Has your state passed gag orders banning books or topics? Check the PEN listing.
PEN wrote:
Over the past three years, state legislators have launched an onslaught of educational gag orders—state legislative and policy efforts to restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender, American history, and LGBTQ+ identities in educational settings.1PEN America tracks these bills in our Index of Educational Gag Orders.
During the 2023 state legislative sessions, 110 bills that PEN America defines as educational gag orders were introduced, and 10 became law. Four more gag orders were imposed via executive order or state or system regulation: two in Florida, and one each in Arkansas and California. These developments bring the number of educational gag orders that have become law or policy to a total of 40 across 21 states as of November 1, 2023.
While it is difficult to guess the total number of educators affected by these laws and policies, a conservative estimate would put the number at approximately 1.3 million public school teachers and 100,000 public college and university faculty.2 The students who have been directly affected—through canceled classes, censored teachers, and decimated school library collections—likely number in the millions. The chilling effect on public education across the country is certainly much larger.
In this report, we analyze the educational gag orders introduced and passed in the 2023 legislative sessions, as well as the impact of laws passed in 2022 and 2021. We find the following trends:
In 2023, educational gag orders changed dramatically in their shape. Their supporters, who remain overwhelmingly politically conservative, have learned from past mistakes and have new and more insidious strategies for silencing America’s educators.
Backers of these laws in K–12 schools have shifted their emphasis to bills that restrict speech about LGBTQ+ topics and identities, including numerous copycats of last year’s HB 1557 in Florida, known to critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
In higher education, legislators have introduced a new set of bills that attack the traditional support network that underpins academic freedom and free speech,including proposed restrictions on university governance, curricula, faculty tenure, DEI offices and initiatives, and accreditation agencies.
New surveys of K–12 and college teachers affected by educational gag orders show for the first time the extensive toll such laws are having on educators.
Fortunately, resistance to educational gag orders is rapidly growing. Increasing majorities of Americans have had enough, and organized opposition to educational censorship has increased across the country, with some notable successes.
In 2024, legislative efforts to censor educational institutions are likely to continue. Each of the past three legislative sessions has seen greater and more varied proposals to impose prohibitions on the freedom to learn and teach in schools, colleges, and universities. The 2024 general election is likely to contribute to ongoing escalation of this trend.
New College is the honors college of the state university system. It cared too much about race and gender, so Governor Ron DeSantis grabbed control by appointing hard-right conservatives to the New College board of trustees. The new board fired the President, a respected scholar who earned $350,000 a year and replaced her with politician Richard Corcoran, who served as Speaker of the House and State Commissioner of Education. He has no experience in higher education, but is an enthusiastic proponent of charters and vouchers, as well as DeSantis’ ally in fighting “woke,” liberalism and progressivism.
His charge is to turn this small bastion of progressivism into a small bastion of conservatism.
So far, Corcoran has succeeded in driving out one-third of the faculty and has abolished diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, as well as gender studies. He has established athletic teams and is recruiting athletes.
Mel Brooks said in his film “A History of the World, Part 1,” that “It’s good to be the king.” In Florida today, it’s good to be a crony of DeSantis.
Gabriel Arans of the Texas Observer writes about the revival of McCathyism at universities in Texas. Republicans are intent on pushing out professors they think are too liberal.
Arana writes:
Texas A&M University’s disgraceful treatment of celebrated journalism professor Kathleen McElroy should terrify anyone who cares about academic freedom, education, and equality in Texas. The state’s Republican leaders, along with Governor Greg Abbott, have launched a radical, McCarthyite crusade to purge education of liberal bias.
Only in Texas or Florida would decades of experience at the country’s most prestigious newspaper and a track record of championing newsroom inclusivity disqualify someone for a job relaunching A&M’s defunct journalism program, which was shuttered in 2004 after 55 years.
McElroy’s ordeal is just the beginning.
At first, A&M officials seemed to realize how lucky they’d been to snag McElroy, a Black woman who served in various managerial positions at the New York Times for 20 years before completing a doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she served as the director of the School of Journalism and Media and now teaches.
McElroy didn’t want to draw attention to herself, but A&M insisted on a public ceremony to celebrate her appointment as head of the university’s new journalism program. On June 13, she signed an offer accepting a tenured position in front of a crowd gathered at the school’s academic building, pending approval from the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents.
