Indiana’s Republican-controlled General Assembly decreed this year in House Enrolled Act 1447 that every public school board and charter school governing body must establish a procedure for the parent of any student, or any person residing in the school district, to request the removal of library materials deemed “obscene” or “harmful to minors.”
The procedure may provide for an intermediate response by school personnel to a request to remove a library book, but it must include the school board reviewing, and possibly implementing, each removal request at its next public meeting.
The new law followed claims by Hoosier Republicans that Indiana school libraries are secretly loaded with books containing pornography and other content inappropriate for children.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has been blasting away at knuckle-headed Republican governors like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott for their cruel indifference to other people. He’s already suggested he may sue DeSantis for kidnapping, after Florida sent two private planes with Venezuelan immigrants to Sacramento. Now, he’s going after Abbott for his refusal to take action against gun violence.
He wrote:
Texas… where elected officials are relying on Winnie the Pooh to teach their kids about active shooters because they don’t have the courage to keep our kids safe.
Texas… where Greg Abbott signed a law to send DNA kits to parents of school children so their bodies can be identified after a shooting.
Guns are the leading cause of death for kids in America. Kids!
We’re not talking about accidents, or cancer or something unpreventable. We know the steps to take to save our kids lives. But leaders like Greg Abbott lack the courage to act.
Until then… It’s Winnie the Pooh for Texas families.
Peter Greene was a teacher in Pennsylvania for 39 years. He is now a regular writer at Forbes and a super star blogger. This column appeared on his blog. He responded to Rick Hess’s claim that school choice is not an attack on public education but part of a long history of trying to improve them. From my perspective, it’s hard to understand how public schools improve by defunding them and replacing them with religious schools, low-quality private schools, home schooling, and cyber charters.
This is what Peter Greene wrote:
Rick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) is one of those occupants of the reformy camp that I take seriously, even when I think he’s wrong. So when he raises the question of whether or not school choice is an “attack” on public education, I think it’s a question worth talking about, because I think the answer is a little bit complicated. So let me walk through his recent piece on that very question bit by bit.
After an intro suggesting that choice expansion flows directly from the pandemic while ascribing opposition to choice to a shadowy cabal that flows from teachers unions, Hess gets to his point, which is that seeing choice as an anti-public school is “misleading and misguided.”
Hess puts choice in the context of a century’s worth of public school fixer-uppers, “a barrage of reforms.” He offers a list–“compulsory attendance, district consolidation, larger schools, smaller schools, magnet schools, standards, test-based accountability, merit pay, and more.”
Some of these ideas were good. Some weren’t. But in hindsight, it’s pretty clear that they weren’t “attacks” on public education; rather, they were attempts to improve it.
I disagree. Some of these ideas were offered with sincere hope for the best. But I’m going to single out the standards movement and test-based accountability for special recognition here.
If you weren’t teaching during the rise of No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and Race To The Top, I’m not sure if I can really capture for you the dawning sense of horror, frustration and futility among teachers at the time.
Word came down that new regulations required us to get test scores up– a little bit per year for starters, then ramping up to an impossible climb, until somehow every single student would be above average. If not, there would be penalties, maybe the complete dismantling and rebuilding of the district, perhaps as a privately-run charter school. “This is not possible,” educators said. “All will learn all,” replied the Powers That Be. “Don’t you believe that students can learn? And which child do you propose to leave behind.”
Then there were the tests themselves. Not very good, and with results coming back with so little detail–and so very late in the game–that they were less than no help at all. “Well, if we just teach the standards, the tests scores will follow,” said some optimistic educators. That didn’t happen. Schools rejiggered curriculum, pulled students away from untested material like art and recess so that they could be double-whammied with test prep.
“Maybe Obama will fix it,” we hoped. He did not. He doubled down. And 2014–the year for 100%–came closer and closer, the year when anyone dealing with educational reality knew that every district in the country would be either a) failing or B) cheating.
And through those years, one at a time or in small groups, teachers arrived at an unpleasant conclusion.
They are setting us up for failure. They want us to fail.
Why would they want that? The rhetoric had already been around on the far right, back all the way to Milton Friedman and on through his intellectual spawn– public education should be dismantled. There was a new push for vouchers and especially charter schools, and that coincided with rising noise about “failing” public schools. There was very little “let’s expand the educational ecosystem” and an awful lot of “we must help students escape failing public schools.” The constant refrain of “school choice will force public schools to improve because competition” was also an omnipresent crock, a slap in the face to educators who were already working their butts off and resented the suggestion that they were either incompetent or lazy. And that thread runs all the way up guys like Christopher Rufo arguing that to get to universals school choice, you have to get to universal distrust of public schools.
Maybe school choice wasn’t in and of itself an attack on public education, but it certainly seemed as if attacking public education was a means of promoting school choice.
I have no doubt that there are people who believe that education would work better if handled by the free market (I think their belief is magical, misguided and wrong, but I do believe it’s sincere). I believe there are technocrats who believe that standards, tests and data would improve education (ditto).
But to be a public school educator on the receiving end of all this (and more) absolutely felt like an attack. The irony is that when reformsters eventually figured out that the attack-filled rhetoric wasn’t helping and they dialed it back, the attacks themselves had become more real.
But let’s get back to Hess.
Public education can encompass a lot of approaches, and it can be organized in many different ways. Rather than blindly insist that “defending public schooling” requires clinging to outdated policies from decades (or centuries) past, we would do better to clarify principles, examine particulars, and then debate proposals.
All of this language is doing a lot of work, but as far as it goes, Hess and I probably agree more than we disagree. But the disagree part comes in the very next paragraph.
Indeed, the pandemic was a stark reminder that there are lots of ways to deliver schooling, including innovations such as learning pods, microschools, virtual tutors, and education savings accounts.
Learning pods and microschools are okay if you’re wealthy. As policy ideas in the vein of the DeVosian, “Well, your voucher may not be enough to get into a good private school, but you can always start a microschool,” they suck. I don’t think there are more than a hundred people in the country who came out of the pandemic thinking virtual education is a great idea. And education savings accounts are just vouchers with extra super-powers and porcine lip gloss. And none of these are really new ideas. They also all suffer from the same issue, which is the notion that any school choice system must be done free market style. We can do a great choice system without the free market at all (but that’s a post for another day).
Hess identifies one of the issues as the fuzziness of the word “public.” On this point, I think he gets some things wrong.
