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The Campaign to Punish Those Who Did Not Mourn Charlie Kirk’s Death

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2025 //
30

People who did not express genuine grief at the murder of Charlie Kirk are in serious trouble. Some have been fired or suspended. Some have been harassed for their views. Before anyone attacks me for acknowledging this phenomenon, let me point out that I did deplore his murder while making clear that I share none of his views.

Reuters reported on the efforts to ferret out and punish those who did not react to Charlie’s assassination in the correct manner.

At least 15 people have been fired or suspended from their jobs after discussing the killing online, according to a Reuters tally based on interviews, public statements and local press reports. The total includes journalists, academic workers and teachers. On Friday, a junior Nasdaq employee was fired over her posts related to Kirk.

Others have been subjected to torrents of online abuse or seen their offices flooded with calls demanding they be fired, part of a surge in right-wing rage that has followed the killing.

Some Republicans want to go further still and have proposed deporting Kirk’s critics from the United States, suing them into penury or banning them from social media for life.

“Prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death,” said conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump and one of several far-right figures who are organizing digital campaigns on X, the social media site, to ferret out and publicly shame Kirk’s critics.

CNN reported that there is a coordinated campaign to punish those who speak ill of Charlie on social media.

Indeed there is. It’s called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” on Twitter, and it invites everyone to report the names and screenshots of anyone who posted sentiments critical of Charlie or comments applauding his murder.

The website opens with this message:

Charlie Kirk was murdered.

Is an employee or a student of yours supporting political violence online?

Look them up on this website.

Send information on anyone celebrating Charlie’s death.

Follow us on X/Twitter: @forcharliekirk1

ATTENTION:
This website will soon be converted into a searchable database of over 30,000 submissions, filterable by general location and job industry. This is a permanent and continuously-updating archive of Radical activists calling for violence.

This is the largest firing operation in history.

Since his admirers on all ends of the political spectrum have expressed admiration for his commitment to discussion, debate, and dissent, it is ironic that not only his friends but government officials like Pete Hegseth are searching social media for people they can punish for saying “the wrong thing” (e.g. criticizing Charlie’s views or not mourning his death).

Charlie, a high school graduate, was contemptuous of higher education, which he believed was controlled by leftwing, anti-American ideologues. On Twitter, before his killer was identified, several of Charlie’s admirers speculated that the murderer had been indoctrinated by Marxists and Communist professors at college. Such comments led to snarky responses about the political leanings of the faculty teaching electrical technology (how to be an electrician) at Dixie Technical College in Utah.

Freedom of speech is a basic right, guaranteed in the First Amendment. Even abhorrent views are protected speech; it’s the abhorrent views that need protection, not those that offend no one.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Democrats, Extremism, Freedom of Speech

Jamelle Bouie: I Mourn Charlie’s Death But Not His Ideology

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2025 //
15

Jamelle Bouie is one of the best, most interesting opinion writers for The New York Times. As a subscriber to that newspaper, I signed up for Bouie’s newsletter, which is where these thoughts of his appeared.

Jamelle Bouie writes:

Virtually every person of note in American politics has, rightfully, condemned the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk and expressed their deep concerns about the growing incidence of political violence in the United States. Wherever we stand politically, we all agree that he should still be alive.

There has been less agreement about Kirk’s life and work. Death tends to soften our tendency to judge. And sudden, violent death — especially one as gruesome and shocking as this one — can push us toward hagiography, especially in the immediate wake of the killing.

So it goes for Kirk.

“Charlie inspired millions,” President Trump said in an Oval Office speech on Wednesday. “He championed his ideas with courage, logic, humor and grace.”

“The best way to honor Charlie’s memory,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California declared, “is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.”

Kirk’s approach, wrote the editors of Politico’s Playbook, “was to persuade, to use charm and charisma and provocation and the power of argument to convince people of the righteousness of his cause.”

There is no doubt that Kirk was influential, no doubt that he had millions of devoted fans. But it is difficult to square this idealized portrait of Kirk as model citizen with the man as he was.

Kirk’s eulogists have praised him for his commitment to discourse, dialogue and good-faith discussion. Few if any of them have seen fit to mention the fact that Kirk’s first act on the national stage was to create a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics. Kirk urged visitors to the website to report those who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

The list, which still exists, is a catalog of speech acts in and outside the classroom. The surest way to find yourself on the watchlist as an academic is to disagree, publicly, with conservative ideology, or even acknowledge ideas and concepts that are verboten among the far right. And the obvious intent of the list is made clear at the end of each entry, where Kirk and his allies urge readers to contact the schools and institutions in question. Targets of the watchlist attest to harassment and threats of violence.

The Professor Watchlist is a straightforward intimidation campaign, and you can draw a line directly from Kirk’s work attacking academics to the Trump administration’s all-out war on American higher education, an assault on the right to speak freely and dissent.

To speak of Kirk as a champion of reasoned discussion is also to ignore his frequent calls for the state suppression of his political opponents.