Over the next few weeks, the deal unraveled. After conservative activist site Texas Scorecard published a scare-mongering article about McElroy’s work on newsroom diversity, right-wing ideologues on the board of regents started scrutinizing her hire. Six or seven regents called and texted now-disgraced University President Katherine Banks to express concerns.
“I thought the purpose of us starting a journalism program was to get high-quality Aggie journalist [sic] with conservative values into the market,” regent Jay Graham texted Banks. “This won’t happen with someone like this leading the department.”
Another regent, Mike Hernandez, added that McElroy was “biased and progressive-leaning” and called giving her tenure a “difficult sell” for the board.
Members of a conservative alum group called the Rudder Association and other right-wing Aggies flooded Banks’ office with calls and emails.
Text messages show that Banks—who initially denied any involvement in McElroy’s bungled hiring, then was caught lying—was fully behind conservatives’ efforts to rein in liberal academia: “Kathy [Banks] told us multiple times the reason we were going to combine [the colleges of] arts and sciences together was to control the liberal nature that those professors brought to campus,” Graham wrote.
So Banks watered down the offer to McElroy. Still eager to return to her alma mater to train the next generation of journalists, she agreed to accept a revised five-year, nontenured teaching position, which would not require the regents’ approval.
“You’re a Black woman who worked at the New York Times,” José Luis Bermúdez, the interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, warned McElroy. Her hire, he said, had been caught up in “DEI hysteria.”
But then, Banks diluted the offer further, offering McElroy a one-year, “at will” position. McElroy declined and spoke about how the university had treated her with the media.
“I’m being judged by race, maybe gender,” McElroy told the Texas Tribune. “I don’t think other folks would face the same bars or challenges.”
(Editor’s note: McElroy sits on the parent board of the Texas Observer. Because of our editorial independence policy, she has no say in our editorial decisions. Alongside this piece, today the Observerpublished a heartfelt essay from McElroy about her journalism journey and the irony of being the subject of media coverage rather than the one behind it. )
Over the summer, with the governor’s support, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 17 (SB 17), which requires institutions of higher education to do away with all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and initiatives by 2024. Already, the University of Houston has shut down its Center for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as well as disbanding its LGBTQ+ Resource Center (under pressure, however, it appeared to backtrack, but it is only a matter of time before the offices are officially closed). Public universities across the state have formed committees to implement the law and seek input from the academic community. It’s clear, however, that days are numbered for all the offices and programs that help students from different backgrounds.
While the ostensible goal of anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts is to prioritize merit over race in higher education—and get rid of all the “divisive” diversity stuff that liberal academics champion—the real intent is to put radical, uppity queers, minorities, and liberals in their place. A key part of the plan is to strip liberal academics of the protections that allow them to pursue research and speak publicly without fear of reprisal; this past session, right-wing legislators tried to get rid of tenure but settled on more modest restrictions. The Senate also passed a ban on “critical race theory,” an academic theory that posits racism is embedded in society, but the House failed to pass the measure….
Anti-DEI hysteria will lead to a brain drain at Texas’ public universities. Academics at most institutions enjoy the freedom to conduct scholarship without interference. To ensure they can pursue ideas that may be unpopular to the public and pursue knowledge for its own sake, they are granted protection after demonstrating excellence in their field. The best scholars don’t want to work in a place where they have to worry that criticizing wingnut politicians will get them put on leave—as A&M did when Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick complained to administrators about criticism levied against him by opioid expert Joy Alonzo—and the best students from around the country will choose institutions that value academic freedom, openness, and inclusion rather than those under siege by the radical right.
Since Governor Ron DeSantis engineered the hostile takeover of Florida’s progressive New College, the interim president was Richard Corcoran. Corcoran was a hard-right Speaker of the House of Representatives and Dtate Commissiober of Education, in which role he led the state’s attacks on public schools and the expansion of charter schools and vouchers. His wife founded a charter school and is now associated with the Hillsdale College Barney charter schools.
He dropped out of the University of Florida and enrolled in St. Leo University, a Catholic college. After graduating, he received his law degree from Regent University, a private Christian university.
He has no previous experience as a professor, a college administrator, or a scholar. He is uniquely unqualified for a college presidency. Since he took charge of New College, one-third of the faculty has resigned, faculty have been denied tenure without reason, and students have protested the decisions of the board.
He has been successful in rightwing politics.
