What One Iranian Thinks of Trump’s Threat to Wipe Out Power Grid

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2026 //
16

An article by Patrick Wintour in The Guardian describes Iranian responses to Trump’s threat to bomb Iran’s power grid unless Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz.

This comment stood out:

One well-known Iranian reformist writer Ahmad Zeidabadi likened what could lie ahead to the post-apocalyptic novel Blindness by José Saramago in which the whole world gradually becomes blind. The normally constrained Zeidabadi described Trump’s attack as “the greatest threat posed against our country or any other country in the world throughout history”.

He said: “If electricity to 90 million people were to stop, homes and streets would be plunged into darkness, the elderly and the disabled would be trapped in residential towers and water, gas, gasoline and diesel would become scarce, followed soon by no food, no hygiene and no transportation.

He went on: “If the people of America or other countries do not stop this savage being, the Middle East will instantly become an unimaginable hell and then a barren and uninhabitable land.” He described Trump as a mad individual who was nonetheless “the main decision-maker of the world’s greatest military power”. The sense that the US is in the grip of a deranged figure is quite common among Iranians.

Categories Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, History, Trump

Tom Ultican: Grade Retention is a Popular “Remedy” That Hurts Students

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2026 //
8

When an education policy is tried and failed, then tried again and continues to fail, that policy may justly beee called “zombie policy.” It survives despite experience..

Tom Ultican, retried teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California, here describes such a policy. It is called “grade retention,” but is more commonly known as flunking a student because he or she is not “ready” to be promoted with peers. The short-term effect may seem successful: test scores. But the long-term effect on students’ success is typically negative.

Ultican writes:

Twenty-six American states have a mandatory third-grade retention policy for students who do not pass the state’s reading exam and Maryland is set to implement that policy in 2027. According to researchers, this is bad thinking based on intuition not science. Writing for Education Trust, Brittney Davis declared, “The research is clear that grade retention is not effective over time, and it is related to many negative academic, social, and emotional outcomes for students — especially students of color who have been retained.”  

Economist Jiee Zhong won her PhD from Texas A&M in 2024 and is now an assistant professor of economics at the University of Miami. Last year, she just finished a very impressive study on the effects of grade retention for Texas third graders. Texas abandoned mandatory third-grade retention in 2009.

Zhong studied outcomes of third-graders from 2002-03, 2003-04 and 2004-05 school years who took the Texas reading exam that carried retention consequences. This large data set allowed her to use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to extract many results. By 2024, the students studied were all young adults over 26 years of age. She was able to evaluate their education, social and economic outcomes using powerful math techniques.

Zhong concluded:

“I find that third-grade retention significantly reduces annual earnings at age 26 by $3,477 (19%). While temporarily improving test scores, retention increases absenteeism, violent behavior, and juvenile crime, and reduces the likelihood of high school graduation.”

For one outcome, she investigated a group of students who barely passed or barely failed the reading test. She learned that the barely failing students earn $1,682 (11.3%) less at age 23 than the barely passing students. Zhong noted that 64.2% of barely passing students graduated from high school while just 55.1% of the barely failing students graduated. She observed that both of these results were statistically significant at a 5% level.

Zhong also noticed a racial disparity. She reports, “White students experience a sharp 43.8 percentage point decline in high school graduation probability, higher than the reductions for Black (17.6 percentage points) and Hispanic students (0.6 percentage points).”

These results from 2025 add more weight to similar results that previous researchers have reported.

The Retention Illusion

In January 2025, Duke University in Chapel Hill, North Carolina published a linked series of three policy briefs concerning grade retention by Claire Xia and Elizabeth Glennie, Ph.D. The Duke researchers stated, “The majority of published studies and decades of research indicate that there is usually little to be gained, and much harm that may be done through retaining students in grade.”

They also mention the grade retention illusion is held by many community members, administrators and teachers who believe grade retention is helpful and needed. The Duke researchers stated, “The findings that retention is ineffective or even harmful in the long run seem counterintuitive.” This belief is so strong that on the 31st Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallop Poll, 72% of the public favor stricter promotion standards even if significantly more students would be held back. Other studies show the public being strongly opposed to social promotion believing low-achieving students will continue to fall farther behind.

Please open the link to finish reading.

Categories Accountability, Failure, Research

Nancy Bailey: Why Are We Still Debating Retention? There Are Better Alternatives.

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2026 //
5

Nancy Bailey taught for many years. She writes a blog that is a source of wisdom, gleaned from experience and love of children.

She wrote recently that the debate about retention should be a dead issue. We know that it hurts the kids who are flunked. We know there are better alternatives.

She wrote:

The permanency of retention and the message it sends students may have long-term effects on self-esteem and school attachment that may override even short-term academic benefits (1995).

~Melissa Roderick, the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, the University of Chicago

Sometimes failing at a task or endeavor might be instructive. Most of us will experience failure, maybe often, and learning to be resilient in the face of it can create stamina and character. But being retained in school is a failure that many students may never overcome. It’s time to end retention and focus on solutions that work, that lift children!

There has been much debate about this over the years, yet it seems increasingly unnecessary, as there are enough child-friendly alternatives that render retention outdated and ill-informed. Retention simply isn’t necessary!

Many alternatives exist to support students without failing them. Summer school, smaller class sizes, small group instruction, looping two classes with the same teacher, a mixed-grade class, tutoring, and assistance with resource classes can help children catch up.

That hasn’t stopped some educators and non-educators from promoting third-grade retention as a major reform since 2003. It has persisted despite extensive research showing it doesn’t work.

Sadly, as of 2025, 17 states and the District of Columbia require third graders to repeat a year if they fail tests. English language learners and students who use alternative assessments may be exempt.

Students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have always been retained at higher rates.

Middle School Hell

Melissa Roderick, a well-regarded expert on this issue, whose bio is linked above, has numerous studies and a book on retention, its effects on retained students, and the dropout effect.

Roderick points out that retention becomes a major issue in middle school because retained students are overage. This leads children to become disengaged, and that stigma they’ve carried since being retained may push them to drop out (1994).

Imagine middle school students who tower over their peers and who have already developed into students who look like they should be in high school.

If you still aren’t convinced, Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reports on a new and unique study, Early Grade Retention Harms Adult Earnings, by economist Jiee Zhong of Miami University, which demonstrates that children who are retained might show initial progress but will eventually face significant employability problems, including lower earnings as adults.

