Imagine this: The multi-billionaire Ellison family, which recently bought CBS, is currently the winner of a bidding war for Warner Brothers Discovery, which includes CNN and other news and entertainment outlets. The total deal is worth $111 billion. The Ellisons won’t buy Warner Brothers Discovery on their own. Some $24 billion of the $111 billion deal will be advanced by three Middle Eastern states: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. Saudi Arabia is putting up $10 billion of the $24 billion.
The Ellisons say that these investors will have no role in corporate governance or policymakers. It’s possible, but can you imagine CBS or CNN airing a Frank documentary on women’s rights in Arabic nations?
Ellison’s Middle Eastern Money: It’s happening: David Ellison is set to take $24 billion in Middle Eastern money to fund his acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, raising a mountain of ethical and regulatory questions. The WSJ’s Jessica Toonkel and Lauren Thomas reported that about $10 billion will come from Saudi Arabia, an anti-free speech country with a long list of human rights abuses, including cracking down on independent journalism. Now the country will be part-owner of a giant U.S. media conglomerate with not only tremendous cultural influence, but which will own and control two newsrooms, CNN and CBS News.
The funding, of course, has already raised concerns on Capitol Hill, where Democrats have demanded the Treasury Department conduct a thorough review of the transaction. Of course, given that the Treasury Department is under Donald Trump’s control, that is unlikely. But if Democrats win in November, they could drag Ellison in to testify—and Ellison will still need approval from the states and the European Union.
Federal Judge Richard Leon again halted work on Trump’s super-sized ballroom, which can hold as many as 1,000 people and would be twice as large as the White House. It’s a giant golden sore thumb looming over the White House.
Trump said that under the ballroom would be a major security site and that continuing the construction of the ballroom was a matter of national security. A federal appeals lifted Judge Leon’s stay and asked him to clarify what part of the structure he was stopping.
A federal judge set new limits on President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom, saying construction could proceed only on an underground portion of the project deemed necessary by the military, and not on the 90,000-square-foot aboveground addition that Trump has eyed to entertain VIP guests.
“National security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity,” U.S. District Judge Richard Leon wrote Thursday. He said the Trump administration could also take steps to secure the construction site to make it safe for people on the White House grounds.
Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, last month ordered a halt to Trump’s planned $400 million project, ruling that it could not continue until the president obtains approval from Congress. But Leon permitted further construction to ensure “the safety and security of the White House” after Trump officials said work on an underground emergency bunker was necessary to protect the president, his family and his staff….
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the organization that sued to block the ballroom construction last year, disputed Trump’s interpretation and asked Leon to explicitly bar any aboveground construction on the ballroom until it received authorization from federal panels and Congress. It also questioned the Trump administration’s claim that pausing the project puts the president at risk.
“No matter how much the Defendants insist otherwise, the lack of a massive ballroom on the White House grounds is not a national-security emergency,” lawyers for the National Trust wrote in a filing Tuesday. They noted that Trump continues to live at the White House and entertain foreign dignitaries, despite the administration’s claim that the current situation poses a security risk.
The National Trust’s lawyers also called attention to the Justice Department’s shifting arguments over the project’s scope. The Trump administration initially maintained that the underground work was separate from the aboveground ballroom, an argument that Leon considered when he declined to pause the project last year and allowed the underground work to continue.
I first met Vivian Connell in 2012 at a conference for legislators in Raleigh, North Carolina. She was part of a panel of North Carolina teachers who spoke about the challenges and needs of their classrooms. She was brilliant and articulate. I later learned that she was both a lawyer and a teacher. I was impressed by her candor, her insight, her passion, and her deep connection to her students.
That happened to be the same year that the Network for Public Education was founded.
Four years later, the Network decided to hold its annual conference in North Carolina. The decision was controversial because the state legislature (the General Assembly) had just passed a bathroom bill requiring that everyone must use the bathroom aligned with their assigned gender at birth. HB2 was known as Hate Bill 2. Some thought we should avoid North Carolina, others said we should show up.
We decided to stay in North Carolina (had we canceled at the last minute, we would have gone bankrupt), and our decision was reinforced when our dear friends in the state were able to persuade the Reverend William Barber to be our keynote speaker.
Rev. Barber was indeed eloquent, and we were glad we decided to stand by our original decision to meet in Raleigh. Funnily enough, the major hotel we stayed in had three kinds of bathrooms: women’s, men’s, and gender neutral. I wondered if the General Assembly knew. Had it occurred to them that HB 2 was unenforceable unless they had an inspector at every public bathroom to visually inspect either birth certificates or genitalia.
One prominent North Carolinian was missing from our conference: Vivian Connell.
Vivian lived about an hour away but she couldn’t travel. She had ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, which causes physical degeneration and has no cure.
At the end of the last session, on April 17, 2016, several of us joined Bertis Downs to pay a visit to Vivian. Bertis is from Georgia; Colleen Wood is from Florida; Phyllis Bush, now deceased from cancer, was from Indiana; and I am from New York.
Surrounding Vivian at her home, Mr, Bertis Downs, Colleen Wood and Phylis Bush. Vivian, in her wheelchair, holds a first edition of one of her favorite books.
When we arrived at Vivian’s home, we met her husband Paul, her children Hadley and Hagan, and her aide. Vivian was in a wheelchair. She had no physical mobility and could not speak. She was able to communicate via an amazing device. She “typed” by looking at letters on a computer screen, which then expressed words. A member of our group gave her a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, one of her favorite books. Her husband announced that he was taking the kids to see Hamilton, their favorite show (they had memorized the lyrics.)
Soon after she received her diagnosis of ALS, she began writing a blog called “finALS.” When she began, she was still fully mobile. She documented her activities, checking off the items on her bucket list, and describing her deteriorating condition.
What follows is her final blog, which she wrote after we visited. We know that every word was laboriously written in a transfer from her eyes to the machine.
I hope you read it. You wil get a sense of her beautiful soul, which could conquer any obstacle but ALS.
One Last Time
[Prelude: It is June 24th, and I have at last finished my final post for finALS. It is not the masterpiece I dreamed of writing, but I am not a writer, and it is from my heart. This Monday, my medical team, husband and I will explore palliative sedation to manage the terrible choking and gagging that now dominate my waking hours. Some people adapt; some never wake up.
Before I go, I must spotlight my husband, Paul Connell, who has, from the beginning, eschewed any limelight. Never has a spouse been more constant or devoted. And though we each have big personalities that clash, he has never wavered in his devotion or care.
I dedicate all I have accomplished in law school and after my diagnosis to Paul, without whose selflessness, I could have done little.
VRC]
Well, I am back at last.
My doctor has called in hospice and used the phrase “last few months.”
And I have been paralyzed by the composition of this post.
You should all thank my writer friend David Klein that you are not reading my original idea. It involved stories of seeing Ken Burns speak in 2008–a version replete with quotations and commentary, I assure you–of how I wove segments from my beloved TV favorite, Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing, into my teaching (again, with no shortage of inspirational anecdotes) and of how I discovered that the author and star of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, shares my love for the show.
But this is not to be an artful feature delineating again the ideals that inspired my teaching or the late-life leap to law school that validated my life’s work and filled the 27 months since I was diagnosed with ALS with wonder and opportunity. And I would love to regale you with the story of my Network for Public Education friends and colleagues visiting my home with both a signed first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird ( I know, right?) and my education policy hero, Diane Ravitch. I want to describe the tears of joy I cried when they left and the tears of joy my family enjoyed when we were gifted tickets to Hamilton! My husband wept because I couldn’t go. I bawled like a baby because they could.
And I want to tell you how my daughter ended up with an older script of Hamilton that Miranda had given to a journalist!
But this is not another post about serendipitous meetings and virtually miraculous joy that have so fully packed my life since I was diagnosed with this heinous, degenerative, and terminal disease.
I have covered my blessings pretty well.
These are to be my final words. Not a lesson from a dying teacher. Not an argument from a dying lawyer.
But one last time to attempt candor and artless honestly about my passions, my regrets, and wishing that this cup could be taken from me.