“‘Investigate first, define the crimes later’ should be the order of the day,” Kirk declared in an editorial demanding the legal intimidation of anyone associated with the political left. “And for even the most minor of offenses, the rule should be: no charity, no goodwill, no mercy.”

Speaking last year in support of Trump’s plan for mass deportation, Kirk warned that the incoming president would not tolerate dissent or resistance. “Playtime is over. And if a Democrat gets in our way, well, then Matt Gaetz very well might go arrest you,” he said.

It is also important to mention that Kirk was a powerful voice in support of Trump’s effort to “stop the steal” after the 2020 presidential election. His organization, Turning Point USA, went as far as to bus participants to Washington for the rally that devolved into the Jan. 6 riot attack on the Capitol.

And then there is Kirk’s vision for America, which wasn’t one of peace and pluralism but white nationalism and the denigration of Americans deemed unworthy of and unfit for equal citizenship.

On his podcast, Kirk called on authorities to create a “citizen force” on the border to protect “white demographics” from “the invasion of the country.” He embraced the rhetoric of white pride and warned of “a great replacement” of rural white Americans.

“The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different,” he said last year. “You believe in God, country, family, faith, and freedom, and they won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated.”

Kirk also targeted Black Americans for contempt. “Prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people — that’s a fact,” he said in 2023. Kirk was preoccupied with the idea of “Black crime,” and on the last episode of his show before he was killed, he devoted a segment to “the ever-increasing amount of Black crime,” telling his audience, falsely, that “one in 22 Black men will be a murderer in their lifetime” and that “by age of 23, half of all Black males have been arrested and not enough of them have been arrested.”

Kirk told his listeners that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson of the Supreme Court “is what your country looks like on critical race theory,” that former Vice President Kamala Harris was “the jive speaking spokesperson of equity,” and that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “was awful.”

“I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it,” Kirk said at a 2023 event. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”

This is just a snippet of Kirk’s rhetoric and his advocacy. He also believed that there was no place for transgender people in American society — “We must ban trans-affirming care — the entire country,” he said in 2024 — and has denounced L.G.B.T. identities as a “social contagion.”

It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk’s influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.

We can mourn Kirk. We can send prayers to his friends and family. We can take stock of the gravity of this event. We can — and should — do all of this and more without pretending he was something, as a public figure, that he was not.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Reform, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Gender, Racism

Charlie Kirk Was the Voice of MAGA

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2025 //
15

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was vile, disgusting, and abhorrent. The perpetrator has apparently been identified and will be held accountable, as he should be.

Charlie was a bright star in the orbit of Donald Trump, and his many fans and admirers are raising him up on a pedestal because of his tragic death. A Florida member of Congress has proposed erecting a statue to him in the halls of Congress. Trump is awarding him the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Senator Jim Banks spoke to Indiana Republicans after Charlie’s death and urged them to use redistricting to eliminate every Democratic Congressman because “they” killed Charlie. Of course, we now know, as Senator Banks did, that Charlie was not killed by Democrats or a cabal of left wing fanatics, but by a young white Utah man who was raised in a staunchly Republican home. At this writing, we do not know why he killed Charlie. We don’t know his views about politics, whether he objected to Charlie’s views from the left or from the far-far right.

Although his death has been mourned by people of all political views, it’s important to acknowledge what Charlie advocated and what he opposed.

The New York Times published a summary of some of his views. For example:

He opposed gay rights and transgender rights.

He opposed gun control and argued that more people should have guns. A few deaths every year, he said, was a small price to pay to preserve the Second Amendment.

He opposed the civil rights movement and belittled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an “awful” man. In 2021, he referred to George Floyd as a “scumbag.”

He opposed affirmative action. He called Justice Ketanji Brown Harris “a diversity hire.”

He opposed gender equality.

He published a list of academics called ProfessorWatch. They are/were people who teach about “gender ideology” and racial justice. On social media, professors whose names were on Charlie’s list said they were threatened, doxxed, suspended, harassed, even fired. So while he is supposedly a champion of free speech, he encouraged suppression of free speech by professors on his Watchlist.

Charlie, the Times reported, “rejected the idea that climate change posed an existential threat to humanity, describing it as ‘complete gibberish, nonsense and balderdash’ in December 2024 to members of Turning Point UK, the British offshoot of Turning Point USA.”

In another source, Charlie stated his absolute opposition to abortion. Charlie compared abortion to the Holocaust. When a questioner asked what he would do if his daughter was raped and became pregnant at the age of 10, he said the baby should be born.

A reader of this blog who is called Quickwrit posted the following comment about Charlie’s ideology:

Kirk’s view of women clearly stated in a comment he addressed to Taylor Swift on her announcement of her engagement to Travis Kelce:

“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, August 26, 2025

Kirk comments on Civil Rights and race:

“We made a huge mistake when we passed the civil rights act in the 1960s” — at America Fest, December 2023.

