Conservative firebrand Bridget Ziegler insists she will stay on the Sarasota school board after the other members passed a resolution calling on her to resign. The board doesn’t have the legal power to force her removal. Only DeSantis does.
Ziegler is co-founder of Moms for Liberty and a national voice for traditional family values. She has led the crusade to censor books about sexuality and racism. She is an outspoken critic of homosexuality.
Students were not allowed to attend the meeting because of the nature of her activity: three-way sex with her husband and another woman.
Hypocrisy is not a crime.
Maybe now Bridget will stop denouncing gays. Or is that too much to hope?
When you hear Jeb Bush or Ron DeSantis boast about the success of education in Florida, don’t believe it. Laugh out loud. Fourth grade reading scores are high, but could it be because low-scoring third graders are retained? Eighth grade reading scores are at the national average on NAEP—nothing to brag about. Florida’s SAT scores are embarrassingly low for a state that brags about test scores. Apparently those impressive reading scores in fourth grade ebb away as each year passes.
New rankings show Florida students are posting some of the lowest SAT scores in America.
We’re talking 46th place. Down another 17 points overall to 966, according to the combined reading and math scores shared by the College Board.
Florida trails other Southern states like South Carolina and Georgia. We trail states where more students take the test, like Illinois and Indiana.
We somehow now even slightly trail Washington, D.C. — a district long maligned as one of the supposedly worst in America, where all students take the test.
This should be an all-hands-on-deck crisis. Yet what are Florida education officials obsessing over?
Pronouns. And censoring books.
While other states focus on algebra and reading comprehension, Florida’s top education officials are waging wars with teachers about what kind of pronouns they can use and defending policies that have led to books by Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston being removed from library shelves. We are reaping what they sow.
But perhaps the most disturbing thing about Florida’s current crop of top education officials isn’t just the misguided policies they’re pushing, it’s the way they behave. Like it’s all a joke. Like Twitter trolls.
They’re calling names, mocking those trying to have serious conversations about education and generally reveling in owning the libs.
A few months ago, Orlando Sentinel education reporter Leslie Postal spent weeks trying to get public records about a newly hired state education employee. Postal just wanted to explain to taxpayers how their money was being spent. But state officials refused to answer questions.
So Postal wrote up the piece, and Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz shared the piece on Twitter (now X) with a two-word comment: “Cry more!”
For those of you who don’t speak troll, “Cry more” is a response used by some social-media users — usually those juvenile in age or intellect — to mock someone who is unhappy. The folks at Urban Dictionary, who revel in all things trolly, define “Cry More” as a “phrase used in online games when someone is getting owned, and they b*tch about it.”
The game in question here, mind you, was the Sentinel’s two-month quest to get answers about how the state was spending tax dollars. And the response from the state’s top education official was: “Cry more!” What a role model for students.
That’s just one example. Last week, after I wrote a column about rampant book-censorship in the state — with one district shelving 300 titles — State Board of Education Member Ryan Petty responded (at quarter ’til 1 in the morning): “Just dumb. This passes as journalism.” Followed by a clown emoji.
OK, for argument’s sake, let’s say I’m the dumbest clod to ever set foot in the Sunshine State. Petty still wouldn’t answer any of the direct questions posed in both the column and on Twitter. Specifically, if the goal isn’t widespread book-banning, why won’t his education department provide a definitive list of what books it believes students shouldn’t have access to in school?
Petty opted for emojis over answers, because that’s what trolls do.
The responses on Twitter to Diaz and Petty — both appointees of Gov. Ron DeSantis — were about what you’d expect. One user told Petty: “My ninth grader could have crafted a more articulate response.” Several users responded similarly to Diaz’s “Cry More!” post, questioning his ability to maturely discuss policy and referring back to a Miami Herald investigation into student claims of “inappropriate behavior” by Diaz back when he was a teacher; claims Diaz said were bogus smears.
None of this did a thing to address this state’s education issues. Yet that’s where we are in Florida these days, mired in culture wars and trolling each other.
We also saw something similar last week when Diaz refused to directly answer questions from Orange County Public Schools about whether teachers were allowed to honor the requests of transgender students who wanted to be addressed with different pronouns — if the teachers wanted to and if those students also had their parents’ written permission. (Think about how bizarre it is that schools must even ask that question … in the so-called “parental rights” state.)
In his response to the district, Diaz offered a theatrical and condescending response that referred to “false” pronouns but which school officials concluded didn’t actually answer the question in a straightforward manner. Just more troll games … involving a population of teens more prone to self-harm and suicide, no less.
As far as the SAT goes, the test certainly has its share of legitimate critics. But it’s still one of the best apples-to-apples metrics we have for student learning.
Yet hardly any Florida media organizations even covered the October release of the new SAT scores that showed Florida’s poor showing. Why? Because we’ve been trained to follow the bouncing-ball, culture-war debate of the day.
So we see plenty of coverage about Florida supposedly ranking No. 1 in “educational freedom” by partisan political groups and scant addition to real education issues.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like hard numbers more than political posturing or magazine rankings. So do others who actually care about and study education.
Paul Cottle, a physics professor who authors a blog that focuses on STEM education, noted Florida’s increasingly cruddy SAT scores back in October when they were released — when everyone else was focused on the debate-of-the-day.
Cottle noted that Florida’s math scores for 4th graders were solid but that the SAT scores for graduating seniors were so bad, they suggested something was going awry for students before Florida schools sent them into the real world.
Cottle called the showing “a sad state of affairs.”
He’s right. Yet we’re getting precisely the educational environment and results that our culture-warring politicians are cultivating — an environment where trolls thrive, even if students don’t.
Rudy Guiliani admitted that he defamed two Georgia election workers by accusing them of fraudulently switching ballots. The two are mother and daughter Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. As a result of his repeated accusations on national television, which were repeated by Trump, calling them out by name, the pair were subjected to continual threats, harassment, and intimidation. They are suing Guiliani for a sum between $15.5 million and $43.5 million. Jury selection begins today.
The showdown between the financially strapped Giuliani and the two temporary poll workers he baselessly accused of ballot tampering in 2020 will highlight a major court battle over false claims that became central to former president Donald Trump’s efforts to stay in power and is now at the heart of two criminal cases against him.
U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell has already found Giuliani liable for more than a dozen defamatory statements against Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, who are mother and daughter, leaving a jury of eight only to decide how much he should pay in damages for violent threats and harassment the pair received. Howell previously ordered Giuliani to pay the women $230,000 in legal fees and sanctions for failing to turn over relevant information. She said those failures, combined with Giuliani’s own admissions, compelled her to rule without a trial that he defamed both women, intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them as part of a civil conspiracy, and owes punitive damages.
