longtime staff reporters and editors, that is the way we have felt about the Post. It was there for us, and we for it. One Saturday night, in May, 1992, the investigative reporter George Lardner, Jr., was in the newsroom when he received a call that his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Kristin, had been shot and killed in Boston by an abusive ex-boyfriend. As I recall, there were no more flights that night to Boston. The Post’s C.E.O., Don Graham, chartered a plane to get Lardner where he needed to go. It was typical of Graham, a kindness that engendered the loyalty and affection of a dedicated staff.

Graham’s own supreme act of loyalty to the Post was his painful decision to sell the paper, in 2013, to Bezos, who made his vast fortune as the founder of Amazon. The Graham family was hardly poor, but in the new media environment—and under the relentless demands of reporting quarterly earnings—they were forced, again and again, to make trims, at a time when investment was needed. Instead of continuing to cut and, inevitably, diminish the paper that he loved, Graham carried out a meticulous search for a new owner with the resources, the judgment, and the vision to help the Post navigate this new era. Bezos—the “ultimate disrupter,” as Fortune had called him a year earlier—seemed the right choice.

For a long time, she writes, Bezos was a hands-off manager. During Trump’s first term, Bezos supported the newspaper’s editorial opposition to Trump’s 2016 election and its tough coverage of the chaotic Trump term.

She liked Bezos: In my experience of that time, Bezos came off as charming, smart, and unpretentious.

In 2020, the Washington Post endorsed Biden.

In 2024, Bezos stopped the editorial board from publishing its endorsement of Kamala Harris. The man Bezos selected as publisher was Will Lewis, a Brit who had worked in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Lewis defended the non-endorsement. Two opinion writers resigned, most signed a letter to Bezos objecting to his decision. Some 300,000 people cancelled their subscriptions.

After the election, Bezos seemed to fawn over Trump, defending him at every turn, donating to his inauguration fund. Two months after the election, Bezos offered Nelania $40 million to produce a documentary about her life in the White House. Many saw it as protection money.

Bezos defended his new view about Trump by saying that Trump had grown, was more deliberative since his last term. He told a reporter from The New York Times that Trump “is calmer than he was the first time and more confident, more settled.” Marcus said Bezos displayed “willful self-delusion.”

In early January, before the Inauguration, a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winning Ann Telnaes depicting the billionaires bowing to Trump was rejected by the editor David Shipley on grounds that it slduicated a column already published. Marcus thought this was an example of “obeying in advance,” that would not have happened if Bezos were not in charge.

Then came the order from Bezos on February 25, 2025, to editorial writers that The Post would publish only editorials and opinions that supported “free markets and personal liberties.” Those with opposing views would not appear in The Post.

No editorial writer had worked under these restrictions before. Marcus submitted a piece objecting to the restrictions; the publisher (Will Lewis) rejected it. She was stunned.

She tried to see him, but was told, “The decision is final.”

Marcus wrote:

So, too, was mine. I submitted my letter of resignation on Monday, to Bezos and Lewis. “Will’s decision to not run the column that I wrote respectfully dissenting from Jeff’s edict—something that I have not experienced in almost two decades of column-writing—underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded,” I wrote. “I love the Post. It breaks my heart to conclude that I must leave.”

The Washington Post that she had known and loved for forty-one years was dead.

Categories Billionaires, Censorship, Freedom of the Press, Media

Glenn Kessler: Jeff Bezos Runs the Washington Post for an Audience of One

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2026 //
1

Glenn Kessler is the relentless fact-checker who spent many years at The Washington Post and now writes his own blog at Substack, still fact-checking.

He wrote recently about Jeff Bezos’s plan to lay off a large number of staff at the venerable newspaper. News of the impending cuts circulated for days. When it finally happened, journalists were shocked by the depth of the cuts. One third of the writers lost their jobs. The sports section was eliminated. Foreign coverage was slashed. Local reporting, a Post specialty, was cut hard.

As things now stand, one of America’s most consequential newspapers is in a death spiral, accelerated by Jeff Bezos. It is not often that we witness the destruction of a great institution by those entrusted with its care.

Ashley Parker, a former reporter for The Washington Post, wrote in The Atlantic about “The Murder of the Washington Post.”

Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future. This morning, executive editor Matt Murray and HR chief Wayne Connell told the newsroom staff in an early-morning virtual meeting that it was closing the Sports department and Books section, ending its signature podcast, and dramatically gutting the International and Metro departments, in addition to staggering cuts across all teams. Post leadership—which did not even have the courage to address their staff in person—then left everyone to wait for an email letting them know whether or not they had a job. (Lewis, who has already earned a reputation for showing up late to work when he showed up at all, did not join the Zoom.)