A LAST LITERARY LESSON
It feels important as well that I not leave anyone thinking too highly of me.
I was blessed to accomplish much I am proud of, mainly because I genuinely bought in to the best ideals of those before me and found the courage to follow my callings–to strive always to do more and do better.
Deepest thanks to my teachers and heroes.
I would be terribly remiss, however, if I failed to share at least a few of my representative fears and failings.
I’ve thought often of Hawthorne’s exhortation in The Scarlet Letter:
“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”
While I will not spend this post mimicking the poor guilty minister’s self-flagellation (you’re welcome), I will be sharing some of my less admirable choices. In retrospect, in fact, I am certain that my shame and regret–my failures–motivated me to keep striving to do better.
A loud conscience is a benefit, I think. At long as it brings about striving to do better rather than paralysis via self-loathing.
I diverge from many of my progressive parent friends because I take to heart that a reasonable and loving authority figure is healthy and character building.
I have no regrets about that aspect of my parenting: I think my kids knew that we rode them because we love them.
And I think this model is more effective when I ride myself equally.
And I encourage you not to procrastinate or ignore an urge to change or do better. Following these feelings brought all the most rewarding experiences of my life. And though I am far from done–though I have more public ( political) and private ( personal) battles to wage and improvements to make, I am out of time. And terribly sad about it.
So emulate the best of the heroes in Hamilton, our flawed founding fathers–yes, many of whom were paternalistic slave owners, but–who genuinely wanted to do better. The tireless work of Diane Ravitch, who once embraced the errant ideology of the failed Bush education mandate, No Child Left Behind (newsflash: many of our most vulnerable populations were “left behind”) but who now is standard-bearer for Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post, hundreds of leading education researchers, and hundreds of thousands of teachers and parents who are committed to the civic imperative of excellence and equity in public education.
And maybe even me: a self-absorbed, working-class only child who grew up oblivious to her privilege, pursuing only middle-class self-interest, but who learned through education and experience to change…
… To strive to be better, and in so doing, lived an adult life that makes it much less difficult to face death.
ON FAITH
I know my redeemer lives.
I did not embrace this belief until I was 28. And it is and has been the greatest gift of my life. I thank G-d for making him/herself real to me.
Every worthwhile accomplishment of my life–especially my love for my students and my passion for justice and tolerance–came from my faith.
My worst failings–especially my impatience, a hardness on others to live up to my (unjustified) expectations, and my intolerance for the intolerant–come from my failures to live out my faith.
I am grateful for forgiving friends and a forgiving G-d.
Regrets: Though I raised my children in church and strove to find churches that reflected the love of Jesus of Nazareth rather than the rules of so much organized religion, I never really prioritized participation in my church communities.
We moved several times when my kids were small, and I never fought hard enough to find the right church–a place that worked for social justice and where I could be confident that any person I invited would feel welcomed and loved for who they were.
For a couple of years, I asked my husband for us to tithe on our net, but I worried too much about birthday parties, vacations, activities, and home lifestyle to put giving first.
No Regrets: I did keep trying though, and about a year before leaving Charlotte, I bit the bullet and began shlepping my family to Warehouse 242, a place where I once saw one of my gay/trans high school students visit, and knew I had made the right decision! And when we moved to Chapel Hill, I at last found United Church of Chapel Hill, an open and affirming church community that focuses on serving “the least of these,” is active in the North Carolina Moral Monday movement for social justice, and actively promotes racial equity.
Despite my failures to live out my faith as I would have hoped, I was gifted lifelong friendship with several teens I led in a small group at a church in Charlotte that was much too legalistic for my comfort. I think I won these friendships because I never lied to the girls. I acknowledged the dissonance they perceived between the Jesus they knew or wanted to know and the legalism of our church and /or the politics of their parents.
Somehow I always respectfully challenged those I believe misrepresented the G-d who made himself real to me.
And for that, no regrets.
I do apologize to those with whom I disagreed, but failed to always love or respect. For example, the three arrogant social conservatives who poisoned my law school class: I held my ground against you in public, but I’m afraid I also referred to you surreptitiously as the unholy trinity.
And Andrew Brown, if you wonder why you practically had to rewrite your Law Review piece in which you demonized homosexuals and their rights as adoptive parents, well, that was me spending over twenty hours to eviscerate your pseudo-academic arguments and discredit your sources.
Oh, and Andrew, if you were my student and had used brackets to skew a quote to dishonestly promote your argument, I would have disciplined you to the outer boundaries of academic protocol.
Did you see what I did there?
I showed you that I enjoy kicking over the moneylenders’ tables in the temple a bit too much.
I think I was called to be a fighter, but I don’t think I always fought with love and humility.
May we all seek truth and justice while simultaneously striving to love our enemies as they are loved.
G-d help us all. S/he loves when we try and shows us unlimited forgiveness. This I know, and for this I am grateful.
ON RACE
It’s been a major issue in my life. And one I hate to leave on the table. Along with money in politics, corporate personhood, and the future of public education.
And so I find myself thinking of Greensboro.
The legendary lunch counter sit-ins.
This North Carolina city is now home to the Racial Equity Institute. My principal at Phoenix Academy, the alternative high school, sagely invested in each of his employees by sending us to the two-day introductory seminar of REI. The main reaction of attendees is “life-changing.” No guilting or emotional manipulation in sight, but two days of systematic realities steeped in history and taught by a diverse and largely dispassionate team. They are not crusading, but if you are interested in the statistics–the outcomes for people of color in health care, financial services, law enforcement, education, and other social structures, then they have the facts.
If you are ready and willing to face the not-so-just realities.
And Greensboro is also the home of my former law school classmate and honors writing scholar, Jessica. She married an African-American man, and they have three of the most beautiful biracial children I have ever seen. And though she has been busy with three children under five, she has come to Chapel Hill and fed me and my family on multiple occasions, and today she drove round-trip from Greensboro so that I could meet her two-month-old daughter before she had to pick up her toddler boys … or be charged a dollar a minute.
When I see the videos of those bad apples in law enforcement dragging black teenage girls in swimsuits to the ground or toppling one out of her school desk, or arresting Sandra Bland, I think of Jessica’s daughter. When I see the statistics and remember the stories of everything from violence to injustice to mere humiliation endured by my former students and my friends, I think of all our citizens of color and the ugly truth of Americans who must raise their children in fear.
And I hurt for white America, too many of whom deny the reality of our country’s latent and simmering injustice to so many people of color.
A child of the Deep South born in 1964 to parents raised on farms and in rental shacks around Vidalia, Georgia, I was lucky.
My parents taught me the right words:
Don’t judge people by skin color.
Everyone should be treated equally.
Don’t use the N-word.
But there were no black kids in my Mississippi elementary school and no black families in my neighborhoods… ever.
And the bulk of my south Georgia relatives never got the N-word memo.
By high school, I was passively non-racist but had never had a non-white friend.
Regrets : My worst memories…
When I was a high school sophomore, some popular girls I longed to befriend me asked me to go out after the football game. We got sundaes at the McDonald’s, and one had a hair in it. And so we circled round to request a replacement. Four privileged white girls in nice clothes carrying their generous allowances and riding in a parent’s new sedan. When we returned to the drive-thru, my new friend spoke into the speaker to the African-American girl at the window: “We need another sundae, and this time, hold the ni–er hair.”
I alone didn’t laugh, but I also didn’t speak up or get out of the car. And I still burn with shame at the memory.
No regrets: Junior year University, I brought my roommate home for Thanksgiving. I did not even think to tell my parents she was black. But when my poor mother said that she was afraid of what the neighbors would think, I stood up.
Dr. Anne Sharp, Dr. Albert Somers, Dr. Zach Kelehear and the wonderful English and Education professors unmasked the systematic racism of our education systems and even our very linguistics.
Never in my teaching career could I say “with liberty and justice for all” without adding “someday, if we all work for it.”