If you want to hear the details of what happened to them, watch this clip from the Rachel Maddow show. In addition to hearing their story, you will also hear testimony from the #2 official at the Justice Department, Richard Donahue, who testified to the January 6 Commission that he met with Trump and told him that the Justice Department had investigated all his claims of election fraud and found no evidence for them.
Jim Jordan and his fellow MAGA-ts are determined to impeach President Biden as payback for Trump’s two impeachments. They have no reason for impeachment; Biden has committed no crime, unlike Trump, who invited an insurrection. Dana Milbank says that Jordan and his crew are the Three Stooges of American politics.
He writes:
After House Republicans’ caucus meeting in the Capitol basement this week, Speaker Mike Johnson gave the media an update on his release of thousands of hours of security footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The release had been slowed, Johnson explained, because “we have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day, because we don’t want them to be retaliated against — and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other, you know, concerns and problems.”
It was as clear a statement as there could be on where the new speaker’s allegiance lies: protecting those who sacked the Capitol from being brought to justice for their crimes. Johnson (La.) was openly siding with the insurrectionists and against the United States government he swore an oath to defend.
The Justice Department already has the undoctored footage, as Johnson’s spokesman later acknowledged, so, presumably, the speaker is trying to prevent members of the public from identifying anyone in the violent mob (“persons who participated in the events of that day”) that law enforcement might have overlooked. Sure, they attacked the seat of government in their bloody attempt to overthrow a free and fair election, but let us respect their privacy! After all the yammering from the right about transparency, Johnson is manipulating the footage — not to protect the Capitol’s security but to protect the attackers.
Hours after aligning himself with the insurrectionists, Johnson went to break bread with the Christian nationalists. At the Museum of the Bible, he gave the keynote address to the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, a group whose founder and leader, Jason Rapert, has said, “I reject that being a Christian nationalist is somehow unseemly or wrong.”
At the group’s meeting in June, one of the speakers noted with approval that “the American colonies imposed the death penalty for sodomy.” Confirmed speakers and award recipients for the gathering Johnson addressed included: a man who proposed that gay people should wear “a label across their forehead, ‘This can be hazardous to your health’”; a woman who blames gay marriage for Noah’s flood; and, as the liberal watchdog Media Matters reported, various adherents of “dominionist” theology, which holds that the United States should be governed under biblical law by Christians. Reporters were kicked out of this week’s event before Johnson spoke but, before the event, Rapert called Johnson “an answer to prayer,” the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Alex Thomas reported.
Err, was that a prayer for the branding of gay people?
Rapert’s organization also promotes the pine-tree “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which has been embraced by Christian nationalists, was among the banners flown at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021 — and, by total and remarkable coincidence, is proudly displayed outside Johnson’s congressional office.
Former speaker Kevin McCarthy this week became the 31st lawmaker in the House to announce his retirement, as members of both parties stampede to exit the woefully dysfunctional chamber. McCarthy, the California Republican who spent most of 2023 saying “I do not quit,” will quit this month, with a year left in his term.
Freshman Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) decried the “brain drain” in his party — veteran Republicans Patrick McHenry (N.C.), Michael Burgess (Tex.) and Brad Wenstrup (Ohio) are among those on the way out — although, in fairness, there wasn’t a whole lot of brain in the first place. Of more immediate concern to Republicans is a vote drain: After the expulsion of George Santos (N.Y.) and McCarthy’s resignation, the GOP, paralyzed with a four-vote majority throughout this year, will have just a two-vote majority.
McCarthy, announcing his departure in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, reflected: “It often seems that the more Washington does, the worse America gets.” By this standard, he should be delighted with the current Congress. Famously unproductive during his tenure as speaker, it is now doing almost nothing.
U.S. funds for Ukraine’s defense will run dry by the end of the month, leaving the invaded country vulnerable to a Russian takeover. But Johnson said he won’t take up Ukraine support in the House unless Democrats pay a ransom: a nonnegotiable demand that they swallow House Republicans’ entire wish list of border policies. That obstinance has blown up negotiations in the Senate, where Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) calls Johnson’s position “not rational,” Punchbowl News reported. Johnson has likewise stalled military aid to Israel, which commands overwhelming bipartisan support, by making another unrelated ransom demand: Democrats must repeal legislation that gave the IRS more clout to go after wealthy tax cheats. Johnson has also bottled up attempts to fund the government after next month by failing to agree to the overall spending number that Senate Republicans and House and Senate Democrats have all accepted.
In rare cases when Johnson does try to do something productive, his fellow Republicans denounce him. After a double flip-flop, the speaker finally blessed a compromise with Senate Democrats on the annual National Defense Authorization Act, including a temporary extension of the 9/11-era FISA 702 surveillance authority. “Outrageous … a total sell-out,” protested Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.). Rep. Chip Roy (Tex.) told the Messenger’s Lindsey McPherson this was “strike two and a half — if not more” against Johnson.
The new speaker has even managed to divide the chamber on a matter where there had been virtually no disagreement: the need to denounce the recent rise in antisemitism. The House Education Committee held one of the best hearings of the year this week, in which the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT disgraced themselves by suggesting, in response to questions by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and others, that their students should feel free to run around calling for the genocide of Jews.
It was an entirely different picture on the House floor, where Republicans brought up the latest of several resolutions condemning antisemitism. This resolution, however, declared that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” a dubious proposition equating criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews. A group of Jewish Democrats, arguing that “the safety of Jewish lives is not a game,” urged colleagues to vote “present” in protest — and 92 of them did. But for Republicans, it was a game: After the vote, the National Republican Campaign Committee, the House GOP’s political arm, put out a statement saying “extreme House Democrats just refused to denounce the … drastic rise of antisemitism.” Alas, for the NRCC, the one genuinely antisemitic act from the episode came from Republican Rep. Tom Massie (Ky.), who suggested in a post on X that Congress placed “Zionism” above “American patriotism.”
Still, it would be unfair to suggest that House Republicans have been entirely unproductive during Johnson’s tenure. They have continued to censure each other at a record-setting pace. This week, it was Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s turn. What grave constitutional offense had been committed this time? The New York Democrat had pulled a fire alarm in one of the House office buildings in September.
“If extreme MAGA Republicans are going to continue to try to weaponize the censure,” Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) said on the House floor on Wednesday, “going after Democrats repeatedly, week after week after week because you have nothing better to do, then I volunteer: Censure me next! … That’s how worthless your censure effort is.”
The race to censure has become a competitive sport among Republicans. After McCormick recently got a vote on his motion to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) before Greene got a vote on her motion to censure Tlaib, Greene accused her fellow Georgian of “assault,” Politico’s Olivia Beavers reports. McCormick said he shook Greene by the shoulders in a “friendly” gesture. And censure is just a warm-up for the main event. Next week, House Republicans plan to vote to authorize a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden. You see, they believe they have finally found the smoking gun that proves Biden guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors: He helped his son buy a pickup truck in 2018.