The original New College was founded as a school for creative, free thinkers, educated by faculty who were highly credentialed. The new DeSantis board intends to turn New College into the Hilllsdale of the South.
Corcoran claims to have boosted enrollment, which he did by recruiting athletes, not aesthetes or free thinkers.
Rob Rogers created an excellent TikTok video that shows where Chris Rufo fits into the war on public schools. Rufo invented the “critical race theory” hysteria out of whole cloth. He’s proud of his malicious role in “laying siege to the institutions.” Of course, Ron DeSantis appointed him to the board of New College as part of a rightwing takeover of that once highly esteemed liberal arts college that welcomed free-thinkers. To people like DeSantis and Rufo, free thinking is anathema.
I try to imagine a world in which everyone thought as Rufo wants them to: ban the artists, the creatives, the innovators, the dissenters, the dreamers, the people who think differently. I don’t want to live in that world. It feels like North Korea.
Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, finds a pattern in the Republican attacks on the schools and universities. Their hostility to teaching Black history, their encouragement of book banning, their strategic defunding of higher education, their treatment of teaching about race, gender, and climate change as “indoctrination”—together point to a goal: the dumbing down of American young people.
Republicans say they want to get rid of “indoctrination” but they are busily erasing free inquiry and critical thinking. What do they actually want? Indoctrination.
He reminds us of the immortal words of former President Donald J. Trump: “I love the uneducated.” Republicans do not want students to think critically about racism or the past. They do not want them to reflect on anything that makes them “uncomfortable.” They want to shield them from “divisive concerns.” They want them to imbibe a candy-coated version of the past, not wrestle with hard truths.
He writes:
For reasons that may not be too hard to understand, Republicans and conservatives seem to be intent on turning their K-12 schools, colleges and universities into plantations for raising a crop of ignorant and unthinking students.
Donald Trump set forth the principle during his 2016 primary campaign, when he declared, “I love the poorly educated.”
In recent months, the right-wing attack on public education has intensified. The epicenter of the movement is Florida under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, where the faculty and course offerings of one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges, New College, have been eviscerated purportedly to wipe out what DeSantis calls “ideological indoctrination.”
The state’s K-12 schools have been authorized to supplement their curricula with animated cartoons developed by the far-right Prager University Foundation that flagrantly distort climate science and America’s racial history, the better to promote fossil fuels, undermine the use of renewable energy and paint a lily-white picture of America’s past.
In Texas, the State Library and Archives Commission is quitting the American Library Assn., after a complaint by a Republican state legislator accusing the association of pushing “socialism and Marxist ideology.”
In Arkansas, state education officials told schools that they may not award credit for the Advanced Placement course in African American history. (Several school districts said they’d offer students the course anyway.) This is the course that Florida forced the College Board to water down earlier this year by alleging, falsely, that it promoted “critical race theory.”
I must interject here that I’m of two minds about this effort. On the one hand, an ignorant young electorate can’t be good for the republic; on the other, filling the workforce with graduates incapable of critical thinking and weighed down by a distorted conception of the real world will reduce competition for my kids and grandkids for jobs that require knowledge and brains.
Let’s examine some of these cases in greater depth.
Prager University, or PragerU, isn’t an accredited institution of higher learning. It’s a dispenser of right-wing charlatanism founded by Dennis Prager, a right-wing radio host. The material approved for use in the schools includes a series of five- to 10-minute animated videos featuring the fictional Leo and Layla, school-age siblings who travel back in time to meet historical figures.
One encounter is with Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist. The goal of the video is to depict “Black lives matter” demonstrations as unrestrained and violent — “Why are they burning a car?” Leo asks while viewing a televised news report. The animated Douglass speaks up for change achieved through “patience and compromise.”
This depiction of Douglass leaves experts in his life and times aghast. Douglass consistently railed against such counsel. Of the Compromise of 1850, which brought California into the union but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act — arguably the most detested federal law in American history — he stated that it illustrated how “slavery has shot its leprous distillment through the life blood of the nation.” In 1861, he thundered that “all compromises now are but as new wine to old bottles, new cloth to old garments. To attempt them as a means of peace between freedom and slavery, is as to attempt to reverse irreversible law.”
Patience? The video depicts Douglass quoting from an 1852 speech to a Rochester anti-slavery society in which he said “great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages.”