Choice opponents assert that public schools are “public” because they’re funded by public tax dollars.
No, that’s choicers. It’s been part of the charter school argument that charter schools are public schools because they are funded with public dollars. This pro-public ed writer (I’m not anti-choice, but I am anti-most-of-the-versions-of-choice-with-which-we’ve-been-presented) would say that public schools are public because they the public funds them, owns them, and operates them via representatives. Furthermore, they are public schools because they have a responsibility to the public to serve all students.
You can argue, as Hess and others do, that districts regularly hire outside firms to handle certain functions and occasionally outsource the teaching of certain students with exceptional special needs. But in all those cases, the responsibility for the management of those outside contracts rests with the public school district. A charter or private voucher-fed school carries no such responsibility. A public school district cannot, as can charters and voucher schools may, simply show parents the door and say, “Good luck. Your child is not our problem.” Do all public systems meet that responsibility as well as they ought to? Absolutely not. But at least the responsibility exists. A parent who thinks the public system is short-changing their child can (and often will) sue the district. They have no such option in a choice system, as such systems are currently conceived.
Hess is correct in calling public education “a pretty expansive category.” But it hinges on far more than whose money is being used.
In fact, I’d argue that it is the responsibility portion that is the big difference in the brand of choice being pushed by many these days. Our public system is based, however imperfectly, on the notion that we bear a collective responsibility for educating the young. Modern choice, particularly the current version sold under the culture warrior parental right brand, is about saying that getting a child an education is the responsibility of the parents, and that’s it. Yes, many choicers are also trying to privatize the ownership and provision of education, but it is the privatizing of responsibility for a child’s education that is perhaps the most profound and fundamental shift.
More importantly, simply calling something “public” doesn’t make it a good thing. While the phrase “public schooling” is suffused with happy notions of inclusivity and fairness, “public” isn’t a magic word.
Ain’t it that truth. Public education has a wide variety of issues–though some of those are the direct result of reformster attempts to “fix” things (see above re: standards and testing). But I’ve never argued that I’m against modern school choice and ed reform because public schools are perfect the way they are and everything else sucks. My most fundamental issue is that public schools have some serious issues, and modern ed reform and school choice don’t solve any of them (yes, that is also another long post). They just weaken public school’s ability to work on them while blowing through a giant pile of taxpayer money.
The point isn’t to play word games but to understand that things are less clear-cut than defenders of the status quo are prone to acknowledge. There are many ways to provide and serve the aims of public education.
After all these decades in the ed biz, I’m inclined to assert, repeatedly, that everything in education is less clear-cut that the vast majority of people acknowledge. Some folks on my side of the aisle are quick to infer nefarious and/or greedy motives when, sincere ideology is sufficient explanation (much as some folks in the choice camp assume that the only reason someone would stick up for public ed is because she’s on the union payroll). Some choicers are simply ignorant of how any of this school stuff works. Some are up against a particularly dysfunctional local version of public education. Some are anti-democrats for whom this is just one issue of many, one more way in which the government steals their money to spend it on Those People. Some want to recapture education for a particularly conservative version of christianist religion. Some want to social engineer their way to a more efficient society. Some are serious people, and some are not.
In short, the choicer and reformster camp contains a great variety of individuals.
Are some of those individuals interested promoting school choice as a way of making public education better? Is it possible to make public education better by incorporating some choice ideas? I believe that latter is true, and I swear I’m going to post about it in the not too distant future, and as for the former, well… yes, but.
But for all the variety in the choicer camp, they mostly adhere to two flawed premises– that a choice landscape should rest on a bedrock of free market mechanics and that the resulting system shouldn’t cost a cent more than the current one. As long as we start with those premises, school choice must be a zero sum game, and even if all the people who have spent the past four decades trying to tear public ed down so that choice will look better–even if all those people shut up, the zero sum game feature seems guaranteed to turn school choice into an attack on public education.
Kathryn Joyce is an outstanding journalist who has written several excellent articles about the far-right conspiracy to destroy public education. In this important article, published by both the Hechinger Report and Vanity Fair, she examines the rightwing takeover of public schools in Sarasota, Florida, by the extremist Moms for Liberty and their hero Governor DeSantis.
Joyce begins:
SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — On a Sunday afternoon in late May 2022, Zander Moricz, then class president of Sarasota County’s Pine View School, spent the moments before his graduation speech sitting outside the auditorium, on the phone with his lawyers. Over the previous month, the question of what he’d say when he stepped to the podium had become national news. That March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, quickly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law for its ban on all mention of gender identity and sexuality in K–3 classrooms and restriction of those discussions in higher grades as well. Moricz, a student LGBTQ+ activist, had led several protests against the act that spring and joined a high-profile lawsuit against the state. In early May, he charged on Twitter that Pine View’s administration had warned that if he mentioned his activism or the lawsuit at graduation, his microphone would be cut. (In a statement released last year, the school district confirmed that students are told not to express political views in their speeches.)
In the tumultuous weeks leading up to the ceremony, Pine View — Sarasota’s “gifted” magnet institution, consistently ranked one of the top 25 public high schools in the country — was besieged with angry calls and news coverage. Moricz stayed home for three weeks, he said, thanks to the rvolume of death threats he received, and people showed up at his parents’ work. When a rumor started that Pine View’s principal would have to wear a bulletproof vest to graduation, he recalled, “the entire campus lost their minds,” thinking “everyone’s going to die” and warning relatives not to come. His parents worried he’d be killed.
But after all the controversy, graduation day was a success. Moricz, now 19, delivered a pointedly coded speech about the travails of being born with curly hair in Florida’s humid climate: how he worried about the “thousands of curly-haired kids who are going to be forced to speak like this” — like he was, in code — “for their entire lives as students.” Videos of the speech went viral. Donations poured into Moricz’s youth-led nonprofit. That summer, he left to study government at Harvard.
Half-a-year later though, when Moricz came home, Sarasota felt darker.
“I’m wearing this hat for a reason,” he said when we met for coffee in a strip mall near his alma mater in early March. “Two years ago, if I was bullied due to my queerness, the school would have rallied around me and shut it down. If it happened today, I believe everyone would act like it wasn’t happening.”