The study  should be taken seriously and aligns with many studies, like Roderick’s, that have been considered for decades, showing that children are more likely to drop out of school after being retained. Research has consistently and strongly shown this connection over the years.

The author of the new study found that third-grade retention deepened existing inequality.

She states:

Third graders who had to repeat a grade in Texas were far less likely to graduate from high school or earn a good living as young adults, nearly two decades later. The harmful effects were quite large and came despite initial improvements in test scores.

Mississippi Deception

Mississippi has been given accolades for student improvement, with students making early test gains, partly credited to retention, although there’s controversy over this and concern about comprehension and the later decline in 8th-grade scores.

Carey Wright, the state superintendent behind the changes to Mississippi’s schools, which included retention, claims in Barnum’s Chalkbeat report that students there received small-group instruction and they never focused on retention

But they did retain students. The New York Times presented a flattering report about the Mississippi gains, How Mississippi Transformed Its Schools From Worst to Best, reporting that they hold back 6 to 9 percent of third graders each year (2026). Students take the test the following year after intense reading instruction. This has been controversial as well.

Also, Mississippi’s children may have been held back earlier. Oklahoma Watch found in 2024-25, Mississippi held back 8.2% of kindergarteners, 7.8% of first-graders, fewer than 5% of second graders and 6% of third graders, according to the latest report on the state’s Literacy Based Promotion Act. It’s unclear how many children, if any, have been retained twice.

Retention always raises questions about whether children may need more time between kindergarten and third grade to learn, perhaps being pushed to read too soon. What if they hadn’t been retained and had received intensive reading instruction throughout? Fourth grade is not an insignificant year for learning to read better.

While reading success is noteworthy by third grade, it doesn’t have to be the pressured year for students to prove their reading skills; that’s another issue.

Focus on Support

Wright is right that small groups might help children who are behind, but why do children need to be retained to make that happen?

Retention believers often argue that it’s wrong to simply promote students. They’re also right. The learning difficulties students bring to school should never be ignored. Students are entitled to critical assistance when they aren’t making progress in school.

But Shane Jimerson from the University of California, Santa Barbara showed in a Meta-analysis of Grade Retention Research: Implications for Practice in the 21st Century that children who are promoted, without extra help, still do better than those who are retained. Jimerson called for an end to the debate and stressed that neither retention nor social promotion of a student with difficulties was good. Children need help with their school difficulties.

As I pointed out earlier, there are various solutions to retention. Children don’t have to leave school with such a stigma. My favorite is looping. I’ve seen it work wonderfully!

Looping two years with one teacher is one great solution. Teachers get to know students for two years, understand their progress in reading and math, and bring them up to speed. Unlike retention, which funds another school year for a child, there’s no extra cost to this. The child would be in the next grade anyway and is never made to feel like a failure! A well-qualified teacher, in tune with this process, is critical for this class.

Scores of research studies show that retention harms students in the long term, and no child deserves to be demeaned because they have learning difficulties.

The retention debate is old and stodgy, perpetuated over the years by those doing studies to try to prove it works, who refuse to think outside of the box for better alternatives.

We should know better now! There’s no need to retain children and undermine their self-belief. It’s time to focus on solutions that lift students, like looping, rather than leaving children feeling like they’ve failed.

References

Roderick, M. (1994). Grade Retention and School Dropout: Investigating the Association. American Educational Research Journal, 31(4), 729–759. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312031004729

Mervosh, S. (2026, January 11). How Mississippi Transformed Its Schools From Worst to Best. The New York Times. Retrieved at: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/mississippi-schools-transformation.html

Jimerson, S. R. (2001). Meta-analysis of Grade Retention Research: Implications for Practice in the 21st Century. School Psychology Review, 30(3), 420–437. https://doi.org/10.1080/02796015.2001.12086124

Addendum

I have written about this topic many times. It’s disappointing to see there have been few, if any, changes concerning this serious issue. Here are a few other posts.

13 Reasons Why Grade Retention is Terrible, and 12 Better Solutions

Why Do Science of Reading Advocates Accept Unscientific Third-Grade Retention?

Michigan fortunately no longer retains third graders but the points in this post are important.

For You Michigan!—You Are WRONG about Retention!

FORCE & FLUNK: Destroying a Child’s Love of Reading—and Their Life

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Categories Cruelty, Education Reform, Literacy

Peter Greene: Nebraska GOP Wants Vouchers, Even After Voters Rejected Them

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2026 //
1

Peter Greene retired after 39 years of teaching, and now is the best-informed and most prolific writer about misguided and sometimes malicious efforts to “reform” public schools.

Peter has his own blog–Curmudgucation–and also writes a column about reform frauds for FORBES.

In this post, he tells the remarkable and unsavory story of vouchers in Nebraska. Nebraska is a solid red state, but its voters don’t want vouchers. Rural legislators–even Republicans–know it’s a waste of money and are sure to defund their public schools.

But the voucher-pushers keep looking for clever ways to bypass the voters, who have made it clear that they don’t want vouchers.

Peter Greene writes:

Nebraska’s voucher fans are bound and determined, like legislators in many states, to get around the voters so they can get vouchers installed.

In May of 2023, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen signed into law LB 753, creating tax credit vouchers for subsidizing private schools.

The concept has been floated in Nebraska before, notably turning up more than once in 2022’s session. In 2023, it finally progressed through the legislature. But NSEA political action director Brian Nikkelson told the Nebraska Examiner that the public did not support the vouchers, and if the bill was passed, there would be a petition drive to force the bill to go on the ballot for voters to decide.

And so there was. It was a heck of a battle, with the pro-voucher forces have attracting a mountain of money, some of it from outside the state. Paul Hammel at the Nebraska Examiner reported that big money contributors include C.L. Werner, an Omaha-based trucking company executive ($100,000), Tom Peed and his son Shawn of a Lincoln publishing company ($75,000 each), and former Nebraska governor U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts ($25,000). Governor Pillen himself has contributed $100,000 to the campaign to save vouchers from a vote.

At the same time, Hammel reported, the American Federation for Children, the school choice advocacy group founded by Betsy DeVos, has contributed $103,000 in in-kind services and $583,000 in cash to the campaign.

