Andrew Kirell writes: This morning, Pete Hegseth unloaded on the press again, this time invoking the Bible and likening journalists to the Pharisees, the New Testament figures who opposed Jesus.
Hegseth accused the press of constant negativity despite Trump’s “historic and important success” in Iran. “Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what side some of you are actually on,” he added.
He then launched into a lengthy biblical analogy, describing the Pharisees (and thus journalists) as “self-appointed elites of their time” who “witnessed a literal miracle” yet sought to “explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda.” The “legacy, Trump-hating press,” like the Pharisees, he said, is “calibrated only to impugn.”
The sermon-like rant stood out, given the recent dust-up over Trump sharing an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus — a post he later deleted and claimed was meant to depict a “doctor.” The White House may have backed away from the religious comparison, but Hegseth’s comments only seem to resurrect it. “So…they are doubling down on Trump being Jesus?” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller wrote.
Stelter’s take
This sentence from Hegseth was the tell: “I just can’t help but notice the endless stream of garbage, the relentlessly negative coverage, you cannot resist pedaling.” He just can’t help himself.
The “holy war” type talk, insinuating that doubting Trump is like doubting Christ, was both deeply offensive and surprisingly insecure.
Gretchen Carlson put it perfectly on X: “As a Christian, how dare you use religion to shame those who simply ask questions.”
As a practical matter, a defense secretary who thinks the press is ignoring US military victories (the press has not done that, but I digress) would provide greater access to service members and share videos from the war zone. There are lots of ways to do that. But Hegseth has been pushing the press out. He’s not even giving fulsome access to MAGA media outlets.
>> Bottom line: Hegseth’s media-bashing hasn’t worked. The polling hasn’t budged. Trump and Hegseth’s messaging is not moving public opinion, which remains broadly opposed to the war.
Imagine this: The multi-billionaire Ellison family, which recently bought CBS, is currently the winner of a bidding war for Warner Brothers Discovery, which includes CNN and other news and entertainment outlets. The total deal is worth $111 billion. The Ellisons won’t buy Warner Brothers Discovery on their own. Some $24 billion of the $111 billion deal will be advanced by three Middle Eastern states: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. Saudi Arabia is putting up $10 billion of the $24 billion.
The Ellisons say that these investors will have no role in corporate governance or policymakers. It’s possible, but can you imagine CBS or CNN airing a Frank documentary on women’s rights in Arabic nations?
Ellison’s Middle Eastern Money: It’s happening: David Ellison is set to take $24 billion in Middle Eastern money to fund his acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, raising a mountain of ethical and regulatory questions. The WSJ’s Jessica Toonkel and Lauren Thomas reported that about $10 billion will come from Saudi Arabia, an anti-free speech country with a long list of human rights abuses, including cracking down on independent journalism. Now the country will be part-owner of a giant U.S. media conglomerate with not only tremendous cultural influence, but which will own and control two newsrooms, CNN and CBS News.
The funding, of course, has already raised concerns on Capitol Hill, where Democrats have demanded the Treasury Department conduct a thorough review of the transaction. Of course, given that the Treasury Department is under Donald Trump’s control, that is unlikely. But if Democrats win in November, they could drag Ellison in to testify—and Ellison will still need approval from the states and the European Union.
Norm Eisen was the White House ethics officer during the Obama administration. There were no financial scandals during the Obama administration; President Obama did not profit from his office during his presidency.
The financial conflicts of interest during the Trump administration are too numerous to mention.
This post is also an advertisement for The Contrarian, where this post appeared. It is a premier site for those trying to save democracy from Trump’s authoritarianism and grifting.
Eisen writes:
When I was the Obama White House ethics czar during the Great Recession, I would not even allow the president to refinance his modest family home in Chicago. He was regulating the banks in a time of crisis, and it wouldn’t have looked right.
That’s not exactly the approach that President Trump, his cronies, and their families have adopted. I’ve written before about the Top 10 most outrageous corruption scandals of this administration. This week, my Democracy Defenders Fund colleagues and I added another item to the list. Working with former New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin, we filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission urging it investigate ALT5 Sigma(ALTS).
This company boasts Trump’s son Eric as a board member and Trump Special Envoy Steve Witkoff’s son Zach as its board chair. Its history in recent months is one of serious failures of compliance, breakdowns of governance, and profoundly concerning financial connections with another Trump and Witkoff-linked venture, World Liberty Financial (WLF).
The story starts in August, when ALTS told the world that it had raised $1.5 billion through various investment vehicles. ALTS then moved the money to WLF by buying $750 million of its $WLFI governance tokens, about 7% of total supply. As detailed in our letter, “ALTS appears to have steered as much as $500 million of private investor money directly into the pockets of the Trump family and their associates.” When this money hit their wallets, Zach Witkoff (co-founder and CEO of WLF) and Eric Trump (also a WLF co-founder) assumed leadership roles on the board of ALTS.