These days, he said, queer kids sit in the back of class and don’t tell teachers they’re being harassed. A student at Pine View was told, Moricz said, that he couldn’t finish his senior thesis researching other states’ copycat “Don’t Say Gay” laws. (The school did not respond to a request for comment through a district spokesperson.) When Moricz’s nonprofit found a building to house a new youth LGBTQ+ center — since schools were emphatically no longer safe spaces — they budgeted for bulletproof glass.
“The culture of fear that’s being created is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do,” he said. And much of it was thanks to the Sarasota County School Board.
Over the last two years, education culture wars have become the engine of Republican politics nationwide, with DeSantis’s Florida serving as the vanguard of the movement. But within the state, Sarasota is more central still.
Its school board chair, Bridget Ziegler, cofounded the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty and helped lay the groundwork for “Don’t Say Gay.” After a uniquely ugly school board race last summer, conservatives flipped the board and promptly forced out the district’s popular superintendent. In early January, when DeSantis appointed a series of right-wing activists to transform Florida’s progressive New College into a “Hillsdale of the South” — emulating the private Christian college in Michigan that has become a trendsetting force on the right — that was in Sarasota too. In February, DeSantis sat alongside Ziegler’s husband and Moms for Liberty’s other cofounders to announce a list of 14 school board members he intends to help oust in 2024—Sarasota’s sole remaining Democrat and LGBTQ+ board member, Tom Edwards, among them. The next month, Ziegler proposed that the board hire a newly created education consultancy group with ties to Hillsdale College for what she later called a “‘WOKE’ Audit.” (Ziegler did not respond to interview requests for this article.)
The dizzying number of attacks has led to staffing and hiring challenges, the cancelation of a class, a budding exodus of liberals from the county, and fears that destroying public education is the ultimate endgame. In January, Ziegler’s husband, Christian — who chairs the Florida Republican Party — tweeted a celebratory declaration: “SARASOTA IS GROUND ZERO FOR CONSERVATIVE EDUCATION.”
It wasn’t hyperbole, said Moricz. “We say that Sarasota is Florida’s underground lab, and we’re its non-consenting lab rats.”
For as long as Florida has been grading schools and school districts — a late 1990s innovation that helped spark the “school reform” movement — Sarasota, with its 62 schools and nearly 43,000 students, has enjoyed an “A” rating. Perched on the Gulf Coast just south of Tampa, the county’s mix of powder-soft beaches and high-culture amenities — including an opera house, ballet and museums — have made it a destination for vacationers and retirees. And that influx has made Sarasota one of the richest counties in the state.
Since many of those retirees, dating back to the 1950s, have been white Midwestern transplants, it’s also made Sarasota a Republican stronghold and top fundraising destination for would-be presidential candidates. Both the last and current chairs of the state GOP — first State Senator Joe Gruters and now Christian Ziegler — live in the county. Sarasota arguably launched Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, thanks to Gruters’s early support. These days, though, Sarasota isn’t just conservative, but at the leading edge of Florida’s turn to the hard right.
Partly that’s thanks to the Zieglers, who have become one of Florida’s premier power couples, with close ties to both Trump world and the DeSantis administration and a trio of daughters enrolled in local private schools. As founder of the digital marketing company Microtargeted Media, Christian did hundreds of thousands of dollars of work for pro-Trump PACs in 2021, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. After being elected state GOP chair this February, he announced his goal was “to crush these leftist in-state Democrats” so thoroughly that “no Democrat considers running for office.” Although Bridget stepped down from Moms for Liberty shortly after its founding, she subsequently helped draftFlorida’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, which helped pave the way for DeSantis’s 2021 ban on mask mandates and ultimately last year’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. In 2022, the right-wing Leadership Institute hired her as director of school board programs, and built a 6,000-square-foot headquarters in Sarasota to serve as a national hub for conservative education activism. This winter, DeSantis also appointed her to a new board designed to punish the Disney Company for criticizing his anti-LGBTQ laws….
Last year, when Ziegler was up for reelection and two other board members were terming out, she ran as a unified slate with former school resource officer Tim Enos and retired district employee Robyn Marinelli. The candidates drew support from both DeSantis’s administration — which unprecedentedly endorseddozens of school board candidates across the state — and local members of the far-right. A PAC partially funded by The Hollow’s owner campaigned for the “ZEM” slate (a shorthand for the candidates’ surnames) by driving a mobile billboard around the county, calling one of their opponents a “LIAR” and “BABY KILLER” because she’d once worked for Planned Parenthood. Proud Boys hoisted ZEM signs on county streets and a mailer was sent out, castigating the liberal candidates as “BLM/PSL [Party of Socialism and Liberation]/ANTIFA RIOTERS, PLANNED PARENTHOOD BABY KILLERS, [who] WANT GROOMING AND PORNOGRAPHY IN OUR SCHOOLS.” (Enos and Marinelli did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)
Open the link and read all of the article. It is a devastating article about the takeover of the school board by hateful extremists whose tools are fear and divisiveness.
Jeff Bryant writes often about education. He lives in North Carolina. In this article, he tries to solve the mystery of why Democratic state legislator Tricia Cotham switched sides and joined the Republican Party, giving them a supermajority in both houses of the General Assembly?
Cotham was a Democrat who had campaigned in promises to oppose school vouchers; to defend LGBT rights; and support abortion rights.
Once she gave the Republicans the decisive vote in the lower house, the Republicans had a veto-proof majority and were in a position to override any veto by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.
Cotham, the new Republican, reversed her vote on everything she campaigned for or against. She supported Republicans’ efforts to reduce abortion rights; she endorsed school vouchers; and she sided with Republicans in their attack on trans youth.
In other words, she betrayed the people who voted for her and cast her lot with the hard-right Republicans who have aligned themselves with anti-progressive, anti-liberal, anti-Democrat policies.
Why? She said the Democrats were mean to her. She said they ignored her. She said she didn’t get the committee assignments she wanted. Are these good reasons to join forces with a party that has sought to destroy public education, demoralize teachers, and gerrymander the state to protect its advantages?
None of this made sense. A person doesn’t change their fundamental values because of hurt feelings.
Jeff investigated and determined that her decision was transactional. What did she get in exchange for double-crossing her constituents and her colleagues? Read his article to find out.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes here about the latest disturbing development in the charter school industry—the growth of charter schools that promote a Christian Nationalist perspective. Her article was published on Valerie Strauss’s blog The Answer Sheet at the Washington Post.
