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A Profile in Courage: A Republican Congressman in S.C. Stood Up to Trump

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2022 //
14

Republican Congressman Tom Rice of South Carolina is very conservative. He is seeking his sixth term. He is one of ten Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 insurrection. Trump is determined to defeat every single one of them. But Rice refuses to endorse the lie that January 6 was a peaceful protest or “normal political discourse,” as the Republican National Committee absurdly claimed.

The blog Crooks and Liars posted about Congressman Rice and his passionate defense of the Constitution and truth.

RICE: Democracy is a fragile thing. And the one thing that we have to protect us from tyranny is our Constitution. Our Constitution has to be protected at all costs. Our framers, to protect us against tyranny, set up a separation of powers, where the legislature makes laws but can’t enforce them. The executive enforces laws but can’t make them. And the judiciary decides disputes. They wanted us, they charged us in the Federalist Papers, each branch, with jealously protecting their powers. because they knew that men were corrupt. If they had too much power concentrated in one place, that corruption would overwhelm them.

My friends, I was there on January 6th. I wasn’t absent. I was there. I saw the bomb squads diffusing bombs. I smell the tear gas. I was on the House floor when the glass was breaking. They were getting broken and pulled from the lines. When we got to the spot we were evacuated, Fox News was on TV. I was getting calls from back here, from friends at the news. As I was talking to the news media back here, I was saying, ‘Where is the president? Where is the president? Where is the president?’ but he never came on.

I knew he was going to come on and say the violence has got to stop, but he didn’t for four hours. Later, I asked my staff to pull the records on what he was doing at that time. He was sitting in his dining room next to the Oval Office, proud that these people were ransacking the capitol, beating up the Capitol police officers, he did nothing to stop it. In fact, 20 minutes after they were in the Capitol, he tweeted out, ‘Mike Pence doesn’t have courage.’ My friends, you can argue about whether his speech that morning was inciting or not, but, to me, that one tweet was incitement.

If they’d have gotten ahold of Mike Pence, we could have lost our democracy that day. So if — in my opinion, my opinion is that our Constitution is too precious to risk. The one difference between me and all those leaders back in Washington who said, ‘Oh, Donald Trump went too far. He should be impeached. He should be removed’ and voted the other way. I took the principled stand and I defended our Constitution.

Please open the link and read the whole piece. I probably disagree with Mr. Rice about issues, but he has my respect for defending the Constitution, truth, and reality.

I sure hope he is re-elected.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Buffalo: Racism Is a Poison in America’s Bloodstream

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2022 //
195

The horrific massacre of at least 10 people in a supermarket in Buffalo should be a wake-up call to the nation: Racism is a poison in our nation’s bloodstream. People were doing their shopping and were mowed down by a white supremacist who drove for hours to kill Black people. Proud of what he was doing, he live-streamed his monstrous actions. Only 18 years old, but his heart was already twisted and warped by racism. The early reports say he avidly consumed racist social media. He absorbed the Great Replacement Theory, the fear that white people like him were losing control. So he murdered innocent people in a supermarket.

There was a time, however briefly, when white supremacists hid under a rock and kept their loathsome views to themselves. But then Trump told them that “political correctness” was dead. It was okay for them to spout their venom, and he encouraged them.

It didn’t start with Trump; racism has been part of our nation’s history for hundreds of years. Our history is full of lynchings, massacres, systemic cruelty to a people whose only “crime” was their skin color.

And yet we dared to hope that racism was a thing of the past. In the 1960s, with elected officials passing laws to punish it, and the courts upholding those laws, we imagined we had driven it out of our social fabric and delegitimized it. We did not.

Racism is not in the past. It never went away. It is out in the open, supported by white supremacists like Tucker Carlson, by FOX News, and by racist social media. Racism is legitimated by the states that passed laws banning “critical race theory” (that is, discussions of racism) from their schools and universities. It is openly endorsed by states banning the teaching of “The 1619 Project,” which explores in painful detail the history of racism.

How can we begin to understand what happened Sunday in Buffalo?

Read “The 1619 Project.” Engage wholeheartedly in critical race theory. Read and discuss the systemic racism that encouraged an 18-year-old man to strap on battle gear and go in search of innocent black people to kill. Vote against the legislators who have tried to suppress knowledge of and teaching about racism.

Search your conscience. Ask why so many states are banning books about racism, preventing teachers from talking about it, preventing students from learning about it, and criminalizing the study of its roots.