They have become the Three Stooges of the House’s Biden investigations: Jim, Jason and James, stepping on rakes and getting hit by falling flowerpots as they try to make a case for their predetermined outcome of impeaching the president. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan is Moe, thundering and blundering in his repeated failures to prove Biden’s “weaponization” of the government. Jason Smith, the in-over-his-head chairman of Ways and Means, is Larry, brainlessly reciting whatever script is in front of him. And Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is Curly, perpetually getting a pie in the face when the “evidence” he produces is immediately debunked.
“BREAKING,” Comer announced on social media this week, with two siren emojis. “Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden.” This was evidence that the president “knew & benefitted from his family’s business schemes.” But it turned out the payments, for all of $1,380 each, were repayments for a 2018 Ford Raptor truck Biden helped his son Hunter buy at a time when the younger Biden was broke because of his drug addiction.
Their act is so weak that these stooges have already gone into reruns. Last week, Jordan’s “weaponization” panel held a hearing on supposed censorship at Twitter — the same topic of a hearing he had in March, with two of the same witnesses. This week, Smith’s committee had a hearing with the same two IRS “whistleblowers” who already testified about the Hunter Biden case before that panel, as well as before the Oversight Committee, earlier this year.
Comer, after seeing his allegations refuted in hearing after disastrous hearing, has said he doesn’t want to have any additional public sessions. He prefers the safety of closed-door depositions, from which he can selectively leak misleading tidbits.
Last week, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said his client would be happy to testify publicly before Congress. “We have seen you use closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort the facts and misinform the public,” he wrote. “We therefore propose opening the door.” But Comer immediately rejected the offer, and he and Jordan are now threatening to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress for insisting on public, rather than closed-door, testimony.
Their desire for secrecy is perfectly understandable, given the absence of evidence against the president. Last week, Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo asked a Republican member of Comer’s Oversight panel, Lisa McClain (Mich.), whether investigators had been able to “identify any actual policy changes” that Biden made related to his family’s business dealings. “The short answer is no,” McClain replied.
Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.
This week, the three stooges assembled in the echoey lobby of the Longworth House Office Building for a “media availability” on the impeachment inquiry. Smith alleged that the Bidens moved “an unimaginable sum of money” (actually, between $10 million and $20 million, compared with multiple billions of dollars similarly received by Trump family members from foreign interests). Comer repeated his allegation about the “monthly payments” made to Biden, again omitting that they were for Hunter’s pickup truck.
The three suddenly hustled away. “No questions?” Washington Examiner’s Reese Gorman called after them. “I thought this was a press conference.” Smith then gaveled in the Ways and Means Committee to hear once more from his “whistleblowers.” His first order of business: to close the meeting to the public and the media. The ranking Democrat, Richard Neal (Mass.), made a motion for the hearing to remain open to the public. “You’re not recognized,” Smith replied. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.) asked to debate the Republicans’ motion to kick out the public. “It’s not debatable,” Smith shot back.
Republicans repelled the Democratic attempts at transparency in party-line votes; Smith ordered the room cleared of journalists and spectators. Republicans said they would release a transcript “upon completion of our meeting,” but it didn’t come out that day, or the next.
Their fevered efforts to hide from the public make it clear House Republicans have lost the plot in their attempt to implicate Biden. But will they impeach him anyway? Certainly! Woop, woop, woop, woop, woop, woop.
Robert Kagan wrote a gloomy essay in The Washington Post on November 30 predicting that if Trump is re-elected, he will establish a dictatorship. On December 7, he wrote another essay on how to stop Trump. The bottom line, he contends, is that Republicans must stop him. They know the danger he poses, and they alone have the credibility with Republican voters to convince them that Trump is unfit for office.
Kagan knows well that all of the other candidates for the Republican nomination (except Chris Christie) have stated that they would vote for Trump even if he is convicted of federal crimes.
But his formula to defeat Trump is to assume that Nikki Haley is best positioned to compete with Trump. He believes that the others should endorse her and that she should denounce Trump. She should make clear that Trump is unelectable because of his refusal to accept the election of 2020 and the likelihood that he will be convicted in one of his many trials.
If Republicans agree that Trump is damaged goods, he will lose a large section of his voters—not his MAGA cult, but other Republicans.
Kagan writes:
The first step is to consolidate all the anti-Trump forces in the Republican Party behind a single candidate, right now. It is obvious that candidate should be Nikki Haley and not because she’s pro-Ukraine but because she is clearly the most capable politician among the remaining candidates and the performer with the best chance, however slim, of challenging Trump. All the money and the endorsements should shift to her as quickly as possible. Yes, Ron DeSantis is likely too selfish and ambitious to drop out of the race, but if everyone else does and the remaining money and support all flow to Haley, he will quickly become irrelevant….
Trump supporters fall into roughly three categories. The great majority are completely committed to what former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman has called the “cult” of Trump. They are out of reach for Haley. Another smaller group has no problem with Trump, so long as he can beat President Biden and the Democrats next year. This faction is undoubtedly reassured by polls that say that Trump can win, so the possibility that Haley can also beat Biden is irrelevant to them. They prefer Trump, and there is no reason for them to rethink their position so long as Trump remains clearly electable. Finally, there is a small percentage of Republicans who say they will support Trump unless he is convicted; recent polls suggest these people make up roughly six percent of GOP voters in some of the key swing states…
If she is serious about trying to stop Trump, however, there is only one way to cut into his mammoth majority, and that is by raising doubts about Trump’s electability. The way to do that is to warn those Republicans still capable of listening that a Trump presidency really does pose a risk to our freedom and democracy and the Constitution. That is what will be required to win over the small percentage of Republicans who are still willing to drop Trump if he is convicted. And if Haley can begin to reel in those voters, she can begin to raise doubts in the minds of those who are supporting Trump because they think he can defeat Biden and the Democrats in November. In short, the way to beat Trump is to make him seem unelectable, and the way to make him seem unelectable is to show that he is unacceptable.
Trump will campaign on the claim that he is a victim of political persecution by the Biden asministration. If he becomes the nominee, the Republican Party will echo his claims. They will insist that the American judicial system is corrupt.
Think about that precious small percentage of Republicans who now say they would not support Trump if convicted. They are actually saying a lot more than that. These are Republicans who still regard the justice system as important and legitimate, who consider special counsel Jack Smith’s charges worthy of a jury trial and legitimate, and who for the moment think a guilty verdict, were it to come, would be legitimate. Can we count on them maintaining those views over the coming weeks and months if all they hear from Republican leaders and conservative media is that the trials are illegitimate acts of persecution? Do the people hoping to be saved by the courts think that these voters will conclude on their own that the trials are legitimate when their entire party is saying they’re not?
