Shiloh Salazar Is Running in One of the Reddest Districts in Texas

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2026 //
0

Michelle H. Davis writes a blog called “Lone Star Left,” where she fights an uphill battle against Republicans who control every statewide office, including the legislature, where they have a super-majority.

For years, many legislative districts were so staunchly Republican that Democrats didn’t bother to field a candidate.

This year is different. The Texas Democrats are fielding a candidate in every district.

Michelle Davis describes one of the rural, poor districts where Democrats didn’t run a candidate for many years.

I wish there were a Michelle Davis in every state. I would like to know more about the candidates. I’m grateful Davis is providing profiles like this one.

The candidate is Shiloh Salazar.

Davis writes:

Who is Shiloh Salazar?

Shiloh Salazar is a mom, small business owner, former educator, and lifelong West Texan who’s had enough of watching corporate interests get a seat at the table. In contrast, working families get the short end of the stick.

Salazar spent years organizing and showing up on public schools, early childhood programs, water security, agriculture, healthcare access, economic stability, the unglamorous stuff that actually determines whether a rural community survives. She’s testified about early intervention programs on Capitol Hill. She’s stood up at community meetings packed with residents furious about a data center project. She’s the reason there’s a paper trail on FCI Big Spring’s closure and what it’s doing to the families who depended on those jobs. This campaign is built on a record of actually being in the room.

She’s also a parent of a child with special needs. That’s not a talking point Austin Republicans can fake, no matter how many times they slap “family values” on a bill that guts the programs families actually need.

Her platform reads like a checklist of things Texas Republicans have spent a decade underfunding or ignoring. Protecting public schools, investing in rural healthcare, strengthening agriculture, planning honestly for a water future, and backing paid family leave and affordable childcare.

Salazar’s whole pitch is people-first solutions rooted in West Texas, not culture-war talking points imported from a cable news green room. 

The district. 

HD72 covers Coke, Coleman, Concho, Glasscock, Howard, Irion, Reagan, Runnels, Sterling, and Tom Green counties, basically the Concho Valley and the ranch and oilfield country around it, anchored by San Angelo (Tom Green County, roughly two-thirds of the district’s population) and Big Spring (Howard County). It is Drew Darby’s seat. 

Demographics are 51.8% Anglo and 48.2% non-Anglo. Hispanic residents make up 40.3% of the district. Median household income runs well under the state average. Per capita income is $34,894 versus a state figure of $40,752, and nearly 22% of households earn under $25,000 a year. 

It’s an older district. 17.1% are 65 or older versus 13.4% statewide, and it’s a heavily veteran district; over 11,000 veterans call it home. The economy runs on agriculture, ranching, and oil and gas (7.4% of employment versus 2.3% statewide) and on government jobs (18.6% of the workforce versus 14.1% statewide, driven in no small part by FCI Big Spring before the feds gutted it). 

Housing is cheap by state standards. The average owner-occupied home value is $221,027 versus $366,039 statewide, but rent burden is brutal. 34% of renters pay more than a third of their income to keep a roof over their heads.

So this is a poorer, older, heavily rural, heavily veteran district with real pockets of Hispanic and Black population concentrated in specific counties, especially Howard and Reagan, sitting inside a state that is trending the other way politically even as its demographics shift.

In 2024, Trump led by 56 points here, Cruz led by 51 points, and Drew Darby ran unopposed. Turnout was only 62.1%. Darby also ran unopposed in 2022. 

I’m not going to sit here and tell you this is a swing district, because it isn’t. The biggest goal in this election cycle should be to move the margins as far left as we can and see where we land, but this district would need a fundamental realignment to flip.

To make real gains, Salazar should focus where coalitions already exist, like Howard and Reagan Counties. They’re already majority non-Anglo with heavy Hispanic populations. That’s turnout work, and turnout is exactly where rural Democratic campaigns bleed out. 

She has to run on material conditions since this district is poorer than the state average, older, more dependent on government jobs, and just got hit with a federal prison closure that gutted Big Spring’s employment base. That’s the actual local economy that may have a chance of cutting through in a district where “Democrat” has been a slur for two decades.

Democrats would be doing themselves a lot of favors to exploit the local fights the GOP has created. The Dove Creek data center fight, the water transparency mess, the “sanctuary county for the unborn” ordinance. These are all local controversies where the incumbent’s party is on the unpopular side, and where Salazar has already shown up in person. 

Salazar’s campaign looks less like a Hail Mary and more like the first real investment anyone’s made in finding out what this district actually looks like when someone bothers to organize it. It’s a really good thing, but it isn’t easy. 

The incumbent. 

Drew Darby (R), an attorney and businessman, runs Drew Darby and Associates Law Firm and owns Surety Title Company out of San Angelo. He’s held HD72 since 2007. He chairs House Energy Resources, sits on House Administration and State Affairs, and got a seat on the special committee investigating the July 2025 flooding disaster. In a district built on oil, gas, and increasingly on data centers hungry for both power and water, chairing Energy Resources is a savvy bit of self-preservation.

And I didn’t catch on to how much until, in 2025, he had the gall to imply that the oil industry is taxed TOO MUCH. 

Too much. Like killing millions of people a yearand destroying our planet deserves less tax. 

Before Austin, he chaired the San Angelo Water Advisory Board and the Lake Nasworthy Advisory Board. This is a man who has literally chaired the region’s water planning bodies and now, decades later, is presiding over a district where residents are showing up to town halls furious about opaque data center deals and where Salazar is out there saying West Texas needs “honest water policies now.” Darby’s been the water guy all along.

In Shiloh Salazar’s own words.

Below are some questions I asked Salazar, based on previous reader polls, along with her answers.

Q: Do you support a statewide minimum wage increase to at least $15/hour?

I support this, but I actually think we need more of a sliding scale because in some areas even 15 is not enough. As someone who lives in West Texas, in the rural areas, I’m tired of a one-size-fits-all when it comes to things like the economy.

Q: Do you oppose school vouchers and efforts to privatize public education?

As a former public school educator at a Title I school, I’m against vouchers. I have a daughter who was in special education with a district that had only online therapists because they couldn’t afford to hire someone to keep them in rural West Texas. I’m actually in favor of doing a sales tax on the data that data centers acquire and store, and using that sales tax to fund our schools. 

Q: Should higher education in Texas be free or debt-free at public institutions?