This mayhem will not stop until we white people look honestly at our history and into our mirrors.

Categories Accountability, History, Racism

Ohio: The State Constitution Requires Funding of Common Schools

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2022 //
16

Bill Phillis, retired state education official, is campaigning relentlessly to block the expansion of the state’s voucher program. He is a staunch opponent of privatization. He frequently writes about the low academic quality of the state’s charter schools, their fiscal irresponsibility, and their drain on the state’s public schools. If you live in Ohio, you should join his organization to support public schools.

He writes:

EdChoice Voucher Scheme Does Not Align with the Intentions of the Delegates of Ohio’s 1850/1851 and 1873/1874 Constitutional Conventions Regarding the Public Common School System—Part 1*

The EdChoice voucher scheme is contrary to the intention of the Delegates’ vision of the state system of common schools. During the 1873/1874 Constitutional Convention, when a delegate proposed to alter the 1851 constitutional provision for education to fund private schools, Delegate Asher Cook stated:

Here the children of a district, and often those of an entire village, are united in one school, where all cause of strife and contention is removed, and their minds, true to the instincts with which they are endued, rich and poor, mingle together, for a loving group of little friends, who, hand in hand, march bravely up the rugged hill of science, making the ascent easy by each other’s aid, and smoothing its rugged surface by glad peals of laughter, which ring out merrily and clear over hill top, across valley and up the mountain side, until their echoes wake up a joyous community to thank God for the common schools.

The Delegates to the 1850/1851 Constitutional Convention were intentional in selecting the word “common”. Delegate Archibold expressed that the meaning of “common” at that time might change and thus, suggested the word “useful” to replace “common”. An 1828 dictionary defines “common” as “belonging equally to more than one or to many indefinitely.” Delegate Humphreville stated his belief that “common” as they intended it to function in the clause would never be misinterpreted, and thus, responded to Delegate Archibold’s concern by stating “[C]ommon schools in the future will be common schools—that is to say they will not be uncommon schools.” The inclusion of the word common was intentional.

During the 1874 debates, a discussion ensued regarding the meaning of “a system of common schools.” The discussion led to the question of whether public school funds should be provided to private religious schools. Delegate Root informed the discussion, saying, “Common schools to be successful must be the union of schools. The 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language defines “union” as, [c]oncord; agreement and conjunction of mind, with affections or interest.” Delegate Root asked:

What kind of a common school system would you have but for uniform rules and uniformity of discipline, and by whom are these prescribed? By the legislative power– the highest power in the State. They may relegate the details to certain officers, but it must come from them.

Regarding the same issue, Delegate Miner stated:

I am utterly opposed to a constitutional provision, or to any legislation, having in view the allotment of anypart of the common school fund to any schools except those established, maintained and controlled by, or under the authority of the state. The moment we consent to do so, we deal with a death blow to the system of common schools, upon which, expanded and improved by increasing experience and wisdom, more than upon anything else, it is my profoundest conviction, depends on the perpetuity and efficiency of our American institutions and government.

It is clear that those who established the Constitution language for a system of schools meant that only one system of common schools was to receive public funding for the support thereof.

*Research for this post and much of the content of it is credited to Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Juris Doctor Candidate, Kira Sharp.

Learn more about the EdChoice voucher litigation

Learn About Vouchers Hurt Ohio
8 Lies About Private School Vouchers

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OhioEandA

VOUCHERS HURT OHIO

William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 |ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://ohiocoalition.org

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, History, Ohio, Resistance, School Choice, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson on John McCain, Paul Manafort, and Putin

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2022 //
34

Historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote a fascinating column about Steve Schmidt’s recent revelations about important political figures. Like the good historian she is, she connects the dots.

At home, a big story broke over the weekend, reminding us that the ties of the Republican Party to Russians and the effect of those ties on Ukraine reach back not just to former president Trump, but at least to the 2008 presidential campaign of Arizona senator John McCain.

Late Saturday night, political strategist Steve Schmidt, who worked on a number of Republican political campaigns including McCain’s when he ran for president in 2008, began to spill what he knows about that 2008 campaign. Initially, this accounting took the form of Twitter threads, but on Sunday, Schmidt put the highlights into a post on a Substack publication called The Warning. The post’s title distinguished the author from those journalists and members of the Trump administration who held back key information about the dangerous behavior in Trump’s White House in order to include it in their books. The post was titled: “No Books. No Money. Just the Truth.”