It didn’t matter. Support Our Schools needed 60,000 signatures to force a referendum. They ended up with about twice that number (that’s roughly 10% of all eligible voters in the state). So this November, the voters of Nebraska were supposed to have their say. So you’d expect that voucher fans, who keep telling us how much everyone loves vouchers, would just sit back, secure in the knowledge that their program would win the referendum handily.

Well, no.

Instead, legislators cooked up LB 1402. This bill proposed to repeal the Opportunity Scholarships that were created under LB 753, and then to replace them with a new version of Opportunity Scholarships. This version would have been an education savings account (ESA) style super-voucher that hands over taxpayer money to send a student to a private or parochial school. It was more sketchy than last year’s bill because it appropriates state funds (rather than tax-credited contributions) to pay for the vouchers.

But mostly what it did it render the petition drive moot, because it repealed the version of vouchers that the public was going to vote on. “Ha,” they apparently thought. “That’ll stop those damned voters.”

In 67 days, the coalition of opponents gathered the necessary signatures—again. That repeal passed in November 2024, with 45 out of 49 legislative districts voting to repeal, and Nebraska’s voucher law was toast. The voters had sent a clear and unequivocal message.

Surely the state’s leaders would say, “Well, the voters have spoken, so that’s that.”

Fat chance.

Voucherphiles were back with a new proposal in January 2025. “I’m not dissuaded by the fact that it was defeated at the ballot box,” said freshman State Sen. Tony Sorrentino of Omaha.

To nobody’s surprise, Governor Jim Pillen was first to jump on the as-yet-rule-free federal school voucher proposal. Okay, it was a small surprise, because Nebraska is not known for grabbing federal dollars, but hey– this is Free Federal Money for private schools. In fact, U.S. Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., helped Congress usher the tax credits provision onto President Donald Trump’s desk, even though his home district was among those shooting down vouchers in 2024.

Pillen’s new idea is to sell vouchers for the “gap” year, the year between the time when Nebraska’s vouchers are required to end and the time when the federal vouchers are supposed to kick in. The proposal is being sent through the state’s Labor Department rather than the Department of Education because that would skirt the requirement for any sort of hearing or debate, probably because voucherphiles have a pretty good idea of how that would go.

Nebraska is one of those states where rural Republicans have opposed all attempts at vouchers, and they aren’t sounding any friendlier about this one. Zach Wendling at Nebraska Examiner talked to State Sen. Tom Brandt of Plymouth, a Republican who opposed Linehan’s previous proposals; he said he is opposed to using any public money for private school choice. He’s still waiting to see how the federal tax credit program includes public schools (because, remember, there are no actual rules yet attached to the federal voucher program).

“The referendum simply eliminated that. Period, end of story,” he continued on the state policy. “There’s no other interpretation you can draw from that.”

The gap funding would cost about $5 million for around 2,500 students. Of course, with no rules in place, it’s possible that not all of Nebraska’s current voucher students would qualify for federal vouchers. Nor can we predict what slice of the federal money pie Nebraska would be entitled to. If it comes to that, we could expect voucherphiles to argue that more gap funding is needed to cover new gaps, or maybe to expand above and beyond the federal offerings.

Nebraska voucher fans are making a lot of “think of the children” noises, but families have plenty of time to look for new arrangements (i.e. finding the student a new school or going back to paying the full tuition with their own money).

This is the same story we’ve seen over and over again. Vouchers never win when voters have a chance to be heard. Every single taxpayer-funded voucher program in this country has been created without giving the taxpayers a say or ignoring the say they had already said. Taxpayer-funded vouchers are all the result of legislators backed by deep-pocketed voucher fans deciding they are going to inflict these on the taxpayers. Nebraska’s taxpayers just happen to have a few more tools to fight back with, but Nebraska’s voucherphiles just keep looking for a way to avoid that whole pesky democracy thing.

Categories Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Nebraska, Privatization, Rural Schools, School Choice, Vouchers

The Meidas Report: A Media Phenomenon

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2026 //
9

You should give serious thought to subscribing to the Meidas Report. It is a citizen-driven media site that has six million subscribers, putting it into competition with major cable outlets.

From its website:

In just a few short years, MeidasTouch Network has grown into one of the most-watched news platforms in the world, with over 9 billion views on YouTube and more than 6.1 million subscribers, regularly surpassing traditional corporate and cable news networks in reach and engagement. We are deeply honored to have also received the iHeart Award for News Podcast of the Year last week and the Webby Award for Podcast of the Year.

Meidastouch.com is a progressive media outlet formed in 2020, during the pandemic, by the Meiselas brothers: Ben, Brett, and Jordan. They cover politics intensely, with videos, blogs, podcasts, and other forms of social media.

They created a PAC to oppose Donald Trump and help Democratic candidates. Ben Meiselas is an attorney. Brett Meiselas is an Emmy-award winning video editor. Jordan Meiselas works in marketing.

With these skills, they have built a media powerhouse.

Here is a recent example, written by editor-in-chief Ron Filipowski. Filipowski is an attorney, having been both a criminal defense attorney and a prosecutor. When Robert Mueller died last week, Trump immediately posted a vile comment expressing his pleasure about Mueller’s death. Mueller, of course, led the investigation of Russian efforts to help Trump win the election of 2016.

Filipowski wrote:

Trump made another disgusting post celebrating the death of former FBI Director Robert Mueller: “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

… His post received widespread condemnation from people in both parties, although his hard core MAGA supporters backed up their hero by trashing Mueller for his report on Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 US presidential election. 

… As a Marine platoon leader in Vietnam, Mueller was shot and later returned to lead his platoon after his recovery. He received a Bronze Star for valor, a Purple Heart, two Navy/Marine Commendation medals, Republic of Vietnam Cross of Valor, and numerous other medals.

… Fox chief political analyst Brit Hume: “This is the kind of stuff Trump does that makes people not just oppose him but hate him. There was no need to say anything.”

… Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO): “The President is a petty, sick, and vile man. Robert Mueller volunteered for Vietnam – at the same time Trump avoided serving. His decades of military and public service to our nation represents everything Trump is not.”

… Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) to Politico: “It is clearly wrong and unchristian behavior. The vast majority of Americans want better.”

… Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) on NBC: “It’s just disgusting, it’s so heartbreaking that we have a president who is cheerleading the death of American citizens. Mueller is amongst many who have been trying to hold this president to account. He’s the most corrupt president in the history of the country.”