100%. As a student whose parents worked in public service and just over the threshold of too much for aid but not enough to help support me through getting a degree, I became an unconventional student who took classes online a little here a little there when I could afford them because we lived in that predicament. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a degree; I’m still a few classes shy of that degree because money got tight, but we were always just over that threshold and never quite made enough to keep going. 

Q: Should Texas guarantee free school meals to all K–12 students, regardless of income?

100%. Again, I live in a Title I area where over 69% of the population is below the poverty line. I was pregnant, making only 669 a month working at the ISD, feeding kids some of my pregnancy snacks because lunch wasn’t enough, and they knew dinner would be short-handed. If we are going to force families to send their kids to school 8 hours a day, we better feed those babies. 

Q: Should Texas end tax breaks and regulatory loopholes for oil and gas companies, including exemptions from emissions reporting and waste disposal standards?

Yes. We should go one step further and make sure that they are not doing in-house testing, and make sure a third party is testing and sending those results in a way that can be requested as open records if a need should arise. We should also be taxing oil and gas a lot more on the routes they take and helping rural counties that are primarily oil industries keep up with the county roads that were not made to handle that load. For example, in 2019, Howard County had $ 57 million dollars worth of road damage to county roads and had one of the worst safety ratings on those roads in the state of Texas. Many roads were deemed deadly because of their conditions, yet Howard County doesn’t have the tax base to fix those roads. 

Bonus Question: What does being a Democrat mean to you in 2026?

Look, I’m running in 10 counties, and only 3 have party chairs; of those 3, they’re very small and not very active. I am in an R+56 area. I don’t have time to worry about the title or the party. To me, I’m a Democrat because I’m pushing to get people back at the kitchen table and talk about what we are going through and how we can work together and fix it. I don’t play party politics, though. I will call out both sides when they aren’t doing the right thing. I have told thousands of voters I don’t need you to become a Democrat; I need you to vote for the person that actually cares. Being a democrat out here means you get hated the moment you open your eyes, until you put the party aside and start talking about an electric bill that’s $500 that we both can’t afford. 

Shiloh Salazar is running because the electric bill is $500 and nobody in Austin is losing sleep over it. 

Meanwhile, Drew Darby, who’s had nineteen years and a chairmanship over the region’s own water board to actually fix something, spent 2025 arguing the oil industry gets taxed too much while his district’s roads crumble and his constituents ration lunch money.

HD72 isn’t flipping this cycle. That was never the pitch. But somebody finally showed up to find out what happens when you organize a district everyone else wrote off, and that alone is worth paying attention to. Watch this one.

You can learn more about Shiloh Salazar on her website, Facebook, or TikTok.

Categories Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Texas, Trump

John Thompson: Please! No More Miracles!

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2026 //
2

Belief in transformative miracles is a recurring theme in the history of American education. Sometimes educators are compelled to embrace “miracles”” based on word of mouth. Other times, the media push educators to do something without evidence, but lots of enthusiasm. In 2000, I wrote a book called Left Back, which traced the rise and fall of cures and nostrums in the classroom. These bursts of enthusiasm are seldom promoted by teachers; they are too busy doing their job to come up with revolutionary ideas.

John Thompson reports from the front lines in Oklahoma:

Republican Mike Mazzie, an anti-Muslim freemarket ideolgue, showed more civility in the recent gubernatorial debate with Democrat Cyndi Munson than he did in the Republican primary debate.  Maybe that is why he received less fact-checking from the daily press. 

So, I will focus on my field of expertise, and limit my fact-checking to Mazzie’s claims regarding public education.  

First, he has proposed “eliminating the state income tax over six years, and vowed to get rid of property taxes on homes owned by those who are 65 or older.”  Both taxes play an essential role in funding public education, which has been weakened over the last quarter of a century by the test-driven mandates that Mazzi supports, budget cuts, the Ryan Walter’s administration, Covid, and demographic changes.

In his Republican primary debate, Mazzie denied that those cuts would hurt schools because, Oklahoma has 541 school districts “run by liberal left-leaning radical socialists.”

Three of his opponents, who had decades of experience in public education, pushed back.

Sen. Adam Pugh said he rejected Mazzie’s words “wholeheartedly.”

Superintendent John Cox called Mazzie’s comment “a direct hit on him. ‘I am an extremely conservative person, and I’m not that radical socialist.’”

And, Robert Franklin, who is now running for State Superintendent:

Invoked his years as an assistant principal …”When people made fun of one another, we call that bullying. We also put people in detention for that kind of stuff.” He said the rhetoric disqualified Mazzie from his vote, flatly without apology.   

In the recent debate with Rep. Munson, the closest thing Mazzie said in terms of funding schools after extreme tax cuts was criticizing her for wanting “to pour more and more money into an already dysfunctional system.” And then he changed the subject to school choice, legislative bans for boys playing in girls sports, and requirements that boys should not be in girls bathrooms. 

Mazzie’s other claims that need fact checking involve the so-called “Mississippi Miracle.”

He promised:

I will hire a statewide literacy director in my first week in office to replicate the very successful Mississippi model, which took them from 50th to first in the country in reading outcomes. The keys for their success are phonics curriculum, enough reading coaches statewide, and accountability.

Mazzie oversimplified some numbers about Mississippi’s rankings. But, more importantly, he offered no evidence that Oklahoma, even if it doesn’t eliminate its income and/or property taxes, would provide nearly as much funding as Mississippi did for literacy, which started with $100 million grant from the Barksdale Institute, which would be worth almost $200 million today.  

And he doesn’t seem to understand that since federal, Covid funding has run out, effective, but expensive, high-dosage tutoring is being replaced by dubious, digital tutoring models.

Neither does Mazzie seem to understand how accountability-driven test prep, that took off due to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), undermined the teaching of History, Science, Critical Thinking, Recess, Arts, and Music.  And, that is crucial because background knowledge is the key to reading, and the data-driven mindset that he wants were the major reasons why reading has declined.

Mazzie should also read the Report: Beyond the Surface: Leveraging High-Quality Instructional Materials for Robust Reading Comprehension Learning brief, funded by Tulsa’s Schusterman Family Foundation. As reported by the 74, One of the lead authors, Dan Reynolds, asked, “Are we teaching our K-4 kids that reading is just tasks? Are we teaching them that they just need to label stuff and fill out graphic organizers?”