The Post may yet rise, but this will be their enduring legacy.

Kessler wrote:

“You’re right. I did lose a million dollars [on the newspaper] last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in…sixty years.”

—Charles Foster Kane, speaking to his ex-guardian, in Citizen Kane (1941)

[Diane’s note: if Jeff Bezos subsidized the Post at $100 million a year, he would run out of money in 2,500 years, or 4526, that is, assuming that he wasn’t growing his wealth at the same time.]

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, his net worth was about $25 billion. Now, as he prepares to order devastating layoffs at the newspaper, his net worth is about $250 billion — even after giving one-quarter of his Amazon shares to his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott.

Bezos is a businessman, and the Washington Post is not a charity, so I understand the inclination to demand that losses be stemmed. The newsroom should be able to stand on its own feet. But even if the losses are still around $100 million a year — the figure announced a couple of years ago — for a person of Bezos’ wealth, that would mean he’d have to close the place in…2,500 years.

I don’t think the layoffs have much to do with saving money. Amazon, after all, just spent $75 million buying and promoting a documentary about Melania Trump. It’s about power and influence in Donald Trump’s second term.

After Trump won the first time in 2016, I was among a small group of reporters and editors invited to have lunch with Bezos. With a booming laugh and big smile, he said he wanted to hear war stories about covering the wild Trump-versus-Clinton campaign.

At one point, someone asked if he was concerned that Trump would seek retribution against his other businesses. (I’m writing this from memory, not notes, so I won’t use quotation marks.)
Bezos acknowledged that Trump would assume any negative story about him had been ordered up by Bezos, because that’s what Trump would do if he owned a newspaper. But he said that wasn’t our problem. We only had to write the best stories possible; he could handle the heat if Trump got mad.

Those were comforting words at the time. As far as I know, Bezos has never interfered with any news coverage during his 13 years as owner — even stories critical of Amazon or coverage of Bezos’s personal life, let alone politics. For many years, he didn’t even appear to get very involved with the editorial page, even though, as owner, he could dictate whatever opinion-page policy he wanted.

As Bezos predicted, Trump in his first term often fumed about the “Amazon Washington Post” — they are not connected — and his administration took actions that were costly to Bezos. The Pentagon gave a $10-billion cloud-computing contract to Microsoft, and Amazon sued in 2020, saying Trump intervened because of his anger at The Post. (In 2022, the Microsoft contract was scrapped, and the business was split among four firms, including Amazon.)

Yet Bezos was unbowed. He embraced and promoted a new slogan — Democracy Dies in Darkness — that seemed aimed directly at Trump’s administration. He boosted the size of the staff and increased the ambitions of The Post. He appeared to embrace the idea, dare I say, that he was the steward of a public trust.

Presidential-level threats disappeared with Trump’s defeat in 2020, though Joe Biden was no fan of the tech industry. But when Trump ran again and the Democrats were on the ropes, Bezos’s calculation changed. He could afford Trump’s first term; a second could be ruinous, especially as Elon Musk, his main rival in the space business, embraced Trump.

I used to think billionaires had enough “fuck-you” money to do what they pleased. But in Trump’s creeping autocracy, and with his campaign of retribution, billionaires have too much to lose.

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta spent $100 million to fund fact-checking around the globe. But once Trump was elected, Zuckerberg pulled the plug on funding U.S. fact-checkers, shutting many down. Bezos scrubbed a planned newspaper endorsement of Kamala Harris and announced a rightward shift in the opinion pages, leading hundreds of thousands of subscribers to cancel their subscriptions. That, of course, likely increased the losses.

If there was ever a time for a news organization to need help from a billionaire, it’s now — when AI is killing search traffic and new ways to attract readers are needed. This is when investments are required, not cutbacks.

Even before Trump re-emerged, Bezos appeared to have grown less interested in The Post. The New York Times capitalized on subscriber growth during Trump’s first term to make acquisitions that expanded its reach (The Athletic, Wordle). The Post made no such moves. Subscriber growth stalled, then slipped. Bezos lavished attention on his new love, Lauren Sánchez, whom he married last year in Venice in a $50-million extravaganza. He also spent $500 million on the most expensive superyacht in the world — twice what he paid for The Post.