“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, January 23, 2024

“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” – The Charlie Kirk Show, May 19, 2023

“If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?” – The Charlie Kirk Show, January 3, 2024

“Michelle Obama and [U.S. Representative] Sheila Jackson Lee and [U.S. Supreme Court Justice] Ketanji Brown Jackson…You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to be taken somewhat seriously.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, July 13, 2023

“The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, March 20, 2024

“Islam is not compatible with western civilization.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, June 24, 2025

“Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” — Charlie Kirk post on X September 8, 2025

“There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, July 6, 2022. (But in fact, in the First Amendment, the Constitution clearly forbids religion in government, and Founding Father James Madison, who our nation honors with the title “Father of the Constitution” made it clear why he and the other Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution very deliberately left out any mention of God, let alone of Jesus, in the Constitution; here is what The Father of our Constitution declared: “The religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man. [Government] MUST NOT PREFER ONE RELIGION OVER ANOTHER OR PROMOTE ANY RELIGION OVER NONBELIEF.”

Here are video clips of some of these comments.

The New Yorker wrote about the outpouring of grief for Charlie at Texas A&M, where he had spoken to a large audience about his evangelical Christian views.

Kirk’s evangelicalism inflected both the tone and content of his message. He was open to talk with anyone, but steadfast in his confidence that his path was the correct one. “If you do not have a religious basis, specifically a Christian one, for your society, something else is going to replace it,” he said at the Texas A. & M. event. He and his followers were locked in a battle with an enemy that was not just ideologically opposed but unwell, possibly evil. Democratic leaders, Kirk said, were “maggots, vermin, and swine”; transgender identity was a “middle finger to God.”

Charlie had every right to express his views and advocate for them. His murder was an abomination and a stain on our nation. Unlike Charlie, I support gun control. I don’t believe that the Second Amendment gives everyone a right to carry arms at will.

I disagreed with Charlie Kirk on every issue. I would have urged him to eliminate ProfessorWatch, which endangers professors who did not agree with him; it suppressed their free speech rights.

As Americans, our freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment. We are entitled to believe what we want. No one should ever be murdered because of their views.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Extremism, Gender, Racism

Trump is a Divider Who Won’t Even Try to Unite Us

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2025 //
29

After horrible events, like political assassination or the explosion of a space vehicle, the President typically speaks to the nation and expresses grief and calls for national unity, reminding us that we are all Americans and we must help one another. I vividly recall Ronald Reagan’s talk to the nation after the space shuttle exploded, killing everyone, including Christa McAuliffe, who was going to be the first teacher in space.

No President has ever been as divisive as Trump. With no evidence at hand, he blamed Democrats and “radical left lunatics” for the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Robert Reich wrote the commentary before the alleged killer’s name was known. We now know that Tyler Robinson was not a registered Democrat. He had not voted in the last two elections, according to local officials. He is white, his family are Republicans, he is apparently straight, he was enrolled in a program to become an electrician, he grew up with guns, his father was in law enforcement. He was a regular 22-year-old in a law-abiding family in a deep Red state.

Only Tyler–if he is the perpetrator– can explain his motives.

Yet our President was eager to blame the other political party. He is shameless.

Reich wrote:

The reaction by Trump to the horrendous assassination of Charlie Kirk has been as irresponsible as anything Trump has done to date to divide our nation.

When bad things happen, presidents traditionally use the highest office in the land to calm and reassure the public. The best of our presidents appeal to the better angels of our nature, asking that we harbor “malice toward none.” 

Trump consistently appeals to the worst of our demons, as he did Wednesday night after the shooting when he said:

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”

I don’t know at this writing who was responsible for Kirk’s death, and Trump certainly didn’t know when he made these remarks Wednesday night. But for Trump to blame the “radical left” — a term he often uses to describe the whole Democratic Party — is an unconscionable provocation that further polarizes Americans at a time when we badly need to come together. 

It’s also a vehicle for silencing criticism of Trump’s own authoritarianism, advancing the presumption that if you criticize someone for being an authoritarian, or the member of an authoritarian political movement, you’re a terrorist who’s inciting murder. 

Trump continued:

“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

It’s unclear what Trump is calling for here, but it sounds as if he may use the Kirk assassination as a pretext for unleashing the FBI and other federal law enforcement on every organization that could possibly be seen as contributing to the “radical left.” This becomes clearer from what he said next:

“From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health-care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”

Trump is attributing America’s rising tide of political violence to the “radical left,” ignoring the significant if not larger amount of political violence perpetrated by Trump supporters on the far-right.

The latter includes the shootings of two Minnesota Democratic legislators at their home earlier this summer, the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro in April, the series of shootings at the homes of four Democratic elected officials in New Mexico in 2022, the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, the attempted pipe bombings at the homes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in 2018, and the attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022. 

Trump’s list of so-called “radical-left” violence included attacks on ICE agents — which did not involve gunfire — but conveniently failed to mention the shooting a month ago at CDC headquarters, in which a man protesting Covid-19 vaccines fired more than 180 shots at the building and killed a police officer. 