Reynolds said the “Surface-level” instruction they discovered, “weakens instruction for students and can later manifest as a skills disadvantage.” 

And, Mazzie doesn’t seem to know the history of simpler, cheaper reforms producing brief and short-lived gains. Yes, Mississippi produced big gains in 4th grade reading, even when it used NAEP test scores, which are more reliable than state tests that are designed to be taught to.  But Mississippi’s 8th grade scores remain lower than they were in 2002. This indicates that retentions and test prep haven’t improved reading comprehension.

Even worse, as Mississippi ramped up 8th grade reading prep, evidence has grown that they are increasingly teaching kids to hate reading. For instance, Wired magazine reported how students would:

Grab a Chromebook and log in, at speeds ranging from feet-dragging to actively resistant. They open the StudySync software program, which shows them each a series of questions tailored to their weaknesses. Their faces look like they’re being marched to the guillotine.

And the article ends with the teacher saying that she “can’t think of a single student across her five periods who reads for fun, who considers her class anything beyond an ordeal to be survived.”

By the way, the debate prompted me to read new claims by the supporters of the “Miracle.” For instance, I reread a study that is representative of the rewriting of history that is being presented as evidence that the “Mississippi Miracle,” will be transformative because it is bringing back NCLB’s accountability system. It said that, “There is at least one study about the fact that NCLB led to achievement gains.”

That study actually explained that the “main advantage to using NAEP data for our analysis is that it is a low-stakes exam that is not directly tied to any state’s standards or assessments.” And, it found  that, “Accountability has produced substantial gains in math skills but not in reading.” It estimated that, by 2007, as No Child Left Behind, “8th grade reading dropped by 3.8%.”   

In conclusion, Mazzie seems completely unaware of both, peer reviewed social and cognitive science, and what actually happens in schools. Having had decades of experience working with Republicans, like Robert Franklin, the outstanding candidate for State Superintendent, I’m dismayed by the way he promoted fact-free claims. Having served in the nonpartisan MAPS for Kids, where we listened to national experts, as well as local educators, patrons, and students, I’ve worked in team efforts to tackle complex and interconnected education challenges, as well as witnessing the damage done by ideology-driven true believers in simplistic, cheap, market-driven mandates.   

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Oklahoma

Meg White: Spellings and Duncan Want to Revive Their Failed Programs

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2026 //
7

Charters proved to be the stepping stone to vouchers, persuading parents they school was a consumer choice.-z

Education advocate Meg White writes about one of the worst ideas of our time: Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan have teamed up to support a revival of No Chid Left Behind and Race to the Top.

They might as well call their effort, “Make failure great again!”

If it didn’t work the first time, do it again.

Both programs shared a common strategy: Test and punish. George W. Bush’s NCLB created a singular focus on standardized test scores as the measure of schools. Educators were told that they must raise scores every year or face dire consequences, including turning the school over to a charter organization or private management; firing and replacing teachers and the principal; closing the school.

The unintended consequences: teaching to the test, once considered unethical, became the norm; narrowing of the curriculum to only the subjects tested, reducing time for history, civics, science, recess, and the arts; cheating. Testing became the goal of schooling, rather than a measure.

Duncan’s Race to the Top dangled big cash rewards to states if they adopted his program: evaluate teachers by the rise or fall of student test scores; fire teachers who don’t raise scores: adopt the Common Core; enact laws to permit charter schools.

Together, these two federal programs thoroughly demoralized the teaching profession and caused enrollments in teachers’ colleges to plummet. They crushed the joy of teaching and learning without achieving their goals. Teachers were unjustly fired. Charter schools were opened by for-profit entrepreneurs, as well as grifters and profit-seeking corporations. The charter industry boomed but also burst, as charters closed almost as frequently as they opened.

NCLB required that every school must ensure that every student reached “proficiency” on standardized tests, a clearly impossible goal, by 2014.

Race to the Top blamed teachers and schools for low scores. Duncan wanted the public to know how terribly the schools were doing. He counted on the adoption of Common Core and the spread of charter schools to produce a huge jump in test scores.

On the very last day of the Obama administration, the Department of Education quietly released an evaluation admitting that Race to the Top had failed to achieve its goals.

Meg White writes:

Two former U.S. education secretaries—one Republican and one Democrat—argue that the federal government needs to stop just handing out money for public education and start demanding real results. Margaret Spellings, who served under President George W. Bush, and Arne Duncan, who served under President Barack Obama, have offered their collective ideas on how to strengthen public education, many years later.

Under their proposed plan, the federal government would provide funding to states, pay for scientific research on how kids learn best, and ensure test scores are made public so schools cannot hide poor performance. State governments would be responsible for setting high standards and choosing the actual teaching methods without lowering the expectations to make their states look better. Spellings and Duncan refer to the success in Mississippi, saying, “Mississippi’s historic gains in student test scores since 2013 does not come at the expense of any other state. Instead, it’s a chance for those states to learn from and build on Mississippi’s progress (edweek.org).

Regarding the Mississippi miracle, I wrote about this earlier this year. Much controversy surrounds the increase in test scores.

Their bipartisan plan outlines several goals for every state to ensure student success from early childhood through graduation. First, they suggest schools focus on early learning by giving every child access to high-quality preschool and ensuring they can read well by the third grade. Second, middle schoolers need to learn practical skills, specifically finance and technology. Finally, for future preparation, high schools must provide access to advanced classes so that every graduate leaves with a clear path to a job, trade school, or college, regardless of their family’s income (edweek.org).

Critics, educators, and policy experts argue that this approach is fundamentally flawed because it heavily relies on strategies that failed under initiatives like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT). When federal funding is tied to standardized tests, schools face tremendous pressure to meet those numbers. This forces teachers to teach to the test. Consequently, this dynamic narrows the curriculum, systematically pushing out untested subjects like history, art, music, and physical education (edweek.org).

To avoid losing federal money or facing public embarrassment, many states historically responded by lowering their testing bars so more students would technically pass. This creates a false illusion of progress where state data looks positive, but independent national audits show that actual student performance has stagnated or declined.

If they are serious about research on how children learn best, they will see that it is not scripted curricula or one-size-fits-all literacy programs.