Unlike Scott — who has given away more than $19 billion to 2,000 non-profit organizations— Bezos has set aside a pittance of his net worth for philanthropy. Many Post reporters hoped Bezos would simply give the newspaper to his ex-wife, believing she had a greater sense of social responsibility (and none of his corporate conflicts).

No longer engaged, Bezos appears to have embraced a crude calculus: laying off staff and trimming the sails of a once-great news organization sends a message to an audience of one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, even if the decision ruins the lives of scores of talented reporters and editors.

After all, since the election Bezos has worked hard to ingratiate himself with Trump —making a $1 million donation (via Amazon) to the inaugural fund., dining at the White House, visiting Mar-a-Lago and, according to Trump, solving “a problem very quickly.” (Amazon had planned to list the cost of tariffs with products, but canceled that after Trump called Bezos.)

Trump views any news that is not favorable as “fake news.” He couldn’t have been happy with The Post’s aggressive coverage last year of the dismantling of the federal government, which led to an FBI raid on a reporter’s home in January.
But Trump views Bezos as trying to make the newspaper “more fair,” as he put it in a March interview with Clay Travis. “I think it’s great,” Trump gushed. “It’s such a difference between now and the first…He’s really trying to be more fair. But they actually did a couple of bad articles that everybody said, ‘This is crazy.’”

In another interview, with Sharyl Attkisson, Trump said, “I’ve gotten to know him and I think he’s trying to do a real job. Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with the Washington Post. And that wasn’t happening before.”

And so far in the second term, not once has Trump referred to the “Amazon Washington Post.”

Categories Freedom of the Press, Media, Trump

Trump Promises to Fund Tunnel if Schumer Agrees to Name Penn Station and Dulles Airport for Him

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2026 //
11

We have known for years that Trump is egotistical. We have seen examples of his egotism repeatedly, from his renaming of the John F. Kennedy Center to his slapping his name on countless products and hawking them.

But this one takes the cake!

According to CNN, Trump make an offer to New York Senator Chuck Schumer: Trump would release billions in federal funding for a tunnel linking New York and New Jersey if Schumer agreed to rename Penn Station and Dulles Airport for him.

Schumer said no.

I read this online last night and thought it a joke or a smear.

It’s not.

CNN wrote:

(CNN) — President Donald Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last month that he was finally prepared to drop his freeze on billions of dollars in funding for a major New York infrastructure project.

But there was a condition: In exchange for the money, Schumer had to agree to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.

Apparently, there are no limits to Trump’s egomania.

Republicans in Congress have been pondering whether to name a day for Trump as a national holiday or to put his face on a coin, although such honors are always limited to those who are no longer living.

I assume that Trump is so rattled by a sense of his mortality that he wants to assure that he will be immortalized by plastering his name everywhere.

Sad.

Categories Education Reform

Thom Hartmann on Trump’s New Grift

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2026 //
11

Donald Trump has learned one big lesson from his time in business and politics. Business is risky, politics is a sure thing.

As a businessman, Trump failed repeatedly. He filed for bankruptcy many times. His casinos failed; Trump Airlines failed; Trump steaks failed; Trump wines failed; Trump University failed. Whatever he started lost money. But then he played the part of a tycoon on “The Apprentice” and used that fame to launch his rub for the Presidency.

After he became President, the money came in like a gusher. Kings and potentates booked suites in the Trump Hotel close to the White House. They curried favor by spending at Trump properties. His second term is even more lucrative. He sued and won damages from ABC and CBS. Middle East leaders have made deals with the Trump Organization. Crypto is a bonanza. Meanwhile he sells a whole line of merch.

And now, as a private person, he and his two sons –Don Jr. and Eric–are suing the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion because a contractor released his tax returns and embarrassed him, causing him grievous reputations harm.

But wait, the contractor leaked the truth, not a false and malicious lie. He leaked that Trump paid minuscule taxes in 2016 and 2017. In one year, $750; in the other, $0.

Trump and his sons claim that this truth was so embarrassing to them that the taxpayers should pay them $10 billion.

Do you think that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will fight his boss in court?

Thom Hartmann wrote about this stunning norm-breaker:

— Trump’s New Grift: A $10 Billion Demand for “Reputational Harm” After his Income Tax Avoidance Was Exposed. Seriously. A man is now serving a 5-year prison sentence for leaking Trump’s tax returns to the press in 2018, and he wasn’t even a federal employee; he worked for a contractor. But Trump still thinks his embarrassment when we learned he’s been a tax cheat most of his life is, Trump says, so severe that the American government must give him and his two oldest boys a massive pile of cash. This family never saw a grift it couldn’t embrace…

Categories Ethics, Evil, Trump

GOP Begins Rigging the Vote in 2026 and 2028

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2026 //
5

Greg Palast and Thom Hartmann write together about the Trump administration’s early steps to rig the vote in 2026 and 2028.