I am proud to have passed these lessons to my students and to reap the harvest of watching them work for a more just society. And of course, the root of the problem is not race alone, but the evil human propensity to divide ourselves by skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social class, and myriad other traits. We declare our own group best or righteous, then marginalize and scapegoat “the other.” And in doing so, we undermine the promises of equality in both our Declaration and Constitution. We also fail to love our brothers as ourselves. As shared before, here is the story of my finest hour. Which I pray will counter the all-too-prevalent voices of evil flourishing in our political, and even religious arenas.
I have celebrated the election of our first biracial president only to witness a stunning political backlash and obstruction. I have witnessed racial attacks on President Obama and even his family. I witnessed the police attacks on black men and women, and the overtly racist slaughter in a Charleston church.
And now I have seen the most openly racist candidate become the GOP nominee for the upcoming presidential election. Ken Burns shares my concerns.
But:
I go with hope.
My children mirror my generational progress. My professors at UNC Law and the leaders in my church are standing up… and long have been. And oh, my amazing law school classmates, at so many centers and organizations, working for true equality for all.
I am so grateful to know them all. And to see Ta-Nehisi Coates win a genius grant. And to see Hamilton become the greatest Broadway sensation with a predominantly non-white cast portraying our crusty white founding fathers.
My hope is that America’s majority culture can admit that it is harder to be a person of color here and that this reality does not comport with our ideals.
For soon after that tipping point, this ugly reality will cease to be part of our identity.
“Someday… If we all work for it.”
ON LAW & POLITICS
I am failing fast: my abilities to swallow and breathe are plummeting. I will therefore need to be succinct and, hopefully compelling in this potentially off-putting yet crucial section.
REGRETS:
In 1981 I told my A.P. English teacher that I was apolitical. Though I doubt I knew that term. I’m sure my arrogance was less articulate.
I believe I made this claim because she asked me a question about politics, and I was far too self-involved to watch even the evening news, and so I could not give a knowledgeable answer to her question.
But I remember her upbraiding, partly because she was right, and partly because this truth haunted me and grew in me for decades.
She called bullshit like only a legendary, scholarly, and terrifying old English teacher who has been setting entitled little snots straight for decades can.
She looked me in the eyes and told me not delude myself. For we are all political. She described how almost all of our choices–where we shop, what we buy, where we live, where we educate our children–are all political actions. The only question, she assured me, was whether these choices would be informed decisions or whether I would be too lazy to become informed.
I am loath to admit how slow I was on this curve.
No regrets: During college, life abroad, graduate school, and almost two decades of teaching, I never forgot the clarion truth of Ms. Braswell’s words. I only wish that I had been more informed and much more civically active sooner.
Two tough truths I learned along the way:
“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” ― Paulo Freire
“Allowing the ratio of time we spend enjoying our freedom, wealth, and justice to materially surpass the time we spend preserving those blessings virtually guarantees they will diminish, or even be lost while we are not looking.” – Vivian Connell
When I came to UNC Law in 2010, North Carolina was a moderate state, considered progressive for the South. The Triangle of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill topped lists of best places to live in America.
But then moderates and progressives busy enjoying this status looked away, and paid a disastrous price when dark money flipped our General Assembly to the radical right. It hadn’t happened in a century, but it happened the moment citizens disengaged from civic attentiveness. We have seen national model education programs dismantled, and our voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, and, most recently HB2,”the Bathroom Bill,” have pitted us against federal authorities and made us a national laughingstock.
Of course, these developments are no joke to the poor without health care, to minorities facing all kinds of discrimination, or to public school teachers and advocates who have seen their resources and rankings plummet.
Here are a few of the fights that must be fought when citizens in a democracy cannot be bothered with the work of politics:
It is really this simple: you are political whether you knowingly control the influence you wield or whether you cede your power to others through superficial participation or non-participation.
Informed participation, though. How the hell does one manage it?
Where can one find the truth untainted by special interests?
Obviously, by reading and viewing a variety of sources, some of which do not rely upon special interests for funding.
And if you become frustrated by how “they” have made terrible laws or skewed public policy in a way in which you disapprove, you might want to become one of “them.” I did, and I sought to get to the heart of the democratic process by attending law school.
Now would be a good time to be succinct.
The gravamen of almost every issue demands that we prioritize either our ideals or our economy. And while we need to maintain our economy, there are two essential ways that we have prioritized money to an extent that it is undermining our democracy.
money in politics
quarterly capitalism
Money in politics
Because of a Supreme Court decision called Citizens United–often named along with Dred Scott, Plessy, and Bush v. Gore as the potentially worst Court decision ever–uber-wealthy entities can buy elections.
We must support campaign finance reform so that ideas determine victors. We must find, recruit, and elect representatives who will govern for the greater good. We must recognize and reject empty rhetoric in superficial, soundbite ads.
When one of our most conservative representatives challenged Democratic senator Kay Hagan in 2014, I agreed to act as spokesperson in a $3 million ad buy for the NEA. I loathed the simplistic script because I knew Thom Tillis’s record on education and would have vastly preferred an hour-long, fact-based debate on a website that would not have cost the educators I represented a penny.
But the National Rifle Association outspent the teachers, and Tillis won by roughly a percentage point. I wrote about it for Salon.
I pray that with Citizens United‘s author, Justice Antonin Scalia, deceased and the legion of young Sanders supporters, the coming years will see true campaign finance reform. The reality of special interests and corporations disproportionately deciding ought to horrify anyone who loves this country and the truly democratic ideals for which it stands.
Or consider the words of the inimitable Andy Borowitz.
Quarterly capitalism
My Business Associations class–a course called Corporations at some law schools– enlightened me as to the core legal atrocity that undermines the ability of American companies to contribute to not only our economy but also to the greater good of our society.
Do you wonder why so few corporate officers or companies ever pay for their bad, or virtually fraudulent choices? It’s because our laws protect them from virtually any risk they take. If they can concoct any rationale that their risk was a potential money maker for share holders, then they are protected.
Worst, this singular focus on immediate profit means that corporate leaders face not only disincentive but potential lawsuits should they wish to take a longer and broader view of corporate citizenship. The law prevents them from investing in worker training, more research and development, community betterment, education enhancement, programs to reward and protect their consumer base, or other forward-looking ideas that would enrich all of the corporation’s constituents.
Please listen to this indictment of this system, in which corporate officers decline to consider actions for the long-term benefit of their companies and their constituents–investors, workers, clients, neighbors, and their habitat–if doing so might mean dropping even one penny off their stock price for the quarter.
Thus, we have codified greed and outlawed wisdom.
Our companies should make more than money. They should enrich their communities, workers, business, and society.
Even our Judeo-Christian tradition tells us of a year of jubilee in which debts were forgiven and indentured servants freed. And while I suggest nothing so radical, I insist that we must reform our corporate law AND adhere to financial reforms in Dodd-Frank if we are to retain a robust middle class and remain a society in which business serves people, and not vice versa.
It is funny–not “ha-ha” funny, of course–that I wanted this to be the richest section, a big finale, but it is likely to be the most truncated. I am sleeping more each day and struggling to swallow and breathe during the hours I am awake. And as much as I might write about various policy initiatives, like charter schools, vouchers, merit pay, and especially the insidious philosophy of market-based reform (that would have us apply profit-making principles to the complex, subtle, and sacred art of educating our populace), I want to get to the core.
REGRETS:
I have spent over three hours this morning working with my hospice nurse, my saint of a caregiver husband, my tireless and loyal assistant, to clear my secretions and stop this horrific gagging and choking, so I regret leaving this section for last!
But seriously, folks…
I regret failing to integrate the promotion of civic engagement during the early years of my teaching. It certainly distinguished the final years of my career, and I am grateful to have lived to see so many of my students become teachers, lawyers and activists.
No Regrets:
The hundred-plus emails and messages from students, the tens of visits ( most from Charlotte to Chapel Hill) made by students and even a couple of parents who helped unpack from my move (Jodi Brown) and even execute a plethora of retirement and insurance documents to assure our children’s trust would be the beneficiary (Hallie Hawkins) are major blessings. A couple of weeks ago, two young women visited– including one who feels a profound connection with my daughter, for which I am so delighted – – and when we had a nurse cancel, they cared for me like I was their own mother.