Nor, obviously, did Trump include the violence he himself incited at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by over 1,500 followers who received prison terms — all of whom Trump subsequently pardoned. 

There is no excuse for political violence in America. Nor is there any excuse for provoking even more of it by blaming it on one side or the other. 

And no excuse for a president of the United States using a heinous killing as an occasion to treat his political opponents as accomplices to murder and threatening to use the full power of the government to attack them. 

We have had enough violence, enough carnage, enough blame. We must do whatever we can to reduce the anger and hate that are consuming and destroying so much of this nation. 

It is time for all of us, including a president, to take some responsibility.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

Glenn Kessler: Trump Is the Master of Bullshit

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2025 //
9

I seldom recommend a blog that requires payment. Here is an exception: Glenn Kessler. He served for many years as the Fact Checker for The Washington Post. He is remarkably good as a fact checker. After many years, he left The Post and started his own blog, as so many other journalists have done. He is a member of the International Society of Factcheckers. He relies on facts, not opinion. Consider subscribing. He has my stamp of approval.

Kessler recently started a series about Trump’s long history of bullshitting. As he explains here, there is a difference between lying and bullshit.

Kessler writes:

This is the first in a series of Substack essays looking at Trump’s bullshit. Future installments will be available to paid subscribers.

Twenty years ago this month, the late Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt published his seminal work On Bullshit, which argued that bullshit was worse than lying. His point was that a liar knows the truth and deliberately tries to hide or distort it, while a bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all — they care only about the impression they make.

When Donald Trump emerged on the political stage in 2015, Frankfurt wrote in Time magazine that Trump was the epitome of the bullshit artist he had identified a decade earlier.

“Trump freely offers extravagant claims about his own talents and accomplishments,” Frankfurt said. “He maintains, for example, that he has the greatest memory in the world. This is farcically unalloyed bullshit.”

When I managed The Fact Checker for The Washington Post, readers constantly asked: Why rely only on Pinocchio ratings? Why don’t you call Trump a liar?

I thought “liar” was a conversation stopper — it would be my judgment that he lied. With Trump, it’s hard to tell. He might actually believe some of the stuff he says, or has convinced himself it’s true.

The one time I clearly labeled a lie was when I had convincing evidence. Trump had insisted he knew nothing about hush-money payments to silence alleged paramours before he was elected president. Then his former attorney released a recording of Trump discussing an arrangement with the National Enquirer to pay $150,000 to one woman. Trump was caught on tape, so there was no doubt Trump had lied.

But, following Frankfurt’s theory, focusing only on Trump’s lies obscures a deeper danger to American society. As a bullshitter, Trump doesn’t care whether what he says reflects reality. He says whatever serves his momentary purpose, often contradicting himself without hesitation or shame. This indifference to truth makes Trump’s bullshit more insidious than lies.

Trump is the dominant political figure of the past decade — perhaps of our lifetimes. Tens of millions of Americans support his policies, or at least disdain the policies of his Democratic opponents. In the last election, he narrowly won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. He views those victories as a mandate for a reordering of the federal government, with an unchallenged executive wielding vast power.

The danger is that Trump’s bullshit has become woven into the fabric of American life. Many citizens now struggle to discern reality from spin. Was January 6 a violent attack on democracy — or a peaceful protest demonized by the media? Was Joe Biden legitimately elected — or did Democrats steal the presidency in the greatest fraud in U.S. history?

Trump bullshits to construct an alternative reality — one that almost half the country has accepted as fact. He has been aided by the balkanization of American society, where people live in blue or red zones and often absorb information that confirms what they already believe. Social media, unfiltered and often partisan, has replaced legacy media as a source of information.

Trump’s handling of the Covid pandemic in his first term was disastrous, with the exception of producing vaccines in record time. Yet Americans seemed to erase that period from memory. Thanks to Trump’s relentless bullshit during his first term about having created the “greatest economy in history” — in reality, it was on the brink of recession when the pandemic struck — many Americans retained halcyon memories of Trump’s economic policies, especially once inflation soared in the pandemic’s aftermath.

I often wondered how, if Trump had been re-elected in 2020, he would have explained the runaway inflation. I can only guess, but in any case, he would have spouted bullshit. Most economists agree Biden’s policies added some inflationary pressures on the margins, but pandemic-related supply-chain issues were mostly responsible.

In his second term, Trump has weaponized his bullshit. He is surrounded by lackeys who echo and defend his untruths.

No accurate damage estimate was available when Trump in June declared Iranian nuclear weapons sites had been obliterated. So when he made the statement he was bullshitting. In previous administrations, the results of such an attack might have received positive spin from unnamed officials, but since Trump is never wrong, once he puts it in his own words, the rest of government must twist its findings to conform with Trump’s claim.

Sometimes Trump gets lucky, and his bullshit turns out to be true. But more often than not, he just pretends he was right even when he was wrong.