These facts give rise to questions that are of the utmost importance to the integrity of our financial markets and of our democracy, as our letter explains. The most profound: who were the investors who funded the ALTS $WLFI purchase–and did they do so in order to get in the good graces of the Trump administration?
The concerns about this transaction are only deepened by what went on in the period in and around this massive financial transfer to WLF. In August, ALTS disclosed that several months earlier a Rwandan court had ruled that ALT5 Sigma Canada Inc., a subsidiary of the company, and its former principal were criminally liable for illicit enrichment and money laundering, ordering imprisonment, fines, and dissolution of the subsidiary. Shortly thereafter, the CEO of ALTS was suspended without explanation, auditors changed multiple times within just a few weeks, and the company failed to meet the due date for filing its annual report. It’s little wonder that ALTS was at risk of being delisted from Nasdaq and its share price has plummeted. Despite the immense capital influx from these transactions, the share piece has declined by around 75%. The company is looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for the 2025 fiscal year.
Given these troubling data points, our letter urges the SEC’s Enforcement Division to “carefully examine these issues because they indicate, both individually and collectively, that ALTS may have engaged in a number of securities violations, thereby harming investors and financial marketplace writ large.” This is not just a story about corporate governance. It is a test of whether the rules that protect investors and the integrity of American markets still apply when political power and private profit intersect.
Our SEC letter calling for an investigation of ALTS is just one of many similar filings we’ve made. This one is outrageous enough that even Trump’s SEC may investigate. But whatever they do, we’re laying down a marker for the press, the public and other enforcement authorities. Whether for state attorneys general and securities regulators, a future more independent Congress, or future federal regulators, there will be a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Meanwhile, we must all demand answers.
Our ability to continue pushing back against Trump and his cronies’ web of dubious dealings is, of course, supported by your paid subscriptions. We are deeply grateful that you Contrarians make this work possible as well as our weekly pro-democracy Contrarian coverage. See for yourself in this week’s roundup of our best content produced by my terrific colleagues:
Jen Rubin wrote on the cascade of civil and political failures behind Trump’s genocidal threats on Tuesday: “some muddled tale of a diplomatic breakthrough should in no way diminish the illegality, the horror, or the frightful intrusion of religious zealotry into our politics.”
Brian O’Neill wrote on how Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be helping to produce the strongest Islamic Republic since 1979. “It would be one of the great strategic self-inflicted wounds in Middle East policy.”
On the podcast this week, Jen spoke with Robert P. Jones about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s crusader rhetoric and the dangers of Trump’s “refrigerator-magnet style” theology, and with Joyce Vance about Iran after the ceasefire, the Republicans finding a shred of conscience, and more.
Norman Ornstein thinks it’s time to call an emergency an emergency and invoke the 25th Amendment. “We have a malignant narcissistic psychopath as president, with control over the military and the atomic arsenal, who is deteriorating mentally before our very eyes.”
Stacey Young wrote on just how much Pam Bondi’s reign as AG degraded the Justice Department: an exodus of talent, criminal cases shut down, an utter loss of good faith with the courts and more. “Now, the best way we can fight for the department is from the outside.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) joined Jen to consider the next attorney general—and the next vacant cabinet seat—amid war with Iran. “I think Kash Patel stands a very good chance of being shown the door.”
Stacey Abrams wrote on how Republicans have made disadvantaged communities a scapegoat for failed economic policies, including a Texas comptroller who quietly decertified more than 15,000 minority- and women-owned businesses in December.
Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera of Common Cause reminded us that, despite what the Trump regime claimed, ICE has never left Minnesota and is continuing operations across the state. “The media may not be all over it … but the need is still there.”
John Boyd, founder of the Black Farmers Association, spoke to April Ryan to sound the alarm on Trump’s devastating attack on small and minority farmers. “There’s going to be a lot of generational land that changes hands.”
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf wrote on how the Trump administration is putting the onus on states to fund social services — while making it impossible for them to provide those services.
Amid the many hype and doom cycles about AI, Adam Conner of the Center for American Progress gave us a breakdown of what AI is actually doing right now — to the economy, to warfare, to your job.
Josh Levs wrote on the problem with AI summaries having taken the place of traditional media as the first source of information for many, even when it comes to war — and how this is compounded by the media’s acquiescence to AI-first search.
Tim Dickinson gave us a rundown of all the things Trump is naming after himself, which somehow includes both the Institute of Peace and the “most lethal warship ever built” at the tip of the iceberg.
Meredith Blake checked in with the second lady, who thinks kids should read more but doesn’t have much to say about the Trump administration defunding libraries (or anything else).
Azza Cohen took a nuanced look at Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, as both gender-empowerment opportunist and persevering target of media sexism. “That a woman can be the head of a political party named ‘brothers’ is some kind of ironic victory.”
This week, we saw anti-war protests nationwide in New York, Illinois, Washington, D.C., Missouri, Tennessee, and more. Get help organizing from Indivisible, find protests in your area at mobilize.us, and send us your protest photos at submit@contrariannews.org.
Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX) joined Jen Rubin with an update on the ongoing standoff over ICE funding and why there is still cause for hope. “The point really is people’s freedoms … so we’re not going to vote for one more penny until these reforms are done.”
Carron J. Phillips wrote on how the 2026 Women’s Final Four will be deservedly remembered for one thing — and it wasn’t the championship game. “Sports are more enjoyable when what’s at stake is more than the final score.”
This column is based on our letter and associated materials
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Philosophy professor Jonathan Caravello, 38, was charged with assaulting federal agents while engaged in an anti-ICE demonstration at a cannabis farm in California. Demonstrators threw rocks at ICE agents. The federal agents rolled tear gas canisters at the demonstrators. Caravello picked up a tear gas canister and threw it back, over the heads of the ICE agents.
No federal agent was hit or harmed by the canister thrown by Caravello. If convicted, he faced up to 20 years in prison.
The jury deliberated for two hours and cleared him of all charges.
LOS ANGELES — A California philosophy lecturer accused of assaulting federal agents after removing a tear gas canister agents had thrown into a crowd of people protesting an immigration raid was found not guilty by a jury on Thursday.
While the U.S. has eliminated its agencies that speak to the world, like Voice of America, Iran has been producing videos mocking the United States, portraying its history as a long series of atrocities, and linking the current war to Jeffrey Epstein.Virginia Heffernan tells the story in The New Republic.
She writes:
There’s a new way to teach American history. It’s not woke. But it’s not patriotic, either. It’s not the 1619 Project or the 1776 project.
It’s the Iranian History of the United States, as seen in “One Vengeance for All,” the most cosmological of the recent pieces of pro-Iran Lego-style agitprop. This is the series you’ve probably caught a glimpse of—the obscene, masterful, and viral AI videos that have hammered the internet since the start of Donald Trump’s ruinous war in Iran. The series, which has been labeled “slopaganda,” is sometimes called “Operation Epstein Fury.”
The strongest entries in the series are producedby an anonymous student activist group called Explosive News (Akhbar Enfejari). Shorter videos in the same style, which look less polished, are reportedly fan-made. All of the videos treat the war with max cartoonery and max ideological torque. Russian and Iraniangovernment accounts regularly boost them. (China has also made its own anti-American propaganda pegged to the war.)
Scare up the extremely violent videos at your own risk, but here’s a plot summary. In an early one, Trump, panicked about his culpability in the Epstein affair, smashes a red button to strike Iran as a distraction. After Iran strikes back and slams shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu run scared from Iran’s strategic genius and godlike military might. In the next few videos, the U.S. Army loses personnel, planes, helicopters, and popular support; capital markets spiral. Coffins draped in American flags pile up.
“One Vengeance for All” stands out from the rest because it contains more American history than breaking news. And what a way to see our once-promising nation. The Iranian History of the United States features no pilgrims, Revolutionary War, Civil War, or wars in Europe. Also absent: slavery, civil rights, feminism, and unions.
Instead, you get 53 seconds of 600 years of American jingoism and genocide. The video opens on an AI caricature of an Indigenous man in a headdress looking to the heavens from the Western plains. Cut to a little boy carrying a dead infant amid smoldering rubble in Hiroshima. These are ghosts.
From there to Vietnam. A middle-aged woman carries a scythe, in a rice field, and again looks skyward. Then come slain Iranian leaders: Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February. All ghosts. Now there’s a girl at a refugee camp in Gaza. We’re given to understand from her hopeful expression that help is coming, and that the help is the Iranian army, though it has no intention of “liberating” or “saving” the ghosts. Instead, with centuries of pent-up resentment in its arsenal, Iran will avenge their suffering with fire and fury.
About two-thirds of the way in, the narrative rounds on the American people, and finds Trump’s victims among us. A blond girl in a pink dress, no older than 6, is pictured in a tropical landscape. It’s Epstein Island. The island’s enigmatic blue-striped building, which some speculate is a reference to the Israeli flag, stands behind her. This girl is also a victim of American imperialism, courtesy of the Trump-Epstein class that merged capital and executive power; private-sector monopolies with political world domination.
This girl’s Iranian counterpart appears in the next image, a young schoolgirl in a blue coat and white hijab, and she seals the connection. She’s abandoned in the deserted courtyard of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Hormozgan Province. This is the schoolyard where around 170 people were murdered, elementary school students, when the school was bombed by U.S. forces back in February on the war’s first day.
At once, a sisterhood of ghosts coalesces. From Epstein Island to southern Iran, schoolgirls pair with schoolgirls, the specters of abused children whose lives or spirits have been extinguished by sadistic American tyrants.
Trump is globally known for sex crimes and, like Hegseth, charges of sex crimes—and the Iranian videos depict the two men explicitly as rapists. In one video, the Lego Trump has doll-like girl figures on his bed and lap, and Hegseth is shown in military garb, repeatedly committing rape. Assaults on girls are the modus vivendi of these videos’ versions of Trump and Hegseth.
