Norman Batley hosts a podcast called “Life Elsewhere with Norman B.” He is based in Tampa, Florida. The program is widely distributed through WMNF and NPR. He asks great questions, and I was thrilled to be invited to be on his show.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, reports on the latest education news from Oklahoma: the Chamber of Commerce is intent on reviving the failed test-and-punish agenda of the Bush-Obama years, plus the so-called “Mississippi Miracle,”which is credited with amazing results in reading.
John writes:
Once again, attacks on under-funded Oklahoma public schools are examples of the threats the nation’s schools face. Yes, we’ve gotten rid of State Superintendent Ryan Walters, but I’m more worried about today’s “accountability-driven” mandates, such as those pushed by the Chamber of Commerce.
On the other hand, our public schools have a history of receiving support from holistic, bottom-up efforts by a variety of excellent social work agencies, nonprofits, volunteers, and innovative educators.
These partners remind me of 1990’s, when student performance was growing. The head of the Oklahoma City Public School System curriculum department dropped into my History classroom, saying that she had been watching me teach, and I might like to try something new. She suggested that I start the year with the 20th century to get my kids hooked on history. Then, around Thanksgiving, we would return to the beginning of the subject, and reteach the 20th century.
It was a brilliant approach, supported by cognitive science. And it showed inner city students respect by nurturing meaningful, challenging instruction. The result was that my kids worked from bell-to-bell, from day one to their graduation day, learning how to learn.
I doubt that would be allowed today, when “everyone” is pressured to be on the “same page,” often requiring the same type of data-driven instruction.
Then, as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 approached, our principal gave us aligned and paced curriculum guidelines; They are now pervasive. She said that she knew we wouldn’t use it, but rather than throwing it away, we should keep it handy in case a top administrator visited the class.
Before NCLB, we had the autonomy to adjust our lessons in order to promote in-depth learning. For instance, when my students came to class carrying Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, which they were reading in their English class, I would quickly change my schedule. Our History class would learn about Ellison’s childhood in Oklahoma City, and how his famous “Battle Royal” scene was inspired by a cruel joke that was played on him when he applied for a job.
And, around that time, the bipartisan MAPS for Kids succeeded in saving the OKCPS from a financial collapse by raising taxes. MAPS for Kids listened to educators, parents, top national education and cognitive science researchers, and students; it called for the meaningful instruction which treated high-challenge kids with the same respect and opportunities that are bestowed on students in the exurbs.
I was in the room when MAPS and OKCPS leaders agreed that educators should receive a clear message – their job is to teach the Standards of Instruction, not to standardized tests.
I was then in the room when top district administrators were supposed to reveal the agreement to a committee of principals. The committee chair started with summaries of ridiculous policies that had been imposed over the years. Principals replied with absurd, but hilarious stories, about the tumultuous effects of non-educators’ political demands.
But, the administrator then said that we would have to dramatically expand standardized testing.
When I pushed back, a highly respected administrator put her hands on my shoulders, and said, “John, I’ve always said you don’t make a hog heavier by weighing it. But this is politics. We have no choice.”
When NCLB and subsequent corporate school reforms were implemented, the supposed goal was using top-down, accountability mandates to rapidly transform schools serving our poorest children of color. But in my experience, those were the students who were most damaged by output-driven reforms that forced teachers to be “on the same page” when teaching the same lessons.
I didn’t have the expertise to get involved in the debates over aligned and paced instruction in pre-k and elementary schools, but the idea that it should be forced on high-challenge secondary students was absurd. Educators pushed back as much as we could, but our resistance was condemned as “low expectations.” And reformers who blamed us Baby Boomers for making “excuses,” sought to replace us with young teachers, such as those in Teach for America, who were trained in the culture of data-driven accountability
Reformers also brought frequent benchmark testing into schools. Lacking explicit stakes, benchmarks could have created a culture of testing for diagnostic, not accountability, purposes. In my experience, however, the test prep culture, combined with more frequent tests, further undermined the teacher autonomy required for holistic instruction.
Today, the campaign for the “Science of Reading,” now known as the “Mississippi Miracle,” is driven by “extensive use of formative and benchmark assessments to track student progress and inform instructional differentiation.” The American Federation of Teachers’ president Randi Weingarten supported much or most of the “Science of Reading” but she “doesn’t advocate for what we have found so disrespectful: scripted curricula or ‘teacher proof’ programs.”