The Republican-sponsored SAVES act has been passed by the House but not the Senate. It would cancel online registration. It requires voters to present a birth certificate or a passport. Millions of American citizens do not have either. Women, in particular, would be disadvantaged because the name on their birth certificates do not match their married names. .

Like me, you probably read that the FBI raided the office of the Fulton County voting headquarters in an effort to prove that the 2020 election was rigged. Just another evidence of Trump’s paranoia.

No, say the authors. That’s a cover story. The truth, they say, is that the raid was intended to rig the elections of 2026 and 2028. It was part of the GOP’s long-running effort to cancel the votes of Blacks and students, groups that favor Democrats.

Palast and Hartmann write:

For god’s sake, let’s get to the REAL agenda behind Wednesday’s-FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office. IT’S NOT ABOUT THE 2020 ELECTION. The warrant says the FBI wants the envelopes from the 2020 election to hunt for crimes. But that’s just the legal excuse for the storm trooping.

This is NOT, as the media seems to think, about Trump’s attempt to prove he won the 2020 race, as if he’s some political Captain Ahab was trying to chase the Moby Dick of 2020 revenge.

This is all about 2026 and 2028. Look at a map. Fulton County is the heart of “Blacklanta.” And Atlanta is the electoral heart of Georgia. And Georgia is the swingiest of swing states. If Republicans don’t cut down the Black vote in Atlanta, they lose the crucial seat now held by Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff. And in 2028, the GOP, if they don’t suppress the vote in Fulton, they lose the White House. Fulton was the fulcrum of Trump’s loss in 2020 and could spell doomsday for Republicans in 2028.

So, how exactly do you stop Fulton County Black folk (and the LGBTQ community and the hipsters who left rural Georgia because they hate their parents) from voting? The answer is in one word: DROP-BOX.

Surveillance footage of a drop box in Atlanta, used in the film 2000 Mules as evidence of a “mule” whom filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza claimed was paid to stuff this and 26 other ballot boxes. According to D’Souza, this was “the smoking gun! O.J. Simpson…leaving the scene of a crime!” But it doesn’t show anything more than a Black man voting.

Follow me on this.

First, let me explain to my White readers a fact about African-Americans: In the majority, they vote early, having suffered the cruel absurdity of six-hour lines on Election Day. (And remember, it’s a FELONY crime in Georgia to give an elderly voter standing in line, thirsty a bottle of water). From long, sad experience, Black voters have learned to use early voting opportunities, especially mail-in ballots that can be placed in a drop-box.

For example, in the election run-off following the 2020 vote, which put two Georgia Democrats into the US Senate, over a million mail-in ballots (1,084,021) were cast, mainly in drop-boxes, mostly in Fulton/Atlanta.

Republicans took note. So, in a bill signed by GOP Governor Brian Kemp, the infamous SB202, the state declared all-out war on early voting, especially early votes placed in secure drop-boxes.

First, the state slashed the number of drop-boxes allowed in Atlanta and Savannah the two big cities with the urban Black population, by 77%.

Early voting days, when you can use the drop box, were cut from 60 to just seven (!). And drop boxes — meant to serve voters who can only vote when they get off work at night — were sealed up at night in state office buildings.

The result, not reported by a single US outlet (except, God bless him, Thom Hartmann) was that the number of mail-in ballots cast dropped by 83% — 83%! — from over a million to 0.2 million (191,286) by the run-off of 2022.

Why? It goes back to what Donald Trump calls, correctly, one of the most influential documentaries of all time: 2000 Mules. The film, premiered by Trump at Mar-a-Lago, accused 2000 Black men of taking $10 from George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg and Stacey Abrams to stuff drop-boxes with tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots, especially in Fulton County. It was the perfect Sturm for the right, a stimulating concoction of racism and anti-Semitism.

There wasn’t a bit of evidence, of course, but it looked convincing to MAGA-nauts. Every single drop-box in Georgia has a video camera over it to prevent fraud, and the videos are public. So, the Trump front called True the Vote, showed videos of Black men “stuffing” the drop boxes with extra ballots.