These sequences are not idle trolling. Rape is, of course, a crime against humanity. But rape is implicated more immediately in the brief for this war, which centers not on strategic goals but on the relentless use of violence against innocents to humiliate an entire people.
As Jamelle Bouie put it recently, “Forcing others to submit through the indiscriminate use of force does not really sound like war. That does sound like something else. It sounds like rape.” He concluded that the ideology of Trump and Hegseth is “the ideology of the rapist.”
After 9/11, President Bush used to tell Americans that our enemies resented “our way of life.” In his memorable “Why Do They Hate Us?” speech of September 20, 2001, Bush answered his own question, “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”
This may or may not have been true of the terrorists a quarter century ago. But it’s not at all true now of Iran, which the U.S. attacked without permission from the people or provocation from Iran. Iran hates the American government for its cruelty toward hundreds of millions of people across six centuries. It’s hard not to see the logic in it.
In Trump, the ideology of the rapist was unmistakable a decade ago, when he crowed about the joy he takes in humiliating human beings by mauling their crotches. With this war, he’s trying, as usual, for highly aestheticized spectacles of humiliation, and he’s getting them—but not for Iran. For himself, and for the United States.
In Arizona, the state charter board did the right thing: it planned to close an online charter school with a long record of failure. But the owner of the charter school was a big Republican donor. And he was a multi-millionaire, who had been richly rewarded by his ownership of Primavera. He had a meeting of the minds with the State Superintendent of Schools, Tom Horne. Horne is a strong believer in choice. Suddenly, Primavera’s grades were recalculated and closure of the piggy bank was off the table.
PHOENIX — For more than a year, Arizona’s largest online charter school, Primavera, and its multi-millionaire owner, Damian Creamer, faced the very real possibility of being shut down.
Plagued by poor academic performance and mounting scrutiny, the State Charter Board had already taken multiple steps toward revoking the school’s charter in 2025.
But in a surprising turn of events, Primavera has been given a lifeline — thanks to an intervention from Republican State Schools Chief Tom Horne.
The decision sparked frustration among board members who had spent months working toward closure.
Longtime board member James Swanson, reflecting the general mood of the 11-member board.
He said the board acted within its authority to hold Primavera accountable after students recorded “D” letter grades for three consecutive years ending in 2024.
Board Chairwoman Jessica Montierth echoed that sentiment after the 9-2 vote, noting the significant time and effort invested in the case.
“Our authority is based on following through with policy and procedure, and that’s what we have done,” she said, adding that the outcome was difficult to accept given the circumstances.
The controversy surrounding Primavera intensified following a 12News investigation early last year.
The 12News Investigates report in February 2025 revealed that the school’s owner, Creamer, had paid himself $24 million since 2017.
At the same time, the school consistently underperformed academically as the Charter Board gave Primavera its worst annual rating four times: Falls Far Below Standard. Two times, Primavera got the second-worst rating: Does Not Meet Standard.
The free-wheeling at Primavera is a byproduct of Arizona’s loosely regulated charter school industry that allows owners to make as much money as possible for years with public funds.
But in March 2025, the Charter Board formally voted to begin the process of shutting the school down after it received three consecutive annual “D” letter grades.
Creamer, who did not attend Tuesday’s meeting, previously attributed the low grades to administrative errors.
He argued that Primavera should have been evaluated under alternative school standards rather than traditional ones.
And he appealed directly to Horne, after having the support of Republican leaders who also lobbied the Charter Board on his behalf.
“We’re so grateful for Tom Horne,” Creamer, a major GOP donor, said during a press conference in mid-March 2025. “For working with us so that we can correct this administrative error.”
Horne twice that month said he wasn’t going to intervene.
“My first priority for all public schools is academic success,” Horne said in March 2025. “It is important that charters and district schools alike are held accountable for the quality of education they provide. The Board’s action demonstrates that these are not just words, but actions. Primavera is being held accountable and losing its ability to operate because of poor academic results.”
Horne, however, later allowed Primavera to privately meet with his staff and present new records to his office.
The board accused Horne of taking the “unprecedented steps of retroactively reclassifying Primavera from a traditional school to an alternative school, reopening prior-year data, and allowing the submission of additional information.”
That was key because traditional charter schools are evaluated under higher academic measures, while alternative schools, which typically serve higher-risk or non-traditional student populations, are evaluated with different performance expectations.
It’s unclear when Horne, who is currently in a tight re-election campaign against Treasurer Kimberly Yee for the GOP nomination, made all of the changes.
But Charter Board officials on Tuesday said Horne’s intervention resulted in the Department of Education indicating the school would have received three Alternative “C” grades instead of three “D” grades under the traditional model.
The board, in a statement, said this “after-the-fact rewrite of Primavera’s academic performance fundamentally changed the facts underlying the Board’s case long after enforcement had begun, effectively removing the Board’s ability to proceed under its established authority.”
Remember, “it’s all about the kids! No child should be trapped in a failing charter school! Parents know best!”