But it doesn’t include lines from later in the speech, reproaching his audience for prematurely celebrating the progress of abolition: “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; … all your religious parade and solemnity, … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
Another video in the series parrots the fossil fuel industry’s talking points against wind and solar power: Standing over the corpse of a bird supposedly slain by flying into a wind turbine, the schoolkids’ interlocutor states, “Like many people … you’ve been misled about renewable energy, and their impact on the environment…. Windmills kill so many birds, it’s hard to track how many…. Wind farms and solar farms disrupt huge amounts of natural habitat.”
Acid rain, pollution, global warming — those consequences of fossil fuel energy aren’t mentioned. The video ends with a pitch for nuclear power, never mind the unsolved question of what to do with its radioactive waste products.
PragerU’s sedulous attack on renewables perhaps shouldn’t be much a surprise: Among its big donors is the Wilks family, which derives its fortune from fracking and which approved “future payment” of $6.25 million to PragerU in 2013.
In a nutshell, the Sarasota institution possessed a well-deserved reputation as one of the nation’s outstanding havens for talented, independent-minded students. Then came DeSantis. He summarily replaced its board of trustees with a clutch of right-wing stooges including Christopher Rufo, known for having concocted the panic over critical race theory out of thin air and then marketed it as a useful culture war weapon to unscrupulous conservative politicians, including DeSantis.
Rufo and his fellows fired the university president and installed a sub-replacement-level GOP timeserver, Richard Corcoran, in her place. Faculty and students have fled. Students who stayed behind and were in the process of assembling their course schedules for the coming year are discovering at the last minute that the courses are no longer offered because their teachers have been fired or quit.
Instead of ambitious scholars committed to open inquiry, Corcoran has recruited athletes to fill out the student body, even though the college has no athletic fields for many of them to play on. According to USA Today, New College now has 70 baseball players, nearly twice as many as the University of Florida’s Division I NCAA team.
More to the point, the average SAT and ACT scores and high-school grade point averages have fallen from the pre-Corcoran level, while most of the school’s merit-based scholarships have gone to athletes. New College, in other words, has transitioned from a top liberal arts institution into a school that places muscle-bound underachievers on a pedestal. DeSantis calls this “succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission.”
Finally, West Virginia University. Under its president, Gordon Gee — who previously worked his dubious magic at Brown Universityand Ohio State University, among other places — the school built lavish facilities despite declining enrollments. The construction program at the land grant university contributed to a $45-million deficit for the coming year, with expectations that it would rise to $75 million by 2028.
But the main problem was one shared by many other public universities — the erosion of public funding. As the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy points out, “if West Virginia lawmakers had simply kept higher education funding at the same levels as a decade ago, West Virginia University would have an estimated additional $37.6 million in state funding for [fiscal year] 2024, closing the majority of this year’s budget gap.”
The decision on which programs to shutter at WVU points to a shift in how public university trustees see the purpose of their schools, trying to align them more with economic goals set by local industries rather than the goal of providing a well-rounded education to a state’s students. Trustees in some states, including North Carolina and Texas, have injected themselves into academic decisions traditionally left to administrators, often for partisan political reasons.
When it comes to interference in educational policies by conservatives, such as what’s happened in Florida, Texas and Arkansas, there’s no justification for taking these measures at face value — that is, as efforts to remove “indoctrination” from the schools. The truth is that the right-wing effort serves the purposes of white supremacists and advocates of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination — they’re moving to inject indoctrination that conforms more to their own ideologies.
Take the attack on critical race theory, or at least the version retailed by Rufo and his ilk. “The right has reduced CRT to an incendiary dog whistle,” the Black scholar Robin D.G. Kelley of UCLA has observed, by caricaturing a four-decade-long scholarly effort to analyze “why antidiscrimination law not only fails to remedy structural racism but further entrenches racial inequality” into “a racist plot to teach white children to hate themselves, their country, and their ‘race.’”
(The inclusion of Kelley’s work in the AP African American Studies course was cited as a “concern” by Florida officials in their rationale for rejecting the course; Kelley’s work was suppressed by the College Board in its effort to make the course more acceptable to the state Department of Education.)
These attacks are couched in the vocabulary of “parents’ rights” and student freedom, but they don’t serve the students at all, nor do they advance the rights of parents interested in a good, comprehensive education for their children, as opposed to one dictated by the most narrow-minded ideologues in their state.
Where will it end? Florida’s ham-fisted educational policies won’t produce graduates with the intellectual equipment to succeed in legitimate universities, much less in the world at large. The only university many will be qualified to attend will be Prager U, and that won’t be good for anyone.