Except it wasn’t true. The “star” criminal was a Black man accused of “running from the scene of crime like OJ Simpson.” In fact, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is Republican controlled, ran all over the state to arrest each Black alleged ballot stuffer (a felony crime) — but found that every one, EVERY ONE, was a legal voter. The man accused of thievery was Mark Andrews, who is a Verizon executive who legally dropped his family’s ballots in the drop box. But, as LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter says, “He was seen guilty of a crime because he was Black.” That, literally, was the only “evidence” of the crime.

Note: I want you to see Mark Andrews, supposed Black “criminal” supposedly caught in the act of VWB, Voting While Black. Next Thursday, February 5, at 6:30pm Central time (4:30pm Pacific), chapters of Indivisible will host a special online showing of my film, Vigilantes Inc., America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, which rips Trump’s True the Vote a new one. If you’re in the Chicago area, you can attend the live showing with Q&A to follow.

Early voting, mail-in voting and casting an early vote in a drop were the keys to Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, key to a huge surge in minority and student votes nationwide.

And massive suppression of early, mail-in and drop-box votes were key to Trump’s triumphant return. (Did anyone note that, seen from the Oval, the demolition of the East Wing only leaves the Right Wing.)

Following the 2020 election, over 20 Red States passed laws eliminating or restricting drop-boxes. And in every single case, legislators cited the bullshit “evidence” of 2000 Mules. Fact check: The state of Georgia recounted and reviewed every single Fulton County drop-box and mail in ballot and didn’t find one single forged ballot. Every vote had an identified, verified vote. Not ONE ballot.

White Democrats don’t seem to understand how important early drop-off votes mean to Black and student communities. But the Republicans understand it completely. In fact, GOP Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that, had he not gone to court and stopped Houston from mailing out absentee ballots to all voter, “Donald Trump would have lost Texas.” Texas! (Note: Houston has the largest number of Black voters of any city in America.

By seeking every envelope from drop-box and absentee voters, Attorney General Pam Blondi is saving her job by saving the GOP from the voters’ wrath. The game is to force a state (i.e. Republican) takeover of Fulton County voting (possible under SB 202). And you can’t separate the invasion of Atlanta voting offices from the Purge’n General Blondi’s demand that Minnesota hand over its voter rolls.

The underlying purpose of Blondi’s seizure of Minnesota’s voter files is the restoration of two other racially poisonous vote suppression tricks. One is the return of the “Interstate Crosscheck” purge program and its sister, the purge of “aliens” from the rolls. Interstate Crosscheck cost nearly one million voters their registrations in 2016, key to Trump’s first election. Crosscheck was ruled illegal through a grassroots campaign led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sen. Bernie Sanders and litigation brought by PUSH, the NAACP and the ACLU based, I’m proud to say, on the evidence presented to the courts by the Palast Investigative Fund. But. now, Crosscheck is BAAAACK! Want to know about Crosscheck. Read my investigation for Rolling Stone.

And there’s the canard of allegedly MILLIONS of alien voters swimming the Rio Grande just to vote for Democrats. When Florida used the ICE lists to purge 187,000 (!) voters from the rolls, mostly Hispanics, it turns out only ONE was an illegal alien: A Republican from Austria.

But that’s a story for another day — and for our film, Vigilantes Inc. Grab some popcorn and save America.

The Palast team is preparing to launch a full-scale, national investigation of vote suppression in coordination with PUSH, Black Voters Matter Fund, the NAACP and the Transformative Justice Coalition. But dammit, we can’t do it without funding. We don’t need a lot, but if you don’t stand up and help, who will?

Greg Palast Investigates is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Greg Palast

Investigative journalist and author of the NY Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse + The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. See my latest film at: https://WatchVigilantesInc.com

Categories Atlanta, Cheating, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Georgia

Denis Smith: Public Funding of Private Schools Fragments Our Culture

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2026 //
2

Denis Smith retired after spending years working for the Ohio Departmeny of Education. His last job was overseeing charter schools.

In this post, which appeared in the Ohio Capitol Journal, Smith reviews a proposal by Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican candidate for Governor, that unintentionally reveals the hypocrisy of public funding for private schools. Ramaswamy wants to mandate the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance daily in all public schools, but publicly-funded private schools would be exempt from this mandate.

Smith writes:

It’s hard for me to offer a thank you to Vivek Ramaswamy for anything, but he truly deserves our thanks for a recent statement. 

Thank you, Vivek, in making the case for public education and demonstrating its true value to the nation. 