… Gavin Newsom: “Trump despises anyone with a deep sense of duty, discipline, and patriotism. Rest in peace, Robert Mueller.”

… Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX): “It is completely tasteless and unacceptable for the sitting President of the US to celebrate anybody’s death – let alone someone who served this country. Trump continues to show us time and time again that there are no limits to how low he is willing to go.”

… Democratic activist Jamie Bonkiewicz got over 44,000 likes on X for this post: “I better not hear A SINGLE FUCKING WORD about the tweets I’ll be posting after he goes.” 

… Many contrasted Trump’s statement with those from other presidents. Barack Obama: “Bob Mueller was one of the finest directors in the history of the FBI, transforming the bureau after 9/11 and saving countless lives. But it was his relentless commitment to the rule of law and his unwavering belief in our bedrock values that made him one of the most respected public servants of our time. Michelle and I send our condolences to Bob’s family, and everyone who knew and admired him.”

… George W. Bush: “Laura and I are deeply saddened by the loss of Robert Mueller. As a Marine in Vietnam, he proved he was ready for tough assignments. He earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart before returning home to pursue law. In 2001 only one week into the job, Bob transitioned the FBI’s mission to protecting the homeland after Sept 11. He led the agency effectively, helping prevent another terrorist attack on US soil. Laura and I send our heartfelt sympathy to his wife of nearly 60 years, Ann, and the Mueller family.”

… Journalist Aaron Rupar: “Incredible – Fox & Friends completely ignored Trump’s batshit post celebrating Mueller’s death during their brief news hit about Mueller’s passing, and instead highlighted the more normal response of George W Bush.”

… Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on NBC: Q – “Do you think it’s appropriate for the president to celebrate the death of a Bronze Star, Purple Heart recipient who served in Vietnam? Bessent: Neither one of us can understand what has been done to the president and his family. Q – So you don’t think there’s anything wrong with a post saying, ‘Good. Robert Mueller’s dead’? Bessent: We should have empathy for what’s been done to the president and his family.”

… WaPo: “In the run-up to Hungary’s pivotal election in April, a unit of Russia’s foreign intelligence service last month began sounding the alarm over plummeting public support for PM Viktor Orban, whose friendly ties to Moscow have long given the Kremlin a strategic foothold inside NATO and EU. Officers from the intel service suggested that drastic action might be necessary – a strategy they called ‘the Gamechanger.” 

… The Russian report said one thing could “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign – the staging of an assassination attempt on Viktor Orban. Such an incident will shift the perception of the campaign out of the rational realm of socioeconomic questions into an emotional one, where the key themes will become state security and the stability and defense of the political system.” 

… The Russians staging an assassination attempt of a key foreign political candidate to boost their standing? I’m sure they would never try that in the US.

Categories Character, Cruelty, Ethics, Trump

Putting ICE in Place of TSA Won’t Work, Say Experts

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2026 //
4

The ongoing partial shutdown of the federal government affects only the Department of Honeland Security. Democrats refuse to fund it without reforms in ICE, which have used violent tactics in their pursuit of immigrants. They have been given a numerical target, and they have arrested citizens as well as citizens, raided schools and churches and broken into homes without a judicial search warrant.

Democrats would like to sever ICE funding from funding other parts of the Department of Homeland Security but Republicans have refused.

One consequence is that TSA agents have been quitting, and there are long lines at many airports. Some passengers have waited 3-4 hours to board their flights, yet still were unable to board.

Some TSA agents are looking for other jobs, because they need the money.

Thanks to cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s DOGE, TSA was already short of staff.

Trump says that he will send ICE agents to take the place of TSA personnel but ICE has no training for security screening.

At a time when people are concerned about terrorism, in response to Trump’s war in Iran, it’s wrong to reduce safety at airports.

The publication Government Executive reported:

President Trump will beginning Monday shift Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel to airports to provide security there in a move he said will alleviate long lines created by shutdown-induced callouts but which experienced TSA officials said would have minimal impact. 

The unusual approach comes as Trump administration officials have repeatedly lamented that Transportation Security Administration employees are calling out and quitting the agency due to the shutdown’s impact on paychecks, lengthening wait times at many airports around the country. Details of the assignments were not clear as of Sunday, despite Trump declaring that the airport deployments would occur on Monday. Tom Homan, the White House’s border czar, told CNN on Sunday that he was “working on the plan” and would come up with one soon. 

Several current and former TSA officials told Government Executive that ICE personnel will be limited in what they can accomplish at airports, as they will not have the requisite training to check identification, examine luggage x-rays or provide other key security services. TSA employees go through classroom and on-the-job training before they can staff those roles, the officials said. 

“It serves no practical use,” said one former official with decades of federal experience who declined to be named out of fear of professional reprisal. “It’s a political, publicity action, not a practical solution.” 

Homan suggested ICE employees could staff the areas where travelers exit their terminals, though former officials noted many airports already use non-TSA personnel for those areas. 

A second former senior TSA official added there are almost no functions ICE staff would be capable of offering. 

“They can basically provide little help,” the former senior employee said. 

In some airports, such as in Houston, call outs during the shutdown have reached 50%, forcing TSA to close lanes and leaving travelers waiting for hours to get through security. Employees have now missed at least one full paycheck after receiving a partial paycheck last month during the shutdown that began Feb. 14. Staff are guaranteed full back pay for their hours worked once the government reopens.

After seeing consistent staffing growth for the previous five years, TSA lost around 3,000 employees in 2025, or around 5% of its workforce, due to various firings and attrition measures. The agency has seen more than 400 employees leave the agency since the shutdown began, the White House said on Sunday. 

Congressional Democrats are holding out on funding the Homeland Security Department until the White House agrees to reforms for law enforcement personnel carrying out President Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown. They have repeatedly sought to fund TSA and other non-immigration components of DHS—including on Saturday in a rare weekend session—but Republicans have blocked all of those efforts.

“If the Democrats do not allow for just and proper security at our airports, and elsewhere throughout our country, ICE will do the job far better than ever done before,” Trump said on Sunday, making the announcement just one day before he said the deployments would begin. 

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA staff, said those workers spend months learning specific skills that enable them to detect explosives, weapons and individuals looking to evade security. They are recertified on an ongoing basis after receiving extensive instruction and seeking to replace them with ICE personnel would only exacerbate the problem. 

“You cannot improvise that,” Kelley said. “Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a gap. It creates one.”