John Thompson, retired teacher and historian in Oklahoma, considers ideas about how to improve Oklahoma’s schools, but insists that one overlooked cause of lower academic progress, was the torrent of misguided mandates written in Washington, D.C., such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
Being a retired inner-city teacher, I am pleased by Tyner’s rejection of cheap, quick, and simple solutions. But, as a historian, I would focus on different NAEP test scores, and the way that No Child Left Behind (NCLB); Race to the Top (RttT); and budget cuts undermined teaching and learning.
To his credit, Tyner linked to Matt Barnum’s analysis of both the potential benefits and harms of the “Southern Surge,” and the “Mississippi Miracle.” Barnum acknowledged the gains in 4th grade test scores by states that drew upon the “Science of Reading.” But, he concluded:
Eighth graders’ results “have been less impressive for these Southern exemplars.” Alabama’s eighth grade reading scores have been falling and are among the lowest in the country. Louisiana’s eight grade reading scores remain at the 2002 level. And, Mississippi’s eighth grade reading scores are about the same as they were in 1998.
I believe that Tyner’s history of the last three decades should be read in conjunction of his recent commentary in the Oklahoman. He starts it with Phonics instruction being “a first step towards teaching literacy.” But, he adds, “Background knowledge is key to reading comprehension.”
Tyner then explains:
To become a strong reader in middle school and beyond, students need a firm foundation of core knowledge, and that comes not just from practicing reading, but from developing a broad vocabulary and an understanding of a large range of topics — from geography and history to literature and science.
He then critiques many Oklahoma schools for efforts to improve comprehension by mainly:
Having students practice so-called “comprehension skills and strategies,” such as finding the main idea in a passage and making inferences. These Chromebook-based exercises often resemble test prep. Although some of this practice is fine, hours spent on it crowd out history, geography, science and literature.
This is very consistent with a scholarly paper by the SRI, Report: Beyond the Surface: Leveraging High-Quality Instructional Materials for Robust Reading Comprehension Learning brief, funded by Tulsa’s Schusterman Family Foundation. As reported by the 74, Katrina Woodworth, the director at SRI’s Center for Education Research & Improvement, explained. “The point is to both teach reading and to build students’ knowledge base so that they have more scaffolding for future learning of both content and meaning.” But even the most promising Science of Reading programs they studied, may be “unintentionally encouraging teachers to focus on surface-level goals.”
One of the lead authors, Dan Reynolds, asked, “Are we teaching our K-4 kids that reading is just tasks? Are we teaching them that they just need to label stuff and fill out graphic organizers?”
Reynolds said the “Surface-level” instruction they discovered, “weakens instruction for students and can later manifest as a skills disadvantage.”
And, getting back to Tyner, he wrote that an “important caveat to the undeniable successes of Mississippi and Louisiana in raising fourth-grade reading is that those states have seen little improvement in eighth-grade reading.”
While I very much agree with his position on the harm done by the failure to focus on background information, educators didn’t voluntarily undermine the teaching of history, the arts, and critical thinking. After all, the SRI study finds hope in the evidence that students and teachers prefer deep reading instruction.
But, I wish he had explained how the decline of holistic instruction was the predictable result of the NCLB’s and RttT’s test-driven mandates. During that time, for example, I served on a team assembled by our outstanding State Superintendent Sandy Garrett, in order to minimize the harm we knew was coming with NCLB.
Due to the demand that schools meet impossible testing goals, schools were forced to cut back on social studies, history, science, and the arts, as well as critical thinking. They inflicted the worst harm on schools serving the poorest children of color. Being a history teacher in extremely high-challenge high schools, I was horrified by the hundreds of stories I was told by students who said they were “robbed of an education.”
And those experiences explain why I’m worried by Tyner’s call for “deliberate efforts to improve instruction and accountability.” I would communicate with many thousands of teachers, and students, and I can’t remember anyone who lived through those “reforms” and didn’t see test-driven, accountability-driven instruction as a failure.
Moreover, while Tyner calls for solid funding of the infrastructure necessary to implement the Southern Strategy, he is less clear about the harms that retaining students can have. Given the lies perpetrated by rightwingers who claimed Oklahoma failed to improve reading because Joy Hofmeister quickly ended retentions, I wish he would be more explicit in fact-checking them.
A history of 21st century education in Oklahoma should also explicitly include the reasons why Oklahoma backed off from passing four End of Instruction tests. Rep. Joe Eddins explained in 2005, “Based on test data, the House of Representatives staff estimates 89,000 failed tests each year.”
I taught in an alternative school, in 2012, when new End-of-Instruction tests were being piloted. I resigned after being required to give the vast majority of my students’ worksheets, and focus on tutoring a few students who had a chance of passing the test, and graduate. Fortunately, under the leadership of Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, that law was repealed in 2016.
A history of what went wrong in Oklahoma schools should also address the budget cuts that killed those successes.