This strategy has failed because it treats low achievement strictly as a bureaucratic problem that can be solved with goals and data, completely ignoring any socioeconomic inequalities that can predict a child’s success. It does nothing to address underfunding in low-income districts, food insecurity, unstable housing, or the widespread teacher shortages caused by low pay and poor working conditions. 

Imposing top-down mandates from Washington ignores the challenges of different communities, and strips local educators of the flexibility they need to build tailored solutions for their students. Hiring uncertified and inexperienced teachers does not support strong pedagogy for students who need good teachers.

Spellings and Duncan conclude, “This is a moment for national leadership. We call on the president, Congress, governors, and education leaders to put student achievement back at the center of the nation’s agenda. Washington should provide the direction, research, and transparency. States should set high expectations and act when schools or students fall short. Parents should hold all of us accountable for results(edweek.org). This is a repeat of the failed policies of NCLB and RTTT.

NCLB and its strict test-based accountability system created unintended consequences that damaged public education. The law included an outrageous expectations that 100% of American students achieve academic “proficiency” in reading and math by 2014, which was statistically impossible.

No Child Left Behind was built on the mistaken belief that low test scores stemmed entirely from ineffective teachers or indifferent administrators who required threats to improve. By focusing on classroom performance, the policy overlooked the systemic, out-of-school challenges that directly hinder student success—including chronic poverty, food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and massive funding disparities between school districts.

Race to the Top pressured states to alter their education policies for a share of $4.35 billion in grants, but ultimately failed to improve student test scores. This failure stemmed first from a rushed adoption of the Common Core State Standards. The initiative forced states to tie teacher job security to standardized test scores using unproven statistical models. States made unrealistic promises to turn around failing schools in four years, yet the federal prize money amounted to a mere 1% of state education budgets—far too little to execute such massive structural overhauls (economicpolicyinstitute.org).

Ultimately, RTTT repeated past policy mistakes by relying on a narrow, data-and-testing approach that hyper-focused on classroom metrics while completely ignoring the actual out-of-school drivers of the achievement gap, such as deep childhood poverty, food insecurity, and unequal school funding (economicpolicyinstitute.org). If Congress seriously considers data on charter schools, vouchers, and Educational Savings Accounts, they need to look at their high cost and lack of success in Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. It didn’t work there, but depending on where you get your news, there were miraculous gains in test scores. 

Two former secretaries of education who initiated failed programs, are again suggesting ideas that didn’t work, and again do not address the extrinsic issues students face before they ever get to school. 

These are my reflections for today.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Propaganda, Race to the Top

Trump Claims That Schools in 5 States Encourage Transgender Surgery

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2026 //
16

At a rally a few days ago in Dalton, Georgia, Trump made the preposterous claim that five states allow schools to promote transgender surgery.

We got critical race theory and transgender mutilization insanity out of our schools. I mean, we have five states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy three or four days later. It’s true. And teachers make — somebody makes a decision. Can you imagine? Goodbye, Timmy. I love you so much.

I’ll see you later. And you say where’s my son? My son is in the hospital. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? They don’t even need approval. It’s sick. You’ll have five — I think Minnesota and some others. I think it’s five or six states. You know that, right? So — and we made English the official language of the United States of America.

He told the same story about the notorious five states repeatedly in the 2024 election, and each time he said it, the news media said it was false. He never produced evidence. Never. Not one single instance.

No teacher. No student. No Timmy. No Tammy.

At first, I was outraged that no journalist called him out for this lie.

But as I read the speech, I realized there were so many lies that it would be overwhelming to correct them all.

Please, if you can stomach it, read the clips from this speech given in Dalton, Georgia, on October 16, 2026.

Categories Fake News, Fraud, Gender, Lies, Trump

Andy Spears: Tennessee Republicans Want State Takeover of Nashville Schools, Despite Record of Failure

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2026 //
3

Andy Spears is a veteran education journalist from Tennessee. He writes on his blog that Tennessee Republicans want the state to take control of the public schools in Nashville. They have already taken over the schools of Memphis.

They are unfazed by the fact that Tennessee’s first effort to take over “failing schools” was a disastrous failure. It was called “the Achievement School District” and was launched with bold promises of catapulting low-performing schools into high-performing schools. Other states copied Tennessee’s lead without waiting for results. When the results came in, the low-performing schools were still low-performing schools. The state has no magic formula.

He writes:

Tennessee Republicans spent the past two legislative sessions engineering a state takeover of Memphis schools. Now, they’ve set their sights on Nashville. 

State Rep. Scott Cepicky of Maury County, who chairs one of two Education Committees in the Tennessee House of Representatives, told WKRN in Nashville that he’s looking at an effort to have the state take over Nashville schools.

“We’ve already gone after Memphis, and now it’s Nashville’s next,” Cepicky told the radio show host.

Cepicky also spoke about the comptroller potentially doing a financial audit: “I am asking the Speaker to do a forensic audit on Nashville to start the process of looking at taking them over. We’re going to get the comptroller involved, financially.

A board appointed by Tennessee Republican leaders now has authority over Memphis schools, after some legal wrangling that delayed the takeover. That board includes the leader of a dark money issue advocacy organization that has been at the forefront of state education policy since 2010 – Tennessee Score.

Tennessee has a terrible track record in the school takeover business. The so-called Achievement School District, run by the state, was supposed to turn schools around in Memphis. Instead, the ASD failed massively, leaving students and Memphis communities behind. 

Four Tennessee schools are now returning to local control after getting taken over by the state ten years ago. The Memphis-area schools were brought into the Achievement School District with the promise from state leaders to turn things around.

But the schools are now returning to Shelby County Schools with no significant improvement in test scores.

The latest data from the Department of Education shows each of the four schools report less than five percent of students performing at grade level. ASD as a whole reports just 4.5 percent of students performing at grade level.

This is the type of terrible policy Cepicky and his GOP colleagues want to bring to Nashville schools.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Failure, State Takeover, Tennessee

Texas Evangelicals Lead the Fight to Eliminate Separation of Church and State

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2026 //
1

Robert Downen wrote for The Texas Monthly about the Texas-hatched plan to make the United States a “Christian nation.”

He opened:

Dan Patrick calls the separation of church and state a lie and has worked to infuse Christianity into Texas institutions. Trump is helping him take that strategy nationwide. 

Dan Patrick is the state’s powerful far-right Lieutenant Governor. Before he entered politics, he was a talk-show host and was considered a mini-Rush Limbaugh, completely lacking any trace of compassion. His goal now is to spread Christian nationalism.