Lawmakers have met with Homan in recent days in hopes of reaching an agreement on reforms that Democrats would accept in exchange for funding all of DHS, but they have yet to strike such a deal. 

Kelley added that turning to ICE could prove dangerous, given that the allegations of excessive force that they have faced. 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Funding, Safety

Thom Hartmann: A Message to MAGA Voters: You Got Played

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2026 //
4

Thom Hartmann is a veteran journalist who write The Hartmann Report, where this article appeared:

Dear MAGA voter,

I’m not writing this to mock you. I’m writing because you were lied to. And it wasn’t by the people you were told to hate, but by the man you trusted the most.

You were pissed off when you voted in 2024. Honestly, rightfully angry. Your town lost its factory. Your kids can’t afford the house they’ve been dreaming of for years. The politicians in Washington kept promising you things and delivering nothing; in fact, Republicans even took away your Medicaid and food stamps as well as your kids’ school lunches. You wanted someone who’d finally blow the whole damn thing up and put regular people first.

So did I and millions of other Americans. The difference is who we trusted to do it. Let’s talk about what actually happened.

You were told Trump would “drain the swamp” of corruption in Washington DC. Instead, as Marjorie Taylor Greene can tell you, Donald Trump has built the most corrupt, billionaire-stuffed cabinet (13 of them!) in American history. Epstein-buddy Howard Lutnick. Billionaire hustler Scott Bessent. Hedge fund managers and Wall Street insiders as far as the eye can see.

And then he handed the core agencies of the federal government — with no vote, no vetting, no accountability to anyone — over to Elon Musk, the single richest human being on the planet. Not a populist or a Washington outsider: the most powerful oligarch alive, whose source of wealth came from Obama bailing out Tesla and who now gets tens of billions in annual government contracts. 

Musk’s teenage hackers then stole your Social Security information and destroyed America’s soft power by gutting USAID: as Bill Gates said, “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.” This is your swamp now, one that’s already literally killed at least a million children around the world while handing our nation’s soft power over to Putin.

He also said there would be no more “stupid wars.” Yet he’s spending $1 billion a day and has already destroyed six American lives in Iran and still can’t explain to us why he attacked them or what actual threat that country represented to America. It appears he just did it because Putin, Netanyahu, and Kushner all encouraged him to. 

And now The Washington Post is reporting that Putin is giving Iran “targeting information” so they can kill American troops, just like when Putin put a bounty on US soldiers in Afghanistan and that was fine with Trump during his first term. Is that the kind of war you want? Somehow I doubt it.

You were also promised lower drug prices. Remember that? Trump made it a centerpiece of his campaign pitch. He looked straight into the camera and said he’d take on Big Pharma. But the pharmaceutical industry is making more money than ever before, and now the same Republican Congress that cheers Trump’s every move has cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid (the cuts come later this year).

That’s the national healthcare program that covers roughly one in five Americans, the majority of them in rural, working-class communities that voted for the same Republicans who gutted it on Trump’s orders. Your neighbors. Your family members. People who believed in him. Cuts made simply to pay for a trillion dollars of Trump’s $5 trillion tax break for himself, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and the other billionaires who put him into office. 

And then there’s the tariffs, which he told you China would pay. But China isn’t paying: you are. Tariffs are taxes collected at the border and paid by American importers, that are then passed on to American consumers like you and me. 

The people most exposed to rising prices on clothes, appliances, groceries, and cars are working-class families who spend a higher share of their income on the necessities of life. That’s you. The billionaires in his cabinet can absorb and even profit from Trump’s inflation; you can’t.

And while all this is happening, the national debt keeps exploding. It ballooned by $7 trillion during his first term. His second-term tax proposals are deficit-financed giveaways that only benefit corporations and the ultra-wealthy. 

Trump talks about “no taxes on tips” and “no taxes on Social Security” but those cuts are very, very limited and expire in a few years; the tax breaks on billionaires are deep and last forever. Your grandchildren will spend their lives paying off Trump’s tax cuts for people who summer in the Hamptons. This isn’t fiscal conservatism: it’s looting dressed up in a red hat.

Remember the wall? Mexico was going to pay for it. Mexico didn’t pay for a single inch of it. And remember when Elon Musk publicly defended keeping H-1B visas, the program Trump uses to import European workers for his shabby golf motels and that let corporations import cheaper foreign labor and hold down American wages? That caused a genuine civil war inside MAGA world for about a week, before the Murdoch/Ellison Epstein-class billionaire media moguls changed the subject. Trump sided with the billionaires; being one himself, he always sides with the billionaires.

Don’t forget Social Security and Medicare. He swore — repeatedly, explicitly — that he’d never cut them. Watch what the fine print says, particularly since he fired over 7,000 Social Security workers to make it really hard on people who are trying to sign up. That’s about encouraging people to move to the Medicare Advantage scam plans that are so profitable to his insurance industry donors.

Watch what DOGE is circling. Watch the budget proposals coming out of his own party’s Congress. The cuts aren’t coming for the people at Mar-a-Lago: they’re coming for you.

And perhaps the cruelest irony of all: the communities hit hardest by Trump’s policies are the communities that supported him most. Farmers crushed by retaliatory tariffs from trading partners. Rural hospitals dependent on federal funding now facing existential pressure. FEMA cuts hurting people in bright red Southern states. The economic pain is landing heaviest on the people who believed in him the most.

None of this is an accident. This is what happens when you elect a pathological liar who talks like a populist but governs for the donor class. Your anger was real. His betrayal is real.

I’m not asking you to become a Democrat. I’m not asking you to agree with me about anything except this: a man who fills his cabinet with hedge fund managers, hands power to the world’s richest oligarch, lets Big Pharma walk, starts a war to distract us from news he raped 13-year-old girls, and watches your grocery bill climb while calling it “victory” is not on your side.

He never was.

The swampy system you were furious at? It’s still there. It just has a new Dear Leader.

You deserve better than this. Heck, we all deserve better than this. 

Categories Billionaires, Extremism, Hoax, Lies, Trump

Audrey Watters: Who Benefits from AI? Not You.

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2026 //
5

Audrey Watters is one of the best–maybe the very best–writers about Ed-tech. As she has documented in her writings, including her book, Teaching Machines, the quest for a cheap and mechanical way to replace teachers with efficient devices has a long history. A few people dream of endless profits, but the promise of better teaching by machines has never been realized.