I hope this means that they know I really loved them.
Even when overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, and demeaned by many who genuinely believe that “those who can’t, teach, ” I regret not even one day I spent in the classroom.
Closing comments about education policy:
First, in lieu of embarking upon a treatise on education policy, I’ll let a passionate young history teacher who just marched to Raleigh to practice civil disobedience tell the story in a much more engaging manner.
And if You wish to remain informed about public education and align yourself with one of the most important social movements of the age, follow Diane Ravitch and support The Network for Public Education. They will be on the right side of history.
I am most concerned with all schemes to create “for-profit” charters for K-12 education. A quick Google search of charter school and fraud yields over 1 million results. Which makes sense: as you will remember from our discussion of quarterly capitalism, businesses exist to serve their owners. (If anyone wants to read my rather prescient Law Review note eviscerating corruption in for-profit higher education.
Can any first-rate, moral country exist and thrive without providing its citizenry with quality education?
I want my final commentary to address the purpose of education, a topic which ought be at the heart of every education debate yet which too often parents, businessmen, and the general populace presume to be settled.
But is the goal of education to produce a workforce or enlightenment? Should it indoctrinate children to sustain and succeed within the status quo or to challenge what is and strive ever for progress, even if change is painful?
As a country born of revolution and the Enlightenment, our answer must be the latter. Every educated citizen should have a working understanding of our government, as well as a belief that their civic engagement is essential to maintaining our democracy and that they can make a profound difference in their worlds.
Children in our best schools already come away with this understanding. Unfortunately, many of today’s education reformers are powerful business entities and politicians who would defund the liberal arts.
North Carolina governor Pat McCrory made the following telling remark: Liberal arts Programs, he said, ought to continue, but not receive government subsidies.
Let me translate: If you are wealthy enough to attend a prestigious private university, then you may study whatever you like: anthropology, minority Literature, developing political systems, gender studies, dance. But if not, you ought to be required to study subjects that promote the economic interests of those in power–business, technology, and skill majors. The goal of the education haves can be enrichment; the education have-nots will be herded into a compliant labor force.
Governor McCrory did not mention that his undergraduate degree from a private school is in philosophy.
Or that the majority of U.S. senators majored in the liberal arts. So did the majority of lawyers.
The study of history, Literature and the arts inspires and empowers, and it must remain accessible to all. And all of our public schools must equitably prepare every child to pursue his or her calling, whatever it may be.
And as long as there exist schools in our communities that are not considered good enough for some children, yet which remain the only option for other kids, we must acknowledge that the playing field of the American dream is not level.
And that until it is, we continue to fall short of justice for all.
Finally, most of you will have heard of “the achievement gap”–the disparity in educational outcomes between the predominantly successful students and those who fail to thrive or become functional members of society. Researchers have long (and largely accurately) identified poverty as the key demographic of “failing schools.”
But about a year ago, a Gallup poll found a more specific predictor of academic success: hope. And the miracle of Tangelo Park has born out the truth of this finding.
These poor minority students–kids many middle-class and affluent parents don’t want their kids to have to go to school with–suddenly began graduating at over 95 percent, one of the best in the country. Why?
Because they knew that if they got into college, they could go. It would be paid for. They were given the power to win in a system stacked against them.
They were given hope.
And none of us should rest until every American child has that hope.
GOODBYE
I have arrived at the end time of this disease, and it is horrific as they say. As I struggle not to choke and gag, I do wish that I had fewer regrets. Of course, these wishes that I had been a better wife, mother, and friend are tempered by all the love and mercy with which I have been blessed.
I want to thank the many amazing and generous people who have helped us in too many ways to innumerate. And thank the thousands of you who have read and shared my blog ; I am deeply honored that anyone has found value, comfort, or inspiration in my words.
May G-d bless and keep you all.
As I often told my students, few of us will be a Mother Teresa or a Hitler, but we will each make the world a little better or worse.
May we all strive to make it better. May we engage responsibly in the miraculous gift of our democracy and support public-interest lawyers and entities working for social justice. It feels so much better than following thoughtlessly in consumerism and self-interest.
History has its eyes on us all.
And as for death, I will quote Grandpa Blakeslee from Olive AnnBurns’s novel, Cold Sassy Tree: “Hit’s what you get for living.”
And though ALS is one of the worst demises imaginable, I’ll take the trade.
Love,
Vivian
P. S. I will be listening to the beautiful Gilead, the Harry Potter audio books as well as all my favorite playlists. (As Dumbledore says, “Ah music. A magic beyond all we do.”) My whole family will be listening to Hamilton–and how lucky I was to be alive right now. And I made it through The West Wing and The Newsroom again. Bless all of you who listened and watched with me, especially my patient and loving husband and my wonderful and Sorkin-savvy children! Thanks also kids for sharing Doctor Who. I would not have missed it for the world.
We have learned a few facts about state voucher programs since they have spread to about half the states. They have spread not because of popular demand but because of big money and campaign contributions. Every state referendum on vouchers has failed.
Most vouchers are used to subsidize the private school tuition of students who never attended public schools.
The students who transfer from public schools to private, mostly religious schools, usually do not have better academic performance; they often have dramatically worse academic performance than their public school peers.
More money for vouchers means less money for public schools, where the overwhelming majority of students are enrolled.
In Missouri, a county judge upheld the state voucher program.
A Cole County judge has thrown out a lawsuit that claimed the state of Missouri unlawfully funded its private school voucher program using taxpayer dollars.
The lawsuit, filed in July 2025 by two members of the Missouri National Education Association against the state of Missouri and several elected officials, alleged that the General Assembly unconstitutionally allocated $51 million to the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Program fund. One of the elected officials listed was Gov. Mike Kehoe.
The General Assembly created the program, also called MOScholars, in 2021. The program awards tax credits to Missouri taxpayers who donate to organizations that award scholarships to families to help send their students to private schools.
Last year, the new state budget put over $50 million in taxpayer dollars toward the program in addition to the volunteer donations, which the plaintiffs in the lawsuit argued was an unconstitutional allocation of funding.
However, Cole County Judge Brian Stumpe disagreed, writing in his 57-page ruling that the court would have to find statutory prohibitions not written in state laws themselves in order to side with the plaintiffs.
“As both sides agree, nothing in the statutes governing the Missouri Scholars Program expressly proscribes appropriations made by the General Assembly,” Stumpe wrote in the ruling. “Plaintiffs thus assert that the statute’s structure does not permit appropriations by the legislature to fund scholarships — making the appropriation an improper amendment to the governing statutes. But for Plaintiffs to prevail, this Court would have to find statutory prohibitions not articulated in the statute’s text. This Court cannot do that.”
Stumpe ruled that the allocations made did not directly contradict the statutes that govern MOScholars, meaning the appropriations were constitutional.
Stumpe threw out all allegations made in the lawsuit and denied the plaintiffs request for an injunction. Stumpe dismissed the plaintiffs’ petition with prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs cannot refile the lawsuit.
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway called the decision a “complete win” in a post on social media.
“This is a victory for parents and students across Missouri,” Hanaway wrote in the post. “MOScholars gives students the full freedom to attend a school that helps them achieve success.”
Norm Eisen was the White House ethics officer during the Obama administration. There were no financial scandals during the Obama administration; President Obama did not profit from his office during his presidency.
The financial conflicts of interest during the Trump administration are too numerous to mention.
This post is also an advertisement for The Contrarian, where this post appeared. It is a premier site for those trying to save democracy from Trump’s authoritarianism and grifting.
Eisen writes:
When I was the Obama White House ethics czar during the Great Recession, I would not even allow the president to refinance his modest family home in Chicago. He was regulating the banks in a time of crisis, and it wouldn’t have looked right.
That’s not exactly the approach that President Trump, his cronies, and their families have adopted. I’ve written before about the Top 10 most outrageous corruption scandals of this administration. This week, my Democracy Defenders Fund colleagues and I added another item to the list. Working with former New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin, we filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission urging it investigate ALT5 Sigma(ALTS).