Valerie Strauss introduces Carol’s article:
The religious right scored a win this week when Oklahoma’s virtual charter school boardapproved the opening of the nation’s first religious charter school, which, if it is actually allowed to open as planned in 2024 for grades K-12, will weave Catholic doctrine into every single subject that students take. Given that charter schools are publicly funded, and public schools aren’t supposed to provide religious education (although they can teach about religion), you may wonder how this school could be given permission to exist.
The decision is no surprise to people watching the way some charter schools run by right-wing organizations have been operating in recent years, pushing the boundaries of the separation of church and state embedded in the U.S. Constitution even as Supreme Court decisions have chipped away at it. Details can be found in a new report entitled “A Sharp Turn Right: A New Breed of Charter Schools Delivers the Conservative Agenda.” (See full report below.) It was written by the nonprofit Network for Public Education, a group that advocates for traditional public school districts and opposes charter schools, and has written reports in recent years chronicling waste and abuse of public funding of charter schools.
The network’s newest report looks at charter schools that it says are designed to attract Christian nationalists with specific imagery and curriculum. The student bodies of these schools are largely Whiter and wealthier than in other schools — in the charter sector and in traditional public districts — and have deep connections to people within conservative Christian movements, the report says.
Former U.S. education secretary Betsy DeVos, a leader in the movement to expand charter schools and school vouchers — which use public funds for private and religious school education — has acknowledged that her work in the education sphere is driven by desire to advance school choice as a path to “advance God’s kingdom.” Her husband, Amway heir Richard DeVos, who worked with her for decades in the school choice movement, said he was sorry that public schools “displaced” churches as the center of communities.
The charter school movement moved into new territory Monday when the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved, on a 3-2 vote, an application for the opening of a virtual school to be named St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School and run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa. The vote will be challenged in court, and as attorney and education policy scholar Kevin Welner wrote on this blog last year, we can expect to see litigation around whether church-run charters can “successfully assert their Free Exercise rights in an attempt to run the school without restrictions on proselytizing and religiously motivated discrimination.” You can read here about howthe Supreme Court has been laying the groundwork for religious charter schools.
The new report by the Network for Public Education focuses on two types of charter schools: classical charters — which use the word “classical” in their names — and those offering “back to basics” curriculum. Diane Ravitch, an education historian and co-founder of the Network for Public Education, said in an introduction to the report that these charter schools are “the lesser-known third part” of a strategy by right-wing Christians to undermine secular public education; the others are vouchers and similar programs that use public funding for private and religious education, and book/curricular bans.
While private classical schools have a long history — emphasizing Eurocentric texts and the study of Latin and Greek — what is new is “the use of taxpayer dollars to fund them when they become or are established as charter schools,” the report said. Founders of classical charters generally reject modern instructional practices and accuse Progressive Era educational leaders such as John Dewey for removing Christian ideals from curriculum.
The Network for Public Education’s report notes that in classical private Christian schools, the curriculum focuses not only on the Western canon — Homer, C.S. Lewis and beyond — but also on scripture. “Classical charter schools emphasize ‘values’ or ‘virtues,’ which stand as shorthand for quoted scripture,” it says, which is especially true of classical charters that have opened since Donald Trump became president in 2017. “From videos posted on websites to crosses shown on the top of the school, we found example after example of charter schools presenting themselves as free private Christian schools,” the report says. It cited Liberty Common High School in Fort Collins, Colo., which celebrates “capstones” representing the “highest order of virtue and character,” including “prudence, temperance, and patriotism,” and the American Classical Charter Academy in St. Cloud, Fla., which promotes eight “pillars of character” and four “classical virtues.”
“Back to basic” schools use red, white, and blue school colors, patriotic logos and pictures of the Founding Fathers, along with terms such as virtue, patriotism and sometimes outright references to religion, the report says, citing as an example the website of the four-campus Advantage Academy in Texas, which boasts of educating students in a “faith-friendly environment.” The Cincinnati Classical Academy, another charter school, does not advertise its charter status on its website, while offering a free education with instruction in “moral character.” The American Leadership Academy in Utah posts videos its choir singing religious songs; one includes the note, “We want to help kids and adults turn to Jesus, or become Jesus people.
The fastest-growing sector of right-wing charters combines both a classical “virtuous” curriculum with “hyper-patriotism,” exemplified by charter schools that adopt the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum, which is centered on Western civilization and designed to help “students acquire a mature love for America,” its organizers say. The curriculum comes from Hillsdale College in Michigan, whose longtime president, Larry Arnn, is an ally of Trump’s and is aligned with DeVos. A Hillsdale K-12 civics and U.S. history curriculum released in 2021 extols conservative values, attacks liberal ones and distorts civil rights history, saying, for example: “The civil rights movement was almost immediately turned into programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders.”
The Network for Public Education said that it had identified 273 open charter schools that offer a classical curriculum and/or have websites designed to attract White conservative families with for-profit management corporations running 29 percent of them, a percentage nearly twice as high as the entire charter school sector.
The new report looks at Roger Bacon Academy charter schools, run by Baker A. Mitchell Jr., which prohibit girls from wearing pants or jeans to school in order, according to a lawsuit, to ensure they are regarded as “fragile vessels” that men are supposed to take care of and honor, based on a quote from the Bible’s New Testament. (A ruling in a lawsuit challenging the dress code is on appeal to the Supreme Court after a federal judge ruled in favor of Bonnie Peltier, who objected to the unequal treatment of her daughter.) Students are also required to recite a daily oath committing them to be “morally straight” and guard “against the stains of falsehood from the fascination with experts,” while also avoiding the “temptation of vanity” and “overreliance on rational argument.”
“A Sharp Turn Right” also says one purpose of these schools is “to raise the next generation of right-wing warriors” to fight culture wars. Kyle Shideler, a senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy, an anti-Muslim organization classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, wrote in a recent article in the Federalist that donors should fund boot camps to train right-wingers in “the political dark arts” of organizing. In the article, he praises Hillsdale College for “the growing Christian classical school movement … for the purpose of forming young minds.”
Shideler is referring to Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative, which stems from the Barney Family Foundation, established by Stephen Barney and his wife, Lynne, in 1998. The report says it identified 59 charter schools that are open or will soon open that claim affiliation to the initiative. While Hillsdale College’s mission is to maintain “by precept and example the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith,” the mission of their K-12 charter schools includes a call for “moral virtue.”