Oklahoma’s per pupil funding of the state aid formula for public schools has fallen 26.9 percent after inflation between FY 2008 and FY 2017. These continue to be the deepest cuts in the nation, and Oklahoma’s lead is growing. On a percentage basis, we’ve cut nearly twice as much as the next worst state, Alabama.
Although I would have written a different history on Oklahoma education’s decline, I do believe we can rebuild our education systems.
But, I would have liked to read more of Tyner’s thoughts about the damage teachers witnessed by accountability-driven reforms that were imposed on Oklahoma schools, and huge funding cuts. My main response to his history, however, is that this is the time to be more blunt in terms of what it would really take to achieve equitable levels of reading for comprehension.
Given the lack of evidence that the “Southern Surge” is improving reading comprehension, providing long-term benefits, and doing more good than harm, we should find a more holistic way to reverse the harm inflicted on our schools by top-down mandates of the last quarter of a century.
A very important election takes place on Sunday. Hungarians will vote whether to keep Viktor Orban or to replace him with Peter Magyar, leader of the center-right party Tisza. The latest polls show Magyar leading Orban’s Fidesz party. The election is close, and there are many undecided voters.
Orban is a favorite of Trump and his MAGA base. He is also admired by Putin because he has been a disruptive force within NATO, blocking aid for Ukraine. Orban has fascist tendencies: he has clamped down of freedom of the press and expressed hostility to immigrants. He has a special hatred for gays.
JD Vance visited Hungary this week to convert support for Orban’s “illiberal democracy.”
Trump and Putin, Bibi and Tucker Carlson, thug-ocrats of all nations flock to Orbán’s banner.
If you wanted to find some way to cluster in a single room the individuals who pose a genuine threat to liberal freedoms, egalitarian values, and scientific epistemology, you might want to call a meeting of the Viktor Orbán fan club. There, Donald Trump would rub elbows with Vladimir Putin, JD Vance with Xi Jinping, Tucker Carlson with—yes—Bibi Netanyahu. Orbán, whose longtime rule over Hungary is threatened by Sunday’s election there, is uniquely positioned at the center of a set of overlapping Venn diagrams representing every xenophobic, obscurantist, homophobic, ethno-nationalist, and anti-democratic thug either currently in power or maneuvering to get there.
Right now, the two major players working to save Orbán from defeat on Sunday are Trump and Putin. Ukraine, Schmukraine: Both see in Orbán a fellow immigrant-hater, who, like them, has walled off his borders, seized control of his nation’s judiciary, created (through the miracle of kleptocracy) a new oligarchic elite devoted to bolstering his rule, taken control of the news media (both public and private), turned education into indoctrination, banished an entire university endowed by George Soros (whose legacy includes bringing down Putin’s beloved USSR and backing anti-Trump candidates and initiatives), served as Putin and Trump’s inside operator to undermine the European Union, mobilized homophobia when it’s been politically useful, and done his damnedest to curtail freedom of speech. Is it any wonder that Putin’s agents have tried to rig the upcoming election in his favor, or that MAGA culture warriors have rushed to bolster his cause because he’s demonstrated that even partial authoritarianism can impede the woke and exile the empiricists? Is it any wonder that Vance was stumping for him in Budapest last weekend as a way to solidify his own support from the American MAGAnauts whose affection he needs to rekindle? Is it any wonder that Trump himself has endorsed Orbán, or that Putin sees him as his man inside the EU?
Idolizing Orbán is also the common thread linking Tucker Carlson, who probably has done more to promote Orbán to MAGA conservatives than anyone else, and Bibi Netanyahu, who sent a message last month to the MAGA faithful attending their annual CPAC conference in Budapest, hailing Orbán as a leader who can “protect against this rising tide” of Islamic terrorism. “Viktor Orbán,” he added, “means safety, security, stability.” If that didn’t suffice, Yair Netanyahu, Bibi’s son, traveledto that Budapest conference to echo his father’s endorsement.
Orbán has emerged as a kind of Jeffrey Epstein of geopolitics. Just as Epstein managed to assemble a mind-boggling assortment of elites in the cause of sex with underaged girls, so Orbán has also brought together an equivalently mind-boggling assortment of elites in the cause of ethno-nationalistic anti-liberalism—a cause, clearly, that can unite communists and capitalists, Jews and antisemites.
The Trump-Orbán lovefest is nothing new. Orbán has endorsed Trump in all three of his presidential campaigns, and last October, Trump rewarded him by exempting Hungary from the sanctions his administration has placed on nations buying Russian oil and gas. Trump later made clear that this agreement was specifically between him and Orbán; were Orbán not re-elected (the most recent polls show him trailing his opponent by roughly ten percentage points), Trump made clear there was no guarantee that he would continue to honor it.
But Orbán’s ties to America’s Christian nationalists go beyond Trump’s “what’s in it for me?” ethos. When a number of Hungary’s European neighbors were welcoming Muslim refugees a decade ago, Orbán built barricades on the borders and made clear that Muslims were not welcome. While endorsing Orbán during his drop-in to Budapest, Vance said he’d come there “because of the moral cooperation between our two countries,” that each was engaged in a “defense of Western civilization” based on their common adherence to “Christian civilization and Christian values.”