This company boasts Trump’s son Eric as a board member and Trump Special Envoy Steve Witkoff’s son Zach as its board chair. Its history in recent months is one of serious failures of compliance, breakdowns of governance, and profoundly concerning financial connections with another Trump and Witkoff-linked venture, World Liberty Financial (WLF).
The story starts in August, when ALTS told the world that it had raised $1.5 billion through various investment vehicles. ALTS then moved the money to WLF by buying $750 million of its $WLFI governance tokens, about 7% of total supply. As detailed in our letter, “ALTS appears to have steered as much as $500 million of private investor money directly into the pockets of the Trump family and their associates.” When this money hit their wallets, Zach Witkoff (co-founder and CEO of WLF) and Eric Trump (also a WLF co-founder) assumed leadership roles on the board of ALTS.
These facts give rise to questions that are of the utmost importance to the integrity of our financial markets and of our democracy, as our letter explains. The most profound: who were the investors who funded the ALTS $WLFI purchase–and did they do so in order to get in the good graces of the Trump administration?
The concerns about this transaction are only deepened by what went on in the period in and around this massive financial transfer to WLF. In August, ALTS disclosed that several months earlier a Rwandan court had ruled that ALT5 Sigma Canada Inc., a subsidiary of the company, and its former principal were criminally liable for illicit enrichment and money laundering, ordering imprisonment, fines, and dissolution of the subsidiary. Shortly thereafter, the CEO of ALTS was suspended without explanation, auditors changed multiple times within just a few weeks, and the company failed to meet the due date for filing its annual report. It’s little wonder that ALTS was at risk of being delisted from Nasdaq and its share price has plummeted. Despite the immense capital influx from these transactions, the share piece has declined by around 75%. The company is looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for the 2025 fiscal year.
Given these troubling data points, our letter urges the SEC’s Enforcement Division to “carefully examine these issues because they indicate, both individually and collectively, that ALTS may have engaged in a number of securities violations, thereby harming investors and financial marketplace writ large.” This is not just a story about corporate governance. It is a test of whether the rules that protect investors and the integrity of American markets still apply when political power and private profit intersect.
Our SEC letter calling for an investigation of ALTS is just one of many similar filings we’ve made. This one is outrageous enough that even Trump’s SEC may investigate. But whatever they do, we’re laying down a marker for the press, the public and other enforcement authorities. Whether for state attorneys general and securities regulators, a future more independent Congress, or future federal regulators, there will be a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Meanwhile, we must all demand answers.
Our ability to continue pushing back against Trump and his cronies’ web of dubious dealings is, of course, supported by your paid subscriptions. We are deeply grateful that you Contrarians make this work possible as well as our weekly pro-democracy Contrarian coverage. See for yourself in this week’s roundup of our best content produced by my terrific colleagues:
Jen Rubin wrote on the cascade of civil and political failures behind Trump’s genocidal threats on Tuesday: “some muddled tale of a diplomatic breakthrough should in no way diminish the illegality, the horror, or the frightful intrusion of religious zealotry into our politics.”
Brian O’Neill wrote on how Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be helping to produce the strongest Islamic Republic since 1979. “It would be one of the great strategic self-inflicted wounds in Middle East policy.”
On the podcast this week, Jen spoke with Robert P. Jones about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s crusader rhetoric and the dangers of Trump’s “refrigerator-magnet style” theology, and with Joyce Vance about Iran after the ceasefire, the Republicans finding a shred of conscience, and more.
Norman Ornstein thinks it’s time to call an emergency an emergency and invoke the 25th Amendment. “We have a malignant narcissistic psychopath as president, with control over the military and the atomic arsenal, who is deteriorating mentally before our very eyes.”
Stacey Young wrote on just how much Pam Bondi’s reign as AG degraded the Justice Department: an exodus of talent, criminal cases shut down, an utter loss of good faith with the courts and more. “Now, the best way we can fight for the department is from the outside.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) joined Jen to consider the next attorney general—and the next vacant cabinet seat—amid war with Iran. “I think Kash Patel stands a very good chance of being shown the door.”
Stacey Abrams wrote on how Republicans have made disadvantaged communities a scapegoat for failed economic policies, including a Texas comptroller who quietly decertified more than 15,000 minority- and women-owned businesses in December.
Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera of Common Cause reminded us that, despite what the Trump regime claimed, ICE has never left Minnesota and is continuing operations across the state. “The media may not be all over it … but the need is still there.”
John Boyd, founder of the Black Farmers Association, spoke to April Ryan to sound the alarm on Trump’s devastating attack on small and minority farmers. “There’s going to be a lot of generational land that changes hands.”
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf wrote on how the Trump administration is putting the onus on states to fund social services — while making it impossible for them to provide those services.
Amid the many hype and doom cycles about AI, Adam Conner of the Center for American Progress gave us a breakdown of what AI is actually doing right now — to the economy, to warfare, to your job.
Josh Levs wrote on the problem with AI summaries having taken the place of traditional media as the first source of information for many, even when it comes to war — and how this is compounded by the media’s acquiescence to AI-first search.
Tim Dickinson gave us a rundown of all the things Trump is naming after himself, which somehow includes both the Institute of Peace and the “most lethal warship ever built” at the tip of the iceberg.
Meredith Blake checked in with the second lady, who thinks kids should read more but doesn’t have much to say about the Trump administration defunding libraries (or anything else).
Azza Cohen took a nuanced look at Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, as both gender-empowerment opportunist and persevering target of media sexism. “That a woman can be the head of a political party named ‘brothers’ is some kind of ironic victory.”
This week, we saw anti-war protests nationwide in New York, Illinois, Washington, D.C., Missouri, Tennessee, and more. Get help organizing from Indivisible, find protests in your area at mobilize.us, and send us your protest photos at submit@contrariannews.org.
Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX) joined Jen Rubin with an update on the ongoing standoff over ICE funding and why there is still cause for hope. “The point really is people’s freedoms … so we’re not going to vote for one more penny until these reforms are done.”
Carron J. Phillips wrote on how the 2026 Women’s Final Four will be deservedly remembered for one thing — and it wasn’t the championship game. “Sports are more enjoyable when what’s at stake is more than the final score.”
This column is based on our letter and associated materials
Thank you for being part of The Contrarian. Share this piece to help spread the word.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott waged a multimillion dollar campaign to defeat moderate Republicans in the Hogse of Representatives so he could finally get the legislature to pass his voucher bill. He wanted to subsidize private Christian schools and was shocked when Islamic schools wanted their students to get vouchers.
Abbott falsely claimed that public schools were “indoctrinating” students, and he wanted the state to pay for students to go to religious schools, whose explicit purpose is indoctrination.
As usual, the overwhelming majority of voucher applicants had never attended a public school. Most were already enrolled in a religious or private school or were none-schooled.
What would’ve been school-choice proponents’ triumphant publicity tour after the application period closed on Texas’ shiny new voucher program, in mid-March, was instead consumed by catty finger-pointing between two top state officials over who’s to blame for the state seemingly botching its attempt to religiously discriminate against some program participants.
It’s the sort of comedic tragedy that has become all too common in the red empire of Texas: Pass a harmful new policy while prevaricating as to its actual intent, create a pretext to carry out the policy in a clearly discriminatory fashion, invite a costly lawsuit that will ultimately end with the state being forced to comply, muddy the waters over who’s to blame.
While pushing the private-school voucher bill through the state House and Senate last year, Republican legislative hands repeatedly insisted, when presented with various theoretical scenarios, that this near-universal “Texas Education Freedom Accounts” program would be open to any and all types of private schools—of all creeds and persuasions. Religious freedom was to reign supreme. How dare thee even question the universality of this venerable program, Republican legislators inveighed.