And we face new threats when, as is happening in Oklahoma,” the ideology-driven, reward-and-punish parts of the “Mississippi Miracle,” are combined with the Moms for Liberty’s focus on “back to basics” foundational skills and phonics.
Despite the lack of evidence that the Miracle increases long-lasting reading comprehension, as opposed to short-term test gains for 4th graders, Oklahoma’s Chambers remain committed to retention based on reading test scores, like we did in 2015-2016 when we were second to Mississippi in retaining k-3rd grade students. They ignore that tragic results which seemed likely to occur in 2004, and in 2012, and 2015 when Oklahoma briefly required the passing of four End-of-Instruction tests to graduate from high schools.
But, I would remind the Chamber of its call for recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers in order to attract and retain business investors for Oklahoma. After all, the best way to attract high-quality teachers, and parents of students, is to allow for high-quality, holistic teaching and learning, not make them work in a 21st century version of a Model T assembly line.
Paul Thomas was a teacher in South Carolina for many years; he is now a professor of education at Furman University. He believes that the movement to mandate “the science of reading” is a fraud, as is the so-called “Mississippi Miracle.” The key to the alleged miracle, he says, is holding back third-graders with low reading scores. That is the magic bullet, not the reading curriculum.
In this post, he compares the claims for SOR with research.
He writes:
Journalists and politicians are both drawn to and depend on compelling stories.
Regretfully, whether or not those stories are factually true is less and less important, and in some cases, what makes the stories compelling is over-simplification while the truth is complicated or often not clearly defined.
The stories told about education have a long history of being trapped in compelling but false claims. Currently, the most popular and compelling education story is about reading proficiency among US students; this story is grounded in a very compelling story about reading reform in Mississippi, identified as reform labeled the “science of reading.”
The repetition of the so-called Mississippi “miracle” has occurred dozens of times since 2019—and here are just two of the most recent:
•Rahm Emanuel on Twitter:
•And yet another article in The New York Times: How Mississippi Transformed Its Schools From Worst to Best.
Everything about the Mississippi story fits perfectly into the larger stories that Americans love.
So there is now a recurring accusatory question: If high-poverty poverty state with a large proportion of Black students can radically improve reading proficiency among their students, why don’t all states adopt that policy?
From that, it gets uglier because the implication and direct accusations that follow are damning: The education establishment, bolstered by teachers unions, simply don’t think poor and Black students can learn; the education establishment uses poverty as an excuse and will not let go of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Throughout the stories being told about reading, teachers, and education, there is a discouraging pattern: The stories are not supported by the evidence (ironically, the stories behind the “science of reading” lack scientific research), and in many cases, the evidence contradicts the story being told.
Is poverty an excuse for student achievement and is teacher quality/knowledge a major reason students underachieve?
Poverty, inequity, and other out-of-school factors are the primary cause factors in measurable student achievement (test scores), accounting for 60% or more of those scores.
Teacher quality impacts measurable student achievement at rates of about 1-14%.
Research:
If you want to read the research that directly contradicts the received wisdom about how to teach reading, open the link.
Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, wrote regularly for The New York Times. Now he writes a blog at Substack. In this post, he characterizes the deepening dysfunction of our president, Donald Trump.
Things are not going well politically for Donald Trump. The polls show him underwater on every major issue. And while he insists that these are fake, it’s clear that he knows better. He recently lamented that the Republicans will do badly in the midterms and even floated the idea that midterms should be canceled.
And as January 6th 2021 showed, Trump simply can’t stand political rejection. He will do anything, use any tool or any person at his disposal, to obliterate the sources of that rejection.
So as we head into the 2026 midterm season, the best way to understand U.S. policy is that it’s in the pursuit of one crucial objective: Propping up Trump’s fragile ego.
What was the motivation for the abduction of Nicolás Maduro? It wasn’t about drugs, which were always an obvious pretense. By Trump’s own account it wasn’t about democracy. Trump talks a lot about oil, but Venezuela’s heavy, hard-to-process oil and its decrepit oil infrastructure aren’t big prizes. The Financial Timesreports that U.S. oil companies won’t invest in Venezuela unless they receive firm guarantees. One investor told the paper, “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.”