As even the most cursory course in Hungarian history can make clear, one of the nation’s defining Christian values has long been antisemitism. Imagine the kind of 20th-century Silicon Valley that Hungary could have cultivated had it not compelled such Jewish scientific and mathematical geniuses as John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Theodore von Kármán to leave their homeland in their late teens or early twenties. Imagine how many more Hungarian Jews would have survived the Holocaust had Hungarian Christians not been steeped in antisemitism well before the Gestapo arrived.
“Will you stand for freedom, truth, and the God of our fathers?” Vance concluded. “Then, my friends, go to the polls and stand for Viktor Orbán.”
But, hey: If Bibi is willing to overlook such incidents, who am I to cavil?
Of course, there have always been lots of Hungarians who never cottoned to Orbán, the God of their fathers notwithstanding. Like most big, cosmopolitan cities, Budapest has been a bastion of anti-Orbán sentiment, favorably disposed to the arts and sciences; his support, like that of most Christian nationalist leaders, is disproportionately rural and parochial. But the redistribution of Hungarian wealth and income to the oligarch class that Orbán has created has apparently taken a political toll even among some longtime Orbánistas—much as its American equivalent seems to be taking a political toll on Republicans here in the States.
JD Vance was right: Illiberal kleptocratic Christian nationalism is on the ballot in Hungary this Sunday, just as it will be on the ballots that Americans will cast in November. Here and there, may it be massively repudiated.
Natalie Korach of Status questions whether the press should invite enemies of a free press to the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. Status is an unusually perspicacious source of insider talk about the communications industry.
As the Trump administration wages war on the press, news outlets hosting White House Correspondents’ Dinner events are dodging questions about who’s on their guest lists.
When Donald Trump revealed last month that he would attend this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner for the first time as president, the announcement prompted immediate blowback. After years of vilifying the press, the decision by the White House Correspondents’ Association to welcome Trump as a guest of honor struck many as an extraordinary act of appeasement.
Yet little attention has been paid to the nation’s biggest news organizations who play host to the weekend’s marquee gatherings. But as invitations for the weekend’s festivities started to circulate this week, it raised the question of whether newsrooms plan to welcome members of an administration that has spent more than a year publicly waging war against them.
Status reached out to the handful of major outlets hosting WHCD-adjacent events to ask whether they planned to invite members of the administration to sip cocktails and snack on hors d’oeuvres at their respective events. Will officials like Karoline Leavitt and Stephen Miller—who regularly launch vicious assaults on the press—be welcomed with open arms at gatherings ostensibly aimed at celebrating the First Amendment and standing up to those who would chip away at it?
Representatives for ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, MS NOW, NBC News, and POLITICO all declined to comment when asked whether they will play host to members of the administration—perhaps tellingly so.
That reticence is hardly surprising. When Statusreported earlier this week that many attendees plan to don First Amendment-supporting accessories to this year’s dinner, some derided the symbolic action as a weak response to the near-daily assaults unleashed by Trump against reporters and news organizations.
“It’s entirely hypocritical to invite administration officials who consistently attack the media,” one former network executive told Status, calling it “absurd.”
The situation is no doubt an uncomfortable one for news organizations, which have not had to seriously grapple with the issue before. During Trump’s first term, the White House largely stayed away from the correspondents’ dinner and surrounding festivities, sparing outlets from their events becoming defined by officials who were simultaneously attacking them. That followed conservative blowback in 2018 when the night’s entertainment, comic Michelle Wolf, roasted then-Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, comparing her to Aunt Lydia in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and quipping, “She burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye.”
With Trump planning to attend this year, it is far more likely that administration officials will make the rounds. Executives are now tasked with deciding whether inviting Trump officials is simply an extension of long-standing bipartisan tradition or an act that risks normalizing an administration that has repeatedly sought to undermine the press and stepped far outside the bounds of accepted behavior.
Still, there are early indications of how at least some networks are approaching the weekend. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for instance, could make an appearance at the CBS News–POLITICO pre-dinner reception, Status has learned. That’s because Hegseth has been invited by the network to attend the dinner itself, according to a person familiar with the plans, as first reported by Breaker. New CBS News Editor in-Chief Bari Weiss also plans to attend, the person said, who noted that the network has historically invited the full cabinet and administration officials to the dinner. This year’s invitations, the person said, were extended to elected leaders from both parties, with an expectation that Democrats would attend as well.
Even so, the Hegseth invitation didn’t sit well with some. “What a slap in the face to the journalists at CBS News to invite the man leading the fight to unilaterally shut down press freedoms in this country,” an executive from a rival network told Status. “Nothing says celebrating press freedoms like the man who won’t even let photographers in the room for fear they’d miss his good side!”