The foundation’s 990s tax forms show that in addition to its health and child-centered charities, it funds right-wing think tanks, foundations and organizations that create conservative legislation on various issued used as models by Republican-led states. One recipient has been Hillsdale College, where Stephen Barney is a trustee emeritus on the Board of Trustees. Between 2010 and 2019, the Network for Public Education identified more than $4 million earmarked for the college from his foundation. In 2010, the Barney Charter School Initiative began with a half-million-dollar contribution from the foundation, and contributions in that range have been recorded every year for which records are available, the report says.
“A Sharp Turn Right” discusses examples of Republican officeholders and party chairs who, like Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), aggressively push the conservative charter school agenda. Republican Heidi Ganahl, who lost to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) in the 2022 gubernatorial election, is a founder of the Golden View Classical Academy. She also advocates for one of the fastest-growing Hillsdale-affiliated charter chains, Ascent Classical Academies, which operates two schools in Colorado, with plans to open four more in South Carolina, three in Colorado and at least one in North Carolina.
If you read only one article today, read this one. It’s powerful and poignant. The article was written by Forrest Wilder and appears in the Texas Monthly, a terrific publication.
To understand why Republican legislators from rural districts helped to defeat vouchers in Texas, read this article about the schools of Fort Davis in Jeff Davis County in rural West Texas. The superintendent is a bedrock conservative who is dead set against vouchers. His schools are on the verge of bankruptcy due to the state’s Byzantine school-finance system. The state government doesn’t care. At the end, you will understand Governor Abbott’s long-term goal: to eliminate property taxes and completely privatize education.
Texas doesn’t have a mile-high city, but Fort Davis comes close at 4,892 feet. The tiny unincorporated town is nestled in the foothills of the Davis Mountains, where bears and mountain lions and elk stalk among pine-forested sky islands. Fort Davis is the seat of Jeff Davis County, whose population of 1,900 is spread among 2,265 square miles, 50 percent bigger than Rhode Island. The sparsely populated desert country of Mongolia has nearly seven times the population density of Jeff Davis County. Odessa, the nearest city to Fort Davis, is two and a half hours away. The state Capitol is six and a half.
For Graydon Hicks III, the far-flunged-ness of Fort Davis is part of its appeal. He likes the high and lonesome feel of his hometown—the “prettiest in Texas,” he says. But these days, it has never felt further from the state’s political center of gravity.
For years, Hicks, the superintendent of Fort Davis ISD, has been watching, helplessly, as a slow-motion disaster has unfolded, the result of a flawed and resource-starved public-school finance system. Over the last decade, funding for his little district, which serves just 184 K–12 students, has sagged even as costs, driven by inflation and ever-increasing state mandates, have soared. The math is stark. His austere budget has hovered around $3.1 million a year for the past six years. But the state’s notoriously complex school finance system only allows him to bring in about $2.5 million a year through property taxes.
Hicks has hacked away at all but the most essential elements of his budget. More than three-quarters of Fort Davis’s costs come in the form of payroll, and the starting salary for teachers is the state minimum, just $33,660 a year. There are no signing bonuses or stipends for additional teacher certifications. Fort Davis has no art teacher. No cafeteria. No librarian. No bus routes. The track team doesn’t have a track to train on.
But Hicks can’t cut his way out of this financial crisis. This school year, Fort Davis ISD has a $622,000 funding gap. To make up the difference, Hicks is tapping into savings. Doug Karr, a Lubbock school-finance consultant who reviewed the district’s finances, said Fort Davis ISD was “wore down to the nub and the nub’s all gone. And that pretty much describes small school districts.”
“I am squeezing every nickel and dime out of every budget item,” Hicks said. “I don’t have excess of anything.” When I joked that it sounded like he was holding things together with duct tape and baling wire, he didn’t laugh. He said: “I literally have baling wire holding some fences up, holding some doors up.”
The district’s crisis comes at a time when the state is flush with an unprecedented $33 billion budget surplus. Hicks is a self-described conservative, but he thinks the far right is trying to destroy public education. For years, the state has starved public schools of funding: Texas ranks forty-second in per-pupil spending. And yet Governor Greg Abbott is spending enormous political capital on promoting a school voucher plan, which would divert taxpayer funds to private schools. Public education, Abbott has repeatedly said, will remain “fully funded,” though public-education spending is lower now than when he took office in 2015, and the Legislature recently passed a $321.3 billion budget with no pay raise for teachers and very little new funding for schools. Unable to get his voucher plan through the regular legislative session, Abbott is threatening to call lawmakers back to Austin until he gets his way.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, long a champion of vouchers, is backing legislation that would attempt to appease rural Republican legislators—a bloc long wary of vouchers—by offering $10,000 to districts that lose students to private schools. Hicks can barely contain his anger when he hears such talk. He has been lobbying state leaders for years to fix the crippling financial shortages that plague districts like his. “Take your assurances and shove ’em up your ass,” he says, before softening a bit. “I’m so tired. I’m so frustrated. We have tried. I have fought and fought and fought.”
With each passing month, his rural district inches closer to financial ruin. If nothing changes by next summer or fall, Fort Davis will have depleted its savings. He doesn’t know the exact day that his school district will go broke, but he can see it coming.
It’s easy enough to grasp the basic problem in Fort Davis. But what’s going on beneath the surface is another story.
During my twenty years of reporting on Texas politics, I’ve often heard that only a handful of people in the state understand the school-finance system, with its complicated formulas, allotments, maximum compressed tax rates, guaranteed yields, and “golden pennies.” A former colleague of mine, who once spent months trying to make sense of the topic, warned me against writing about it. Karr, the school finance consultant, compares the process of making sense of our public education funding to encountering a fire at a roadside cotton gin on some lonely West Texas highway. “You drive off into that smoke and you might never drive out,” he said. “You might end up getting killed.”
A thorough explanation of the system is the stuff of graduate theses, but the broad strokes are straightforward enough. How a school district is funded begins with two key questions: How much money is the district eligible for? And who pays for it?
Here it’s helpful to use a venerable school finance analogy: buckets of water. The size of a school district’s bucket—how much money it’s entitled to—is largely determined by the number of students in attendance. Every district receives at least $6,160 per pupil, an amount known as the basic allotment, an arbitrary number dreamed up by the Legislature and changed according to lawmakers’ whims.
At this point in the article, Wilder goes into the intricacies of school finance in Texas. Very few people understand it. All you need to know is that some districts are lavishly funded while others, like Fort Davis, are barely scraping by and may go bankrupt.