Trump a few weeks ago fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because job-growth estimates were revised downward — a common occurrence, especially if an economy is stumbling. Trump claimed the BLS director had manipulated the figures because she was a Biden appointee. That was bullshit. The BLS director cannot manipulate the job numbers, which are derived from surveys conducted by professionals many rungs below in the Labor Department. Yet Trump’s bullshit now threatens to erode faith in the accuracy of federal data.

This week provided another example. Trump, desperate to win a Nobel Peace Prize ever since Barack Obama did, keeps claiming he ended six wars in six months. This is, of course, exaggerated, as numerous fact checks have documented. But Trump took it a step further when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders visited the Oval Office and Trump explained to reporters why he had dropped his demand for a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war.

“If you look at the six deals that I settled this year, they were all at war. I didn’t do any ceasefires,” Trump said.

That was bullshit. At least three of the conflicts on Trump’s “six wars” list were halted with ceasefires. But Trump needed to explain why he folded on his demand for an immediate ceasefire — embraced by Ukraine — in the face of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s charm offensive in Alaska last week.

So he just invented bullshit on the spot. The consequence is that Russia feels no pressure to end the war and can continue shelling Ukrainian cities. More people will die.

As part of this Substack, I intend to write a series of essays that examine specific examples of Trump’s bullshit and the consequences. I will likely start with Trump’s claim that he was a self-made business success — so central to the myth that carried him into office — but I also welcome suggestions from readers. Future posts on this theme will be limited to paid subscribers, so please consider signing up. 

Trump’s central tactic is saturation — flood the zone with bullshit until the truth becomes impossible to locate. I intend to create a record of what happened before it’s lost in a storm of revisionism and propaganda.

To open the next Glenn Kessler fact-checks, become a subscriber.

Categories Accountability, Character, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Trump Orders Murder of 11 People on a Boat in International Waters

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2025 //
8

When I first heard that an American fighter plane had attacked a boat in international waters off Venezuela, my first thought was that there must have been a high-value target on that boat. I waited for the details, but they were never released. Eventually I heard that there were 11 people on the boat. Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth said that they were gang members and they had a boatload of drugs that they were intending to bring to the U.S.

I looked at that video released by the War Department, and I was struck by two anomalies. First, the boat wasn’t large enough to travel from Venezuela to the U.S. But more importantly, could a small boat with 11 people have room for a significant load of drugs? It didn’t seem so.

Where was the evidence that this boat was bringing drugs to the U.S. I never heard it. Secretary Hegseth would clarify the reason for the attack in the boat if he supplied facts and evidence. Does Trump plan to attack other boats and ships that may or may not be carrying a shipment of drugs.

This is not normal.

Thom Hartmann addressed the questions about the use of American power to police international waters.

He wrote:

When the Court says Trump is above the law, who speaks for the eleven dead on that boat? Their lives ended not in a battlefield crossfire or a clash between nations, but at the whim of one man emboldened by six justices who declared him untouchable. 

Trump simply ordered human beings erased, confident the Court had given him immunity from any consequence and the leaders of his military would obey an illegal order. Eleven souls were sacrificed not just to his cruelty, but to a judicial betrayal that transformed the presidency into a license to kill.

For most of our history, American presidents have at least gone through the motions of cloaking lethal force in some form of legal justification. 

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War but sought Congress’s approval. Franklin Roosevelt went to Congress for Lend-Lease before escalating aid to Britain, and sought a declaration of war against Japan. George W. Bush and Barack Obama leaned heavily on the post-9/11 Authorizations for Use of Military Force to justify everything from Afghanistan to drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia to killing Bin Laden.

The principle has always been that the United States does not simply kill people without some kind of legal process. It may be stretched, it may be abused, but it has been invoked.

What Donald Trump has now done with the strike on a small boat off Venezuela’s coast is to break that tradition in a way that is both lawless and unprecedented. He gave the order to kill eleven human beings with no congressional approval, no international authorization, and no visible evidence justifying it.

This was simply murder on the high seas. And the world knows it….

If America embraces this new Putin-like assertion of America’s power to bomb anybody, anywhere, on the whim of the president, we’ll have abandoned any claim to moral leadership.

Worse, we will have normalized the authoritarian logic that anyone the president labels an enemy can be eliminated without trial, without evidence, without process. We’ll have handed Xi a rationale to attack Taiwan; all he has to do is claim that a non-governmental gang within that nation is importing drugs into China (or something similar).

The international reaction has already been severe. America’s allies are horrified, our adversaries have been emboldened, and human rights groups are openly appalled.

But the real test is here at home. Do we still believe in the principle, famously cited by our second President John Adams, that America is a nation of laws and not of men? Do we still insist that presidents cannot kill at will? If Trump can strike a boat off Venezuela today, what is to stop him from ordering lethal force against dissidents, protesters, or political opponents tomorrow?

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Justice

The Courts Are Striking Down Trump’s Illegal Orders; What Will the Supreme Court Do?