The real purpose of the abduction, surely, was to give Trump an opportunity to strut around and act tough. But this ego gratification, like a sugar rush, won’t last long. Voters normally rally around the president at the beginning of a war. The invasion of Iraq was initially very popular. But the action in Venezuela hasn’t had any visible rally-around-the-flag effect. While Republicans, as always, support Trump strongly, independents are opposed:
And now the story of the moment is the atrocity in Minneapolis, where…an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good by shooting her in the head.
Trump and his minions responded by flatly lying about what happened. But their accounts have been refuted by video evidence which show an out-of-control ICE agent gunning down a woman who was simply trying to get away from a frightening situation. Yes, MAGA loyalists will fall into line, preferring to believe Trump rather than their own lying eyes. But public revulsion over Good’s murder and Trump’s mendacity are high and growing.
A president who actually cared about the welfare of those he governs would have taken Good’s killing as an indication that his deportation tactics have veered wildly and tragically off course. He would have called for a halt of ICE actions and made sure there would be an objective and timely federal investigation into this national tragedy.
But for Trump, ICE’s violent lawlessness is a feature, not a bug. Sending armed, masked, poorly trained, masked and out-of-control armed thugs into blue cities is, in effect, a war on Americans, just as January 6thwas a war on American institutions. In effect, Trump would rather savage his own people than be held accountable for his actions.
So in Trump’s mind, Renee Nicole Good’s murder is at most collateral damage, in service to his insatiable need to dominate and feel powerful — so insatiable that he is attempting to create an alternate reality, claiming that that Good ran over an agent although there is irrefutable video evidence that she didn’t.
And when one set of lies doesn’t work, he switches tactics – changing the topic, deflecting, and spouting even more lies. Thus, just hours after Good’s death, Trump proclaimed that he was seeking a huge increase in military spending:
It’s a near certainty that Trump’s assertion that he arrived at an immediate 50% increase in the military budget after “long and difficult negotiations” is yet another lie. There’s been no indication whatsoever that a massive increase in defense spending was on anyone’s agenda before he suddenly posted about it on Truth Social.
So what was that about? Given the timing, it’s clear that Trump’s announcement was yet another exercise in self-aggrandizement, as well as an attempt to grab the headlines away from Good’s killing. But what’s also important to realize from Trump’s announcement is that he is now clearly conflating the size of the US military with his ego. Evidently the sugar rush of Maduro’s capture has left him wanting more and more military validation, particularly as his poll numbers tank.
So here’s a warning to the US military: if you continue to indulge the sick fantasies of this man, he will drag this country into more and deeper international morasses to feed his need for glory. Do what Admiral Alvin Holsey, an honorable man, did – stand down and refuse an illegal order. Here’s a warning to the Republicans: if you continue to allow this man to perpetrate war against his own people with impunity through the actions of ICE, you will be remembered as cowards and hypocrites. Here’s a warning to all his other enablers: if you do not do something to stop this madman, you will go down in history as traitors to this country.
And here’s a warning to those directly perpetrating Trump-directed atrocities: He will not be in power forever, and I expect and hope that you will be held accountable, personally, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
The Trump administration is making life harder for young parents, says blogger “Home of the Brave.” Trump’s boasts about the economy don’t help families who are struggling to pay for groceries and to buy a home. Trump has even slashed funding for in vitro fertilization, which some families need to have children.
Donald Trump has dubbed himself “the fertilization president” and stacked his administration with self-described pro-natalists—most notably JD Vance—who say they’re concerned with increasing America’s birth rates. Trump has bragged, falsely and bizarrely, about being the “father of IVF” and said on the campaign trail that “we want more babies.”
Here’s the reality beyond the rhetoric: Trump’s presidency is a disaster for new parents and young families. If you’re looking to start a family today, Trump’s making that harder. And if you’re a new parent, Trump’s going out of his way to make that harder, too. Here are just some of the ways they’re doing it:
1.) Cutting funding for family planning.
Trump’s DOGE cuts have gutted federally-funded IVF programs. In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eliminated its Assisted Reproductive Technology Surveillance program, firing six researchers who tracked IVF effectiveness nationwide. People involved with the program told NBC News it was “a tremendous resource” and called its closure an “immediate loss.”