For someone who reportedly wanted to “detox” from social media only a week ago, your post on X stating that you would make the oral recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance mandatory in the state’s schools has provided added layers of meaning for the public to discern that public education is a public good.

Unbeknownst to the Republican governor candidate, his tweet gives public school supporters added ammunition to hurl back at GOP efforts to fund private and religious schools though universal education vouchers that violate the Ohio Constitution.

“We’ll say the pledge of allegiance every day at every public school after I’m elected,” Vivek wrote. 

He went on to say that, “We need more national unity, not less.”

When examined further, his brief post reveals the fatal flaws in Republican efforts to establish a parallel, non-public system of education that violates the Ohio Constitution. 

Let’s look at a few flaws that Ramaswamy’s seemingly innocuous post brings to light.

According to the Ohio Revised Code, “The board of education of each city, local, exempted village, and joint vocational school district shall adopt a policy specifying whether or not oral recitation of the pledge of allegiance to the flag shall be a part of the school’s program …”

There is no requirement in that section of the ORC for private and religious schools to adopt policies that would place the oral recitation of the pledge as a regular part of the school program.  

That sentence is revealing because it shows that non-public schools can receive state funds but not be encumbered by the many laws and regulations that govern public schools.

That’s having it both ways, an art that non-public schools practice so well. We’ll take your money, thanks, but don’t tell us that this or that law or regulation is mandatory in our (private or religious) schools.

Hmmm. I wonder how Ramaswamy and Republicans privately feel about how public funds might go to non-public schools that might care less about instilling patriotism than inculcating their own brand of ideology and history. 

The idea or probability of a publicly funded religious school that teaches its students that the earth is only 6,000 years old readily comes to mind. 

With the current devolution of our society, where Republicans achieve a twofer by eroding public education as a way of destroying public employee unions, that idea is not farfetched.

In addition to a possible future Pledge of Allegiance mandate for public schools, as called for in Ohio House Bill 117, where public and religious schools would be exempt from such requirements, there is another hidden structural flaw in Ramaswamy’s post that belies his words: 

“We need more national unity, not less,” Ramaswamy wrote.

Huh? How does a parallel, unconstitutional yet publicly funded private and religious school system, funded by universal educational vouchers, contribute to national unity?  

Vivek said that we need more national unity. Explain how $1 billion taken from state school aid and given to other, non-public schools that are exempt from so much law and regulation, adds to national unity.

Do these schools pledge allegiance to the state and embrace regulatory compliance in return for such cash? Hardly.

Two years ago on these pages, I offered the views of Dr. Kenneth Conklin, a philosopher who is concerned about “community cohesion and settled social bonds,” along with cultural fragmentation. Here are his considered views:

“If an educational system is altered, its transmission of culture will be distorted,” Conklin wrote. “The easiest way to break apart a society long-term without using violence is to establish separate educational systems for the groups to be broken apart.”(Emphasis mine.)

How do we get more national unity by establishing separate educational systems?

Dr. Conklin added some other thoughts that Ramaswamy and other Republicans such as Ohio Speaker Matt (“We can kind of do what we want”) Huffman and Senate Education Chair Andrew (“Public education in America is socialism”) Brenner might reflect on as our national unity continues to deteriorate. 

“A society’s culture can survive far longer than the lifespan of any of its members, because its educational system passes down the folkways and knowledge of one generation to subsequent generations. A culture changes over time, but has a recognizable continuity of basic values and behavioral patterns that distinguishes it from other cultures. That continuity is provided by the educational system.”

Ramaswamy says that he is concerned about national unity. So am I. Indeed, that continuity is provided by a common school system.

If Ramaswamy is truly concerned about national unity, we should await his announcement about the corrosive effect of vouchers, their damage to community cohesion, settled social bonds, and cultural fragmentation.

Categories Accountability, Funding, Hypocrisy, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Trump’s Golden Statue Is Ready for Installation!

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2026 //
9

This is good news! A group of Trump’s crypto backers were so thrilled with their returns that they commissioned a collossal golden statue of the man who is larger than life.

The good news?

The statue will not be installed on the White House grounds or in the U.S. Capitol or in the Trump-Lincoln Memorial or anywhere else in D.C.

The New York Times reports:

It’s known as “Don Colossus.”

At 15 feet tall, the statue of President Trump, mounted on its 7,000-pound pedestal, is about the height of a two-story building — a giant effigy cast in bronze and finished with a thick layer of gold leaf.