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2025 //
2

Jay Kuo writes a delightful blog called The Status Kuo. He is a lawyer with a sense of humor, and he writes clearly for the public, not for other lawyers.

This post is important because Kuo shows that the courts are blocking Trump’s overreach and cautions us not to assume that the Supreme Court will act as Trump’s echo chamber.

He writes:

Trump’s losses in the federal courts continue to pile up, and this week saw a number of critical rulings go against him. Judges from D.C. to Texas to California rejected the Trump regime’s illegal overreach on tariffs, deportations, military law enforcement and even his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.

Let’s do a legal lightning round to summarize these rulings, any one of which frankly is important enough to have warranted its own stand alone analysis. Today I’ll cover

  1. A major ruling from the Federal Circuit invalidating most of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs;
  2. A long weekend emergency ruling stopping planeloads of unaccompanied children from being deported to Guatemala;
  3. Trump’s big loss after a bench trial in California over his unlawful use of federal troops in that state; and
  4. The Fifth Circuit smackdown of Trump’s invocation of the “Alien Enemies Act” to justify summary deportation of alleged gang members.

Make no mistake: These are big losses that carry major implications for Trump’s plans to isolate the U.S., impose a police state, and conduct mass detentions and deportations.

And if you’re now thinking to yourself, “What does it matter, the Supreme Court will reverse these?” or “Great, but Trump will just disobey the orders,” I want to hit pause and do a reality check. As I’ll explain toward the end of this piece, these arguments, while common and understandable, simply don’t match the facts on the ground….

At this point, Kuo discusses each of the above decisions. You should subscribe to read these analyses.

But these rulings don’t matter! SCOTUS will overrule! Trump will defy!

There’s an understandable tendency to hear about a big court victory for the good guys but then cynically dismiss it, claiming either that the Supreme Court will overturn it, or that the Trump White House will simply ignore the courts’s orders.

I want to encourage readers to not fall into this trap. True, the Supreme Court has intervened in a few cases to lift a few injunctions imposed by lower courts, and that admittedly has been awful to see. But it hasn’t ruled substantively on much of anything yet. 

And that has allowed court victories by the good guys to produce some real progress.

For example, the Blue State Attorneys General group has been successful at using lawsuits to claw back huge sums impounded by the White House. This has occurred even while the red states, which failed to challenge the illegal withholdings, were left starved of funds. 

In his newsletter today, Robert Hubbell pointed to a chart with data from KFF Health News illustrating how successful lawsuits have spared the blue states from a great deal of the blow to public health infrastructure funding:

This helps show that the Supreme Court hasn’t been able to stop every lawsuit from succeeding. Indeed, many if not most have achieved their goals.

It’s also common to believe that the government is simply refusing to comply with every single court order. This misconception perhaps arose because so much attention was on a pair of lawsuits involving deportations, where the Justice Department and Homeland Security pretty much gave the finger to the courts.

But those are the only instances I’m aware of where court orders have been defied outright. And there are now major consequences for those involved with the plan to show open contempt. Judge Boasberg is now weighing bar disciplinary referrals for the lawyers involved.

In other cases, it is also true that the government has dragged its feet, delayed, deflected, misdirected and sought immediate appellate review of preliminary injunctions. But that is not the same as open defiance. And the courts have gotten much better at holding the government’s feet to the fire, as we just saw with Judge Sooknanan’s order followed by a demand for a series of status updates, all to keep the government on the straight and narrow.

The Department of Justice wants the American public to assume that none of the orders granted by federal judges are being heeded. They want us to believe that they, and not the judiciary, are in control. But this is simply not the case. As we saw this weekend, the Justice Department doesn’t have the appetite for another round of contempt proceedings, and it is even turning planes around when ordered to do so.

Zooming out a bit, we can understand why. The Justice Department is in disarray and demoralized, it has in some instances squandered the crucial “presumption of regularity” that is normally afforded to government functions, and the Trump regime is now losing the lion’s share of the most consequential lower court cases. 

Sure, the Supreme Court may eventually weigh in with a set of terrible decisions. But that won’t stop, and hasn’t stopped, resourceful civil rights lawyers from finding new and novel ways to attack the White House’s policies and orders. For example, when SCOTUS found that litigants could not obtain nationwide injunctions against White House directives, plaintiffs adjusted quickly, moving for class certification so that the nationwide part got built into the definition of the class.

And who knows? Maybe even this SCOTUS majority will draw the line somewhere—perhaps by protecting the bright line independence of the Federal Reserve or by telling Trump he can’t order federal troops anywhere he wants for whatever mission he wants. 

Until then, every win in the lower courts chips away at the MAGA fascist golem, and maybe with enough blows, we can take the entire monstrosity down.

Categories Accountability, Justice, Trump

Sacramento: How Could a Charter School Misuse $180 Million in Two Years?