In predictable fashion, the Texas GOP—lately in the throes of another virulent anti-Muslim bender—hasn’t quite lived up to that promise. In the lead-up to the official voucher rollout, acting Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock—who is currently in charge of administering the program and was, at the time, trying to win a primary election to hold onto his appointed post—used the administrative process to effectively block certain Islamic schools from participating by alleging such potential applicants were affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a national civil rights group akin to the NAACP or LULAC, and the Egypt-based transnational organization the Muslim Brotherhood, each of which the state has deemed a “foreign terrorist organization.” (The rule also sought to block schools affiliated with the darned Chinese Communist Party.) The conflation of CAIR with the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine’s Hamas is a theory that’s long brewedin the right’s more feverish swamps. (CAIR is suing the State of Texas over this designation.)
In response, a group of Islamic schools and Muslim families went to court over the discriminatory exclusion from the program: “The exclusion is not based on individualized findings of unlawful conduct by any specific school, but rather on categorical presumptions that Islamic schools are suspect and potentially linked to terrorism by virtue of their religious identity and community associations,” the lawsuit read. A federal judge ordered the state to extend its application deadline to allow for these schools to go through the process.
The comptroller’s office has since said that it has accepted all eligible Islamic schools that applied to participate in the program—including Houston’s Quran Academy—but not before Hancock sent a letter critiquing Attorney General Ken Paxton’s handling of the court case and urging Paxton to strip Quran Academy, which the state unsubstantially claims has links to the Muslim Brotherhood, of its ability to operate in the state. In the letter, Hancock—fresh off being blown out in his primary bid to be the duly elected comptroller by ex-state Senator Don Huffines—effectively accused Paxton of being soft on terrorism. “Texas cannot be asleep at the wheel as radical Islam spreads,” Hancock wrote.
Paxton, in the midst of a heated runoff battle with John Cornyn after coming in second in his own primary bid to ascend to the U.S. Senate, took exception to being scolded by the likes of a RINO such as Hancock (i.e., one of the two GOP senators who voted to convict Paxton in his impeachment proceedings in 2023). The still-AG issued a scorched-earth retort, calling the interim comptroller an incompetent never-Trump hack nursing a deep political grudge—and demanding Hancock be fired. (It’s not clear who, if anyone, would have the authority to fire him.)
Paxton then said his office, whose duties include serving as legal counsel for state agencies, would no longer be defending the comptroller in the federal vouchers lawsuit, claiming Hancock’s letter undermined the state’s case and introduced “incendiary” accusations against Quran Academy that had not been entered into evidence in court.
“Never before have I witnessed such a fundamentally unserious person be both an unbelievable embarrassment to the State and put his own interests above Texans,” Paxton wrote. “It would be easy to disregard Kelly Hancock’s letter as nothing more than hotheaded, politically-motivated behavior from someone desperately clinging to relevancy, but it’s far worse than that: His actions hurt my office’s ability to defend the Comptroller’s office in these critical cases.”
For vouchers, there have been some other PR snags as well. For instance, one religious school—Cypress Christian in the Houston area—that hosted a pro-voucher event during Governor Greg Abbott’s promotional tour last year, has itself opted not to participate in the program.
Per the Houston Chronicle, the school’s leader told parents that the institution is “governed exclusively by biblical doctrine and scripture” and that enrolling in the voucher program would inherently result in “ongoing government entanglement.” Many other high-end private schools—where the annual tuition typically far exceeds the standard $10,000 voucher allotment—in the Houston area have also optedagainst participation.
All the while, Abbott—who claims political ownership of both the school voucher program, having succeeded in ramming it through a humbled Texas House, and Kelly Hancock’s comptrollership, an ally whom he plucked from the state Senate to take over the statewide office and launch of the program—was radio silent. The governor, in late March, spent his allotted time at CPAC in Dallas, while Paxton and Hancock traded potshots, droning on about the urgent need to stop the “Talarico takeover of Texas,” referencing the Democrats’ Senate candidate.
Meanwhile, how does the voucher program—which was sold as a tool to allow low-income families to get their kids out of the state’s failing woke indoctrination facilities, known as public schools, and into predominantly Christian private schools—appear to be sizing up with its mission?
It’s certainly succeeded in getting more applications than the $1 billion that the state has initially appropriated can cover, which is about 90,000 spots. Applications had been submitted for about 275,000 students as of late March. But just 25 percent of those—about 60,000—were for students currently enrolled in public schools, according to state comptroller data. (That, per the Texas Center for Voucher Transparency, amounts to about 1 percent of the state’s 5.5 million public school students.)
To be clear, that means the vast majority of the students who are applying for vouchers are already enrolled in private schools, being homeschooled, or entering school for the first time. There were roughly 2,300 schools enrolled in the program so far—though those schools have full discretion in whether or not to accept a voucher recipient. Many of the enrolled schools are parochial Catholic schools or Christian academies. As the Texas Observer has previously reported, dozens of these enrolled schools have policies that restrict admission based on religion and even sexual identity.
The application period closed on March 31, then the process moved on to the next phase in which the state—through its privately contracted voucher vendor—will determine who receives the limited number of vouchers, based on a convoluted, multistep process accounting for family income and other variables.
By that point, it seems assured, some new brouhaha will be consuming the program.
Philosophy professor Jonathan Caravello, 38, was charged with assaulting federal agents while engaged in an anti-ICE demonstration at a cannabis farm in California. Demonstrators threw rocks at ICE agents. The federal agents rolled tear gas canisters at the demonstrators. Caravello picked up a tear gas canister and threw it back, over the heads of the ICE agents.
No federal agent was hit or harmed by the canister thrown by Caravello. If convicted, he faced up to 20 years in prison.
The jury deliberated for two hours and cleared him of all charges.
LOS ANGELES — A California philosophy lecturer accused of assaulting federal agents after removing a tear gas canister agents had thrown into a crowd of people protesting an immigration raid was found not guilty by a jury on Thursday.
Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat wrote about a convening of education “reformers” who agreed that it’s time to revive the “bipartisan” education coalition, exemplified by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
Barnum writes:
These days there’s a new energy around an old idea: bipartisan school reform.
Reviving this was the quaint but ascendant goal of a recent Washington D.C. event that I attended last month. The Bipartisan Policy Center convened a group of influential education leaders from both parties to sketch out a new agenda for school reform.
“The moment is now,” said former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings during the opening panel. “We have not recovered from COVID fully. We really need to light the fire of urgency.”
This was the sort of thinking that used to dominate Washington D.C. Presidents from both parties once insisted on a muscular federal role to hold schools and teachers accountable for raising test scores. These advocates have been on the outs politically for over a decade, but some see an opportunity to revive the old coalition. A flurry of reports, compacts, commissions, events, and essays have made the case that politicians of both parties need to come together to address the striking declines in student learning and center education as a national priority.
Whatever you think about this mini-resurgence, it’s worth paying attention to. Bipartisan school reform upended schools once before (with a much debated legacy). Could it happen again? Maybe. In many ways the ground is ripe, but it’s not clear advocates have a clear constituency or reform agenda.
Drawing from recent history, here are three reasons this particular brand of reform could return and three obstacles this effort faces.
Why bipartisan reform could be revived: There really is a learning crisis.
Modern bipartisan school reform has its roots in a 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” which claimed (with disputed evidence) that the country’s schools were in dire shape. These days the data is clear: Test scores have been on an alarming trajectory for a decade. This has again led to widespread concerns among policymakers, academics, and journalists.
The aspiring reformers are driving the mainstream media narrative about education.
Centrist education advocates and politicians, like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have offered a clear theory to explain these recent learning declines. Emanuel argues that Democrats deserve blame for backing COVID-era school building closures, focusing on culture war issues, and downplaying the importance of test scores. He says Democrats should look to Republican-led states in the South, like Mississippi.
A remarkable slew of articles have endorsed versions of this narrative. That includesseveralpiecesin theNew York Times. Not many other prominent Democrats are echoing Emanuel, but we can be sure they are reading the Times. Crucially, those Democrats more sympathetic to teachers unions and public education have not articulated a clear alternative theory to explain recent learning declines.
Both parties may have political incentives for moving to the center on education.