As Trump remakes himself into a victim of persecution, will Haley and other Republicans still insist that they will support Trump if he is the nominee? In doing so, they will be tacitly agreeing, and certainly not refuting, the claim that Biden is a dictator and Trump is being persecuted. By the time the trials get underway, that will be the standard Republican talking point. Today, it is just the most devoted Trumpers, but before long, we will see even respectable Republicans “raising questions” about the prosecutions, to the point where the entire court proceeding will be delegitimized in the eyes of the ordinary Republican voter.
What effect will that have on that small percentage of Trump supporters who now say they would drop their support if he were convicted? Those who cling to the hope that the trials will bring Trump down need to understand that the number of Republicans willing to abandon Trump because of a conviction, already small today, is going to be much smaller come spring. As the Trump narrative gains traction and becomes the baseline Republican position, Haley will become a footnote as Republicans of all stripes rally to the martyrdom of Trump…
What they need to hear right now (and for the rest of the campaign) is that they are right, that the Biden administration is not a dictatorship, that the trials are not an abuse of power, and that if Trump is convicted, justice will have been done. And they do not need to hear this from Democrats and Post columnists. They need to hear it from their fellow Republicans, from Republicans they admire. At some point, some leading Republicans are going to have to display the courage to defend the justice system even though that will put them in direct conflict with Trump and his supporters.
We probably can’t expect Haley to take the lead in making the case for Trump’s unacceptability, even though she should. But other Republicans certainly can. It is no secret what people such as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) think about Trump. Romney’s biography is filled with whispered comments by leading Republicans privately indicating their fear and loathing of Trump. But today, those Republicans remain in their coward’s crouch, hoping to survive as they have the past eight years — by keeping their heads down, by waving off Trump’s threats and dictatorial behavior. Romney, who once had the courage to vote to convict Trump for trying to overthrow the government in 2021, now tells us “at some point you stop getting worried about what he says.” At this moment, Trump and his supporters are engaged in an attempt to obliterate history right before our eyes, to say that down is up and up is down, and that instead of destroying democracy Trump is saving democracy from the Biden tyranny, and that this is what the trials are about. And this is Romney’s response? The people who want to put their faith in the good judgment of Republican voters are counting on those voters to come to the right conclusion themselves while even their most respected Republican leaders are too frightened to defend the justice system against Trump. That is a lot of faith indeed.
But imagine a different scenario. Imagine that Republicans who know Trump poses a threat of dictatorship suddenly discovered their courage and began speaking out, and not just one or two but dozens of them — current and former elected officials, former high-ranking officials from the Trump and past Republican administrations. Imagine if the wing of the Republican Party that still believes in defending the Constitution identified itself that way, as “Constitutional Republicans” implacably opposed to the man who blatantly attempted to subvert the Constitution and has indicated his willingness to do so again as president.
Then the Republican primary campaign would become a struggle between those defending the Constitution and those endorsing its possible dismantlement at the hands of a dictator. That small percentage of Republicans who now say they would drop Trump if convicted would remain in play, and those now sticking with Trump because he can beat Biden might have reason to start questioning that assumption. It would not take a lot of speeches, or well-placed interviews, or appearances on Sunday shows, by the right people to change the conversation. But that, it seems to me, is the only chance Haley has of giving Trump a run for his money in the primaries.
If Haley can’t beat Trump in the primaries, he thinks she should launch a third party campaign.
Could this coalition come into being? Yes. But it will require extraordinary action by a number of important individuals. People will have to take risks and make sacrifices, but is it asking too much? The risk of standing up today will not be nearly as great as it might be after January 2025. Does McConnell really want to go down in history as the silent midwife to a dictatorship in America? Can Romney not see that it is his destiny to lead the way at this critical moment in America’s history. Did Paul Ryan sell his soul for a Fox board seat? All these people went into public service for a reason. Wasn’t it to rise to an occasion such as this? Former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney shouldn’t have to fight this alone. For people such as Condoleezza Rice and James Baker and Henry Paulson Jr., what was the point of acquiring all this experience and respectability, if not to use it at this moment of national peril? Why are Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) defending Trump when they must know he is a threat to American democracy and the Constitution? Where is Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, the man who courageously pushed back against Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election? Where are all those officials who learned firsthand what a danger Trump was and who have occasionally said it out loud, people such as former attorney general William Barr and former White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly? Where is former vice president Mike Pence, who single-handedly saved our system of government almost three years ago? Was that his last act? And for that matter, where is former president George W. Bush, who is well known to be appalled by Trump? A word from him would go a long way to emboldening others. What a service he could perform for his country.
Kagan says that stopping Trump would not take a miracle. It would take courage.
How likely is that?
He concludes:
Some readers of my last essay asked fairly: What can an ordinary citizen do? The answer is, what they always do when they really care about something, when they regard it as a matter of life and death. They become activists. They get organized. They hold peaceful and legal rallies and marches. They sign petitions. They deluge their representatives, Republican or Democrat, with calls and mail, asking them to speak up and defend the Constitution. They call out their political leaders, state and local, and give them courage to stand up as well. Americans used to do these sorts of things. Have they forgotten how? At the risk of sounding Capra-esque, if every American who fears a Trump dictatorship acted on those fears, voiced them, convinced others, influenced their elected officials, then yes, that could make a difference. Another ship is passing that can still save us. Will we swim toward it this time, or will we let it pass, as we have all the others? I am deeply pessimistic, but I could not more fervently wish to be proved wrong.
Over the past week, there was a surge of articles about the danger that Donald Trump poses to our democracy. Trump ratcheted up his threats to punish his enemies and to replace the civil service with Trump loyalists. When his admirer Sean Hannity asked him point blank whether he intended to be a dictator—expecting he would say “of course not”—Trump responded he would be a dictator “only on the first day,” when he would command the completion of the border wall with Mexico and “drill, drill, drill.” Trump’s rhetoric no longer sounds like a normal candidate. But he was never a normal candidate.
Some commentators noted that his threats were unprecedented, yet they barely caused a ripple. He said that certain generals who served him yet denounced him deserved to be executed. What would the press have done if Obama had made such a statement? It would have been front-page news for days, not a blip. Trump has normalized threats of violence. His base has come to expect promises of violence from him. He doesn’t disappoint them.
In his first term, he reached out to some who were not in his personal orbit. He won’t make that mistake if there is a next time.
Kagan was a noted neoconservative but left the GOP in 2016 because he couldn’t accept Trump. His recent article is 7,500 words. I read it late at night and couldn’t sleep. Kagan’s article laid out the case that Trump will win the nomination; that no elected Republican will stand up to him; that he stands a good chance of being re-elected; and that if he is, he will surround himself with toadies and wreak havoc on our democracy. He predicted, as the title says, that Trump would have no guardrails, no respect for the norms of the Presidency, and no regard for the Constitution.
