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Jan Resseger: The Facts About Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
5

The Network for Public Education reposted this excellent review of a book about vouchers. The review and the book summarize the findings about who benefits from vouchers and how they affect the public schools. The place to begin is with recognition of the handsomely funded propaganda campaign on behalf of vouchers. The promise was equity. The reality was inequity, diverting public funds to subsidize students who never attended public schools. Were vouchers intended as a scam or did they unexpectedly turn into one?

New post on Network for Public Education. Jan Resseger: New Book Contrasts What Voucher Proponents Promise to the Inequitable Results

Jan Resseger writes:

Jan Resseger looks at a new book edited by Kevin Weltner of the National Education Policy Center entitled The School Voucher Illusion. Reposted with permission.

Teachers College Press recently published The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, a dispositive analysis of the failure of publicly funded private school tuition voucher programs.

The book is a collection of essays edited by Kevin Welner, Director of the Education Policy Center and professor at the University of Colorado; Gary Orfield, Director of the Civil Rights Project and professor at UCLA; and Luis Huerta, professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Contributors include the editors as well as Derek Black, author of Schoolhouse Burning and professor at the University of South Carolina; Christopher Lubienski, author of The Public School Advantage and professor at Indiana University; Preston Green, professor at the University of Connecticut; and Suzanne Eckes and Julie Mead, professors at the University of Wisconsin, and many other scholars. The list includes academic experts on constitutional law, civil rights, public policy, and the social foundations of education.

In the final chapter, after 270 pages of data and theoretical exploration, Welner, Orfield, and Huerta contrast what the promoters of school privatization promise to the damage caused by the school voucher programs spreading across the states today: “If the real choice is not access to a superior, idealized school with an excellent faculty, but instead to a segregated religious school that is also struggling with concentrated poverty plus a weak and inexperienced teaching force, then vouchers are offering a fundamentally different experience than what’s been advertised.” (p. 276)

What about the diversion of states’ education budgets to private schools?

“What began in Cleveland and Milwaukee as small-scale pilots targeted to ‘save’ students of color from ‘failing public schools’… quickly transformed into a movement to give all students a taxpayer subsidy to incentivize them to leave their public schools and, then, into subsidies for students who were in private schools anyway—simply a transfer of money, usually to families without the financial exigency.” (p. 278)

Through the research reported by contributors to this book, the editors conclude that measuring the fiscal impact of transferring tax dollars to private schools is complicated due to all the ways: “vouchers interact with public budgets… Any measure of the immediate fiscal and educational efficiency of vouchers must… account for significant cost differentials compared to a comprehensive public school system… and must include measures of quality and the amount of services provided to all students. For example, public schools routinely enroll greater numbers of special education, vocational education, and English language learner students, who require more expensive educational services than those that private schools typically provide.” (p. 284)

There is also the problem of fixed costs that do not change when students leave public schools with a voucher: “A reduction in public school enrollments must also be taken into account due to effects on the economies of scale that support public school infrastructure…. When policies move students out of public school systems, the schools often have fixed costs… that cannot be lowered to match declining per-student aid from state governments, leaving less money for educational operations.” (p. 284)

And what about the vouchers taken up by students already in private schools? “Voucher programs only realize financial savings for state governments when the cost of providing vouchers to families is offset by corresponding reductions for students opting out of the public school system… Advocates who claim voucher and neovoucher programs are a savings to taxpayers use very high switcher rates, which can result in a gross overestimate of public-coffer savings.” (p. 284-285)

What have we lost through the erosion of the Constitutional protection of the separation of church and state?

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Although previous U.S. Supreme Courts used to interpret the separation of government and religion under the Establishment Clause, in three recent Supreme Court precedents, today’s justices have relied on the Free Exercise Clause—opining that if a state provides vouchers to private schools, it may not interfere with the free exercise of religion by denying vouchers to private schools that are run by faith communities, even those private schools that explicitly teach religion as part of the curriculum.