Watters believes that the Ed-tech industry is minting money for itself without delivering on its promises. In this article, which appears on her blog, Second Breakfast, she describes the current AI boom and the likely endgame.

She writes:

This morning I attended one of the new NYC Chancellor’s public “conversations,” his administration’s initiative to “engage directly with communities to reflect on what safety, academic rigor, and true integration look like in practice.” There were about one hundred folks in attendance, including members of the AI Moratorium for NYC schools, who were there to leaflet beforehand (and were vastly outnumbered, I should note, by the NYPD). 

As the aforementioned name suggests, this coalition of local organizations is asking for a two-year moratorium on AI in the city’s schools, pointing to the growing opposition to AI and (in their words) “to evidence that it represents substantial risk to student privacy, cognitive development and skills, critical thinking, creativity, mental health, and the environment.” I’d add that it represents substantial risk more broadly: to labor (teachers’, librarians’, translators’, social workers’) and to democracy itself.

And really, what’s the rush?! I mean, other than the desperate need of the tech sector to prove that the trillions of dollars invested in this endeavor will soon show some profit and that – unlike crypto and Web 3.0 – this isn’t just some giant fraud being perpetrated so executives can buy more private islands.

I’ve said repeatedly (but didn’t articulate into any open mic at the meeting because I still very much feel like a new New Yorker), this recent push for “AI” is yet another grandiose and grotesque experiment on children – one that no one asked for and few want. Another grandiose and grotesque experiment on all of us. 

We have lived through decades and decades now of repeated digital promises — we’ll be better, faster, stronger, more connected, what have you — and none of the computational fantasies have really come to fruition, certainly not for everyone. We are not more productive (despite now being asked to work so much more, clicking away on our devices at all hours of every day); we are not smarter; and most importantly, we are not better. (A tiny group of men are, on the other hand, now richer than any other humans have ever been in all of history. So there’s that.) Our public institutions are crumbling, in no small part because these men are fully and openly committed to the failure of democracy, having positioned themselves to profit mightily from years of neoliberalism. “AI” marks the further (and they hope, final) consolidation of their power – not just the privatization and monopolization of all information under their control, but the automation of the dissemination and replication of knowledge. These men are more than happy to sell a story, a system that trains all of us, but particularly young people, to become entirely dependent on and subservient to computational machinery; they are more than happy for us to sacrifice our cognitive capabilities, our creativity, our agency, our decision-making, our morality, to solidify their crude oligarchal dreams of total efficiency, total financialization, total domination.

Jennifer Berkshire writes about the back history to the growing backlash against not just “AI” but a lot of ed-tech and what she calls “the curious case of collective amnesia” (invoking one of Hack Education’s enduring contributions to “the discourse: “The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade” as well as Teaching Machines).

We should know by now that this stuff is almost entirely wretched – we do, right? I mean, at this stage, I’d be deeply embarrassed if I was out there, trying to argue that this stuff is any damn good. And yet here comes Silicon Valley and education reform, hand-in-hand once again, trying to peddle disruption and innovation and their long war on “one size fits all education,” armed with their algorithmic bullshit and billionaire board members.

It doesn’t help, I think, that there are several prominent technology journalists who keep falling for / perpetuating this stuff, who loudly insist in caps-lock-on prose that “THERE IS NO EVIDENCE!!!111” that devices are bad for children. (The irony, of course, is after they repeat this claim — and with such certainty — they turn around and point to dozens of stories of the most batshit–crazy news about the horrors of digital culture.)

And maybe part of the problem too is just that: we are so steeped in the insanity of techno-capitalism, the insanity of techno-capitalists that some folks are losing track of what aberrant behavior really is. Cory Doctorow writes a bit about this this week, offering “three more AI Psychoses” — a response, in part, to Samantha Cole’s excellent piece in 404 Media, “How to Talk to Someone Experiencing ‘AI Psychosis’.”

I wonder if it isn’t simply that “AI” delusions are ubiquitous (at this stage, I’m thinking these delusions are experienced by almost everyone, not just a tiny fraction of “AI” users); it’s that many of these delusions are unrecognizable as such because they reflect precisely the sort of sociopathy long embraced by Silicon Valley’s Ayn-Randian, libertarian set. “Here’s to the crazy ones” indeed.

[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. – David Graeber, Debt…

If plagiarism is wrong and bad and theft is wrong and bad and schools are duty-bound to help instill these values in students, how can they justify adoption of a technology that is, at its core, built on stolen work and whose purpose is the extrusion of text to be passed off as one’s own thinking and writing?

I invite you to open the link and continue reading this thought-provoking article.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Online Education, Technology

David Sanger: No End in Sight to Trump’s War in Iran

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2026 //
5

David Sanger of the New York Times comments on the mess that Trump created by making war on Iran.

Before the war, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine warned Trump of the risks, including the likelihood of Iran shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, according to the Wall Street Journal. Trump ignored his warnings, because he thinks he’s the smartest person in every room. He had the experience of a swift victory in Venezuela, so he decided Iran would be a piece of cake. He thought Iran would capitulate in two or three days.

Make no mistake: the Iranian theocratic regime is led by cruel fanatics who tolerate no dissent. Only days ago, three men were executed on charges of murdering policemen during the January protests. One of those publicly hung was a teenage wrestling champion, who said his “confession” was coerced by torture.

Trump started the war ostensibly to free the Iranian people from their tyrannical leaders but quickly dropped that goal and said his purpose was to destroy Iran’s capacity to wage war , especially on Israel.

When Iran attacked shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Trump called on our NATO allies to open the choke point for 20% of the world’s oil. They refused. He began blasting our allies for failing to help us; they did not want to get involved in a war that Trump and Netanyahu started. Trump forgot that he had been belittling our allies since he returned to office (as well as during his first term in office), even threatening to attack and seize Greenland, which is part of Denmark.

He has painted himself into a corner, even threatening to crash the world economy, because of his ignorance and stupidity.

Now, thousands of Marines are en route to the Middle East. The 82nd Airborne is on alert. The world waits to see how much more damage he will inflict before he declares victory and stops his war.

David Sanger, veteran national security reporter, wrote:

Ever since President Trump began what he now delicately calls his “excursion” into Iran, Washington has been consumed by the question of when he would call it a day — even if many of his war goals remain unaccomplished.