He said that would use the Justice Department to harass and punish his enemies.
A few quotes from his article:
Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination.
Once Trump sweeps Super Tuesday, he writes, Republicans will fall in line behind him and so will big donors. All of the other GOP candidates except Chris Christie will endorse him.
Meanwhile, Biden will have trouble unifying his party. The news media love to run stories about disenchanted Democratic voters who will stay home. Biden faces challenges from third-party candidates, including Jill Stein, Robert Kennedy Jr., and possibly a No Labels candidate like Joe Manchin.
Trump “enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.”
Trump enjoys some unusual advantages for a challenger, moreover. Even Ronald Reagan did not have Fox News and the speaker of the House in his pocket. To the degree there are structural advantages in the coming general election, in short, they are on Trump’s side. And that is before we even get to the problem that Biden can do nothing to solve: his age.
Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.
Today, Republicans might be responsible for Washington’s dysfunction, and they might pay a price for it in downballot races. But Trump benefits from dysfunction because he is the one who offers a simple answer: him. In this election, only one candidate is running on the platform of using unprecedented power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing number of Americans claim to want that, in both parties. Trump is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of the system. Advantage: Trump…
If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.
What limits those powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent. A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has? Will a future Congress stop him? Presidents can accomplish a lot these days without congressional approval, as even Barack Obama showed. The one check Congress has on a rogue president, namely, impeachment and conviction, has already proved all but impossible — even when Trump was out of office and wielded modest institutional power over his party.
Another traditional check on a president is the federal bureaucracy, that vast apparatus of career government officials who execute the laws and carry on the operations of government under every president. They are generally in the business of limiting any president’s options. As Harry S. Truman once put it, “Poor Ike. He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing at all will happen.” That was a problem for Trump is his first term, partly because he had no government team of his own to fill the administration. This time, he will. Those who choose to serve in his second administration will not be taking office with the unstated intention of refusing to carry out his wishes. If the Heritage Foundation has its way, and there is no reason to believe it won’t, many of those career bureaucrats will be gone, replaced by people carefully “vetted” to ensure their loyalty to Trump.
Trump might decide he wants a third term. Who will stop him? The Constitution? The 22nd Amendment? The Congress? Not likely.
Trump as President will pursue those who tried to stop him. He pledged in his Veterans Day speech to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.
What will that look like? Trump has already named some of those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials from his first term such as retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Gen. Mark A. Milley, former attorney general William P. Barr and others who spoke against him after the 2020 election; officials in the FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe; Justice Department officials who refused his demands to overturn the 2020 election; members of the Jan. 6 committee; Democratic opponents including Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.); and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his impeachment and conviction.
But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted. Many will simply be fired, but others will be subject to career-destroying investigations. The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people “work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process.
Prepare for a new McCarthyism as Trump and his MAGA lackeys go after the “anti-American” Democrats whom he calls “”Communists,””Marxists,” “Fascists,” and “vermin.”
How will Americans respond to the first signs of a regime of political persecution? Will they rise up in outrage? Don’t count on it. Those who found no reason to oppose Trump in the primaries and no reason to oppose him in the general are unlikely to experience a sudden awakening when some former Trump-adjacent official such as Milley finds himself under investigation for goodness knows what. They will know only that Justice Department prosecutors, the IRS, the FBI and several congressional committees are looking into it. And who is to say that those being hounded are not in fact tax cheaters, or Chinese spies, or perverts, or whatever they might be accused of? Will the great body of Americans even recognize these accusations as persecution and the first stage of shutting down opposition to Trump across the country?
Kagan says that the odds of a Trump dictatorship are growing by the day. In 2016, it was completely improbable that a man such as trump would win the Republican nomination, and completely unlikely that he would win the Presidency. And it was unthinkable that when he lost in 2020, he would insist that he won in a landslide, and even crazier that his base would believe the Big Lie. Republicans will cower in fear before him; Democrats will protest, maybe take to the streets, but Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act to shut them down.
Who will have the courage to stand up to Trump when the risk is not just losing your political office but arrest, detention, public humiliation, and the loss of your freedom?
Christian and Bridget Ziegler have been leaders of the extreme rightwing in Florida. They are (or were) close to Governor DeSantis and Donald Trump. But when they became ensnared in a sex scandal, they were exposed as rank hypocrites. Christian thus far insists he won’t step down as chairman of the Florida Republican Party. Bridget Ziegler was one of the three co-founders of Moms for Liberty, which led the fight to ban books about homosexuality and to harass transgender students. The website of Moms for Liberty now claims there were only two co-founders; she has been written out of their narrative. She’s a non-person. The editorial board of the Orlando Sentinel says it’s time for both of them to resign. Karma is a bitch.
The deepening troubles of Christian and Bridget Ziegler would be just another local news story if they were two private people. But they are highly public figures who are suddenly in a heap of trouble, and their sex life is in headlines.
He is chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, close to both Gov. Ron DeSantis and former president Donald Trump. She is a nationally known conservative culture warrior, a Sarasota County School Board member and a co-founder of the book-banning Moms for Liberty, which denounces all things LGBTQ. She is also a DeSantis appointee to the Disney World oversight board.
Christian Ziegler is accused, though not formally charged, of raping a woman at her apartment in Sarasota. She told police of a previous three-way sexual encounter with both Zieglers and said she was “mostly in” for Bridget — not him.
Sarasota police and the Florida Trident — the reporting arm of the nonprofit Florida Center for Governmental Accountability — say Bridget Ziegler confirmed the previous threesome. They had recorded Christian Ziegler promising his accuser that there would be another. Text messages showed that the woman had told him not to come to her house without Bridget. He went there anyway and admits to having sex with her, but insists it was consensual.
DeSantis wants Ziegler out, but claims to be powerless to remove him. (To that we say: Since when has that stopped him?) So do other leading Republicans: Sen. Rick Scott, all three Cabinet members and both leaders of the state Legislature. Conspicuously missing from their statements are expressions of concern for the possible rape victim.
The state party vice chairman, Evan Power, has called a closed-door Dec. 17 executive committee meeting in Orlando to “censure or discipline” the chairman after Ziegler refused to call the meeting himself.
Bridget Ziegler remains on the school board, feeding the nationwide mockery over the blatant hypocrisy between her private life and her public preaching. She is also under pressure to resign.
The presumption of innocence
Christian Ziegler is legally innocent unless he’s convicted. There is nothing on the public record that Bridget Ziegler could be charged with, since hypocrisy is not a crime. Neither is a ménage à trois among consenting adults. Her virulent hatred for all things LGBTQ in public while conducting a bisexual tryst in private is damning only in the court of public opinion.
But the Zieglers show contempt for public opinion and for the Republican political machine that enriched them and made them prominent public figures. They should retire discreetly to private life while the criminal investigation proceeds.