The decision to invite Hegseth is particularly stark after the former Fox News weekend host booted journalists from the Pentagon and used press briefings to discuss the U.S. war on Iran to deride reporters. One CBS News staffer called it “deeply disappointing” that the Weiss-led outlet would invite Hegseth as a guest, while another told Status it felt like an “access play,” at the expense of the network’s journalists.
Other networks seem to be approaching the weekend in a similar manner. A person familiar with CNN’s planning said that the network doesn’t take “different approaches” to its guest list “based on who is in office,” adding that extending bipartisan invites is standard practice. “If they choose to accept this year when they’ve boycotted before, that’s their decision, but it’s not a new approach,” the person said.
Likewise, a person familiar with NBCUniversal’splans for the weekend said that, as in years past, NBC News has extended invitations broadly to both Democrats and Republicans, including members of the current administration.
It goes without saying, however, that the Trump administration is not just another Republican administration. It’s not politics as usual in Washington, though it seems clear some news executives prefer it were. Trump and the top officials in his government have shattered norms and taken unprecedented measures to chill speech and demonize the press. While news executives might conveniently position their decisions as simply following decades-long norms, Trump has had no problem shredding them. It raises the question: If Trump is willing to trash longstanding traditions, why are news executives so beholden to them?
In any event, some newsrooms are signaling a more pointed posture.
While a spokesperson for MS NOW declined to detail the guest list, invitations to the network’s first standalone correspondents’ dinner event since its split from NBCUniversal have adopted a distinctly values-driven tone, emphasizing that “a free press and the journalists who power it are essential to the future of democracy,” as MS NOW’s afterparty invitation reads. (Full disclosure: Status is also hosting an event and has chosen not to invite or grant admission to administration officials, given their ongoing attacks on the press.)
HuffPost has also outright said that it is taking a principled stand against mingling over champagne and canapés with Trump administration officials who have derided, mocked, and insulted the press corps, choosing not to attend the dinner this year, a departure for the BuzzFeed-owned digital outlet.
“HuffPost refuses to celebrate journalism and laugh alongside an administration and president that regularly attacks the free press, weaponized the FCC, and threatened to jail journalists,” a person familiar with the decision told Status. Instead of having a presence at the dinner, the progressive outlet will focus on “rigorously covering the White House and holding power to account and covering any developments on April 25th,” the person added.
During his second term, Trump has taken his threats against the media to a new level, barring outlets from events and stripping the White House Correspondents’ Association of its traditional authority over the press pool. Trump has stripped funding for public media and moved to shut down Voice of America under Kari Lake’s leadership. Meanwhile, the White House has sued numerous news organizations, including ABC News, the BBC, CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.
The dinner, and what comedians like Stephen Colbert, Hasan Minhaj, and Larry Wilmore have joked about from the stage, has long been a source of friction and occasional controversy. Until Trump, though, presidents and officials dutifully attended, weathering the jabs and jokes that went with it. This year, however, the association has invited mentalist Oz Pearlman to headline the evening, signaling a less politically-tinged monologue with Trump in the room.
But Hegseth and other administration officials making the cut for events celebrating the First Amendment underscores a larger issue. News organizations have long prided themselves on maintaining neutrality. But that posture is being tested in an environment where one side of the political equation has made hostility toward the press a central feature of its governing approach.
With the rapid spread of vouchers, which are busting the budgets of several states and tearing down the wall of separation between church and state, it’s easy to overlook the danger posed by charter schools. Charter schools are a strong step towards vouchers, replacing neighborhood schools with consumerism. Almost 90% of American students attend public schools. We should be funding those schools, not schools operated by private boards and religious groups.
Dr. Shawgi Tell reminds us that charter schools continue to breed corruption and fraud, as they drain resources from public schools. Charter schools are not subject to the same accountability as public schools. They operate under private management, which shields them from the accoubtabilty to which public schools are subject. Without oversight or accountability, bad things happen.
Dr. Tell is a professor of education at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York.
He writes:
Even though they make up only 8% of schools in the country, crimes, scandals, and arrests take place at a robust tempo in the nation’s privately-operated charter schools.
These non-stop wrongdoings usually include fraud, embezzlement, harassment, and a range of sex crimes.
This is not surprising given the weak accountability, transparency, and background checks that have plagued the crisis-prone charter school sector for more than 30 years.
A small sample of headlines from just this year speaks volumes:
Do such horrible things happen in traditional public schools and private religious schools? Yes they do, but when looking at scale, scope, frequency, and proportionality, they are considerably more rampant in charter schools, which are deregulated businesses governed by unelected private persons.
The privatization and marketization of education lends itself to such phenomena on a broad scale. Privatization increases corruption and lowers standards across a broad range of operations, roles, and services. Converting public programs and services into capital-centered programs and services usually enriches a handful of people while harming the public interest in the process. When programs and services focused on uplifting people and society are transformed into profit-maximizing entities, the majority suffers.
See here for more examples of charter school crimes and scandals.
Shawgi Tell (PhD) is the author of Charter School Report Card. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu
Diane Ravitch's blog 