Please sign up now for the 10th Annual Conference of the Network for Public Education on October 28-29 in D.C.
We have a lineup of stellar speakers, including Randi Weingarten, Becky Pringle, and Dr. Marvin Dunn, the leading scholar of African American history in Florida.
The Miami Herald published an editorial describing the climate of fear that’s descended on the classrooms of Florida. That’s exactly what Republicans want, says the editorial board. Once people start self-censoring, the battle for censorship is won.
The editorial board wrote:
The fear is the point.
Schools in Florida have been canceling — and then, in some cases, reinstating — Advanced Placement psychology courses for high school students because they’ve been told by the College Board, or simply believe, the classes would violate the state’s ban on lessons involving sexual orientation and gender identity.
The worry is understandable — and a bonus for a state intent on waging culture wars in schools and crushing any dissent. If you can get people to self-censor, you’ve pretty much won the battle.
School districts in Miami-Dade and Broward counties announced Wednesday that they would be among those offering the course, although in Broward it will be require parents to “opt-in.” The districts’ decisions came after Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr., who is from Miami and once taught in the public schools here, said the class could be taught.
But the fact that school districts have to publicly announce their intent to teach a class that has been around since 1993 is indicative of the problem. Under Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his lockstep Legislature, fear has seeped into schools. Teachers and school districts are rightfully worried about violating the Parental Rights in Education Act, the “Don’t say gay” law that outlawed sexual orientation and gender identity teachings. The penalties for a violation are potential career-enders, teaching licenses suspended or revoked..
This all happened after the College Board, the New York City-based nonprofit that manages AP courses in the United States, said last week that it wouldn’t recognize Florida’s AP psychology course and — critically — wouldn’t give students college credit for it because the state wanted any mention of sexual orientation and gender identity stripped out. Any course that censors required content cannot be labeled “AP” or “Advanced Placement,” the board said. Students applying for college rely on AP credits as a plus on their applications.
And school is about to start — next week in Miami-Dade and the following week in Broward.
So now the state says it’s OK to teach the course, but the education world is jittery, with good reason. Can the state be trusted?
In Leon County, where Tallahassee is located, Superintendent Rocky Hanna said the district would offer the class, but he is clearly wary. On Twitter, he wrote: “Our teachers have some concerns but we are going to take the commissioner of education’s word when he says that Advanced Placement Psychology may be taught in its entirety,” Hanna said.
He added that he has told the staff to “respect the law and follow the law but not to fear the law.”
This is where we are in Florida: Instead of supporting our public school teachers, we are instilling fear and worry. Instead of celebrating their hard work, we are threatening them with license suspensions if they dare to cross the power of the mighty state.
Teaching has always required courage. In Florida, it now requires a whole new brand of bravery.
Thom Hartmann is an insightful, incisive journalist and blogger. In this terrifying post, he describes what to expect if the Republican Party wins the presidency.
Please read and react.
Thom Hartmann
So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a GOP president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher…
Hartmann writes:
Every day that goes by, even with yesterday’s newest indictment, looks more and more like Donald Trump will be the GOP’s standard bearer in 2024. After all, his popularity stood at 44 percent when NY DA Alvin Bragg indicted him; it then rose to 49 percent when he was indicted in the documents crime; following his conviction for raping E. Jean Caroll it rose to 54 percent among Republicans.
But even if he’s not the candidate, Republican primary voters will demand a candidate with the same affection for Putin and other dictators; the same disdain for racial, religious, and gender minorities; the same abusive attitude toward women and girls; the same faux embrace of Confederate and hillbilly values and hatred of city-dwellers and college graduates; the same cavalier attitude toward guns and fossil fuels.
There’s also the growing possibility that Trump or another MAGA Republican could win the White House. Yesterday, both the New York Times and CNN reported on polls showing that Trump and Biden are right now at a dead heat.
And even if Trump collapses in the polls as the result of the indictments, which is unlikely (Netanyahu is under indictment for bribery and some pretty terrible stuff and he just got re-elected), there are numerous other Republicans who would love to take his place.
And no matter who it is, if they are MAGA inclined, Trump has shown them where there are levers of power and corruption that are consequential in ways that they never dreamed of before him.