Hicks is not alone in thinking the opaqueness is intentional. “They make it just as complicated as they can,” he said of state officials. “Because how do you explain something so complicated to the average voter?” In other words, if constituents can’t easily grasp the perplexing and unnecessarily knotty framework, it’s tougher to hold officials accountable for budget decisions.
Though the spreadsheets may be head-spinning, they tell a story. In a state where some wealthy suburban communities build $80 million high school football stadiums, Fort Davis ISD is one of many rural communities literally struggling to keep the lights on.
I first heard from Hicks in March 2021, when he emailed state officials and journalists with a dire message: “What, exactly, does the state expect us to do? What more can we do? What more do our children need to be deprived of? At what point does our community break?” Hicks has received few answers, even as his situation has grown more desperate.
When I visited him in April, we met in his office, where he keeps a book on Texas gun laws, a photo of his West Point 1986 graduating class (which included Donald Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo), and a list of quotes from General George Patton (“Genius comes from the ability to pay attention to the smallest details”). Hicks, who’s stout and serious and talks in a sort of shout-twang because of partial hearing loss, wore a cross decorated in the colors of the American flag. He was eager to show me the fine line he walks between fiscal prudence and dilapidation. The first lesson came as he stood from his desk and I noticed the holstered handgun on his hip. The district, he explained, can’t afford to hire a school security officer, so he and eleven other district employees carry firearms.
His family has been in the area since the 1870s, when federal soldiers still pursued Comanche and Apache from the town’s namesake garrison. His great uncle was one of the first superintendents of Fort Davis ISD. (At one point, Hicks showed me a copy of his great-uncle’s 1942 master’s thesis, “The Early Ranch Schools of the Fort Davis Area.”) Later, as we were walking around campus, Hicks’s ten-year-old grandson, a thin fourth-grader wearing blue-rimmed glasses and blue jeans tucked into a pair of cowboy boots, ran up to Hicks and gave him a hug.
Superintendent Hicks hugs his grandson in the hallway at Dirks-Anderson Elementary School in Fort Davis.Photograph by Maisie Crow
Both the elementary school and the high school—where Hicks graduated in 1982—were built in 1929, Hicks explained. Walking through their timeworn hallways is to step back in time. In places, the plaster is flaking off the original adobe walls. The elementary school gym floor is bubbling up because of a leak under the foundation. The wooden seats in the high school auditorium have never been replaced. The urinals in the elementary school are original too. The newest instructional facility, a science lab, was built in 1973. In the summer, Hicks mows the football field, the same one he played on five decades ago. “Every bit helps,” he said.
The funding challenges create all manner of ripple effects. Hicks has trouble recruiting and retaining teachers, and some students drift away from school without extracurriculars to hold their interest. “You lose teachers, then you start losing kids, and then your funding gets worse,” he said. “It’s a circle-the-drain kinda thing. And it’s really speeding up for Fort Davis.”
The first problem is the size of the district’s bucket. For the last decade, TEA has calculated that Fort Davis’s Tier I annual allotment is between $2 million and $2.5 million, well short of its already spartan $3.1 million budget.
And then there’s the matter of how that bucket is filled. In the 2011–2012 school year, the state covered two-thirds of Fort Davis’ entitlement, about $2.1 million. Today, it chips in about $150,000, a 93 percent decrease. How to explain that change?…
In June 2019, the Big Three figures in state government—Abbott, Patrick, and then–House Speaker Dennis Bonnen—gathered at an elementary school in Austin for an almost giddy bill-signing ceremony. As a bipartisan group of lawmakers watched, Abbott signed into law House Bill 3, an $11.6 billion package of property tax cuts and education funding that had received near-unanimous support in both the House and Senate, a rarity in the highly polarized Legislature. “This one law does more to advance education in the state of Texas than any law that I have seen in my adult lifetime,” said Abbott.
For almost a year, an appointed commission of experts had met to discuss how to overhaul the school-finance system, issuing a report in December 2018 that called on the Lege to “redesign the entirety of our state’s funding system to reflect the needs of the 21st century.” HB 3 was the by-product of that prompt. Lawmakers rejiggered many of the system’s outdated formulas, offered pay raises to teachers, fixed some of the most glaring inequities, and reduced the amount of money recaptured by the state from property-wealthy districts. Most important, HB 3 represented a much-needed infusion of cash for struggling schools. The basic allotment was raised from $5,140 to $6,120 per student.
But HB 3 also exacerbated disparities among property-wealthy and property-poor districts. Because of changes to the way Tier II enrichment funding works, some communities were able to cut tax rates and generate significant new revenues from their tax base. For others, a minority of districts, HB 3 actually created new problems. Around 10 percent of districts saw a decrease in formula funding. This year, Alpine has $220,000 less than it would have had under the old system, even as some of the richest districts in the state—tiny West Texas communities with lots of oil wealth—saw their funding explode. Rinehart contrasts Alpine, which has almost no mineral wealth, with Rankin ISD, 130 miles northeast in the Permian Basin oil patch. While Alpine’s funding went down 2 percent, Rankin’s went up 339 percent. Even though Rankin is projected to return close to $100 million in recapture payments to the state this year, the district is fabulously wealthy. “Alpine’s budget is $10 million,” Rinehart points out. “Rankin’s is $14 million. We educate a thousand kids and they educate three hundred kids. So they are a third of our size and have a budget 40 percent larger than ours.”
Rinehart doesn’t begrudge Rankin’s wealth—she recently served as assistant superintendent there—but uses the Alpine–Rankin comparison as a “wild” example of how HB 3 exacerbated inequities, making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Hicks, too, has noticed. “Rankin just built a whole new school,” he told me. “They got a new fieldhouse, a new gym. Two new science labs. A turf practice field, a turf game field. A new track, a new stadium. And my buildings were built in 1929.” Rankin is planning to build ten new “teacherages”—district-funded housing for teachers, important to attracting and retaining talent in areas with scant or affordable residences.
Jeff Davis County, on the other hand, has no oil and gas and very little industry; any school debt would thus be borne by homeowners through bonds. Hicks’s district has never issued a bond, in part because it would be unlikely to pass; the voters wouldn’t support a tax increase. The school’s ag barn was built in 2019 with local donations. The band program, suspended for nine years as a cost-saving measure, was only revived in 2023 after a philanthropist left his estate to the school.