Anyone who has studied American history knows that the Founding Fathers had no intention of creating an evangelical Christian nation. If they did, they would have written it into the Constitution. Indeed, the word religion appears only twice in the document:

The First Amendment says:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

Article VI, Clause 3, of the Constitution says:

“No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

But prominent religious extremists claim that the Founding Fathers actually wanted a decidedly Christian nation with no separation of church and state.

They must have forgotten to write it down.

Texas evangelicals are intent on imposing their views on everyone, and not just in Texas.

Robert Downen of The Texas Monthly wrote:

Flanked by a coterie of pastors, lawyers, a self-described prophet, and a former talk show host, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick stood in the Oval Office in June and boldly proclaimed the beginning of a new era for religious liberty. For far too long, he said, Americans of faith had been trampled underfoot by secularism, their sway over government held at bay by weaponized disinformation. “The separation of church and state is not in the Constitution,” Patrick said as President Donald Trump nodded from behind the Resolute Desk. “From this day forward, that phrase should have no power over people of all faiths ever again.”

It was a monumental moment. For decades, leaders of Texas’s religious right have argued that the Founding Fathers were primarily conservative evangelicals and that the First Amendment’s establishment clause was meant only to prevent the adoption of a specific Christian denomination as the national religion. Led by David Barton, an Aledo-based activist and self-described amateur historian, the movement contends that because the words “separation between church and state” do not appear in the U.S. Constitution, the notion that the founders intended to maintain a wall between the two is a myth that has been used by secularists to obscure America’s true Christian heritage. Rather than a bulwark against theocracy, they claim, the founders envisioned a wall that extends only one way—protecting the church from the government.

In Texas those theories have helped fuel a massive infusion of Christianity into public life, particularly in schools. State lawmakers have in recent years passed bills that require the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms; grant voluntary, school-sanctioned prayer time; and allow districts to replace counselors with religious chaplains. At the same time that Texas leaders have successfully pushed for school-voucher legislation that sends taxpayer money to private, often unregulated, religious schools, they have focused intently on what is taught in public classrooms. Barton, for example, served as an adviser to the State Board of Education’s recent overhaul of K–12 social studies curricula, a process that experts said inserted revisionist history into lessons and downplayed the contributions of non-Christians.

Patrick’s Oval Office remarks, delivered as part of the Department of Justice’s Religious Liberty Commission, which he coleads with Trump’s former housing secretary Ben Carson, were a high-water mark for the movement. Now, with a friendly president and U.S. Supreme Court, Patrick and his allies are working to codify their views into federal policy. The result would be an America that looks a whole lot more like Texas.

A few decades ago, the ideas championed by Patrick would have been considered fringe, even to many conservative Christians, according to Joseph Locke, a historian at the University of North Texas and author of One State Under God: A History of Religion in Texas. “To see [these ideas] sponsored and supported at the highest level—and to see Texans at the head of it—is pretty remarkable,” Locke told me.

For most of the nation’s history, the church-state wall was treated as near sacrosanct by many  Christians—especially Baptists, who looked to it for refuge from the violent persecution they faced in colonial America. Texas, with its heavy concentration of Southern Baptists, was aggressive in separating faith from policy in the decades after declaring its independence. Clergy were constitutionally barred from serving in state offices until 1869. For much of the next century, Locke said, the idea of advocating for policy on explicitly religious grounds would have been anathema to most Christians. Church-state separation “is not some kind of idea that emerged from the ether in the nineteen-sixties,” he told me. “This is something that was absolutely foundational to what it meant to be a Protestant in Texas.”

But that began to change amid growing conservative anxieties over secularism, feminism, gay rights, and racial desegregation. By the late eighties, a Republican coalition of business interests and politically active Christians led in much of the South. Enter Barton, whose theories gave leaders permission to abandon the church-state wall, Locke said, and to call for Christian dominance over American life.

Many scholars have pushed back against Barton’s work, noting that it is riddled with errors and false quotes. (His 2012 bestseller on Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was pulled by its Christian publisher because “basic truths just were not there,” the company said.) Still, his theories have become increasingly mainstream as acolytes of his movement have risen to power. Mayes Middleton, the Republican nominee for Texas attorney general, repeatedly invoked Barton’s theories during his three terms in the Texas Legislature. U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said Barton had a “profound influence on me and my work and my life.” And leaders of Barton’s advocacy group, WallBuilders, are frequently called to testify in statehouses across the country and reportedly are advising the Trump administration’s purge of “woke” history from the Smithsonian Institution.

The DOJ’s Religious Liberty Commission, which Patrick said he persuaded Trump to establish, is the latest example of the movement’s rising influence. Save for one Orthodox rabbi, its members are all conservative evangelicals or Catholics—including notable Texans such as Dr. Phil McGraw and Allyson Ho, a lawyer and the wife of hard-line Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho. Its findings are undergirded by the work of Barton, who also testified during one of the commission’s hearings. 

Released in late June and based on several hearings held over the previous year, the commission’s 224-page draft report details what it says were intentional attempts, namely by the Biden and Obama administrations, to persecute people of faith. The examples range from a Navy SEAL who was punished after refusing, on religious grounds, to get a COVID-19 vaccine to a former Texas Children’s Hospital surgeon who was federally charged after leaking information about patients, including children, who sought gender-affirming care. (The DOJ dropped the charges after Trump’s reelection.)

Echoing the work of the DOJ’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which was formed in 2025, the report describes a wave of anti-Jewish discrimination sweeping across college campuses—including via student protests over Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. (One adviser to the commission was removed after speaking out against Israel and what she said was Zionist influence over the commission’s work; the only Muslim member resigned in protest of the removal and the war in Iran.) And the report includes dozens of examples in which conservatives faced social or workplace consequences for expressing their views on issues such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, or use of gender-inclusive pronouns.

photo of donald trump and dan patrick shaking hands
Trump greeting Patrick during a National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 1, 2025.Alex Brandon/AP

The report focuses heavily on discrimination in education—specifically in what it calls “government-run schools.” Across three sections totaling about forty pages, it describes numerous examples in which public school students, teachers, or other employees were prevented from expressing their religious views. Among the stories it highlights are that of a high school valedictorian who was told not to mention Jesus Christ during his graduation speech and a high school football coach in Washington state who was told by administrators not to pray midfield with his team after games. In both cases, as with many others mentioned in the report, the current system worked: After legal intervention, the valedictorian was allowed to give the speech as intended, and Joe Kennedy, the high school football coach, won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld his right to personal prayer.