According to the Cleveland Clinic, since 1978 more than 8 million children have been born thanks to IVF, making it the most common type of fertility treatment available, and one of the most effective. Roughly 5 percent of couples experiencing infertility turn to the treatment, and it can offer life-changing results. For millions of Americans, IVF is their best hope for starting a family.
Far from being the “father of IVF,” Trump has made the treatment harder to get for ordinary Americans. When he originally came out in favor of IVF, many of Trump’s social conservative allies in the Republican Party were outraged, calling on him to “walk back” his remarks. They can rest easy now that they know that—as in so many other cases—Trump was lying.
2.) Driving housing costs through the roof.
Houses have become costlier year over year due to limited housing supply. With fewer houses on the market, demand from buyers—especially growing families—outpaces supply. This imbalance drives up prices, freezing out younger and less established homebuyers. To combat this, there’s bipartisan agreement on the need for millions of units worth of new home construction—and fast.
But Trump’s policies are making it harder to build anything. A large portion of the lumber used in American home construction comes from Canada. Steel, another critical building material, is imported predominantly from Japan. Trump has imposed steep tariffs on both countries, making the foundational materials needed to build homes more expensive, which drives up production costs and increases the final price. Regular American families bear the brunt of these increases.
On top of that, as many as 30 percent of construction workers in the United States are immigrants, and Trump’s campaign against immigration is shrinking the available labor supply for construction projects. Masked ICE agents are conducting jump-out raids on unsuspecting contractors and construction workers, in some cases trapping them on freezing cold job sites for hours. As a result, the construction industry is starting to see worsening labor shortages.
Trump built his image on being a real estate magnate, promising on the campaign trail that his administration would be “cutting the cost of a new home in half.” Instead, he’s the biggest obstacle to young parents and new families getting a roof over their heads.
3.) Making everything your child needs more expensive.
Any parent will tell you that you’re always buying something for your kids: babies grow out of clothes constantly, toddlers break toys, you’re forever restocking diapers and formula. It’s a never-ending cycle that is hard to budget for even in the best of times. Trump’s tariffs have made essential baby items—clothes, formula, cribs, strollers, car seats, toys—even more expensive than they already were.
Prices for toddler clothes have gone up 3.3 percent in recent months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose non-political and widely-respected commissioner Trump recently fired for reporting accurate statistics. Other baby essentials have experienced similar jumps thanks to Trump’s tariffs. The Baby Center, a digital resource for parents, wrote that, unless diapers and other goods “are excluded from the tariffs, prices could increase … because manufacturing equipment, packaging, and materials may all be imported.”
Despite Trump’s “America First” monomania, we can’t source every single part of every single baby product here in the United States. It would make everything prohibitively expensive and undercut businesses’ bottom lines. And even if businesses were onboard with this scheme, it would take years or decades to re-shore all the necessary components to US soil. This is what happens when Trump’s economic illiteracy meets reality….
Trump has boasted about his lack of involvement in his children’s lives. He said tasks like changing the kids’ diapers were “just not for me” and he admitted in 2005 that he “won’t do anything to take care of” his children. According to Vanity Fair, his son Don Jr. told him, “You don’t love us! You don’t even love yourself. You just love your money.”
The pattern is clear: The “fertilization president” and “father of IVF” is systematically making it harder and more expensive for American families to have and raise children. He’s gutted IVF programs, driven up housing costs, made baby essentials more expensive, and even taxed parents’ coffee—all while breaking his campaign promises.
American parents shouldn’t have to suffer because Trump was a lousy dad and an even worse president.
Jan Resseger reminds us of the purpose of public education by quoting Derek Black’s new book Dangerous Learning, in which he writes that “public schools are the place where children—regardless of status—share a common experience, come to appreciate the public good, and prepare for equal citizenship. The purpose of public education has always been to sustain a republican form of government.” The Trump administration does not want to “sustain a Republican form of government.” It blabbers on about parents’ rights, not the common good. It is determined to destroy the U.S. Department of Education because it protects the rights of students, especially the most vulnerable. Ironically, the claims for “parents’ rights,” has been turned into a battering ram against students’ rights.
Jan writes:
In his newest book, Dangerous Learning, constitutional law scholar Derek Black explores one of the most basic reasons our public schools, our society’s most extensive and inclusive civic institution, are essential: they are an enormous system whose promise is to serve the needs and protect the rights of nearly 50 million children and adolescents. Justice cannot be achieved solely through the protection of parents’ rights, by which parents vie to advance their own children’s needs.