For more than a year, the golden statue has been at the center of one of the stranger moneymaking ventures of the Trump era. A group of cryptocurrency investors paid $300,000 to have a sculptor create it as a tribute to Mr. Trump, an outspoken crypto proponent.

Then they used it to promote a memecoin called $PATRIOT.

Now, improbably, the project appears close to fruition. A pedestal made of concrete and stainless steel was installed last month on the grounds of Mr. Trump’s golf complex in Doral, Fla. Pastor Mark Burns, one of the organizers of the effort and a friend of Mr. Trump’s, told his collaborators that the president planned to attend the statue’s unveiling there, according to messages reviewed by The New York Times.

Open the link to read the history of “Don Collosus” and the roadblocks it overcame.

Categories Trump

Minneapolis: What Kind of Nation Terrorizes Its Children?

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2026 //
8

Italia Fittante is a high school literature teacher in Minneapolis. This essay was published by Education Week. Trump promised during his campaign to deport “the worst of the worst,” criminals, rapists, murderers. Instead he has put a target on the back of every immigrant, no matter how long they have lived here, no matter how much they have contributed to society. Our children are experiencing a reign of terror.

One of my seniors walked into my classroom after school yesterday. He needed an extension on his final project, and I could see he’d been working up the nerve to ask me.

His parents haven’t left the house in over a week for fear of being stopped by immigration agents, which means someone has to work. At 17, that someone is him. After school every weekday and all day on weekends, every week, because the bills don’t stop.

He carries his U.S. passport everywhere now, tucked in his pocket, transferred from his jeans to his school uniform and back again, refusing to let it out of his sight even in my classroom. He’s been stopped twice on his walk home from work by masked men and women in unmarked cars, demanding he prove his right to exist in the country where he was born.

He wants to go to medical school; he’s always dreamt of being a doctor. He told me about the university in Mexico holding a spot for him, the contingency plan he never thought he’d need. Just in case things get worse here and he has to follow his parents across the border, just in case his future is decided by policy instead of potential.

I told him to forget the deadline.

Another one of my seniors came to me early Tuesday morning before class started, her eyes hollowed out and bloodshot from lack of sleep. She was concerned about making up a reading quiz she had missed the day before.

In tears, she explained to me that she was working the register at a fast-food restaurant over the weekend when ICE agents burst through the doors midshift. They pushed past her, forced their way into the back of the restaurant, and violently detained two of her co-workers. Nobody knows where they went, when they’re coming back, or if they’re coming back at all.

She told me she hadn’t slept since the raid. This student, who immigrated with her family to the United States just three years ago, described being paralyzed with fear.

I told her to forget the quiz.

The past few weeks in Minnesota have been marked by relentless federal immigration operations. Agents operate openly and without restraint. This week alone, ICE detained multiple students from a neighboring district, one as young as 5 years old. Children and teenagers have been taken on their way to school, from driveways and from cars. My students live with the constant awareness that anyone they love could be taken at any moment. They themselves could be next.

What we’re asking these kids to do seems impossible. Show up. Focus. Read about the American Dream in Advanced Placement Literature while you wonder if your father will be deported before graduation. Solve for x while you’re solving how to pay the electric bill. Write your college application essay about overcoming adversity while doubting you’ll survive it.

They already come to school knowing they might die there. We’ve made peace with that somehow. Lockdown drills and barricading doors are routine. My students can tell you the difference between shots fired in the building versus shots fired nearby. At the beginning of the school year, two elementary students were killed during mass at a Catholic school just miles from us. Before the media even covered it, my students were calling their parents. I could hear them crying in the halls, in my classroom. 

Some of them knew the victims. Now, they come to school and know which corner of each room has the best cover. They are 17 years old and fluent in survival tactics.

My students carry U.S. passports in their pockets like keys to a house where the locks keep changing, navigating their own city like it’s hostile territory. Their walks to and from school are haunted by the persistent possibility that they’ll come home to silence, their parents taken by masked strangers who leave no forwarding address.

We’re creating a generation of students from immigrant families who understand exactly how little this country values their safety. 

They’re learning the lesson we’re teaching, even if it’s not the one we claim to be giving. They understand the message we’re sending when we demand their labor and their silence and their gratitude, all while treating their existence as conditional and their families as disposable. How can we expect them to love their country when those in power have made it clear their country doesn’t love them back?

The curriculum is clear. Documentation determines dignity, and borders determine which families matter. Authority needs no accountability, not when violence can be rebranded as policy if it advances “our” goals.