To be sure, Alpine and Fort Davis are outliers. Most districts saw an immediate boost to their finances from HB 3, and advocates celebrated a meaningful investment in public education after $5.4 billion in devastating cuts in 2013. But even for those districts, the sugar rush from HB 3 didn’t last long. According to Chandra Villanueva, the director of policy and advocacy at the progressive nonprofit Every Texan, the $1,000 increase in the basic allotment was “roughly enough to cover one year of inflation….”
The property tax system and the school finance system are inextricably linked, Rube Goldberg–style. Twist a dial here and a light will come on over there. Slip a gear here and spring a leak there. As state lawmakers have prioritized tax cuts over public education funding, the trade-offs have grown clearer. This year represents a potential turning point. But rather than trying to solve the problem using the $33 billion budget surplus—a generational bonanza—Abbott and Patrick have overwhelmingly focused their attention on property tax cuts and a school-voucher plan loathed by almost everyone in public education, in part because it would threaten to strip even more funding from school districts.
The just-completed regular session was a bloodbath. The 88th Legislature began in January with the governor and lieutenant governor promising to pass a transformative voucher program and a record-setting $17 billion in property-tax cuts. Funding for public education, often a banner issue, was scarcely discussed. Even the House, the friendlier chamber toward public education, only proposed raising the basic allotment by $140, from $6,160 to $6,300 per student—far less than the $1,500 increase needed to keep up with inflation since 2019, according to the Texas American Federation of Teachers. But in the end, teachers and public schools got virtually nothing.
Teachers and administrators were stunned. Zeph Capo, the president of Texas AFT, called it a “joke.” HD Chambers, the executive director of the Texas School Alliance, accused Patrick and Abbott of playing a “hostage game” with Texas’s teachers and public school students by tying education funding to vouchers. “It’s pretty simple. The governor and Senate says, ‘If you don’t give us the kind of vouchers we want, we’re not giving you any money.’” The House refused to budge, and the regular session concluded without a deal on property tax relief, vouchers, and other GOP priorities.
Now, the governor has promised to convene multiple special sessions to take up the unresolved issues. The first special session began three hours after the regular one ended, and effectively wrapped up less than 24 hours later, with the House rejecting the Senate property-tax plan, passing its own program consisting solely of property-tax compression, and then abruptly adjourning. Abbott threw his support behind the House plan. The message to the Senate was clear: take it or leave it. If the Senate yields, the House version would push some school districts down to as low as $0.60 per $100, with no new source of revenue to backfill for the reduced funding in case of a bad economy.
Abbott has said his goal is to completely eliminate the main school property tax. In such a scenario, Texas’s thousand-plus school districts would be at the mercy of the Legislature for funding—a troubling scenario, says Villanueva. She suspects vouchers would then become inevitable. “At that point, it’s like, ‘You know what, we don’t have the money to fund schools. Everyone take five thousand bucks, figure it out for yourselves.’”
That day, if it ever comes, may still be far off. But the education system is in crisis right now, and unlike previous hard times, the state is flush with cash. The pain, Chambers says, is being intentionally inflicted by Abbott and Patrick. “Because of this one pet project that the governor has”—vouchers—“they are purposely creating a financial environment where every school district in Texas is being set up to fail.”
The result is that Texas schools, already operating on “shoestring budgets,” will have a harder time attracting and retaining educators, said Josh Sanderson, the deputy executive director of the Equity Center, a nonprofit that represents six hundred Texas school districts. They will run up deficits. They may have to cut extracurriculars and athletic programs. Some, like Fort Davis, may become insolvent and be forced to consolidate with another district, an often painful process.
As we were sitting in his red pickup with the engine idling outside his office, Hicks told me that he’d given up on lobbying the Legislature. He mentioned again that Patrick and other GOP lawmakers are trying to destroy public education by using vouchers to privatize schools, and he said that most other politicians “don’t give a shit about West Texas.” But for the time being he was still fighting: writing op-eds, firing off plaintive missives, asking concerned citizens to contact their legislators.
Toward the end of our visit, I asked Hicks what’s going to happen to his schools. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not patient enough to spend time with assholes in Austin, and I’m not rich enough to buy any votes.” TEA has suggested consolidating with another district—most likely nearby Valentine ISD—but Hicks said this would harm both Fort Davis and the other district.
He seemed resigned to his role as a Cassandra warning of impending doom, destined to be ignored. He reminded me that his grandson goes to school here, and that the painful road ahead feels both personal and existential. “If you don’t have a school,” he said, “you don’t have a community.”
Two months later, Hicks called me with some news. He’d decided to resign this summer, joining the mass exodus of school leaders that have fled the profession in the past few years. To anyone who closely follows public education in Texas, his reasoning was tragically familiar: He said he was too tired to fight anymore.
Paul Cobaugh is a military veteran who retired as a Chief Warrant Officer who worked in special operations in communications and narrative strategies. He writes a blog about national security called “Truths About Threats.”
This is a short TAT. After all, it is the weekend. This morning, a friend posted on LinkedIn, a copy of the letter Jim Jordan sent to AG, Merrick Garland. That is what pushed me to my keyboard before resuming chores. Endless words will be written after the historical indictment of a former president. I will bring you a very different perspective on that indictment that very few will address, as I wade into this national security nightmare the beginning of next week. In the meantime… please consider my brief thoughts below, not for my sake but for all of ours. “All politics are local.”
Now Jordan, is the rep of one of the most gerrymandered districts in the country. When I lived in Urbana, Ohio in the late 60’s and early 70’s, our local congressman was exceptionally well liked and respected. Clarence, “Bud” Brown represented what the Republican Party could have been, had they not deviated to scorched earth politics under the leadership and tutelage of Newt Gingrich. America has never been the same since. Don’t see this as an endorsement of the so-called, “other side” but as a statement of clear-eyed facts.
Jim Jordan’s, Ohio 4th Congressional District
This letter by Jordan to the AG, Merrick Garland shows in detail and Jordan’s own hand, the level of false narratives and utter dishonesty that keeps today’s MAGA-controlled GOP afloat. For those who have been warning about this and other indictments based on reality, research, and the opinions of elite experts, this is just another “hail Mary”, mis/ disinformation campaign designed to empower those who’ve proved that they will believe anything, if it suits their political identity. My personal and professional opinion of Jordan sees him as one of the most unethical and dangerous members of Congress.