Black writes: “As rhetoric, educational freedom sounds good. As a practical matter, it falls well short of freedom for all. It does not even attempt to ensure that private education works for children. At best, it is agnostic toward the school environments students enter. At worst, it uses public funds to facilitate patterns and values that America has spent the past half century trying to tame… Public schools to be sure, are far from perfect. They have never fully met the needs of all students and all communities. But those shortcomings are clearly understood as problems to fix. They are seen as bugs, not features, of public education, which has operated for two centuries on the premise that public schools are the place where children—regardless of status—share a common experience, come to appreciate the public good, and prepare for equal citizenship. The purpose of public education has always been to sustain a republican form of government. And public schools are the only place in society premised on bridging the gaps that normally divide us—race, wealth, religion, disability, sex, culture, and more. The founders of the American public education system believed that rather than inhibiting liberty, a common public education is essential to it.” (Dangerous Learning, pp. 182-183)
Widespread educational justice across the nation cannot be achieved solely through the laws of the states. At the federal level, Brown v. Board of Education, and federal laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act have for three quarters of a century been tools by which the federal government could challenge and rectify injustice in public schools. In 1979, the U.S. Department of Education was founded to pull together many of the programs designed to increase opportunity for children in states whose public schools had failed to protect their educational rights due to their race, ethnicity, or disability—the work of the Office for Civil Rights, and programs supporting English language learners and special education for disabled students, for example. The Education Department also increased investment in school districts which states had inadequately funded—Title I for school districts serving concentrations of poor children, for example, and grants for Full-Service Community Schools and 21st Century After-School Programs.
The Trump administration has, however, avoided acknowledging the history of educational injustice as the President has consistently promoted the goal of shutting down the U.S. Department of Education and “returning education to the states.” When she was confirmed as Education Secretary last March, Linda McMahon declared: “President Trump pledged to make American education the best in the world, return education to the states where it belongs, and free American students from the education bureaucracy through school choice. I intend to make good on that promise.” McMahon has laid off staff whose positions were created by Congress, threatened to send specific programs to other federal departments, and cancelled a raft of specific, congressionally allocated grant funding —all contrary to federal law. Many of these threats have been temporarily stayed by the courts; others are quietly moving forward.
Last week, McMahon took a new step to weaken the Department’s reach—by agreeing to waive federal rules that prescribe how federal funding can be spent and allowing states to combine at their discretion funding from specific federal grant lines. For the Associated Press, Colin Binkley explained: “The Trump administration is giving Iowa more power to decide how it spends its federal education money, signing off on a proposal that is expected to be the first of many as conservative states seek new latitude from a White House promising to ‘return education to the states.’ Iowa was the first state to apply for an exemption from certain spending rules.” Binkley describes Education Secretary McMahon’s justification for giving Iowa control of spending federal dollars from four different grant programs: “McMahon told The Associated Press that the new flexibility will free up time and money now devoted to ensuring compliance with federal rules. With fewer strings attached, states can pool their federal dollars toward priorities of their choosing, including literacy or teacher training….”
For K-12 Dive, Kara Arundel lists four separate programs established by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act whose funding streams Iowa has been permitted to combine: Title II, Part A—Supporting Effective Instruction; Title III, Part A—English Language Acquisition; Title IV, Part A—Student Support and Academic Enrichment; and Title IV, Part B—21st Century Community Learning Centers (after-school programs). Arundel describes Iowa’s Republican Governor Kim Reynolds expressing gratitude for giving her state more freedom: “Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, speaking at the press conference, said the state is ‘confident that we can do even more by reallocating compliance resources. Iowa will begin shifting nearly $8 million and thousands of hours of staff time from bureaucracy to actually putting that expertise and those resources in the classroom.’ “
Several writers, looking at the modesty of last week’s Iowa waiver to consolidate grants are not yet anticipating that the Iowa situation bodes massive deregulation of federal funding. Education Week’s Mark Lieberman explains: “The waiver approval appears to mark the first time since the 2015 passage of the Every Student Success Act that the federal government has used its authority under that law to allow a state to consolidate funding. But, in contrast with proposals the state put forward roughly a year ago, the new federal approval touches only 5% of Iowa’s overall allocation of federal education funds, the part that’s set aside for the state education agency. The bulk of federal dollars that flow to school districts each year—$900 million worth—will retain their current structure and spending and reporting requirements.”