Schmidt left the Republican Party in 2018, tweeting that by then it was “fully the party of Trump. It is corrupt, indecent and immoral. With the exception of a few governors…it is filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders…. Today the GOP has become a danger to our democracy and our values.” Schmidt helped to start The Lincoln Project, designed to sink Trump Republicans through attack ads and fundraising, in late 2019.

The apparent trigger for Schmidt’s accounting was goading from McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain, a sometime media personality who, after years of slighting Schmidt, recently called him a pedophile, which seems to have been a reference to the fact that a colleague with whom Schmidt started The Lincoln Project was accused of online sexual harassment of men and boys. Schmidt resigned over the scandal.

Schmidt was fiercely loyal to Senator McCain and had stayed silent for years over accusations that he was the person who had chosen then–Alaska governor Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice presidential candidate, lending legitimacy to her brand of uninformed fire-breathing radicalism, and about his knowledge of McCain’s alleged affair with a lobbyist.

In his tweetstorm, Schmidt set the record straight, attributing the choice of Palin to McCain’s campaign director and McCain himself, and acknowledging that the New York Times had been correct in the reporting of McCain’s relationship with the lobbyist, despite the campaign’s angry denial.

More, though, Schmidt’s point was to warn Americans that the mythmaking that turns ordinary people into political heroes makes us unwilling to face reality about their behavior and, crucially, makes the media unwilling to tell us the truth about it. As journalist Sarah Jones wrote in PoliticusUSA, Schmidt’s “broader point is how we, as Americans, don’t like to be told the truth and how our media so loves mythology that they work to deliver lies to us instead of holding the powerful accountable.”

Schmidt’s biggest reminder, though, was that the director of the 2008 McCain campaign was Richard (Rick) Davis, a founding partner of Davis Manafort, the political consulting firm formed in 1996. By 2003, the men were representing pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Yanukovych; in July 2004, U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov was murdered in Moscow for exposing Russian government corruption; and in June 2005, Manafort proposed that he would work for Putin’s government in former Soviet republics, Europe, and the United States by influencing politics, business dealings, and news coverage.

From 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. In 2016, Manafort went on to lead Donald Trump’s campaign, and the ties between him, the campaign, and Russia are well known. Less well known is that in 2008, Manafort’s partner Rick Davis ran Republican candidate John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Schmidt writes that McCain turned a blind eye to the dealings of Davis and Manafort, apparently because he was distracted by the fallout when the story of his personal life hit the newspapers. Davis and Manafort were making millions by advancing Putin’s interests in Ukraine and eastern Europe, working for Yanukovych and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Schmidt notes that “McCain spent his 70th birthday with Oleg Deripaska and Rick Davis on a Russian yacht at anchor in Montenegro.”

“There were two factions in the campaign,” Schmidt tweeted, “a pro-democracy faction and…a pro Russia faction,” led by Davis, who—like Manafort—had a residence in Trump Tower. It was Davis who was in charge of vetting Palin.

McCain was well known for promising to stand up to Putin, and Palin’s claim that she could counter the growing power of Russia in part because “[t]hey’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska” became a long-running joke (the comment about seeing Russia from her house came from a Saturday Night Live skit).

But a terrific piece in The Nation by Mark Ames and Ari Berman in October 2008 noted: “He may talk tough about Russia, but John McCain’s political advisors have advanced Putin’s imperial ambitions.” The authors detailed Davis’s work to bring the Balkan country of Montenegro under Putin’s control and concluded that either McCain “was utterly clueless while his top advisers and political allies ran around the former Soviet domain promoting the Kremlin’s interests for cash, or he was aware of it and didn’t care.”

Trump’s campaign and presidency, along with Putin’s deadly assault on Ukraine, puts into a new light the fact that McCain’s campaign manager was Paul Manafort’s business partner all the way back in 2008.

Note: Richardson has a list of sources at the end of her post. For some unknown reason, WordPress did not permit me to copy her notes. I inserted some but not all. Open the post to check the links.

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Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Fraud, Lies, Politics, Republicans, Scandals, Trump

Carol Burris: What Jonathan Chait Forgot to Mention in His Latest Defense of the Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2022 //
14

Jonathan Chait writes for New York magazine, where his latest article appeared, opposing the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed regulations for the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). CSP currently spends $440 million annually to underwrite new charter schools. Chait titled his article “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools,” but it might as well have been titled “Biden Abandons the Betsy DeVos Legacy on Charter Schools.”