What I once knew as a community of hardworking mostly rural Ohioans with remarkable grace, compassion and honesty, is now burdened by the weight of being sold snake oil by traitors and conmen who can’t even spell, “American values.” They largely operate on the traitorous narratives of FOX news. Fortunately there is still a solid core of great Americans in my home town but sadly, they are a minority. Even the Trumpists are some of the nicest people you will ever meet. The manipulation of their political identity by unethical, professional influencers, some domestic and some foreign, has resulted in Seditionists like Jordan and his ilk, leading the worst threat to our democracy since the Civil War.
The pain I feel for my hometown, is being played out all across America in small and large towns. The extraordinary work by U.S. Department of Justice, has thrown a hand grenade into their political identity. Now, with DOJ’s meticulously assembled public case being the news of the day, Jordan is launching a full-scale mis and disinformation campaign to support a known traitor. Not one person in Urbana would have tolerated this in my youth, despite being in one of the most reliable Republican Congressional districts in the nation.
Yes, I would also love to scream the words, “I told you so” but that will not heal America. Many Americans who were victimized by foreign and domestic malign influencers, are beginning to realize that they have been badly duped. Give them an open invite back into reality without the derision. They are family, friends and colleagues. Tragically, those who resist reality will likely never recover, because the level of indoctrination that leads to public displays of extremism, more often than not, is like rabies, mostly incurable.
It’s time for all Americans to realize that our fellow citizens are not enemies because they have different beliefs. Our Constitution, based on our founding principles, guarantees our right to our own beliefs, false or not. It’s really up to those who are willing to debate over facts and reality, to heal this nation for America’s sake, not a politcal party. It will be those who adhere to what it means to be a truly patriotic American, left, right or otherwise to put our nation, back on the path of progress, respectability and strength.
Truism: If you vote for honesty, integrity and our true American, founding principles… folks like Jim Jordan would never be in office. However you vote, we can never again allow any extremist movement to have so much say in our government, that they can once again threaten what so many have died to preserve.
Welcome back to Lucid, and a big hello to all new subscribers. I started Lucid in 2021 to separate the signal from the noise in politics and provide big-picture thinking about authoritarianism and threats to democracy in the US and around the world. I use my skills as a historian to identify the patterns and dynamics at work in the news that comes at us every day.
In honor of the Department of Justice indictment of Donald Trump, which is only possible because we live in a democracy, for the next week I am offering a 50% discount on the first year of Lucid so that more people can have access to bonus content like this and to the community that has developed from my weekly live Q&As. You can subscribe or convert your current subscription to paid here: (open the link to see the offer).
The bare-bones conference room, with its ugly folding table and florescent lighting overhead. The standard-issue podium at which Jack Smith, Special Counsel at the Department of Justice, stood with his understated attire and not-made for television haircut. There was no glamour and no media buzz as Smith announced the unsealing of a historic indictment against former president Donald J. Trump for “violations of our national security laws as well as participating in conspiracy to obstruct justice.”
All of it moved me to tears.
Special Counsel Jack Smith press conference, June 8, 2023. C-Span.
As an American, I was outraged when I read the indictment. As a scholar of authoritarianism and one of the first people to label Trump as a threat to our freedoms, I was unsurprised at its content. Trump’s proprietary vision of governance was familiar to me, as was his supremely venal attitude. In the strongman world there are no boundaries between public and private. The leader believes it is his right to possess and exploit for personal benefit anything in the nation, from natural resources to economic assets to information—the latter being the most valuable currency.
“Forced out of the White House after his coup attempt failed, beset by financial worries and multiple investigations, how could Trump fail to cast his greedy eyes on the vast store of classified information available to him?” I wrotein Aug. 2022.
Democracy does not churn out telegenic images of demagogues commanding cheering crowds of fanatics. It does not produce dramatic images of coups, whether old-school takeovers with tanks on the streets or today’s radicalized civilian armies assaulting government buildings, as in the US and Brazil.
Democracy has its rituals and rites of passage, but the everyday work of democracy –a political system built on cultivating consensus, rather than lackeys implementing decisions by one man–can seem boring to those who crave theatrics. It entails endless discussions and careful deliberation in Congress and statehouses around the nation.
And so, Jack Smith appeared in his drab institutional surroundings to deliver a message of historic import. In just over three minutes, he informed the public of the status of the investigation he has overseen while also expressing support for some of the most foundational values of democracy and civil society.
Commitment to National Security
In healthy democracies both liberal and conservative politicians share a commitment to protecting their country’s national security. That’s no longer the case in America, where the GOP has left conservatism behind to become an autocratic entity. Republican lawmakers now align with far-right authoritarian parties and governments in Hungary, Russia, and Brazil that see democratic America as an enemy to be taken down.
Add in the GOP’s loyalty to a cult leader who will sell out anyone and anything for more power and profit, and we have a tragic situation: many Republican lawmakers are no longer committed to America’s national security. This shift is partly responsible for the Republican demonization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), America’s support for NATO (and Ukraine), and the Department of Justice.
Moreover, as Rep. Jim Jordan’s sham House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has made clear, Trump loyalists do not want the FBI to clean house of extremists, including those apparently loyal to Putin. That is why Jordan defended Steve Friend, an FBI agent who had his security clearance revoked. Friend refused to investigate Jan. 6 insurrectionists, transferred FBI documents to an unauthorized flash drive, and contributed to Kremlin propaganda outlets Russia Today and Sputnik.
This is why Jack Smith started his speech by recognizing the importance of protecting our national security and those who enforce it:
“The men and women of the US intelligence community and the armed forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people. Our laws that protect national defense information are critical for the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”
Rule of Law
Since today’s autocrats often keep elections going, elections are no longer the main metric of democracy. Instead, we look to accountability and the existence of an independent judiciary to measure democratic health. Both are fundamental to the principle of rule of law, which Jack Smith emphasized in his speech, identifying it as
“a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice. And our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone. Applying those laws, collecting facts, that’s what determines the outcome of an investigation. Nothing more, and nothing less.”
We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.This bears repeating because authoritarianism is about getting away with crime. When the judiciary has been neutralized, the press threatened into silence, and security services made into tools of the autocrat, then the leader becomes untouchable, no matter how many crimes he commits.
This indictment interrupts that trajectory. I know where that road leads, and how much we stand to lose. This is why Jack Smith’s speech moved me.
Diane Ravitch's blog 