Binkley reassures the public: “Iowa’s new plan leaves Title I funding untouched.”
Lieberman quotes Anne Hyslop, who now leads All4Ed, and who worked in the Department during the Obama administration: “This announcement could signal an acknowledgment from the department that its legal authority to flatten discrete funding programs and implement unrestricted block grants without congressional approval is limited, said Anne Hyslop… It also foreshadows an uphill battle for other states aiming to convert federal education funding to block grants, including Indiana, which submitted a request for that flexibility, along with relief from certain school accountability requirements in October.”
Chalkbeat’s Erica Meltzer adds States already control most aspects of education. Federal funding makes up about 10% of overall education spending, and those dollars do come with restrictions and reporting requirements that aim to ensure money is spent appropriately… Iowa’s waiver doesn’t allow districts to consolidate most of their federal funding, which would have represented a much larger pot of money.
However, the reporters acknowledge that, in the context of the Trump administration’s goal to return education to the states, the Department may increasingly grant waivers that limit federal oversight. Will Iowa’s waiver be the first step as the Department of Education reduces guardrails that protect students’ civil rights?
Meltzer reports that the new waiver, “does allow Iowa school districts to take advantage of a 1999 federal provision called Ed-Flex to roll over more money year over year to make it easier to invest in big-ticket items and longer-term strategies….” Lieberman adds: “Separate from the waiver approval, McMahon also simultaneously announced she’s approved Iowa to join 10 other states currently participating in the department’s Ed-Flex program, which gives state education agencies the authority to waive certain spending regulations for individual districts… The 10 states currently participating are Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont and Wisconsin. Iowa is the first state to gain the distinction since McMahon became secretary.”
Meltzer concludes by cautioning readers: “(T)he Education Department still needs to ensure money is being appropriately spent, which is more challenging after massive layoffs.” She quotes Hyslop worrying: “(T)he U.S. Department of Education right now lacks the capacity to do meaningful oversight of how this program is being implemented or the waiver process in general.”
Specifically, Meltzer warns that one of the federal grants Iowa was allowed to merge supported English language instruction, a step that could well reflect the Trump administration’s attack on immigrants or its anti-DEI initiatives: “Advocates are particularly concerned that Iowa’s new block grant consolidates Title III funds that are required to go to English learners…. The Trump administration laid off most of the staff at the Education Department who support those students, and rescinded a guidance document considered to be the ‘bible’ in that field.” She quotes the Education Trust’s Nicholas Munyan-Penney: “I think of red tape equaling protections for students… We want to make sure that students have access to the protections and resources they need to be successful.”
Will 2026 be the year that the Department of Education expands the use of waivers to undercut the federal oversight of funds that protect equality of educational opportunity across our nation? We will need to watch carefully as the chaotic education policy in McMahon’s Department of Education continues into its second year.
This short video was made by Liz Oyer, who used to be the attorney in charge of Presidential pardons at the Justice Department.
Please watch.
Mad King Donald the First won’t let go of his absurd desire to take Greenland. He says he must have it, by purchase or by invasion. The Greenlanders don’t want to be part of the United States. They prefer their 300-year-old association with Denmark, which subsidizes them and provides free healthcare and education and whatever else the islanders need.
Trump doesn’t care what the residents of Greenland want. He wants the minerals of Greenland.
National security is not an issue, because the U.S. has a military base in Greenland and the right to open more.
Trump wants Greenland because he wants Greenland. He’s like a child demanding ice cream. He wants it. He’s all-powerful. He is limited only by “his own morality,” not the Constitution.
Rick Wilson calls on all the generals in the Joint Chiefs of Staff to resign en masse to stop this madness.
He writes:
The lights are burning late in the E-Ring of the Pentagon tonight, but don’t mistake the activity for preparation. It is the frantic, sweating industry of men trying to figure out how to drape a flag over an impending crime of such sweeping malice, stupidity, and toxicity that it will shame this nation for generations.
The word is out. The “stable genius” has finally moved from the fever swamp of his Social Media feed to the operational reality of the War Room. The order has been cut: The United States of America is to prepare for a kinetic invasion of Greenland. Yes, Greenland. That vast, icy, sovereign territory of Denmark, a founding member of NATO, a nation that has bled beside American GIs from the Korengal Valley to Kandahar.