Still, the commission recommended a host of policy changes that may ring familiar to Texans: enacting universal school-voucher legislation, allowing school-sanctioned prayer time, and ensuring that classrooms can hang religious displays such as the Ten Commandments.

The commission also wants a massive expansion of legal and public enforcement mechanisms. Any public official who accuses someone of improperly engaging in religious expression would be required to provide, within thirty days of their complaint, a written explanation that outlines where church-state separation appears in the Constitution or what law has been violated. Commissioners also want to create another DOJ task force to “track and prioritize litigation protecting religious liberty”—sourced from hotlines established across the federal government and education system. Disputes would then be handled by a federal judiciary that, per the report’s recommendation, would ideally be staffed by judges who are sympathetic to the commission’s interpretations of religious liberty.

Most consequential, the commission calls for the DOJ to issue guidance clarifying the “understanding of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state.” In other words: to make denial of the separation of church and state federal policy. To emphasize the point, Patrick has said, he may personally “print up a million bumper stickers saying there is no separation of church and state.”

Some religious experts warn that the report—and the ideas espoused in it—are dangerous. In comments submitted to the commission in July, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which advocates for the historical Baptist position on church-state separation, argued that it cherry-picks anecdotal evidence to support its claims. When I spoke with David Segal, a rabbi and a policy counsel for the BJC, he expressed concern that the report ignores the long history of attacks on the religious liberty of minority faiths, including the president’s frequent targeting of Muslims and the recent decision by the U.S. Department of Defense to drop 180 faith traditions from its list of recognized religions. “It’s very focused on anti-Christian bias at the expense of other kinds of religious discrimination,” Segal said. “They were trying to present one version of a story of how religious freedom looks or should look in this country, which is a story about how Christians are targeted by the government.” 

Please open the link to finish reading the article.

Categories Religion, Texas

Robert Reich: The NY Times Reports “Both Sides” of a Campaign Debate

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2026 //
5

Robert Reich condemns the “both sides” reporting of the debate between the Senate candidates in Michigan, as presented by The New York Times.

Honest reporting, he contends, would comment on the accuracy of the candidates’ remarks, not present them as equivalent.

Reich writes:

Friends,

The venerable New York Times — the “gray lady” of American journalism that not only determines what’s news but sets the standard for how it should be reported — has been describing the upcoming midterms as if it were a competition between two equally passionate and roughly equivalent sides.

For example, in describing the recent debate between the two candidates vying to represent Michigan in the Senate, Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, the Times offered its readers an analysis of social media feeds —“one curated for a left-wing audience and one for a right-wing audience.” 

The Times did this by collecting more than 13,000 posts from X, and then — using a social media analytics company — categorizing the posts according to their apparent political leanings and whether they were “personal attacks and criticism” or concerned a particular issue area. 

Then the Times presented it all in a vertical graph, starting with the beginning of the debate at the top and the end at the bottom, with responses to El-Sayed on the left side and responses to Rogers on the right. 

What did the Times report that might be useful to its readers? It turned out that “viewers following the event on social media likely came away with two very different impressions, depending on their own political inclinations.”

Well, duh. People choose social media depending on their political inclinations to begin with. 

The Times then suggested that the two very different impressions were roughly equal, both in the degree to which they distorted the truth and in how troubling we should find those distortions.

“An algorithm attuned to Democrats … served up commentary depicting the Democratic candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, as a firebrand who delivered quick-witted attacks that left his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, scrambling. A feed curated for Republicans … created an impression of Mr. Rogers as calm and composed onstage as he landed blistering critiques of Dr. El-Sayed.”

When the candidates talked about the Iran war, according to the Times, “left-leaning users” praised “Dr. El-Sayed’s opposition to the conflict” while “right-leaning users” posted “personal criticism of Dr. El-Sayed’s Muslim beliefs.” As the debate shifted to the economy, “left-leaning users” posted about affordability, while the posts of “right-leaning users” were “often laden with personal attacks against Dr. El-Sayed.”

As the debate progressed, the Times reported, these “dueling narratives” became more pronounced. When Dr. El-Sayed again referred to the economy, left-leaning accounts “posted about the high cost of living” while Rogers’s supporters posted that “high gas prices are only temporary.” When Dr. El-Sayed talked about improving healthcare, Rogers’s supporters expressed “skepticism about Dr. El-Sayed’s medical background.” (The Times then noted that although Dr. El-Sayed has a medical degree from Columbia University, he has never practiced medicine.)

So what is the average reader or voter supposed to take away from this so-called analysis? 

Note for starters that all the responses analyzed by the Times were on Musk’s “X” — which already leans authoritarian. 

Beyond this is circular reasoning. People identified as “left-leaning users” were assumed to be “left-leaning” because their comments showed they were for El-Sayed and against Rogers, and “right-leaning users” were “right-leaning” because they were for Rogers and against El-Sayed. 

The worst ad populum fallacy is that both sides deserve equal weight. They engaged in “dueling narratives” and they posted about the same number of comments. Even the graph represented a kind of equivalence. 

Rubbish. Doesn’t The New York Times have a responsibility to tell readers that Rogers has been a rubber-stamp for Trump, including Trump’s war in Iran; that he voted for the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, and surveillance legislation; that he has a political record of suppressing Black votes in Detroit and across Michigan; and that he has long represented corporate interests over the interests of average working people?

And doesn’t the Times also have a responsibility to tell its readers that El-Sayed takes the opposite position on these — and is pushing for a single-payer healthcare system, breaking up large healthcare monopolies, taxing billionaire wealth and regulating AI and data centers, banning corporate campaign contributions, ending gerrymandering, reforming the Supreme Court, and ending U.S. military aid to Israel?

Two weeks from an election that will determine whether guardrails will be erected against America’s first dictator, and what does The New York Times do? Depict it like any other contest between America’s two major political parties — in which they present “dueling narratives” from their “left-leaning” or “right-leaning” perspectives. 