Chait also attacked the Network for Public Education, which had issued two reports (see here and here) documenting the waste, fraud, and abuse in the CSP, based on the Education Department’s own data. NPE found that almost 40% of CSP funding went to charters that either never opened or closed within a few years of opening. In the life of the program, almost $1 billion had been wasted. In addition, NPE pointed out the scandals associated with some high-profile for-profit charter operators, as well as the use of CSP money to open white-flight charters.

This year, for the first time since the CSP was created nearly 30 years ago, the Department proposed to ban the funding of for-profit charter management organizations and of white-flight charters. The regulations also ask applicants for an impact analysis that describes what effect the new charter is likely to have on existing public schools and why the new charter is needed. These sensible reform proposals sent the charter lobbyists into frenzied opposition, claiming falsely that these regulations were meant to destroy all charter schools. This was nonsense because they would have no effect on the thousands of existing charters, only on applicants for new federal funding, that is, charters that do not yet exist.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, sharply denounced the lies and misrepresentations of the “trade organization” for the charter industry. But, despite her reproach, the charter industry still promotes dishonest diatribes about the Department’s efforts to reform the CSP.

Carol Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education, was incensed when she read Chait’s defense of the charter industry’s effort to protect the for-profit managers who have abused CSP funds and of the operators that have used CSP funding to provide white-flight charters.

She wrote the following response.

In his recent column, “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools,” Jonathan Chait is perturbed that the U.S. Department of Education referred Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum to me for comment on an article he was writing about the Department’s proposed regulations for funding new charter schools. He then scolds Barnum for not disclosing that the Network for Public Education has received donations from unions. He calls Barnum’s story “neutral.” Chait’s source for this big scoop? The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Jonathan Chait then parrots the “wild exaggerations and misrepresentations” that Rosa De Lauro called out last week after expressing her support for CSP reforms during the Education Department’s 2023 budget hearing. The Appropriations Chairwoman noted that “this kind of information campaign is a familiar tactic for the trade organization [National Alliance for Public Charter Schools]. It does represent charter schools that are run by risky low-quality for-profit education management organizations.”

You know those “wild exaggerations.” I wrote about them here. Obviously, Chait did not read the mentioned Barnum piece, which was solid reporting, and he certainly did not read the proposed regulations carefully (which Representative DeLauro described in a letter to Secretary Miguel Cardona about the charter industry’s misrepresentations). Or he just chose to twist facts and truth.

Now let’s talk about what Jonathan Chait failed to disclose as he opposed the CSP regulation reforms, using the same misinformation that has appeared in other op-eds.

His wife worked for Center City Charter Schools as a grant writer when that charter chain received two grants from the Charter School Program (CSP), the program whose loose rules he is now defending. Download the 2019 database that you can find here and match the years of dispersion to the resume of Robin Chait. But the undisclosed conflict continues to this day. Since 2018, Robin Chait has worked for West Ed which evaluated the CSP during the Betsy De Vos era. And her employer, West Ed, once got its own $1.74 million grant from CSP.

But back to NPE funding. During some recent years we got modest donations from unions to bring teachers to our conferences. At our very beginning, we received start-up funds from the Chicago Teachers Union through a fiscal sponsor, Voices for Children. That ended in 2015. We will always be grateful to our friend, the late Karen Lewis, for that jump-start. Karen foresaw the growing attacks on public schools and teachers as an ominous trend and wanted to encourage allies to support a bedrock institution of our democracy.

We appreciate any tax-deductible donations we get. You won’t get favors, but you will always get a thank you. Our income comes from individual donations from our large number of supporters—educators, parents, family foundations, and other citizens who have a deep and abiding love for public schools.

This is not the first time Chait has been called out for not disclosing his wife’s connections with charters. But given the topic and her work in organizations connected with the Charter School Program, this is the worst omission yet. Shame on New York Magazine for not making him disclose and for letting him play fast and loose with the truth. And shame on Chait’s hypocritical critique of Barnum even as he hides the family connections with the program he defends.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Scandals, School Choice, Shame, Support for public schools

Politico: “1 Million Deaths Was a Choice”

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2022 //
89

Myah Ward of Politico Nightly interviewed Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine about the depressing fact that one million Americans have died due to COVID. It’s fair to say that he was outraged by the many thousands of unnecessary deaths, encouraged by Republican politicians and by hostility to science. One man, not mentioned here, could have persuaded his followers to get vaccinated and boosted, as he did. Donald Trump. But while he rightly took credit for the rapid development of vaccines, but did nothing to discourage the anti-vaxxers.