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2025 //
6

Diana Lambert of Edsource reported that Jonathan Raymond, the former Superintendent of the Sacramento School District, agreed to take over the leadership of a “troubled” charter school called Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools. The school enrolls adults, many formerly incarcerated or new immigrants.

Wow, was it ever troubled!

Good for Raymond for taking on the challenge of fixing the school! The first thing he did was to dismiss the entire board.

The school owes the state $180 million dollars for money it should not have received or misspent. Most of the teachers were unqualified or were hired because they were friends or family of board members.

And on and on, demonstrating the need for the Legislature to establish oversight and accountability for charter schools, which the California Charter Schools Association has opposed for years.

Lambert wrote:

Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools opened in Sacramento in 2014 with high ideals — to help adult students, many formerly incarcerated or new immigrants, to earn a diploma, improve English language skills, or learn a trade. 

Now, the school is one reason state legislators are considering increased charter school oversight.

The charter school has been the subject of investigations and critical news reports since shortly after it opened its first campus. But, instead of increased oversight, the school was allowed to expand to more than 50 sites with 13,700 students and a budget of $195 million.

WHAT THE AUDIT FOUND
  • Twin Rivers and other organizations did not provide adequate oversight.
  • Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools received more than $180 million in K-12 funds it was not eligible to collect and must now repay.
  • Graduation rates were so low they brought down the state’s graduation rate by half a percentage point.
  • Charter school leaders wasted taxpayer dollars on gifts and trips.
  • School leaders hired friends and family for jobs they weren’t qualified to hold.
  • Most teachers did not have the appropriate credentials to teach K-12 classes.

It wasn’t until the California State Auditor’s Office released a report in June, commissioned by state legislators, that the level of impropriety at the school became apparent.

The 80-page state audit found that the adult school received $180 million of K-12 funding for which it was not eligible, assigned teachers to classes they were not credentialed to teach, and avoided standardized testing by eliminating the 11th grade. 

The audit also found that school leaders spent $1.96 million on a three-day trip for staff to San Diego for professional development, $80,000 on a leadership conference in Maui, $33,000 a month to lease a semi-professional ballpark, and more than $145,000 on gifts for students.

“The Highlands audit has underscored for us the need for greater accountability on the part of charter authorizers of all sizes, to conduct more thorough oversight that is not solely reliant upon a charter school’s annual audit or a charter school’s assertions,” said Cassie Mancini, legislative advocate for the California School Employees Association at a state Senate hearing on Assembly Bill 84, a charter oversight bill, in July.

Legislators, charter school advocates and charter school authorizers have been working to revise two competing charter school bills with the goal of merging them into one. 

Adult charter gets K-12 funds

Many of the problems the audit found at Highlands Community Charter seem to stem from how the school leaders interpreted the rules around a unique federal program that allows adult charter schools, working in partnership with a Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act agency, to receive K-12 funding, which is significantly higher than adult education funding…

Highlands Community Charter had a graduation rate of 2.8% and its California Innovative Career Academy, or CICA, had a rate of 16.9%. Highlands opened CICA, an independent study school, in 2019…

A large number of underqualified teachers and large class sizes, averaging 51 students per teacher, may have contributed to the poor academic performance of the school’s students, according to the audit. The state has no limit on class sizes in charter high schools.

At the time of the audit, only 53 of the school’s 250 teachers had a K-12 credential, said Bill McGuire, who served as executive director of the school during the year of the audit. He blamed the lack of appropriately credentialed teachers on inaccurate information from credentialing officials.

The charter school owes $180 million to the state. It’s asking for some sort of write-off since the money is gone. The authorizer, Twin Rivers, collected $12.9 million in fees but didn’t seem to oversee much.

A scam? An error? A rip-off? Call it what you will. California and every other state needs to establish meaningful oversight and accountability for charter schools. A huge amount of money was spent since the school(s) opened in 2014, and very few people were educated.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, California, Charter Schools, Funding

Bernie Sanders: RFK Jr. Must Resign!

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2025 //
4

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrote an article for The New York Times calling for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign. Since Sanders was chairman of the Senate Committee overseeing HHS, he argues with facts, not just indignation.

He writes:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign.

Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.

This week, Mr. Kennedy pushed out the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after less than one month on the job because she refused to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous policies. Four leading officials at C.D.C. resigned the same week. One of those officials said Mr. Kennedy’s team asked him to “change studies that have been settled in the past” apparently to fit Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views. This is not Making America Healthy Again.

Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, Secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts.

It is absurd to have to say this in 2025, but vaccines are safe and effective. That, of course, is not just my view. Far more important, it is the overwhelming consensus of the medical and scientific communities.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the country’s largest professional association of pediatricians, representing over 67,000 doctors who treat our children every day, calls immunizations “one of the greatest public health achievements,” which prevents tens of thousands of deaths and millions of cases of disease.

The American Medical Association, the largest professional association of physicians and medical students, representing over 270,000 doctors along with 79 leading medical societies, recently said that vaccines for flu, R.S.V. and Covid-19 are “the best tools to protect the public against these illnesses and their potentially serious complications.”