Whether she can ever again be a credible member of a school board, or maintain any connection with Moms for Liberty, is in serious doubt. She should resign, too.
Even if she doesn’t, DeSantis clearly holds power over the position he gave her, on the board of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. Why hasn’t he yanked that appointment, or demanded that she step down?
“She is nothing but a distraction from before and only getting worse and it will never go away as long as she sits there,” fellow School Board member Tom Edwards told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
A pariah to the cause
Some organizations see the hypocrisy in the own ranks.
Moms for Liberty, its credibility further damaged, raced to distance itself from Ziegler and announced that she left its national leadership three years ago, even as she continued to propagate its ideology of intolerance.
She’s also been jettisoned from an organization that “trains conservatives.” Her latest financial disclosure form lists $64,101 in income from the Leadership Institute LLC in Arlington, Va., nearly twice her school board salary of $33,916. Until Wednesday, it listed her as vice president of its School Board Leadership Program. Her name disappeared later that day from the staff list…
Christian Ziegler, meanwhile, regurgitates the standard defense of influential men accused of sexual assault. He claims he’s the victim, if you can believe that.
‘A country to save’
“We have a country to save, and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for the process to wrap up,” he said.
Like Trump, who supported his election as party chair, and like DeSantis, whose slogan is “Never Back Down,” Ziegler advised a Moms for Liberty national conference to “Never apologize. Ever.” It was a reference to a Moms for Liberty chapter that apologized for using a quote from Adolf Hitler in its newsletter.
As a political strategist, he is ruthless. “Until we get every Democrat out of office and no Democrat considers running for office, we’re going to continue to step on the gas and move forward in Florida,” he said on X, formerly Twitter, last February, when he was elected party chairman.
Until no Democratdares to run?
Across Florida, teachers are afraid to acknowledge to their students that same-sex relationships exist. Books are being taken off library shelves because they tell the truth about the modern implications of slavery and racism. Works of towering literary merit are being treated like smut because of brief passages describing sexual encounters. Teenaged victims of rape face the possibility that they will be forced to carry their attackers’ babies to term. Transgender Floridians are terrified they’ll lose access to the health care they depend upon.
This is the world the Zieglers helped to make. Now they should live by its narrow, hateful strictures.
I disagree with the editorial. Christian and Bridget committed no crime. He is a bully, but everyone knew that. Let him remain as the face of the state Republican Party. Bridget inveighed against the dangers of gay sex, but she indulged in it herself. She even harassed a member of the Sarasota school board because he is gay. She should remain on the school board and own up to her bisexuality. Maybe contrition will lead her to new views, inspire her to empathy, and enable her to retract her intolerance. We can always hope.
A quarter-century after the launch of vouchers in Milwaukee, we now know a lot that we didn’t know then. The sales pitch was always humanitarian: vouchers, said its rightwing advocates, would “save poor kids from failing schools.” Except they didn’t. We now know, writes Peter Greene, that vouchers do not save poor kids from failing schools. They are a subsidy for students who were already in private and religious schools. Maybe that was their purpose all along.
One other thing we have learned about vouchers: the first voucher program is for low-income kids, but it is the camel’s nose under the tent. The income restrictions will be raised again and again, and more groups of eligible students will be eligible for vouchers. And one day, there will be vouchers for everyone, without regard to income or need.
He writes:
Voucher program after voucher program is launched with the same promise–this program will rescue disadvantaged students from public schools that can’t get the job done. But now that they’ve been around for a few years, we can see pretty clearly what they actually do.
They expand.
They subsidize private school costs for families that were already in private schools.
Arizona’s program is growing into a state budget buster. New Hampshire’s state subsidy for private school tuition is mushrooming in just three years, and roughly 90% of the students using vouchers are still students who were already in private school. Iowa’s program cost looks to be tremendous, with 19,000 students approved for vouchers.
Arkansas is joining the crowd, and provides a fine example of how these programs grow and who they actually benefit.
Arkansas’s voucher program was set up to start with disabled and low-income students. One immediate effect has been a boom in the Fake Your Way To Disability industry in Arkansas, where options to “prove” your eligibility include “a note from your doctor.” And the Arkansas Times has learned that many students qualifying for vouchers didn’t not even clear that low bar. It’s a bit of a Catch-22, as students often have difficulty getting admitted to a private school if they have an IEP, 504 plan, or disability. Still, almost half of Arkansas’s voucher students were approved based on some sort of claim of disability.
That may contribute to Arkansas’s numbers– of its voucher users, 95% did not attend a public school last year.
And the program is only slated to expand as the bars for qualifying are lowered even further.
Proponents of vouchers, like Governor Reynolds of Iowa, point at the expansion and huge cost runs as signs that families were “hungry for educational freedom.” Well, no. What it shows is that families like free money from the state to help pay for the expenses they have already freely chosen for their children.
Many states have passed laws that ban the teaching of accurate history. Sometimes these laws ban “divisive concepts,” some ban anything that might cause students to feel uncomfortable, some find other language to warn teachers and textbook publishers to omit the shameful events of the past, especially the racist treatment of people of color.
In Florida, where the state went to great lengths to whitewash the teaching of Black history, one man has devoted himself to telling the truth. That man is Dr. Marvin Dunn. Dr. Dunn was a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Network for Public Education. In the meanwhile, you can read his book A History of Florida Through Black Eyes.
In response to Dr. Dunn’s moving presentation, a friend of NPE sent me the following article about the Danville Massacre of 1883. We now know that Reconstruction was a period of impressive racial progress. Formerly enslaved people voted, opened small businesses, and asserted their newly won rights.
But the former Confederates found this rebalancing of racial relationships intolerable. The Danville Massacre put an end to a period of reconciliation and installed Jim Crow, cancelling out the gains of Reconstruction.
The author of the article could not remember learning about this important event in the state’s history.
Learning the truth about history doesn’t make children uncomfortable. It makes them informed.
The Washington Post identifies a serious problem with home schooling: No one is monitoring the well-being of children. In public schools, teachers and staff are designated reporters of children’s physical health; if they see signs of abuse, they are legally bound to report it to authorities. In home schooling, child abuse may be hidden. Read this horrifying story and bear in mind that some states are paying parents to keep their children home instead of sending them to school.
His family had searched, taping hand-drawn “missing” posters to telephone poles and driving the streets calling out the 11-year-olds name. So had many of his neighbors, their flashlights sweeping over the sidewalks as the winter darkness settled on the Sierra Nevada foothills.
The police were searching, too, and nowthey had returned to the place where Roman had gone missing earlier that day: his family’s rented home in Placerville, Calif. Roman’s stepmother, Lindsay Piper, hesitated when officers showed up at her door the night of Jan. 11, 2020, asking to comb the house again. But she had told them that Roman liked to hide in odd places — even the clothes dryer — and agreed to let them in.