My students understand what’s happening because they’re living it. The stakes are clearer to them than to most adults I know. They don’t need explanations or sympathy or platitudes or extensions. They need safety without surveillance, because this country is theirs, too. No child should have to carry identification to prove their right to exist.

What sort of nation terrorizes children and calls it enforcement? That demands loyalty while offering nothing but fear? My students already know the answer. They learned it the moment they started carrying passports in their pockets.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom to Learn, Immigration, Minneapolis, Students

Peter Greene: The Education of Diane Ravitch

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2026 //
8

In addition to blogging at Curmudgucation, Peter Greene is a Senior Contributor to Forbes, where this review appeared.

He reviewed my book in Forbes. You may be tired of seeing the wonderful reviews of my book by fellow bloggers. I agree with you….but…the book has been overlooked by the mainstream media. It is the first book I have published that was not reviewed by the New York Times.

I am thrilled that well-informed bloggers have taken the time to read and review it.

An Education

Peter Greene writes:

Diane Ravitch is one of the biggest turncoats in education policy history, and American education is better for it.

She tells the story in her newest book, her memoir An Education. From humble beginnings in Houston, she moved on to Wellesley, where she rubbed elbows with the likes of future Madeline Albright and Nora Ephron. Upon graduation. she married into the prestigious Ravitch family. Casting around for a career, she gravitated toward education history, starting with researching and writing a massive history of New York City public schools, launching her career as an academic.

She was in those days considered a neoconservative. She believed in meritocracy, standards, standardized testing, and color blindness, and these beliefs combined with her academic credentials formed a foundation for a burgeoning career of advocacy for the rising tide of education reform. By the time the 1990s rolled around, she was tapped for a role as Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H. W. Bush. She appeared in television, met and socialized with top political leaders, enjoyed other odd in-crowd perks like a visit to George Lucas at Skywalker Ranch. She was brought onto an assortment of conservative think tanks, served in various commissions and agencies under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and wrote several books that brought rounds of interviews on major media. She was a committed supporter and promoter of No Child Left Behind, which included all the emphasis on standards and testing that she thought she wanted to see in education.

When she graduated from high school, her English teacher gifted her with two quotes. The second was from Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Those turned out to be prescient words for a woman who was about to engage in a public re-evaluation of her entire body of professional beliefs.

Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor of New York City and brought in Joel Klein to run the schools, and for four years Ravitch watched the ideas she championed implemented, and she saw the down side. She was critical, though carefully so (it was still not common knowledge that she had years ago left her husband for a woman). But she could see that Bloomberg and Klein were “faithfully, if erratically, imposing the right-wing policies that I had once endorsed and demonstrating their ineffectiveness.”

In the following years, Ravitch “step by step” abandoned her long-held views about education. Those long-held views had been her bread and butter, the web that sustained personal and professional networks. And Ravitch was willing not just to break those ties, but determined to “expose the big money propelling the cause of what I called corporate education reform.” 

Her 2010 book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education was a shot across the bow of education reform, signaling a new set of beliefs. “Why did you change your mind,” she was frequently asked.

I changed my mind when I realized that the ideas I had championed sounded good in theory but failed in practice. I thought that standards, tests and accountability would lead to higher achievement (test scores). They didn’t. Even if they had, the scores would not signify better education, just a fortunate upbringing and the mastery of test-taking skills. I originally thought, like other so-called reformers, that competition and merit pay would encourage teachers and principals to work harder and get better results. They didn’t. The teachers were already working as hard as they knew how.

Ravitch came to view the punitive attempt to use test scores to determine teacher careers as demoralizing, destined to discourage young people from choosing the profession. The “toxic policy” of high-stakes testing was ‘inflicting harm on students and teachers.”

Ravitch became a key figure in the movement to support public education in the US. She co-founded the Network for Public Education and spoke out repeatedly against the education reform movement. Her blog became a popular outlet that connected many of the far-flung supporters of public education.

Ravitch has written page upon page critiquing the education reform movement of the past few decades, and in the final chapters of this memoir, the reader can find a clear, crisp encapsulated version of her conclusions and beliefs about the top-down government mandates and big-money attempts to dismantle the public school system and replace it with a multi-tiered privatized system. This brisk, readable book provides a historical recap of the ed reform movement and the resistance to it, as well as the rich history of a woman who, more than any other observer, has examined the pieces of the movement from both sides. 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Vouchers
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