Neil MacFarquar wrote this story in the New York Times. It is a chilling warning.

Many Americans fought and died to protect our democracy and preserve our rights. Sadly, there extremists within the country who threaten the ideas and values we hold dear. They are haters and white supremacists who betray the national idea of e pluribus unem.

They robbed an armored car outside a sprawling Seattle shopping mall.

They bombed a synagogue in Boise, Idaho, and within weeks assassinated a Jewish talk radio host in Denver.

Then a month later, they plundered another armored car on a California highway in a spectacular daylight heist that netted more than $3.6 million.

What initially seemed to F.B.I. agents like distant, disparate crimes turned out to be the opening salvos in a war against the federal government by members of a violent extremist group called the Order, who sought to establish a whites-only homeland out West.

Their crime spree played out in 1984. Fast forward to 2021. Federal agents and prosecutors who dismantled the Order see troubling echoes of its threat to democracy in the Capitol riot and the growing extremist activity across the country…

Those who tracked the group say the legacy of the Order can be seen in the prominent role that far-right organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers played in storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“Many of the participants of these groups today come from the same sources as the Order,” said Gene Wilson, the lead prosecutor, who went on to become a U.S. magistrate judge in Seattle before switching to private practice. “I think they might be just as committed to totally changing democracy as we know it.”

The men who played central roles in disbanding the Order still consider it the most important case of their lives. Given the Order’s “potential for violence and destruction,” said Mr. Manis, no other domestic group posed a similar threat to the United States.

The Order collapsed after its charismatic leader, Robert Jay Mathews, died in a fiery shootout with scores of F.B.I. agents on Whidbey Island, Wash., in December 1984. His followers were rounded up in a nationwide manhunt and 23 of them faced trial on racketeering charges involving two murders, robberies that netted more than $4 million, counterfeiting, weapons violations and arson. Sentenced to lengthy terms ranging up to 252 years, most of the core members died in jail.

Far-right groups often express antigovernment ideology or espouse ideas about returning the United States to some imagined, idyllic form of constitutional rule. What made the Order so dangerous was that it set about achieving that goal, killing, robbing and planning spectacular terrorist acts in hopes of toppling the government.

Just before federal agents closed in, its members had been figuring out how to sabotage the power grid in Los Angeles, hoping to incite riots and looting. Men affiliated with the Order had also surveyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City as a target, which helped to inspire Timothy J. McVeigh to blow it up in April 1995, killing 168 people in the worst homegrown terrorist attack in American history.

The First Amendment means that people cannot be prosecuted on the basis of ideology alone, so the hurdle is figuring out which secretive individual or group, whether far right or far left, might be turning to violence. The dangerous core bent on violence is usually only 5 to 10 percent of an extremist organization, agents said.

Mr. Mathews, raised among white supremacists, organized a heavily armed, clandestine guerrilla force designed to spark a civil war. Adherents sought to restore America to its imagined origins and considered preserving the “green graves” of their white forefathers a sacred duty. To join, members stepped into a wide candlelit circle formed around a white infant and pledged to fight, in secret and without fear of death, to make the United States an Aryan nation…

With the robberies that were the initial focus of the group’s efforts, Mathews worked toward a general uprising, dispensing the money to extremist groups nationwide to buy weapons and other matériel. He hoped his war chest would serve to bind them together, with a wave of violence forcing the U.S. government to cede Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado as an initial white homeland…

The men who disbanded the Order believe that any contemporary group with similarly dangerous aspirations would also likely be hidden. Members of the Order shunned publicity to concentrate on crime. “Everything that they did was covert,” said Tom McDaniel, a former FBI agent who moved to Montana in 1984 to pursue the case and never left.

It was only when the FBI agents were closing in on Mathews in November 1984 that he issued a declaration of war. Part of the declaration threatened to kill politicians in Congress: “When the day comes, we will not ask whether you swung to the right or swung to the left; we will simply swing you by your neck.”