Because Donald Trump wants the rocks, the ice, and the ego-stroke of a colonial land-grab, he has ordered the most powerful military in human history to become a gang of Arctic marauders
.And here is the terrifying part: the Joint Chiefs of Staff, men who have spent four decades wearing the uniform, men who talk endlessly about “honor,” “integrity,” and the “rules-based international order,” are currently sharpening the knives. They are looking at maps of Nuuk and Thule not as partners, but as targets.
A Strategic Suicide Pact
Let’s be clear: Greenland poses no threat to the United States. It is not a launchpad for terror. It is not harboring WMDs. Neither the Chinese nor the Russians are poised to take it by either guile or force.
It is an autonomous territory of a loyal, democratic ally. By executing this order, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) aren’t just following a “controversial” policy; they are participating in a strategic suicide pact that will dismantle seventy-five years of American alliancess in a single afternoon, giving China a strategic license to invade Taiwan, and Russia one to take Latvia, Lithjuaina, and Estonia, to say nothing of continuing their illegal war against Ukraine.
The moment an American boot hits Greenlandic soil without an invitation, NATO, the most successful military alliance in the history of the world, is dead. Article 5 becomes a cruel joke, a relic of a time when America’s word actually meant something. If the United States can invade its own allies for “strategic depth” or mineral rights, why would any nation in Europe ever trust us again? We are effectively telling the world that the “rules-based order” was just a mask for “might makes right.”
A Banquet for Autocrats
While our generals plot the logistics of an Arctic heist, our true adversaries are watching with a mixture of disbelief and predatory delight.
In Beijing, Xi Jinping is likely raising a glass. For years, the U.S. has lectured China on the sanctity of sovereignty and the “freedom of the seas” in the South China Sea. If the “Leader of the Free World” can annex territory in the North Atlantic because he wants to own the “real estate,” what possible argument does Washington have when the PLA decides to “unify” Taiwan? We are handing China the moral and legal precedent to set not just Taiwan, but the entire Pacific on fire. Every diplomatic lever we hold regarding Taiwan will snap the moment we violate Danish sovereignty.
In Moscow, Vladimir Putin is salivating. He has worked for a quarter-century to fracture the West, and Trump is handing him the pieces on a silver platter. A U.S. invasion of a NATO ally is the ultimate “Go” signal for Russian tanks to roll into Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. If America won’t respect the borders of its friends, why should Russia respect the borders of its “near abroad”? The Baltics, Poland, and the Caucasus will be the menu for the next Russian banquet, and we will have no moral authority to stop it.
The Corruption of the E-Ring
The Joint Chiefs are supposed to be the “sober adults” in the room. Their role is to provide candid, unvarnished military advice—to tell the President not just what he can do, but what he should do, and when an order is a catastrophic violation of our national interest.
But the E-Ring has become a place of quiet complicity. To plan this invasion is to stain the integrity of the entire general officer corps. It turns the professional military into a logistics department for a madman’s real estate ambitions. It tells every young lieutenant and NCO that the “Law of Armed Conflict” is just something we put in PowerPoints to look civilized, but that at the end of the day, we’re a mafia nation, a lawless actor, the biggest bullies on the block.
The moral injury to the force will be catastrophic. How do you look a soldier in the eye and tell them they are fighting for “freedom” while they are occupying a peaceful democratic neighbor? How do you maintain discipline in a force that knows its leadership has abandoned the Constitution for the sake of political convenience?
Perhaps the strangest feature of Trump’s invasion of Venezuela is that he left the leadership of the regime in place, removing only Maduro and his wife. Four of the six Venezuelan leaders who were indicted for criminal activities are now running the country.
On the one hand, Trump avoids the problem of a renegade army and security apparatus, which can help repress the citizenry while the U.S. schemes to steal their oil.
On the other, the Maduro regime continues to be thuggish and corrupt.
The Economist magazine conducted a poll in Venezuela and found that most people were pleased that Maduro is gone.
The polling shows that Mr Maduro, who presided over torture and economic collapse and brazenly stole the presidential election in 2024, was deeply hated. Just 13% of respondents even mildly opposed his capture. Strikingly, more than half of them said their opinion of America had improved after the raid.