The prior iteration of bipartisan reform came at a moment where both parties used education as a strategy to appeal to centrist independent voters. Bill Clinton promised to be a different type of liberal who would take a tough-minded approach to schools, while George W. Bush pitched himself as a “compassionate conservative” who would champion the education of disadvantaged children.
Once again Democratic reformers say the party faces a similar political imperative. Emanuel and many others have claimed the party has lost its edge on education with voters. This isn’t true, according to the vast majority of recent surveys, but the talking point has nevertheless proven deeply influential at a moment when Democrats have been casting about for answers following Trump’s election in 2024.
Republicans are not at this soul-searching stage — they’ve leaned into school choice and parents’ rights. But Trump is quite unpopularat the moment, and so is his effort to close the Education Department. Depending on the midterm results, it’s possible that the GOP will make efforts to tack away from Trump’s combative approach to education.
Why bipartisan reform might not happen: Reformers don’t have a clear bumper sticker.
Although the centrist reformers are aligned on what’s gone wrong, their solutions are a bit less clear. This was apparent during a Bipartisan Policy Center panel on education, which I moderated. The group released a number of recommendations about improving schools. These ranged from broad goals (“reimagine the high school years”) to very specific policies (“require transparent, consistent annual reporting” on teacher pension plans). But there wasn’t an overarching idea or takeaway, as best I could tell.
So I asked each participant on the panel what their bumper-sticker pitch for school reform would be.
“Responsive systems and better information,” responded Andy Rotherham, the co-founder of Bellwether, an education consulting firm, and a former Clinton White House staffer.
“Locals lead; feds fund, measure, and evaluate,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard education professor.
“Education is the way out of your parents’ basement,” said Katie Jenner, the Indiana education secretary.
This range of responses is in contrast with the relatively clear bumper stickers from the political right and the left. (“More choice, less wokeness, no U.S. Department of Education,” on the right. “More money,” on the left.)
Without a snappy message for what bipartisan reformers want to do, I suspect advocates will struggle to coalesce policy elites or regular people around their ideas.
There is little clear grassroots demand for this sort of reform.
Indeed, the push to address learning declines has seemingly not broken through to voters. While Americans have an increasingly negative view of the quality of K-12 schools, very few rate education as a top issue. This is quite different than in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Remarkably, in the 2000 presidential campaign, voters sometimes ranked education as the top issue facing the country.
And despite years of headlines about bad test scores, most parents still give their child’s school relatively high marks.
Bipartisan reform may require presidential leadership
Starting with George H. W. Bush and continuing through Barack Obama there were four straight presidents who championed an overlapping agenda of school accountability and school choice. Each made education a central national issue. In a number of cases, these presidents brought along reluctant members of their own parties. The bipartisan coalition crucially depended on this presidential leadership. In turn, bipartisan school reform has collapsed under Trump and Biden since neither bought into this agenda.
To succeed, the bipartisan reformers may need a like-minded president. That could, of course, be tough to get. Right now, Rahm Emanuel is polling at 0%-1%. The question for these aspiring reformers is whether they can find other presidential candidates to carry their mantle.
My response: The bipartisan education reform coalition of Bush and Obama faded away because it s “reforms” failed. It treated test scores as the goal of education, and it turned schools into testing factories. Its philosophy of test and punish failed. Its demand for evaluating teachers by student test scores demoralized teachers and caused teachers to avoid low-performing schools. Merit pay failed, as it has for a century. Common Core was a disaster, ignoring the value of context and background knowledge. It welcomed charter schools, promising that they would be more innovative, get higher scores, and be more innovative than public schools. But charter schools opened and closed with regularity, some were for-profit scams, and some were founded by grifters.
Even Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute referred to the years from 2010-2020 as “the lost decade” for education.
Defenders of public schools have more to say than “more money.” They could also make bumper stickers about public schools that protect democracy, public schools that serve communities, not hedge fund managers; public schools designed to introduce children to friends from different backgrounds; public schools that teach critical thinking, not the indoctrination characteristic of religious schools.
Parents like their public schools because they know the teachers and appreciate the links between students, parents and schools. The bipartisan coalition of education reformers failed because they constantly derided public schools; their efforts to replace public schools with standardization failed.
The reformers look back to their glory days with nostalgia. Parents and students don’t.
While the U.S. has eliminated its agencies that speak to the world, like Voice of America, Iran has been producing videos mocking the United States, portraying its history as a long series of atrocities, and linking the current war to Jeffrey Epstein.Virginia Heffernan tells the story in The New Republic.
She writes:
There’s a new way to teach American history. It’s not woke. But it’s not patriotic, either. It’s not the 1619 Project or the 1776 project.
It’s the Iranian History of the United States, as seen in “One Vengeance for All,” the most cosmological of the recent pieces of pro-Iran Lego-style agitprop. This is the series you’ve probably caught a glimpse of—the obscene, masterful, and viral AI videos that have hammered the internet since the start of Donald Trump’s ruinous war in Iran. The series, which has been labeled “slopaganda,” is sometimes called “Operation Epstein Fury.”
The strongest entries in the series are producedby an anonymous student activist group called Explosive News (Akhbar Enfejari). Shorter videos in the same style, which look less polished, are reportedly fan-made. All of the videos treat the war with max cartoonery and max ideological torque. Russian and Iraniangovernment accounts regularly boost them. (China has also made its own anti-American propaganda pegged to the war.)
Scare up the extremely violent videos at your own risk, but here’s a plot summary. In an early one, Trump, panicked about his culpability in the Epstein affair, smashes a red button to strike Iran as a distraction. After Iran strikes back and slams shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu run scared from Iran’s strategic genius and godlike military might. In the next few videos, the U.S. Army loses personnel, planes, helicopters, and popular support; capital markets spiral. Coffins draped in American flags pile up.
“One Vengeance for All” stands out from the rest because it contains more American history than breaking news. And what a way to see our once-promising nation. The Iranian History of the United States features no pilgrims, Revolutionary War, Civil War, or wars in Europe. Also absent: slavery, civil rights, feminism, and unions.
Instead, you get 53 seconds of 600 years of American jingoism and genocide. The video opens on an AI caricature of an Indigenous man in a headdress looking to the heavens from the Western plains. Cut to a little boy carrying a dead infant amid smoldering rubble in Hiroshima. These are ghosts.
From there to Vietnam. A middle-aged woman carries a scythe, in a rice field, and again looks skyward. Then come slain Iranian leaders: Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February. All ghosts. Now there’s a girl at a refugee camp in Gaza. We’re given to understand from her hopeful expression that help is coming, and that the help is the Iranian army, though it has no intention of “liberating” or “saving” the ghosts. Instead, with centuries of pent-up resentment in its arsenal, Iran will avenge their suffering with fire and fury.
About two-thirds of the way in, the narrative rounds on the American people, and finds Trump’s victims among us. A blond girl in a pink dress, no older than 6, is pictured in a tropical landscape. It’s Epstein Island. The island’s enigmatic blue-striped building, which some speculate is a reference to the Israeli flag, stands behind her. This girl is also a victim of American imperialism, courtesy of the Trump-Epstein class that merged capital and executive power; private-sector monopolies with political world domination.
This girl’s Iranian counterpart appears in the next image, a young schoolgirl in a blue coat and white hijab, and she seals the connection. She’s abandoned in the deserted courtyard of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Hormozgan Province. This is the schoolyard where around 170 people were murdered, elementary school students, when the school was bombed by U.S. forces back in February on the war’s first day.
At once, a sisterhood of ghosts coalesces. From Epstein Island to southern Iran, schoolgirls pair with schoolgirls, the specters of abused children whose lives or spirits have been extinguished by sadistic American tyrants.
Trump is globally known for sex crimes and, like Hegseth, charges of sex crimes—and the Iranian videos depict the two men explicitly as rapists. In one video, the Lego Trump has doll-like girl figures on his bed and lap, and Hegseth is shown in military garb, repeatedly committing rape. Assaults on girls are the modus vivendi of these videos’ versions of Trump and Hegseth.