The wording came from a tract published by the National Alliance, a far-right organization run by William Luther Pierce, author of “The Turner Diaries,” a dystopian novel that imagines a white supremacist underground that takes over the United States and eventually the world.

Although the motivations are related, there is plenty that separates groups active now from those that operated in the past. Far-right organizations once needed to engage with possible recruits in person; now much of that radicalization occurs online. They can connect, scheme and even act through the internet. It was also unthinkable that any high-profile politician would voice opinions that such groups considered encouragement. Now those words have come from a former president.

Former agents viewed the Capitol riot and last year’s protests over social justice issues as possible seeds for radicalization.

“I feel that if there is an organization today from the extreme right that is following in the footsteps of the Order,” Manis said, “you will not know anything about it until it is too late and they have already done something dastardly.”

The Washington Post published contemporary photographs and videos of the Tulsa Race Massacre. As many as 300 black people were killed.

On May 30, 1921, Greenwood was one of the wealthiest Black communities in the country, home to doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs.

It boasted restaurants, grocery stores, churches, a hospital, a savings and loan, a post office, three hotels, jewelry and clothing stores, two movie theaters, a library, pool halls, a bus and cab service, a highly regarded school system, six private airplanes and two Black newspapers, according to the Greenwood Cultural Center.

Two days later, it was all gone.

Inflamed by rumors that a young black man had assaulted a young white woman, a white mob in Tulsa set out to avenge the alleged event. Fighting broke out between whites and blacks, and a large section of black-owned businesses and homes was reduced to ashes. Hundreds of blacks were killed, and a 35-block area of residences, restaurants, professional offices, and theatre was leveled. Subsequently the black man in the incident was absolved.

Alan Singer of Hofstra University writes here about the day that whites in Tulsa burned down a thriving black community.

Singer writes:

That night, white rioters looted and burned over 1,200 buildings in the Greenwood District, which at the time was a prosperous Black business and residential neighborhood known as Black Wall Street. White mobs bombed, looted, and set fire to buildings and opened fire on Black residents who tried to defend their homes and businesses. A report in the Tulsa Tribune described that “machine guns were set up and for 20 minutes poured a stream of lead on the negroes who sought refuge behind buildings, telephone poles, and in ditches.”

Mercedes Schneider read the letter posted by the board of the celebrated IDEA charter chain. She noted that the chief executive officer and chief operating officer had been fired. She dug deeper and wondered about a culture of corruption and self-aggrandizement that went beyond the leaders who were fired.

The May 25, 2021 Houston Chronicle reports of the firing of IDEA Public Schools charter chain CEO JoAnn Gama and CFO Irma Muñoz “after a forensic review found ‘substantial evidence’ that top leaders at the state’s largest charter network misused money and staff for personal gain ‘in a manner to avoid detection by the standard external audit and internal control processes that the Board had in place.

Schneider dug deep into internet archives to take a close look at the “top leaders at the state’s largest charter network.” The network was rolling in dough. DeVos poured in another $200 million plus. Money and luxury. Greed and temptation.

As blogger Billy Townsend explains, education officials in Florida are either hypocrites or stupid.

In a post that is second in a series, he shows how they campaign against teaching about racism (which they consider “indoctrination”) yet state standards require teachers to teach about the infamous 1920 Ocoee race massacre. Is it possible to avoid teaching about racism and white supremacy while teaching a mandated lesson about racism and white supremacy?

Townsend describes the teacher’s dilemma. He or she might satisfy Governor DeSantis by assuring him that the teacher is definitely not teaching “critical race theory,” because he or she never heard of it before.

Just the facts:

Dear class, today we are going to discuss the Ocoee pogrom, which killed or expelled virtually the entire black population of this little town near Orlando because that black population attempted to vote on the presidential Election Day of 1920.