Joe Biden, at 81, faces multiple possible personal scenarios that could pull him out of the race. No Labels and the Green Party’s candidates (presumably Joe Manchin and Cornell West) could pull enough votes from Biden to hand the election to Trump as Jill Stein did in three swing states in 2016 (she pulled more votes in each of those states than Trump’s margin of victory).
The prosecution of Trump (which almost certainly won’t be resolved before the election — and it’s not even remotely possible that appeals would be resolved by then — because of Garland’s dithering for two years) could backfire politically and make him into a popular martyr even with Republicans who disliked him before.
And don’t discount the impact Putin throwing millions of rubles into social media can have: his previous fleet of trolls overwhelming social media helped get Trump elected in 2016 and drove Brits to make the crazy decision to separate from the European Union.
So, it’s important to examine what a second Trump or 2025 MAGA presidency would look like, what effect it would have on America and the world, and how it will impact average Americans.
Forewarned, after all, is forearmed, and all these predictions are based on past behavior and public statements:
Women make up 51 percent of the American populace but they won’t be spared by a MAGA presidency.
MAGA voters celebrate Trump’s “proof of manhood” through his multiple sexual assaults, from his alleged rape of 13-year-old Katie Johnson (with Jeffrey Epstein) to the adult E. Jean Carroll and more than 20 others. He publicly bragged that he just “grabs them by the…” whenever he wants, and Republicans — including more than half of all white women voters — ran to the polls to mark his name on their ballots.
The MAGA base supports bans on abortion: the white nationalist part of that base is fervent about having more white babies (and middle class white women are the most likely to get abortions when they’re legal, according to these people).
Catholics and evangelicals even support bans on birth control, an issue that’s already been floated by Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and in several state legislatures. Fully 195 Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against protecting birth control from state bans. And all of the Republicans on the Court are conservative Catholics (Gorsuch attends his wife’s church, but was raised Catholic).
Additionally, MAGA Republicans support ending no-fault divorce and limiting alimony, putting women back under husband’s thumbs; lowering the marriage age for girls to as low as 12, as Republicans have already attempted in Idaho, Wyoming, Tennessee, Missouri, and Louisiana; and seizing and monitoring the health and doctor’s records of all childbearing-age women to catch early pregnancies so those women can be detained or surveilled “for their own good” (yes, it’s already happened).
The LGBTQ+ community will come under assault in ways not seen for decades.
Like in Germany in 1933, the trans communitywill be the first to come under assault, a process that’s already begun as Red state after Red state enacts laws banning gender-affirming healthcare. Drag queens are already criminalized in multiple states.
Gays and lesbians won’t be far behind; Republicans are already trying to outlaw gay marriage and adoption. Three-quarters of all House Republicans voted against a Democratic bill protecting gay marriage; all but one Republican on the House Appropriations Committee voted for a Republican bill that would allow states to ban gay and lesbian parents from adopting.
Stochastic terrorism against the LGBTQ+ community will explode, and, in a throwback to the 1980s (when Reagan refused to say the word “AIDS” for 8 long years as tens of thousands, including close friends of mine, died) and before, rural law enforcement will often yawn when queer people are assaulted or even murdered.
Terror against racial and religious minorities will become routine.
The last time Trump was president and sanctioned a “very fine people on both sides” climate of hate and bigotry, incidents of lone-wolf terrorism exploded. Jews executed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue; Blacks gunned down in a supermarket in Buffalo and executed at Mother Emmanuel church in Charleston; Hispanics slaughtered in El Paso. All of the killers cited or wrote what were essentially MAGA or MAGA-aligned propaganda instruments as part of their motivation.
When minority communities rise up in indignation and step out into the streets to demand protection from roving bands of street Nazis, armed vigilantes will threaten and even kill them with impunity. As I noted yesterday, Kyle Rittenhouse is now lionized by Republicans and three states have passed into law provisions that hold people who kill protestors with their cars free from prosecution.
American support for democracy around the world will end and Putin will destroy Ukraine.
During his first four years, Trump did everything he could to ridicule and minimize our democratic allies and suck up to strongman dictators around the world.
He tried to blackmail Ukraine’s president and then withheld defensive weapons from that country when Zelenskyy refused to go along.
He told the world that he trusts Putin more than America’s intelligence services. After meeting privately with Putin, he demanded a list of all of America’s spies and their stations around the world; within months, the CIA reported that their assets were being murderedwith an unprecedented speed and efficiency.