1 million deaths. Did you ever think we’d get here?

For me, the big reckoning was the fact that we’ve not really come to a real national dialogue about what happened after May 1, 2021. That was the day the White House announced that there are so many Covid vaccines that any American who wants to get vaccinated can get vaccinated. Yet we lost another 200,000-300,000 Americans after that date. Those who were defiant to vaccines were overwhelmingly in red states, and the redder the county as measured by Trump voters in the 2020 election, the higher the vaccine refusal and the greater the loss of life.

It wasn’t by accident. It was a deliberate effort by members of the House Freedom Caucus, in the House, some U.S. senators, amplified nightly on Fox News.

I don’t even call it misinformation or disinformation anymore. I call it anti-science aggression, to convince millions of Americans not to take a Covid vaccine. And at least 200,000 Americans between May 1 and the end of 2021 died needlessly from Covid because of it. And everyone’s afraid to talk about it because it’s very unpleasant to have to point out that these deaths occurred along such a strict partisan divide. Even the White House won’t talk about it in that way.

So, with an exhausted public, how would you re-engage Americans at this point? Is it by having these “unpleasant” conversations?

You can understand the first wave of deaths in New York in the spring of 2020. You can even start to understand the second wave of deaths in the summer of 2020, in Texas, in the southern U.S. when we’re just trying to understand it. But then as you move forward, you have to start to come to terms with the fact that a majority of the deaths were probably preventable. And certainly just about all of the deaths after May 1 were preventable. And I think that needs to be front and center. That these are not accidental deaths. The people who lost their lives and died after May 1 were themselves victims of anti-science aggression. If you look at the big-picture threats to the U.S. that we spend billions of dollars every year to combat, like global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, or cyberattacks. Anti-science aggression kills more Americans than all those things combined by far. And yet we don’t recognize it as such. That’s critically important to point that out.

Alongside Americans being “done” with the pandemic, there’s also the concern about Covid funding running out if Congress doesn’t act. How important is this money in your view?

We have to recognize that the mRNA boosters are not holding up as well as we’d like. We’re going to have to probably go — unless we come up with a better technology, which I think we should, but that’s a different matter — we’re gonna need to ask the American people to get boosted yet again. And we’re gonna have to provide those vaccines.

And we’re going to need an ongoing amount of Paxlovid, for instance. I mean, why am I talking to you right now? I’m talking to you right now because I’m the beneficiary of Paxlovid, which I’m on right now, and I’m the beneficiary of having my second booster. And even though it’s not ideal to ask Americans to continue to boost, it’s still going to be essential.

The White House is warning we could see 100 million infections this fall. How do you see this fall and winter unfolding?

I know that’s what the White House is doing, but I don’t quite understand the logic of jumping to fall and winter. We still have two big peaks that are hitting us before fall and winter. We have this current BA.2.12.1, which is now about to become the dominant variant. It’s so transmissible, all you need to do is give a dirty look to that subvariant and you become infected. It’s up there with measles. So that’s issue No. 1. And issue No. 2 is we’ve had a terrible wave of Covid-19 both for the last two summers in Texas in the southern United States. I’m expecting that again. Even before the fall, we’re going to have another wave over the summer from variant TBD, to be determined.

Categories Accountability, Health, Politics, Propaganda, Republicans, Science, Stupid

Dana Milbank on the GOP Plot to Ban Abortion and Undermine Democracy

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2022 //
62

Washington Post Dana Milbank writes about the long game of Republicans, which culminated in Justice Alito’s draft decision overturning Roe V. Wade.

So Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell thinks the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe is a “toxic spectacle” and an “attack.” Chief Justice John Roberts calls it a “betrayal.”


Cry me a river.


There is indeed a toxic spectacle and a betrayal going on here, but it isn’t the leak. It’s the betrayal of democracy by McConnell’s Republicans and the toxic spectacle of the Roberts court aiding it.