Here’s the outcome of the Ocoee pogrom demographically:

Ocoee’s purged black population culminated the destruction of a 1920 statewide civil rights/voting registration drive led by black women like Mary McLeod Bethune during the first presidential election of women’s suffrage. Mary McLeod Bethune is about to represent woke Florida in statuary hall in Congress. But in 1920, white people and power crushed her ambition for representative government and legitimate political power with systematic killing and destruction. They did this explicitly to maintain “white supremacy” against black participation in the democratic process and the 1920 presidential election. That’s literally the reason white people gave for doing it — that exact phrase, “white supremacy.” …..

Townsend continues:

I need to quote and address the Chris Latvala Corollary to all these rules: “There is a way to teach it without indoctrinating kids about how bad white people are.” That’s the position of state Rep. Chris Latvala, chairman of the House Education & Employment Committee, on history.

I am not sure what “it” is; so let me just say: White people are awesome. We have always been awesome. Without us, you would not have skinny jeans or emo music or square dancing or hipsters — or so I understand from popular American history. So as you listen to this, remember: it doesn’t mean white people are not awesome. We are. Always have been. OK. Got it?

Even with all that disclaiming, I’m not sure if the Florida powers-that-be will fire me for not teaching Ocoee or for teaching it. Such is the life of an educator in America’s worst designed, worst led, most corrupt, most incoherent, and most stupidly performative state education system.

The New York Times reports on a poll finding that 15% of Americans believe in QAnon conspiracy theories.

Those are the findings of a poll released todayby the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, which found that 15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters. The same share said it was true that “American patriots may have to resort to violence” to depose the pedophiles and restore the country’s rightful order…

And fully 20 percent of respondents said that they thought a biblical-scale storm would soon sweep away these evil elites and “restore the rightful leaders…”

Mr. Jones said he was struck by the prevalence of QAnon’s adherents. Overlaying the share of poll respondents who expressed belief in its core principles over the country’s total population, “that’s more than 30 million people,” he said.

“Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants,” he added. “So it lines up there with a major religious group.”

In a crowded field of candidates in the Democratic primary, only two are opposed to expanding the number of charters in a city with hundreds of them: Scott Stringer and Maya Wiley.

The other candidates support more charters at a time when the national Democratic Party seems to realize that charters are a key component of the rightwing’s longtime goal of privatization of the public schools. Charter advocates started a PAC for Eric Adams. Andrew Yang supports charter schools and is advised by former Mayor Bloomberg’s advisor Bradley Tusk (Bloomberg was very pro-charter). Financier Ray McGuire’s campaign relies on Bloomberg’s chancellor Joel Klein for advice (his campaign manager is pro-charter).

Betsy DeVos loves charter schools, so does the anti-union Walton family and Charles Koch. Across the country, Republican legislators and governors are passing legislation to expand charters and vouchers, while Democrats put public schools first.

This article explains how deeply entangled one of the candidates is with the charter industry. Dianne Morales has pitched herself as the most progressive candidate in the field, but neglects to mention that she was a Pahara Fellow or that she has long-standing ties to charter world.

Those ties are now producing an outpouring of contributions from the charter industry. And Kathryn Garcia, who was endorsed by the New York Times and the New York Daily News, declared recently that she wants more charter schools in the city and will ask the legislature to raise the cap.

There are currently 267 charter schools in the city. Of 1.1 million public schools in the city, 88% are enrolled in the long-neglected public schools. Ironically, by handing off more students to charter schools, the mayor (whoever it may be) is acknowledging his or her own incompetence as leader of the city’s schools.

At the beginning of the campaign, Scott Stringer was the favorite. He served in the legislature, and he is currently the City Comptroller, meaning he has detailed knowledge of the budget and the city’s massive bureaucracy. The United Federation of Teachers endorsed him, along with many progressive groups. But then a woman stepped forward to say that 20 years ago, when they were both single, he groped her. Many of those who endorsed Stringer withdrew their endorsements. Although I have a tendency to believe women in these situations, I think it’s unfair to discredit a candidate based on an unverified allegation. Stringer has been a candidate many times, and the accuser remained silent.

The charter industry has demonstrated time and again that it has the deep pockets to buy elections. What it has not bought is academic success.