This depiction is irresponsible and dangerously fraudulent. Don’t accept it.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Failure, Fake News, Michigan, Trump

Excuse Me While I Keep a Close Watch on Texas

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2026 //
5

Over the next couple of weeks, I will write several pieces about the upcoming election in Texas. More than any other state. I will explain why.

First of all, I was born there, and I’m tired of Texas being a laughing stock. Texans are better than that.

Second, if Texas flips blue, it will be a political earthquake. The state has been owned by oil and gas billionaires for decades. It’s time for a change. It’s time for leaders who care for the people of Texas, not the 1%.

Third, Texas has two great candidates in James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa. Talarico is a religious man, actually a seminarian, who speaks eloquently about our obligations to one another. Gina Hinojosa is running to give the regular people of Texas a voice.

Fourth, Gina understands the sham of Abbott’s “vouchers for all” program. She has pledged to roll back the voucher scheme and invest in the state’s public schools, where almost 90% of the state’s 5.5 million children are enrolled. Under the voucher regime, rural schools are at risk of closing. Gina will fire State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath, who has used his power to take control of entire urban districts, despite the well-documented history of the failure of state takeovers.

Fingers crossed for a new day in Texas, free of the control of billionaires, corrupt politicians, and grifters.

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization, Republicans, Rural Schools, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Students, Supporting public schools, Texas, Vouchers

Texas: Houston Chronicle Endorses Gina Hinojosa for Governor

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2026 //
3

The polls in Texas show a close race between Governor Greg Abbbott and challenger Gina Hinojosa. Abbott has about $91.5 million in campaign funds, Hinojosa has about $21.7 million.

Abbott’s single biggest donor is S. Javaid Anwar, who has given $4,122,086. Anwar is Muslim but supports Abbott despite the Governor’s anti-Muslim rhetoric. Abbott’s top five donors have each donated at least $2 million.

Hinojosa’s biggest donor is the American Federation of Teachers, which appreciates Hinojosa’s strong support for public schools and teachers. The AFT has contributed $345,000.

Abbott is running for his fourth term. Abbott is a hard-hearted MAGA man. He is the favorite of billionaires in Texas and beyond.

Gina is the only candidate in the nation running for governor who has made public schools her number 1 issue. She has pledged to fire Abbott’s State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath and to roll back the billion-dollar “voucher scam.”

Abbott and Hinojosa are one point apart in the polls, a statistical tie.

A few days ago, the biggest newspaper in the state–The Houston Chronicle–endorsed Hinojosa.

The Houston Chronicle said:

Here is the full editorial:

In February, when state Rep. Gina Hinojosa visited the Chronicle editorial board as one of six Democrats who imagined themselves taking up residence in the Governor’s Mansion, we were impressed but saw little reason for Gov. Greg Abbott to worry. What we saw in Hinojosa was a capable, experienced lawmaker with a passion for public education, clearly the best candidate among the six but with little name recognition beyond her Austin district. An even more daunting prospect if she happened to prevail in the primary would be campaigning in the general election under the Everest-sized shadow of a $106 million war chest the governor could avalanche onto her effort if he needed to. 

We didn’t think he’d need to. In Abbott’s quest for an unprecedented fourth term, we expected Hinojosa to be the next in a line of hapless Democrats willing to take one for the party. Hinojosa herself acknowledged that she decided to run for governor only after it became obvious that none of her fellow Democrats were willing to offer themselves up for the quadrennial double-digit beat-down the party has endured for more than three decades. If the ebullient, well-known and well-funded Beto O’Rourke couldn’t come within single digits of Abbott four years ago, why would Texans expect an earnest, relatively low-key unknown to do any better? 

For Governor: Gina Hinojosa

Gina Hinojosa ★★★★ — This Democratic challenger and five-term state representative is running one of the most impressive populist campaigns anywhere in the country. She’s fighting to put everyday Texans back in charge.

Greg Abbott  ★★1/2 — After 12 years as governor, this Republican incumbent seems to care only about billionaire donors and partisan extremists.

When Hinojosa visited the editorial board a few weeks ago, the descriptor “low-key” didn’t come to mind. She made a full-throated, confident call for change. As with her Democratic cohort, the now-nationally known U.S. Senate candidate, James Talarico, her campaign is riding a wave of Trump fatigue and economic angst that has spread nationwide like algae in a reflecting pool. The success of her populist economic message — and the fact that Abbott finally deigned to mention her name only recently — suggests that fiery-red Texas might be slipping toward something closer to crimson, or even purple, on the political color spectrum. Despite the incumbent governor’s advantages — money and name recognition, primarily — the 52-year-old Rio Grande Valley native and five-term House member is within striking distance in most polls.

And it’s not just Hinojosa who has changed: There’s also Abbott himself. The GOP candidate Texans first met way back in the mid-’90s when he ran for district judge here in Houston, the office-holder we got to know through his successful campaigns for the Texas Supreme Court, attorney general and three terms as governor, has transmogrified. In the three decades Abbott has held public office, the seemingly moderate, Bush-era Republican — who even attracted Democratic votes when he ran for the state Supreme Court — has become a relentless, hardcore MAGA standard-bearer. This is the governor whose billion-dollar border boondoggle, Operation Lone Star, pleased the true believers but did nothing to resolve the nation’s immigration remorse. The governor who, in the pursuit of absolute and centralized power, trashed any notion of “local control,” long a Republican value. The governor who sneers at urban Texas, including Harris County, despite its function as the economic engine of a growing state. 

Perhaps that’s the type of pol he has always been, but he has no interest in disguising it now, as he seeks a fourth term as governor (and perhaps a launching pad for the presidency).

But the biggest change of all — bigger than any individual candidate — is happening all over Texas, where Republicans have dominated statewide elections for the past 30 years.  Like a barnacled Moby Dick, parties in power too long grow tired, weighted down, ineffective. Poked and prodded by unrelenting schools of special-interest pilot fish, they lose a sense of a larger public-service mission.  They may be politically dominant, but in fact they’re netted and enmeshed by the privileged and powerful. Like an unfree Willy, they come to feel they have no choice but to acquiesce, even as they seek to distract the citizenry with trivialities. (The Furries Act, anyone?) In an ocean of new ideas, new directions and unfamiliar challenges, they founder. 

“I will tell you that with 30 years of Democratic rule, it would probably be just as corrupt,” Hinojosa said. “That’s what happens when you have one-party control for so long.” 