Brock Garvin, Roman’s 15-year-old stepbrother, was sitting in the dimly lit basement when police came downstairs shortly after 10:30 p.m. He ignored them, he said later, watching “Supernatural” on television as three officers began inspecting the black-and-yellow Home Depot storage bins stacked along the back wall.
Brock had no idea what had happened to Roman. But he did know something the police did not: Much of what his mother had said to them that day was a lie.
When she reported Roman’s disappearance, Piper told the police she was home schooling the eight kids in her household. This was technically true. It was also a ruse.
Most schoolshave teachers, principals, guidance counselors — professionals trained to recognize the unexplained bruises or erratic behaviors that may point to an abusive parent. Home education was an easy way to avoid the scrutiny of such people. That was the case for Piper, whose children were learning less from her about math and history than they were about violence, cruelty and neglect.
Left to their own devices while she lay in bed watching TV crime procedurals, and her husband, Jordan, worked long hours as a utility lineman, their days and nights passed in a penumbral blur of video games, microwave dinners and fistfights. Almost nothing resembling education took place,her sons said. But there was a shared project in which she diligently led her children: the torture of their stepbrother, Roman.
Roman had been a loving, extroverted 7-year-old who obsessed over dinosaurs when Piper came into his life, a mama’s boy perpetually in search of a mother as Jordan, his father, cycled from one broken relationship to the next.
On the day he was reported missing, he was a sixth-graderwho weighed only 42 pounds. He had been locked in closets, whipped with extension cords and bound with zip ties, according to police reports and interviews with family members who witnessed his treatment. Unwilling to give him even short breaks from his isolation, Piper kept him in diapers.
The Washington Post reconstructed Piper’s torment of her stepson from hundreds of pages of previously undisclosed law enforcement records, as well as interviews with two of her four biological children, other relatives, friends of the family, neighbors and police officers.
Piper, 41, who is in prison, did not respond to two letters requesting comment for this story. Her former public defender did not return calls or emails. Jordan Piper, 38, also in prison, declined a request to comment through his attorney.
Little research exists on the links between home schooling and child abuse. The few studies conducted in recent years have not shown that home-schooled children are at significantly greater risk of mistreatment than those who attend public, private or charter schools.
But the research also suggests that when abuse does occur in home-school families, it can escalate into especially severe forms — and that some parents exploit lax home education laws to avoid contact with social service agencies.
In 2014, a group of pediatricians published a study of more than two dozen tortured children treated at medical centers in Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin, Utah and Washington. Among the 17 victims old enough to attend school, eight were home-schooled.
After a home-schooling mother killed her autistic teenager, government analysts in Connecticut gathered data from six school districts over three years. Their report, released in 2018 by the state’s Office of the Child Advocate, found that 138 of the 380 students withdrawn from public schools for home education during that period lived in households with at least one prior complaint of suspected abuse or neglect.
Child-welfare advocates have long pushed fora minimal level of oversight for home-schooled students — calls that have grown more urgent as home schooling has exploded, becoming the country’s fastest growing form of education.But home-school parents, arguing that serious episodes of abuse are rare, have fiercely resisted. And nowhere have their efforts been more successful than in the state where Roman and his siblings spent most of their lives: Michigan.
Michigan is one of 11 states in which parents are not even required to tell anyone they are home schooling, let alone demonstrate they are teaching their children anything. Its lack of regulation, the result of a 1993 state Supreme Court decision still celebrated by home-school advocates, has repeatedly concealed the actions of abusive parents like Piper.
“She told people we were home-schooled, but we weren’t,” Carson Garvin, one of Roman’s stepbrothers, now 16, later wrote in a victim impact statement. “Now I can see it wasn’t for us that she made this decision. It was to protect herself from the school counselors and staff. I believe that if we had went to school that someone would have had a feeling that something was off and that she would have been reported at some point.”
Despite what Piper told the police, Roman had never really liked hiding. The truth was that he had been hidden. And home schooling is what allowed her to hide him.
As Brock Garvin sat in the basement watching TV on the night of Roman’s disappearance, listening to the police officers banter as they opened the Tough Storage Tote bins, he was in a fog. He had been up all night playing “Dark Souls” on his Xbox, and was upset that he hadn’t been allowed to sleep for most of the day, as he usually did.
He was also jarred by the entrance of unknown grown-ups into the house. The family had moved to California from Michigan just a few months earlier. Long isolated, they were now strangers to everyone around them.
But Brock wasn’t worried about Roman. If his stepbrother had run away, whatever he found could hardly be worse than what he had escaped.
Then the lid on one last bin snapped open, and the officers’ laughter stopped.
Even in his benumbed state Brock felt something strange pass through the room, as if the air pressure had suddenly dropped. It was quiet for a moment, then the police began pulling on latex gloves.
‘I’ll behave’
Romanloved beingalive. It was a strange thing to say about an infant, but that was Jennifer Morasco’s first impression of the sunny 5-month-old boy who would become her stepson when she married Jordan Piper in 2010.
“He’d be teething, but he wouldn’t cry,” recalled Morasco, now 41. “He was just so happy to be in existence, and loved being around people and doing stuff with everyone.”
Roman’s mother, Rochelle Lopez, was a soldier who deployed to Iraq when he was 14 months old. After returning, she struggled with heart problems, anxiety and addiction to pain medication, according to police records. Lopez, who died in 2021 at age 34, fought with Jordan in court for years over custody of Roman.
But none of that seemed to weigh on the boy that Morasco largely raised until he was about 4 years old. Morasco still remembers the lyrics to “Life is a Highway,” a song from Roman’s favorite movie, “Cars,” that he sang over and over. Another favorite was “Rainbow Connection,” the banjo-accompanied Muppet ode to life’s unfulfilled promises.
“He thought he was Kermit the Frog, essentially,” Morasco said.
Even after Morasco left Jordan Piper, she kept in touch with Roman, calling every year on his birthday. But in 2016, Jordan wasn’t picking up his phone, so she tried sending a Facebook message to Roman’s new stepmom, asking her to tell him “he is loved all the way to the moon and back.”
Lindsay Piper reacted harshly, warning Morasco not to contact her again and boasting that Roman “has excelled in ways I can’t begin to explain.”
Piper herself had barely graduated high school, according to her sister, Chanel Campbell. Her interest was never in academics; it was in babies. It wasn’t an unusual fixation for a young girl, but there was something off-kilter about the intensity that Lindsay brought to her aspirations of motherhood, her sister said.
“She carried a baby doll around with her until she was, like, 12,” said Campbell, who was raised with her sister in and around Flint. “She just had this fascination with baby dolls and dressing them up and changing them and putting them in diapers.” This treatment extended to the family’s miniature schnauzer, which Lindsay forced into footed pajamas.