The World Health Organization, an agency with some of the most prominent medical experts around the globe, recently noted that over the past 50 years, vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives and reduced the infant deaths by 40 percent.

Against the overwhelming body of evidence within medicine and science, what are Secretary Kennedy’s views? He has claimed that autism is caused by vaccines, despite more than a dozen rigorous scientific studies involving hundreds of thousands of children that have found no connection between vaccines and autism.

He has called the Covid-19 vaccines the “deadliest” ever made despite findings cited by the W.H.O. that Covid shots saved over 14 million lives throughout the world in 2021 alone.

He has ridiculously questioned whether the polio vaccine has killed more people than polio itself did even though scientists have found that the vaccine has saved 1.5 million lives and prevented around 20 million people from becoming paralyzed since 1988.

He has absurdly claimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”

Who supports Secretary Kennedy’s views? Not credible scientists and doctors. One of his leading “experts” that he cites to back up his bogus claims on autism and vaccines had his medical license revoked and his study retracted from the medical journal that published it.

Many of his supporters are from Children’s Health Defense — the anti-vaccine group he founded and profited from — and a small circle of loyalists that have spread misinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories on vaccines for years.

The reality is that Secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of H.H.S., he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.

What will this mean for the health and well-being of the American people?

Short term, it will be harder for Americans to get lifesaving vaccines. Already, the Trump administration has effectively taken away Covid vaccines from many healthy younger adults and kids, unless they fight their way through our broken health care system. This means more doctor’s visits, more bureaucracy and more people paying higher out-of-pocket costs — if they can manage to get a vaccine at all.

Covid is just the beginning. Mr. Kennedy’s next target may be the childhood immunization schedule, the list of recommended vaccines that children receive to protect them from diseases like measles, chickenpox and polio. The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm.

Two years ago, when I was the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, I held a hearing with the major government officials responsible for protecting us from a new pandemic, including the head of the C.D.C. Without exception, every one of these agency heads said that, while they could not predict the exact date, there will be a future pandemic and we must be much better prepared for it than we are today.

Unfortunately, Secretary Kennedy’s actions are making a worrisome situation even worse by defunding the research that could help us prepare for the next pandemic. This month, he canceled nearly $500 million in research for the kinds of vaccines that helped us stop the Covid pandemic. At the same time, Mr. Kennedy is cutting funding to states to prepare and respond to future outbreaks of infectious diseases. This is unacceptable.

America’s health care system is already dysfunctional and wildly expensive, and yet the Trump administration will be throwing an estimated 15 million people off their health insurance through a cut of over $1 trillion to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. This cut is also expected to result in the closing of or the decline in services at hundreds of nursing homes, hospitals and community health centers. As a result of cuts to the Affordable Care Act, health insurance costs will soar for millions of Americans. That is not Making America Healthy Again.

Secretary Kennedy is putting Americans’ lives in danger, and he must resign. In his place, President Trump must listen to doctors and scientists and nominate a health secretary and a C.D.C. director who will protect the health and well-being of the American people, not carry out dangerous policies based on conspiracy theories.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Health, Lies, Medicine, Propaganda

DOJ Lawyer Accused Harvard of “Indifference to Anti-Semitism.” As an Undergraduate, He Wrote a Paper from Hitler’s View

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2025 //
3

The Boston Globe reported a startling story. Michael Velchik, the lawyer leading the charge against Harvard University for alleged “anti-semitism,” wrote a paper from Hitler’s perspective when he was an undergraduate at Harvard.

Hilary Burns and Tal Koran wrote:

The cornerstone of the Trump administration’s justification for cracking down on Harvard University is that the Ivy League school has allegedly allowed antisemitism to fester on campus.

“The choice was made, let’s not give federal taxpayer dollars to institutions that exhibit a wanton indifference to antisemitism,” the lawyer defending the government’s case said in federal court in July.

Inside the war on Harvard

Yet that lawyer, Michael Velchik, when he was a senior at Harvard 14 years ago, submitted a paper for a Latin class written from the perspective of Adolf Hitler, according to three people studying in the department with knowledge of the incident. The assignment was to write from the perspective of a controversial figure, but Velchik’s choice of Hitler so unnerved the instructor that he was asked to redo the assignment.

And in an email to a peer about 18 months later, as he was preparing to enter law school, Velchik wrote that he‘d enjoyed Hitler’s autobiography and political manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” more than any other book he’d read recently during a year of travels, according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by The Boston Globe. He did not mention Hitler’s perpetration of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered. 

Velchik — who holds two degrees from Harvard, one from the college and one from the law school — was the sole lawyer arguing the case for the White House in July. The portrait that emerges from interviews with students who knew him at Harvard, colleagues, and friends, as well as from emails he sent to a peer in his early 20s, is of a young man who is extremely intelligent, at times provocative, and unapologetically confident in his intellectual prowess.

To finish the story, open the link.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Higher Education, Hypocrisy
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