Welner, Orfield and Huerta explain how the Supreme Court’s new definition of church/state separation complicates voucher expansion across the states: “A state-established church is, after all, a formalized entanglement between the two institutions. Connected leadership and decision-making, finances and personnel, beliefs and positions…. Each of these is… a type of entanglement, in the sense that a move taken by one of the two institutions is directly felt by the other… We cannot yet know how far the current Supreme Court will take its elevated Free Exercise concerns about bias against religious institutions—perhaps all religiously motivated discrimination will be given heightened legal protection, or perhaps the Court will treat discriminatory practices as beyond the protection of the Free Exercise Clause, or perhaps racial discrimination will trigger greater scrutiny and protection than discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. It is not difficult to see the slippery slope of unregulated funding combined with extreme protection of religious freedom. While religious beliefs are often caring and comforting, some of these beliefs are hostile to outsiders…. (D)iscrimination against members of the LGBTQ+ community is not unusual in private religious schools.” (pp. 280-283)

Are the most vulnerable children the ones who actually receive the vouchers? And what about protecting children’s civil rights?

“Advocates for expanding vouchers argue that students of color and low income students, particularly those with special needs, are otherwise denied the choices available to middle-class families. Vouchers, they say, will provide a large step toward equity of educational opportunity. Yet as described throughout this book, actual voucher policies tend to reach a different set of students. Choice research across the globe finds that unregulated choice creates stratification and disadvantages the disadvantaged.” (p. 286)

I wish the National Education Policy Center, of which Welner is the director, would publish, as a resource brief, the list of 13 questions (pp. 286-287) which advocates, critics, and regulators should ask when voucher programs are proposed. These questions are designed to expose a voucher program’s violations of standards of equity and opportunity. Here are just three examples: “Under what conditions are voucher-receiving schools allowed to reject applicants and expel students?” “Do the voucher-receiving schools have the staff and training to educate successfully and responsively with a community’s diverse population?” “Does the voucher program increase (or diminish) stratification by race and class? For students with special needs and students whose first language is other than English?” (pp. 286-287)

When students bring vouchers to private schools, there are myriad ways their rights are likely to remain unprotected: “State laws should mandate that, with the receipt of public funds, all participating schools become fully responsible to comply with all civil rights laws. For instance, they must agree to comply with the nondiscrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (or a substantially equivalent state civil rights act), including the antidiscrimination policies protecting students and all job discrimination components of staffing. They must also agree to comply with federal laws on special education rights and prohibitions against sex discrimination. Without such policies (which mirror those in many European countries that have voucher-like funding systems), taxpayer dollars are subsidizing open discrimination against some groups.” (p. 288)

The editors conclude The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity with a warning: “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… If publicly stated social justice goals are to be anything more than empty and misleading rhetoric, lawmakers will need to address the concerns raised by the authors throughout this volume. Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (p. 290)You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/jan-resseger-new-book-contrasts-what-voucher-proponents-promise-to-the-inequitable-results/

Please open the link to read the post in full.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Vouchers

Idaho: Red-State Families Fight Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
1

This story appeared in Commonweal, a progressive Catholic magazine of distinction. The author, Luke Mayville, has organized thus-far successful resistance to vouchers.

He writes:

Ever since Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” economic libertarians have dreamed of privatizing America’s system of public schools. In place of a school system that is publicly funded, democratically governed, and accessible to all, policy entrepreneurs have sought to transform American education into a commodity—something to be bought and sold in a free market.

In the push to privatize education, the tip of the spear has always been school vouchers—policies that extract funds from public schools in order to subsidize private-school tuition. Milwaukee established the nation’s first voucher program in 1990. In the following twenty-five years, voucher experiments were rolled out in fits and starts, often meeting with stiff public resistance. Voucher advocates gained significant footholds in Ohio, Washington D.C., Indiana, and elsewhere, but lacked the power to fundamentally transform the nation’s public-school system.

The cause has gained unprecedented momentum during the past five years. In their book A Wolf at the School House Door (2020), Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider sounded the alarm about “an increasingly potent network of conservative state and federal elected officials, advocacy groups, and think tanks…backed by deep-pocketed funders,” all of them committed to dismantling public education as an institution. The new assault on public education intensified in the pandemic era, as voucher advocates seized the opportunity of mass school closures to propose—and in many cases enact—sweeping privatization schemes. In states across the country, the voucher agenda went hand in hand with efforts to sow distrust in public education by claiming, usually without evidence, that schools had become centers for critical race theory, “gender ideology,” and other forms of “social-justice indoctrination.” Meanwhile, voucher proponents were energized by landmark decisions of the United States Supreme Court, most notably Espinoza v. Montana in 2020 and Carson v. Makin in 2022, both of which appeared to remove constitutional obstacles to the use of public dollars for private religious education.