He or his son-in-law conveyed top-secret documents to the brutal murderer MBS in Saudi Arabia that enabled him to stage a coup and seize control of that nation, a gift for which the Trump family has already received at least $2.5 billion with more coming every day.
Trump has now said that he will end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours.” His strategy? As Mike Pence (who would know) said, “The only way you’d solve this war in a day is if you gave Vladimir Putin what he wanted.”
Putin’s allies, in fact, have told the press that his main strategy for seizing all of Ukraine is to wait for Trump to re-take the White House (and, of course, he’ll do everything he can to make that happen). And just last week, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump came right out and saidthat he’d end all arms support to Ukraine on day one.
Seeing that America will no longer defend democracies, China will take Taiwan and North Korea may well attack South Korea. It could trigger a nuclear World War III, although instead of America being the “bulwark of freedom” as we were in the 1940s, that burden will fall to Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Reagan’s Republican War on Workers will resume and even pick up steam.
The Heritage Foundation already has a 900+ page plan to change the American government, stripping the DOJ, FBI, FCC and the Fed of their independence while ending most union rights and effectively outlawing strikes.
Billionaires will receive more tax cuts, Social Security and Medicare will be fully privatized, and public schools will be replaced with vouchers for private, segregated, religious academies as has already happened under Republican administrations in Arizona and Florida.
The EPA and other regulatory agencies that protect workers, consumers, and the environment will be gutted to the point of impotence in the face of corporate and billionaire assaults.
Efforts to mitigate the climate emergency will be rolled back and fossil fuel extraction and use will explode.
The world just lived through the hottest month in human history; ocean waters off Florida are at the temperature Jacuzzi recommends for their hot tubs; the world’s oceans are dying and winter sea ice isn’t forming in Antarctica.
Right now we humans are adding heat to the atmosphere (because of higher levels of greenhouse gasses) at a rate identical to 345,600 Hiroshima bombs going off in our atmosphere every day: four nuclear bombs per second, every second, minute, and hour of every day.
In response, our planet is screaming at us.
Fossil fuel billionaires and their shills, however, are unconcerned as they continue to fund climate denial nonprofits and Republican politicians who claim it’s all a hoax. They apparently believe their vast wealth will insulate them from the most dire effects.
And they’re probably right: a third of poverty-stricken Bangladesh was underwater this year, as drought, floods, wildfires, heat domes, bomb cyclones, tornadoes, derechos, and typhoons ravaged America with unprecedented ferocity. Increasingly, those without the financial means to withstand weather disasters are killed or wiped out, losing their family homes and often their livelihoods.
Scientists tell us we may have as few as fiveyears, and certainly not more than 20, to end our use of fossil fuels and fully transition to clean renewables. Even within the five-year window it’s technically feasible, but if Trump or another MAGA Republican is elected, civilization-ending weather and the death of much of humanity is virtually assured.
We must wake up America.
So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a MAGA president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher.
Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly says he opposes indoctrination in schools. Yet his administration in early July approved materials from a conservative group that says it’s all about indoctrination and “changing minds.”
The Florida Department of Education determined that educational materials geared toward young children and high school students created by PragerU, a nonprofit co-founded by conservative radio host Dennis Prager, were in alignment with the state’s standards on how to teach civics and government to K-12 students.
The content, some of which is narrated by conservative personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Candance Owens, features cartoons, five-minute video history lessons and story-time shows for young children. It is part of a brand called PragerU Kids. And the lessons share a common message: Being pro-American means aligning oneself to mainstream conservative talking points.
“We are in the mind-changing business and few groups can say that,” Prager says in a promotional video for PragerU. He reiterated this sentiment this summer at a conference for the conservative group Moms for Liberty in Philadelphia, saying it is “fair” to say PragerU indoctrinates children.
“It’s true we bring doctrines to children,” Prager told the group. “But what is the bad about our indoctrination?”
The bottom line message: The US is the best place ever. Its history is unblemished by any troubling episodes. Slavery was practiced in many societies, and white people should be credited with ending it.
PragerU is not an accredited university and it publicly says the group is a “force of good” against the left. It’s a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles that produces videos that touch on a range of themes, including climate policies (specifically how “energy poverty, not climate change” is the real crisis), the flaws of Canada’s government-run healthcare system (and how the American privatized system is better), and broad support for law enforcement (and rejection of Black Lives Matter).
In some cases, the videos tell kids that their teachers are “misinformed” or “lying.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 