On Friday evening, as he headed to Florida, Mr. Trump seemed to be designing that much-discussed exit. But he clearly has not yet decided whether to take it.

And there is mounting evidence — average gas price approaching $4 a gallon, infrastructure in ruins across the Persian Gulf, a decimated Iranian theocracy digging in and American allies at first rebuffing and now struggling with demands to patrol hostile waters — that the repercussions of Mr. Trump’s excursion may outlast his interest in it.

As always, Mr. Trump’s messaging is inconsistent, which his critics cite as evidence that he entered this conflict with no strategy and his followers cheer as strategic ambiguity. With thousands of additional Marines headed to the region and the pace of American and Israeli attacks quickening, Mr. Trump told reporters on Friday he had no interest in a cease-fire because the United States was “obliterating” Iran’s missile stocks, navy, air force and defense industrial base.

Hours later, perhaps sensitive to a Republican base understandably nervous about the political effects, he posted on his social media site that “we are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East.”

But his latest list of those objectives left out a few of his previous goals and watered down others. He made no mention of defeating the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which appears to remain in power, along with Mojtaba Khamenei, who has succeeded his father as supreme leader, though he has yet to be seen or heard in public. Mr. Trump also omitted any message to the Iranian people, whom he told only three weeks ago: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

And after insisting in the failed negotiations that led up to the war that Iran had to ship all of its nuclear material out of the country — starting with the 970 pounds of enriched uranium that are closest to bomb-grade — he suggested a new goal. “Never allowing Iran to get even close to Nuclear Capability,” he wrote, “and always being in a position where the U.S.A. can quickly and powerfully react to such a situation.”

That is, essentially, where the United States was after it buried Iran’s nuclear program in rubble last June. The sites have remained under the watchful eye of U.S. spy satellites.

Mr. Trump ended the posting with a new demand for American allies, whom he had frozen out of his deliberations before starting the war, and gave no warning to prepare for its consequences. “The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it — the United States does not!” American forces would help, he said.

“Think of it as the new Trump Doctrine for the Middle East,” Richard N. Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served on the National Security Council and at the State Department during the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq war, wrote on social media.

“We broke it, but you own it.”

Mr. Trump’s shifting goals continued into Saturday evening. Just a few days ago, he was calling on Israel to avoid targeting Iranian energy sites, for fear it would lead to an escalating round of retaliatory counter-strikes across the Gulf. But on Saturday, he threatened to hit Iran’s power plants if it did not “FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz” within 48 hours.

He said that U.S. strikes on Iranian plants would start “WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST.” Iran’s biggest plant appears to be its only operating nuclear power plant, at Bushehr. For decades, nuclear power plants have been considered completely off limits for strikes because of the obvious risk of environmental calamity.

This is not where Mr. Trump expected to be after three weeks of war.

Foreign leaders, diplomats and U.S. officials who have spoken with the president said that in the first week he voiced expectations that Iran would capitulate. That was clear in Mr. Trump’s demand on March 6 for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.”

The demand was mystifying, said one European diplomat with long experience dealing with Iran, given the country’s competing power centers, its national pride and a Persian state that has existed within the rough boundaries of modern-day Iran, enduring many rises and falls, since the days of Cyrus the Great around 550 B.C.

(That demand was also missing from his latest set of objectives. The White House has since said that the president does not expect a surrender announcement from Iran, but that Mr. Trump will determine when Iran has “effectively surrendered.”)

Iran’s refusal to “cry uncle,’’ as Mr. Trump termed it to reporters on Air Force One, has been only one of the surprises to the president in recent weeks.

The first was the crisis in the energy markets, which the International Energy Agency has called “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” It has sent Mr. Trump and his aides scrambling. They have promised releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was only 60 percent full, reflecting a lack of planning. Over the past week the Treasury Department has issued licenses for the delivery of Russian and Iranian oil already at sea. In other words, to calm the markets, the president has approved enriching an adversary that is at war with Ukraine, an American ally, and another that is at war with the United States.

So far, the effects are minimal. Brent crude closed at around $112 a barrel on Friday after the Treasury announcements, and Goldman Sachs warned on Thursday that if ships were reluctant to make their way through the Strait of Hormuz, prices could remain high into 2027.

The Iranians clearly understand that market chaos is their one remaining superweapon. On Saturday, Tehran warned it could set fire to other facilities in the Middle East. The United States believes the country entered the war with 3,000 or so sea mines — some of which are believed to have been destroyed — and the United States has focused on destroying small boats in the Iranian fleet that are targeting tankers associated with American allies.

“All it takes is for one of those things to get through to shut down traffic,” said John F. Kirby, who served as both Pentagon and State Department spokesman after retiring as a naval officer. “The fear alone can be paralyzing to the shipping industry, as we have already seen.”

Mr. Trump’s second surprise was his sudden need for allies. He didn’t imagine it at the beginning of the conflict, the defense minister of one Gulf nation said recently, because he thought the war would be short. But patrolling the strait, and other checkpoints, appears to be a task that could last months or years.

His third surprise was the absence of any uprising among either the Revolutionary Guards or ordinary Iranians. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in the Oval Office this past week “we are seeing defections at all levels as they’re starting to sense what’s going on with the regime.” But American and European intelligence officials say they have no evidence of such defections — even after Israel targeted, and eliminated, Iran’s supreme leader, its top security and intelligence chiefs and many top military officials.

All that could yet come. Wars are not won or lost in three weeks. But Mr. Trump entered the Iran war after enjoying the fruits of quick victories. A bombing run over Iran’s three major nuclear sites in June was a one-evening expedition, essentially burying the country’s nuclear stockpiles and wiping out thousands of its centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium.

The commando raid to seize Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela from his bed in Caracas was similarly swift. And so far, the government Mr. Trump left in place — essentially Mr. Maduro’s government — has been compliant. That operation has helped Mr. Trump destabilize Cuba, which has lost the Venezuelan fuel supplies that it has long depended on. The other day the electric grid in Cuba collapsed, and administration officials have been openly suggesting that the government will, too.

Perhaps those quick results encouraged Mr. Trump to believe the U.S. military was all-powerful, and that the mullahs and generals and militias that run Iran, a country of 92 million people, would crumble. Perhaps he rushed.