These sequences are not idle trolling. Rape is, of course, a crime against humanity. But rape is implicated more immediately in the brief for this war, which centers not on strategic goals but on the relentless use of violence against innocents to humiliate an entire people.
As Jamelle Bouie put it recently, “Forcing others to submit through the indiscriminate use of force does not really sound like war. That does sound like something else. It sounds like rape.” He concluded that the ideology of Trump and Hegseth is “the ideology of the rapist.”
After 9/11, President Bush used to tell Americans that our enemies resented “our way of life.” In his memorable “Why Do They Hate Us?” speech of September 20, 2001, Bush answered his own question, “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”
This may or may not have been true of the terrorists a quarter century ago. But it’s not at all true now of Iran, which the U.S. attacked without permission from the people or provocation from Iran. Iran hates the American government for its cruelty toward hundreds of millions of people across six centuries. It’s hard not to see the logic in it.
In Trump, the ideology of the rapist was unmistakable a decade ago, when he crowed about the joy he takes in humiliating human beings by mauling their crotches. With this war, he’s trying, as usual, for highly aestheticized spectacles of humiliation, and he’s getting them—but not for Iran. For himself, and for the United States.
Adam Kinzinger is a war veteran and a former Congressman from Illinois who resigned after serving on the January 6 Commission, which other Republicans (except Liz Cheney) shunned.
In his blog, he explained how the Trump administration turned off America’s voice in the world, leaving the space for Iranian satire. You can’t beat humor, he says, with press briefings.
The question we should all be asking is why the Trump administration pulled the plug on America’s communications to the world. Who benefits when America goes silent?
For years, people inside the national security community warned that America’s information infrastructure was one of its most under appreciated strategic assets. Not the bombs, not the bases, not the carrier groups — though those matter enormously — but the quieter architecture of influence: the broadcasters, the counter-disinformation centers, the public diplomacy programs. The “I” in the DIME model — Diplomatic, Informational, Military, Economic — is not decorative. It is load-bearing. Strip it out, and the structure becomes unstable.
We are now watching that instability play out in real time.
Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has methodically dismantled virtually every institutional instrument the United States had for competing in the global information space. Voice of America, which had been broadcasting in nearly 50 languages to an estimated 354 million people weekly, went silent for the first time in 83 years. The administration also terminated funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. The Global Engagement Center — which I helped establish — lost its congressional authorization in December 2024 and was then formally shuttered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in April 2025, with its successor office eliminated as well. In February, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force — the unit dedicated to investigating foreign disinformation and election interference — was dissolved by Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment was disbanded, the Woodrow Wilson Center was effectively shut down, and the US Institute of Peace was ordered dismantled — DOGE physically forced its way into the headquarters and removed board members. USAID, which administered approximately 60 percent of US foreign assistance, was gutted, with over 80 percent of its portfolio canceled. The Fulbright program took severe cuts. Language training programs at universities lost Defense Department funding.
The right-wing argument for all of this rests on a fundamental and willful confusion. The theory goes that these agencies were really instruments of domestic censorship — government apparatuses designed to suppress conservative American voices at home. Marco Rubio announced the GEC’s closure by declaring that it had been used to “actively silence and censor the voices of Americans.” For that claim, officials at the Global Engagement Center have offered denials, and there is no evidence to support it. A federal appeals court, in examining lawsuits targeting the GEC, found no evidence that its officials had coerced or influenced social media platforms to moderate content. The narrative that these agencies were turned against the American people was politically useful and factually hollow.
I say this not as an abstract critic but as someone who was involved in creating the Global Engagement Center. The mission was specific and outward-facing: recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation aimed at undermining American interests and those of our allies. The GEC was tracking Russian narratives around Ukraine, Chinese influence campaigns in Africa and Southeast Asia, and Iranian disinformation targeting American audiences. It was not reading your tweets. It was watching what the Kremlin, the IRGC, and the Chinese Communist Party were doing to shape perceptions overseas and at home — because those are not separate theaters anymore.
The people who tore this infrastructure down either do not understand the modern information environment or, more troublingly, are comfortable with the vacuum their decisions created. Chinese state media openly celebrated the closure of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Former Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin called it “truly gratifying.” When your adversaries are that publicly pleased by a policy decision, it is worth pausing to ask who it actually serves.
Those of us who worked in this space assumed we would have some lag time — that the consequences of these closures would take years to fully materialize. Institutions take time to wind down, adversaries take time to scale up, and global audiences don’t shift overnight. We were wrong about the timeline. The effects have arrived with startling speed, and we are seeing them most vividly in the current conflict with Iran.
Pro-Iran groups, almost certainly linked to the government in Tehran, have deployed AI to produce English-language propaganda targeting American audiences — slick, culturally fluent memes and videos racking up millions of views across social platforms. They have portrayed President Trump as old, out of step, and internationally isolated. They have weaponized the Epstein files, Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, and infighting within the MAGA coalition. One series of AI-generated videos presents Trump and Netanyahu as Lego minifigures. In one, an Iranian military commander raps over imagery of Trump falling into a target. After a ceasefire was announced, the account posted simply: “Iran won! Trump surrendered.”
The videos are, admittedly, sometimes funny. They are also deeply ironic. The regime producing them has imposed a near-total internet blackout on its own citizens. X and most major social platforms have been blocked inside Iran for years, accessible only via VPN — and most ordinary Iranians have barely had access to the internet at all since the outbreak of the conflict in February. The culture these videos depict Iranians defending — the references to American pop culture, the fluency in meme language, the appeal to human rights — is precisely the culture the Islamic Republic murders people for embracing inside its own borders. Women are killed for not wearing the hijab properly. Protesters are tortured and executed. This is the regime now winning the meme war.
Analysts say the sophistication of these videos — the bandwidth, the production quality, the cultural knowledge of the American internet — indicates these creators are officially or unofficially cooperating with the regime. It is state propaganda dressed in the aesthetic of organic content. And it is working in part because the US and Israel do not appear to be engaging in anything comparable for external audiences — the White House’s memes are aimed domestically, at Americans who already support the administration. Nobody is reaching the swing audiences in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Africa who are forming their views about this conflict in real time.
Ridicule and satire are especially potent in this environment because they are captivating and very difficult to counter. A factual rebuttal to a Lego animation almost inevitably looks plodding, humorless, and tonally mismatched. You can’t win a meme war by holding a press conference. You need infrastructure, institutional knowledge, cultural fluency, and the operational capacity to produce and distribute counter-narrative content at scale. We had that. We threw it away.
“This is how we lose big wars,” one former counter-disinformation researcher said after the GEC’s closure. That quote wasn’t hyperbole. In the DIME framework, information is not a supplementary element. It is a co-equal instrument of national power. You cannot substitute military and economic pressure for informational presence — especially when the adversary has studied your culture for decades and knows exactly how to reach your own population. Iran’s propaganda operation is the fruit of a decades-long government program to learn American politics and pop culture — the meme war didn’t emerge overnight. It was prepared. We were not.
There is a tendency in American political life to dismiss information operations as somehow soft, as less serious than real tools of statecraft. The same impulse that sees diplomacy as weakness and foreign assistance as waste. These are the instincts of people who have never had to fight for narrative control in a conflict, who have never watched a carefully crafted lie spread faster than the truth in a language we didn’t think to monitor. The DIME model exists because generations of national security professionals learned, often through painful experience, that you need all four instruments working together. Pull one out and the others become less effective, not equally effective.
We dismantled our informational infrastructure not because it was failing — VOA alone reached hundreds of millions of people in closed societies who had no other access to independent news — but because some people convinced themselves and others that it was a domestic censorship threat. The result is that the US has been all but crippled in its ability to compete in the global information arena, while Russia and China have moved to fill every gap.
The Lego videos are funny. The situation is not. A theocracy that blocks its own people’s access to the internet is currently running circles around the United States in the information space of an active conflict. That does not happen by accident. It happens because one side prepared and the other side burned down its own capacity and called it a victory for free speech.
We will be paying the cost of that decision for a very long time.
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