Its deputy editor Robert Guest wrote this commentary in the January 10-16 issue::
Outside a supermarket in Caracas a few years ago, I saw national guardsmen checking people’s identity before they were allowed in. The logic was that, courtesy of the revolutionary government, the state-owned shop sold essential groceries at below-market prices. So you needed men with truncheons and tear-gas to make sure shoppers only came in on their state-appointed shopping days.
Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship was one of the most thuggish in the world. It was also one of the most economically incompetent. When I walked into that shop, half the shelves were bare and none of the groceries that were supposed to be on sale for less than they cost to make were, in fact, available. A combination of price controls, socialist dogma and industrial-scale corruption had dramatically impoverished a once-prosperous country. The economy shrank by 69% under Mr Maduro—a swifter decline than would normally occur during an all-out civil war. Small wonder Venezuelans in Miami danced in the streets when Donald Trump kidnapped Mr Maduro and whisked him to a courtroom in New York. But they were not dancing in Caracas, for fear of being arrested and tortured. For though the despot is gone, the rest of the regime is still in place.
The Trump administration is determined to prove that Renee Good was a domestic terrorist who was trying to kill an ICE officer by running him down with her car. He had to kill her to save his own life. The many videos that have been released demonstrate that these assertions were lies. Renee Good was attempting to flee the scene and did not strike or injure ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who fired three shots point blank at her and killed her.
The New York Times reported that key federal prosecutors in Minnesota quit rather than defend the administration’s lies. The government wanted them to investigate the victim’s widow for links to terrorism.
Three Minnesota federal prosecutors resigned over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and its reluctance to investigate the shooter, according to people with knowledge of their decision.
Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw a sprawling fraud investigation that has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.
Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent last Wednesday.
Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.
Two other senior career prosecutors, Harry Jacobs and Melinda Williams, also resigned on Tuesday. Mr. Jacobs had been Mr. Thompson’s deputy overseeing the fraud investigation, which began in 2022. Mr. Thompson, Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Williams declined to discuss the reasons they resigned
The Guardian reported that several attorneys in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division resigned in protest when they learned that the Government would investigate the victim but not the killer.
The Guardian reported.
Several attorneys in the US justice department’s civil rights division have reportedly resigned in protest at a decision not to investigate the fatal shooting of an unarmed US citizen by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis – while the FBI presses ahead with an inquiry into the victim.
At least four leaders of the division’s criminal investigations section have stepped down, according to MS NOW, citing three people it said were briefed about the departures.
It follows a decision by Harmeet Dhillon, the Donald Trump administration-aligned assistant attorney general for civil rights, not to investigate the 7 January killing of Renee Nicole Good by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, as would be usual in the case of a shooting by law enforcement.
Separately, the FBI – which seized total control of the investigation after freezing out local officials – is looking into Good’s “possible connections to activist groups”, according to the New York Times. A succession of Trump administration officials, including the president himself, have portrayed Good, without presenting evidence, as a “domestic terrorist” or “paid agitator” – while video of her confrontation with Ross appears to show her trying to steer her vehicle away from him when she was shot three times in the face…
The resignations are the latest in a flow of departures from the civil rights division since Donald Trump began his second term a year earlier. In May, the Guardian reported that more than 250 attorneys had left, been reassigned or accepted a deferred resignation offer since January, a roughly 70% reduction.
Dhillon, a former Republican official in California, and an election denier who promoted the “big lie” that Trump’s 2020 election defeat was fraudulent, was confirmed by the Senate in April. She worked quickly to realign the division’s priorities away from its longstanding work tackling discrimination and protecting the rights of marginalized groups and towards Trump’s political goals, including exposing voter fraud, which is rare, and focusing on anti-transgender issues.
“I don’t think it’s an overstatement to see this as the end of the division as we’ve known it,” a civil rights division attorney told the Guardian at the time.
Subsequently, in September, the online news outlet Notus reported that only two lawyers remained out of 36 at the justice department’s public integrity unit assigned to investigations of corrupt politicians and law enforcement.
What you need to know about Harmeet Dhillon, the lawyer appointed by Trump to lead the Civil Rights Division, is that she spent years litigating against civil rights law. Thus, she is just what you would expect: a prosecutor ready and willing to investigate the murder victim, but not the murderer.
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