Military historians will be dissecting this conflict for a long time. But for now it is clear that Iran is a different kind of challenge. Mr. Trump started using the word “excursion” to suggest this is just a short trip, a brief diversion. But there is no real end in sight.

Categories Ignorance, International, Trump

Brian Stelter: Pete Hegseth Will Appeal Court Ruling that Favors Freedom of the Press

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2026 //
3

Brian Stelter of CNN is one of the very best reporters about the state of journalism. In his newsletter “Reliable Sources,” he reported Sunday morning that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will appeal a ruling by a federal judge that prevents him from excluding mainstream journalists from covering the Pentagon. Hegeth wants to limit or ignore freedom of the press. He wants the Defense Department to be covered only by rightwing journalists.

Stelter writes at CNN:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been taking steps to thwart news coverage of the Pentagon for more than a year. Now he has finally met some resistance.

Friday’s ruling by a federal judge striking down Pentagon press limits was cheered by the news organization that sued over the policy, The New York Times, and by a wide range of First Amendment advocates.

“This is a great day for freedom of the press in the United States,” the Pentagon Press Association, which represents scores of journalists who regularly cover the military, said. “It is also hopefully a learning opportunity for Pentagon leadership, which took extreme steps to limit press access to information in wartime.”

Some beat reporters who were pushed out of the Pentagon complex last fall are now discussing how to get their credentials reinstated.

But Hegseth’s press office says, “We disagree with the decision and are pursuing an immediate appeal,” signaling that he will continue to pick fights with the news media.

At recent press briefings about the war in Iran, Hegseth has mirrored President Trump’s hyperbolic language about the media and made plainly false claims about news coverage.

More alarmingly, from the perspective of Pentagon correspondents, he has also hindered the free flow of information about the US military, in part through the restrictive press pass rules that The Times challenged in court.

The rules had the effect of replacing major news outlets like The Times and CNN with a handpicked group of relatively small and explicitly right-wing outlets.

But the rules veered into unconstitutional territory, senior US District Judge Paul Friedman wrote in Friday’s ruling.

The policy is “viewpoint discrimination,” Friedman wrote, “not based on political viewpoint but rather based on editorial viewpoint — that is, whether the individual or organization is willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.”

Tightening control over coverage

Governments routinely try to encourage favorable coverage, but Hegseth has gone much further since leaving Fox News for the Defense Department, which he has rebranded as the Department of War.

One of his first moves was to boot some news outlets, including CNN, from long-established media workspaces inside the Pentagon complex.

It was billed as a temporary “media rotation program,” boosting pro-Trump media outlets that never had a presence at the Pentagon before. For one year, Breitbart was meant to replace NPR, One America News Network to replace NBC News, and so forth.

But any argument about media diversity was undermined by the department’s inaccessibility.

Hegseth’s spokespeople declined to hold regular press conferences, effectively closed the Pentagon press briefing room, and made key parts of the Pentagon complex off-limits to journalists without an official escort.

By May 2025, the Pentagon Press Association was calling the restrictions “a direct attack on the freedom of the press and America’s right to know what its military is doing.”

It was apparent to many beat reporters that Hegseth wanted to prop up propagandistic outlets while punishing traditional media outlets.

He promoted himself on Fox, for instance, and gave access to right-wing content creators, while bashing what he called the biased “hoax press.”

In September, his press office circulated a new policy controlling the press credentials that grant physical access to the Pentagon complex.

The policy challenged the ability of reporters to freely gather information, for instance, through leaks from sources inside the military, by enabling the Pentagon to suspend or revoke credentials due to reporting.

Media lawyers said the revised rules criminalized routine reporting. So, rather than abide by the new policy, journalists from virtually every major American news outlet turned in their press passes en masse last October.

The Pentagon gave credentials to what it called “the next generation of the Pentagon press corps,” made up of staples of the MAGA media diet that are barely known to the rest of America.

Those media outlets were welcomed into the building’s workspaces, though the cubicles and offices are said to be largely empty nowadays. Before long, some of those outlets also began to complain about a lack of transparency from the Pentagon.

A handpicked ‘press corps’

When the US and Israel began strikes in Iran, and the Pentagon resumed somewhat regular press briefings, Hegseth called almost exclusively on MAGA-aligned outlets that were given front-row seats in the briefing room.

Representatives of bigger news outlets with decades of experience covering the US military — who were granted temporary access to the building — were seated in the back and generally ignored.

Furthermore, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon “barred press photographers” from some briefings after the photographers published photos of Hegseth “that his staff deemed ‘unflattering.’”

Those photographers were allowed back inside for the most recent briefing on March 19.

But Hegseth added a new anti-media talking point to his repertoire that day, claiming that the “dishonest and anti-Trump press will stop at nothing — we know this, at this point — to downplay progress, amplify every cost, and call into question every step.”

He diagnosed them with “TDS,” short for Trump Derangement Syndrome, a favorite insult of MAGA loyalists.

Hegseth also said Iran wants “to put out fake AI-generated images, which, by the way, sometimes our press happens to fall for, like the Abraham Lincoln on fire.”

His assertion that the American press has fallen for the fake imagery is itself fake. As CNN’s Daniel Dale reported, “There is no evidence that mainstream US media outlets promoted fake videos of the Lincoln on fire.” In fact, several US outlets, including The Times, debunked the videos.

When it filed suit against the Defense Department last December, The Times said the press pass restrictions were “an attempt to exert control over reporting the government dislikes.”

When Friedman ruled in agreement on Friday, The Times treated it as front-page news, and a spokesperson said the ruling “enforces the constitutionally protected rights for the free press in this country.”

“Americans deserve visibility into how their government is being run, and the actions the military is taking in their name and with their tax dollars,” The Times said.

Julian Barnes, the Times reporter named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, wrote on X, “This is a big win for the press, the public and the United States military, which fights better when observed by a robust press corps.”

Journalists at other news outlets are also monitoring the case closely. A CNN spokesperson said of the ruling, “This is an encouraging development and we are evaluating next steps and what this means for CNN.”

All the while, most original journalism about military matters has still been produced by the traditional outlets that lost access to the Pentagon complex last fall.

While Hegseth and his deputies have adopted a hostile approach toward the press corps, rank-and-file military officials have not.

When the ruling was handed down, beat reporters who had previously worked inside the Pentagon received messages from military personnel saying things like: “Does this mean we’ll see you Monday?”

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Freedom of the Press
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