Those of a certain age will remember the Sharpstown scandal that hastened the demise of Texas Democrats. Now, after decades of near-total dominance by Republicans, a dozen years under one governor, it’s time for a change.

We had an opening question for the candidate who seeks to forge a new approach for the state: Why would we change leadership given how much Texas is growing, how strong our economy is and, overall, how well things are going?

We found Hinojosa’s answer compelling: “That narrative does not match the experience of everyday Texans. Despite the fact that Texans work more hours  than the national average, we have the most people without health insurance, we have the most children without health insurance of any state, we have the most people being disconnected from their electricity because they can’t afford to pay their bills, despite the fact that we are the energy powerhouse of this country. We have the most bankruptcies of any state in the union, and that is affecting our small businesses in a big way. Small businesses are really struggling to keep their doors open, and all this despite the fact that our property taxes have skyrocketed under Greg Abbott.”

Hinojosa has a name for those economic burdens those bankrupt businesses and everyday Texans carry constantly. She calls it “the Greg Abbott corruption tax.” 

We prefer a Watergate-era cliche: “Follow the money.” Billionaires seem to have an outsized influence on Abbott’s governing priorities. Consider natural gas tycoon Kelcy Warren, whose Energy Transfer vacuumed up $2.5 billion during devastating Winter Storm Uri in 2021. When Abbott showed little interest in determining how the gas industry managed to collect $11 billion in profit during the ensuing blackouts, the Dallas billionaire conveniently showed his appreciation with a $1 million contribution to the governor’s campaign coffers.

Or consider billionaire school-voucher zealot Jeff Yass of Pennsylvania, who donated $12 million to Abbott in apparent appreciation of his unrelenting efforts to establish a billion-dollar school voucher program. The governor got his money from Yass and other political extremists, such as the billionaire Wilks brothers of Cisco, Texas, but public schools, particularly those in rural Texas, lost out: The program siphons much-needed money away from them and into private schools.

Or consider, more recently, AI tech billionairesgetting all manner of tax goodies from our governor — to the tune of $1 billion per year — as gigantic data centers sprawl across acres and acres of the Lone Star State.   

Of course, Abbott isn’t the only governor — Democrat and Republican — who fell hard for data centers. He’s also not the only governor who suddenly feels compelled to respond to the growing rumble of unrest. He can’t help but notice that much of the opposition is coming from rural and small-town Texans, likely Abbott/Trump supporters who have legitimate concerns about water and energy use, incessant noise just across the fence line from their properties, or simply a desire to have some local control over their own communities. 

The growing grassroots fury at elected officials who initially ignored their concerns is democracy in action. We expect that a respect for a government of, by and for the people of Texas, a respect for their needs and concerns, would be the fundamental governing principle in a Hinojosa administration. 

Priorities for what Hinojosa calls her “economic populist agenda” include firing Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath “and putting an educator in that position;” freezing electricity rates and insisting that corporations and industry — including data centers — pay their fair share; and making sure that every Texas child has access to quality healthcare. 

Her most surprising priority is to write a check for $1,500 for every Texas household. The money would come from the state’s Rainy Day Fund, now at $27 billion, although in recent history it’s been closer to $10 billion. 

“The economists we talk to say it’s so irresponsible to have $27 billion hoarded in Austin,” Hinojosa said. “That money belongs in the economy, working for the economy, especially at a time when working Texans are really struggling. Not only that, but people don’t believe that government can do anything to make their lives easier.”

We asked how a $1,500 check for every Texas household differs from Trump’s proposal to send every American household a check for $5,000. 

“We have the money,” Hinojosa said — wryly, but also accurately.

An offhand remark as Hinojosa prepared to leave the editorial board meeting stayed with us. “I think people are tired of fighting,” she said. 

We agree. After a dozen years under the leadership of a governor keenly attuned to the needs of the privileged and the powerful, we look forward to a successor dedicated to serving her fellow Texans. 

As a lawmaker, Hinojosa has proven herself to be a smart, pragmatic and resourceful public servant, one who has realized during her decade in office that if she was going to get anything done, she had to work with the opposition, not divide and denigrate. We’re confident she’ll be a smart, pragmatic and resourceful governor. Gina Hinojosa has our wholehearted endorsement.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Texas

Trump’s Targeting of Rep. Ilhan Omar is Fascist

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2026 //
9

Trump despises Representative Ilhan Omar. She represents everything he hates. She was born in Somalia, which he considers a “shithole” country. He has referred to the Somalis in Minnesota as “garbage.” He has also called Omar “garbage,” “totally crooked,” and told her to “get the hell out.”

Ilhan Omar is a fierce critic of Trump, and he is a fierce critic of Omar.

On October 12, Trump crossed a bright line. The Department of Homeland Security sent agents to raid Representative Omar’s home in Washington, D.C. They carried away boxes of material as well as her cellphone and her computer.

From all reports, they were searching for evidence of immigration fraud.

Omar was born in Somalia in 1982. She and her family escaped the country, which was at war and lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years. In 1995, the family immigrated to the United States. She became a naturalized citizen in 2000, when she was 17.

The family settled in Minneapolis, and she graduated from Thomas Edison High School. She then earned her bachelor’s degree from Notth Dakota State University.

She was elected to the Minnesota Hiusee of Representatives in 2017. She was elected to Congress in 2019. She was re-elected three times. She is standing for re-election on November 3.

There is a rule–not a law–that federal officials are not supposed to interfere in political campaigns within the 60-day period before an election.

The only time I recall that this rule was broken was when FBI Director James Comey announced that the FBI was reopening an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails about 10 days before the 2016 election. A few days later, he closed the investigation, having found nothing. But it very likely cost her the election.

Trump’s investigation of Omar is motivated by malice. Markwayne Mullin, the former plumber who now leads the Department of Homeland Security, has admitted that his agents were looking for irregularities in the immigration paperwork filed by her father in 1995.

The assumption is that Trump is seeking an excuse to strip her of her citizenship and deport her to Somalia. What a victory that would be for the haters!

Trump is investigating whether her father (deceased) committed immigration fraud in 1995, when he and his family were admitted to this country. Ilhan at the time was 12 years old.

This is an outrageous abuse of power.

It is fascist.

She will be re-elected. In time, a federal judge will rebuke the Trump administration.

Add this to the long list of outrages committed by this lawless administration.

Categories Education Reform
« Older Entries