By the time she married Jordan Piper, Lindsay had four children of her own. Their father, Marcus Garvin, was an infantryman in the Army and Army National Guard. He returned from his service in Iraq to years of marital turmoil with Lindsay, who eventually gained full custody of their children. After marrying Jordan, she became the parent of a fifth: her stepson, Roman.
In Piper’s frequent Facebook posts, they were a happily blended family, all beaming smiles and matching flannel shirts. But Campbell knew this image was no more real than the dolls her sister had once carried around. At family gatherings, Piper’s children tended to run wild, and she responded in disturbing ways: pinching them, or biting them on their forearms. When Campbell protested, she said, her sister would storm off.
Reached by phone, Piper’s mother, the guardian of Carson’s twin brother, initially said she would consider speaking to The Post but did not respond to subsequent calls or text messages. Piper’s eldest daughter, now 21, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Shortly after her marriage to Jordan, Piper started to complain about her boys’ experience at their elementary school.
“She said, ‘I’m just going to home-school them. I’m tired of the teachers singling them out. I’m tired of everyone picking on them,’” Campbell recalled. “I thought to myself, ‘You’re definitely right. We’ve got a problem here. But home schooling isn’t going to be the answer to it.’”
Between late 2016 and the summer of 2017, Piper withdrew the children from school, Brock and Carson said. With the exception of a few brief interludes when they were sent back for days or weeks, they would not regularly attend school again for the next five years.
At first, they sporadically logged on to an online learning program, Brock and Carson recalled. Then any pretense of education was dropped.
Piper spent the day watching “Criminal Minds” and “Law & Order,” her sons said, and in the evenings, when Jordan returned from work, the couple would sit around drinking Jack Daniels.
By this time, the family had moved to Gaines, a tiny town amid soybean fields about 20 miles southwest of Flint. At midday, the sound of children at recess echoed past their house from the elementary school three blocks away. But for Piper’s kids, the high-pitched laughter and shouting might as well have come from another planet.
“My world got very, very small,” recalled Brock, who was then 12. “I wouldn’t see the sun or moon. I would just be in my room 24/7.” He at least had his Xbox; Carson had his twin brother. Roman had nothing and nobody, because the things thatmade him human were methodically stripped away.
It happened slowly, his stepbrothers said. Early on, when the boys scuffled, Piper blamed Roman, the one to whom she had not given birth, punishing him with lengthy timeouts. Then she began locking the door to his room. Then she began covering his window with a blanket.
“He would sit in the dark on his bed all day. And she would have us, like, scratch on the walls and make creepy noises so he’d think there’s demons trying to kill him,” said Brock, who expressed deep regret about participating. “He’d sit there and scream, like, ‘Stop it, please’ or ‘I’ll behave’ … that was his life.”
Soon there was no disciplinary pretext for the harm inflicted on Roman, Carson and Brock said. It was simply what the family did. Piper ordered her sons to join in when she whipped him with phone charger cords. Roman began trying to escape, so she tied him down. She took away his clothes. Most of her kids were overweight, but Roman was put on something worse than a starvation diet.
“She would feed him oatmeal with huge amounts of salt in it,” Carson said. “He puked it up, so he wouldn’t have to keep eating it. And she would make him eat his puke.”
Campbell suspected there was something badly wrong inside her sister’s house. She said that after seeing bruises on Roman’s face at a Christmas get-together in 2016, she called child protective services.
She made two follow-up calls, she said, but could never determine whether any action was taken. Police later said they found no records of CPS investigations into Piper’s treatment of Roman. A spokesman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services — which oversees such investigations — declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of child-welfare cases.
Roman kept appearing in Piper’s Facebook photos, increasingly wraithlike beside his grinning siblings.
“He was just lifeless, just sad. You could just see it in his face, aside from the puffy eyes and the bruising on his forehead,” Campbell said. “The love had been sucked out of him.”
It seemed unimaginable that a child could fall so completely through the safety net because a parent like Piper decided to home-school. But in Michigan, it had happened before.
‘A shield for child abuse’
About two years before Roman was withdrawn from school, an eviction crew entered Mitchelle Blair’s Detroit apartment on March 24, 2015. The 35-year-old mother of four wasn’t home, so they began removing her furniture. But their work came to an abrupt halt when they opened a deep freezer in the living room: inside were the bodies of two children.
Stoni Blair and Stephen Berry — estimated to have been ages 13 and 9 when their mother killed them — had been pulled out of Detroit public schools with their siblings two years earlier. During Blair’s conviction and sentencing to life in prison for first-degree murder, it emerged that she had burned her children with scalding water and beaten them with wooden planks.
She also claimed to be home-schooling them.
Stephanie Chang, then a freshman Democratic state representative whose district included the site of the murders, was horrified by the case. She was also alarmed by what she perceived as a yawning gap in the state’s child protection system.
It wasn’t just Stoni and Stephen. Seven years earlier, there had been Calista Springer, a home-schooled 16-year-old who died in a house fire in Centreville, Mich., unable to free herself from a choke chain her parents used to tie her to her bed. Marsha and Anthony Springer were convicted of torture and child abuse and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences.
Chang understood such cases didn’t represent most children’s home-schooling experiences. But she also believed abusive parents were taking advantage of Michigan’s absence of any notification or monitoring requirements for home educators, with devastating consequences.
“There are so many amazing home-school parents who I have so much respect for. But when people use home schooling as a shield for child abuse, that’s not acceptable,” said Chang, now a state senator. “That lack of a notification requirement creates an environment where parents can basically just do whatever they want.”
It is a concern that extends beyond Michigan, and that pediatricians share with politicians….
A month after Mitchelle Blair’s children were discovered dead in Detroit, Chang introduced a bill requiring that parents notify their local school district of a decision to home-school and that home-schooled children meet at least twice a year with a mandated child abuse reporter, such as a teacher, doctor or psychologist.
“It’s such a common-sense thing, in my view,” Chang said.
The state board of education in Michigan endorsed the legislation. But the possibility of any oversight infuriated home-schoolers, and they organized to defeat Chang’s modest proposal.
The story goes on to explain that Roman died of salt poisoning. He was 11, but weighed the same as a six-year-old.
When the older boys were returned to their biological father in Michigan, who had not seen them for years, he insisted on sending them to public school.
His parents were arrested and jailed in California for second degree murder. The mother has been sentenced to a term of 15 years to life. Roman’s father awaits sentencing.
In the face of such horrifying stories, it is incomprehensible that state officials do not pass laws to regulate home schooling: first, to check in the health of the children, and second, to determine whether they are learning anything. A parent with several children, like the one in this story, could collect almost $60,000 a year from the state in Florida or in other states where vouchers go to unregulated home schooling parents.
Diane Ravitch's blog 