The reported 5-to-4 split on the draft shows that this cataclysmic ruling would be forced on the public by the narrowest possible majority. This means the ruling is possible only because of the seat on the court McConnell and his Republican colleagues effectively stole by refusing for 293 days to confirm — or even consider — President Barack Obama’s duly nominated candidate, Merrick Garland.
Republicans handed that seat in 2017 to Neil Gorsuch — in the process going “nuclear” and eliminating the filibuster so that only Republican votes were needed for confirmation.
Then, in a feat of astounding hypocrisy, McConnell’s Republicans reversed their pious claim that Supreme Court vacancies late in a presidency should be left to the “next president” and confirmed Amy Coney Barrett eight days before Joe Biden was elected president — essentially stealing a second seat.
Some justices reported by Politico to be voting to overturn Roe now stand accused by Republican Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) of misrepresenting their positions on the “super precedent” during their Senate confirmations.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Republicans

Afghanistan: Taliban Orders Head-to-Toe Covering for Women

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2022 //
81

Women’s rights are going backward, in the United States and in Afghanistan.

Susannah George writes in The Washington Post that the Taliban have ordered women to wear clothing that completely covers their face and body. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court plans to prevent women from exercising control over their own bodies, the first time in the nation’s history that the High Court has removed a right from anyone. Zealots, zealots, everywhere.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Muslim women in Afghanistan must cover from head to toe in public, according to a Taliban ruling announced Saturday, its latest move to constrain the lives of women since taking control of the country last year.
“This is not a restriction on women but an order of the Quran,” said Akif Muhajir, a spokesman for the Ministry of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, referring to the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic law. “It is the order of Allah and the prophet Muhammad.”
The Taliban’s treatment of women has been a key point of contention as the group has pushed for formal international recognition and increased aid money to address the country’s spiraling economic crisis. When asked for greater engagement with the Taliban, the international community has repeatedly requested a demonstration of greater respect for women’s rights, among other things.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Cruelty

Did Gorsuch and Kavanaugh Commit Perjury at Senate Hearings on Issue of Abortion?

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2022 //
125

Both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh testified at their Senate hearings that they considered Roe v. Wade to be an established precedent.

Now, it appears that they will join with three other extremist justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has been in effect for half a century.

They both lied.

Is that perjury?

Categories Accountability, Freedom, Lies

Confession! How I Was Groomed by My Elementary School Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2022 //
36

The Intercept published a stunning confession by a young man about his “grooming” by an elementary school teacher.

Jon Schwarz writes:

Anyone following the news knows the U.S. right is now obsessively accusing public school teachers, especially ones who are LGBTQ+, of being “groomers” — i.e., pedophiles. It’s both astonishingly vile and horrifyingly cynical.

This kind of propaganda — that some minority group is plotting to harm our children — has always been the specialty of history’s most vicious political movements. Today’s version is just one step away from the Taliban’s violent loathing of education, and two steps from declaring that teachers are using the blood of children to make their unleavened bread. Ignorant audiences have always been vulnerable to these fairy tales, which is why the abuse of children is a popular theme of literal fairy tales.

At the same time, the right-wing figures who spew out this sewage are absolutely indifferent to the actual sexual abuse of children. For instance, one of the most hateful proponents of the groomer narrative is Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at a conservative think tank called the Manhattan Institute. Rufo recently proclaimed on Twitter: “The public school system has a child sex abuse problem.”

That’s all you need to know about Rufo. He has no interest in the sexual abuse of children in private or charter schools. Nor did he mention churches. For that matter, he has nothing to say about the Republican Party: Its longest-serving speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, was a child molester, and the next GOP Speaker of the House may be Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has been accused by eight former studentsof helping cover up the sexual abuse of wrestlers at Ohio State University.

That’s because, for Rufo and his compatriots — such as the playwright David Mamet; Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; andDonald Trump Jr. — the victims of genuine sexual abuse don’t matter at all. They and the lifelong pain many experience are simply useful tools in the right’s centurylong attack on public education. Rufo and company understand that democracy is impossible without public education and so are willing to do anything to destroy it.

We know where this path leads, and we must step off it immediately. The people doing this are cruel and sadistic, but they’re also mewling cowards — and with pushback now, they will slink back into the holes from which they emerged.

At the same time, we should be telling the full truth about public school teachers. The one good thing I can say about this awful current phenomenon is that it’s made me remember all the beautiful teachers I’ve had, and how much better they made my life. Here’s my story of how my elementary school teacher.

Please read his memories of teachers who taught him to love learning.

He says:

From encouraging me to read and write, to nudging me to think for myself, their pernicious influence burdens me to this day.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Childhood, Teachers
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