The nationally coordinated push to privatize public education is one of the most corrosive developments in American life. While Catholics and members of other faith communities have rightly cherished private parochial education, they, too, have strong reasons to support America’s public schools even if their own children do not attend them. It is an essential feature of the mission of public education to affirm the dignity of every child and to prepare each child to be a full participant in civic and economic life. As Berkshire and Schneider put it, public education “is our collective effort to realize for all young people their full human potential, regardless of circumstance.”

Fortunately, the coordinated attack on public education has met strong resistance from educators, students, parents, and citizens in several states across the country. During the 2023 legislative session here in Idaho, legislators presented a long series of voucher bills. One proposal sought to enact universal “education savings accounts” (ESAs) that would be available to every Idaho family—including the affluent. Other bills proposed tax-credit schemes or more targeted approaches. Every single proposal failed. Remarkably, Idaho remains voucher-free even as the voucher movement has enacted sweeping legislation in Arizona, Florida, West Virginia, Iowa, Arkansas, and elsewhere.

Grassroots organizing has been indispensable in Idaho’s fight against vouchers. A strong coalition of educators, parents, and advocacy organizations—including Reclaim Idaho, an organization I cofounded—has proved to be an effective counterweight to the voucher movement’s deep-pocketed lobbying efforts.

A recent poll by the Idaho Statesman found that public opinion in Idaho is dead set against vouchers, with 63 percent opposed and just 23 percent in support. The mission of organizers has been to translate widespread public opposition into effective political action. To that end, we’ve organized in communities across this vast state and helped citizens become defenders of public schools and sharp critics of voucher schemes. We’ve helped local advocates understand and articulate the arguments against vouchers that resonate most with the public: that vouchers are fiscally reckless, costing far more than advertised; that voucher programs tend to diminish student achievement and discriminate against students with disabilities; and that voucher programs are especially harmful for rural communities where no private-school options exist.

In local efforts to resist vouchers, grassroots organizing can harness the power of personal stories. The voucher movement has attempted to tell their own personalized story by evoking images of poor, marginalized children who’ve been “trapped” in failing public schools. The promise of “school choice” is to give struggling parents the choice to move their children into private schools that better fit their needs. However, as more states adopt voucher programs, the vast majority of voucher funds are flowing not to students who’ve left public schools but to private-school students who were never in public schools to begin with. A total of 89 percent of voucher funds in New Hampshire, 80 percent in Arizona, and 75 percent in Wisconsin have gone to students already enrolled in private schools, and these students disproportionately belong to affluent families living in suburban and urban areas.

The “school choice” story is mostly a fiction, and grassroots organizing can refocus the conversation on personal stories that paint the full picture. When people get organized on the voucher issue, the question can suddenly shift from “Do families deserve more choice?” to “Why would we pull scarce funds from our public schools—especially in rural areas—in order to subsidize tuition for affluent suburban families?” During testimony before the Idaho Senate Education Committee on a bill to create universal ESAs, a public-school supporter named Sheri Hughes phoned in to testify remotely from Challis—a mountain town of 922 people located 190 miles from the state capital. “I know the power and strength of consolidated public money for education, especially in rural Idaho,” Hughes said. She told the committee that her grandfather had served on the Challis school board and helped build the town’s first high school, that her mother—also a school-board member—helped get the high school rebuilt after the 1983 Challis earthquake. “Based on Arizona’s ESA Voucher experience,” Hughes went on, “the money proposed to be removed off the top of Idaho’s education funding budget would take an estimated 17–20 percent of funding away from Challis schools—in an area with no private alternative choices, and where home-school students still access public-school resources for proctoring, band, sports, special ed, and other extracurricular activities.”

Grassroots organizing can also help advocates expose the creative attempts by voucher proponents to present their policy agenda as something less threatening. With the American public skeptical of school vouchers and school privatization more generally, the privatization movement has aggressively sought to rebrand vouchers by means of convoluted policy schemes. Proponents of ESAs claim that they are not proposing vouchers but merely offering families money that can be used for a wide range of education services—including, but not limited to, private-school tuition. Similarly, proponents of “tax-credit scholarships” claim their proposals are distinct from vouchers because they do not directly spend public dollars on private schools but instead award tax credits to individuals who choose to fund private-school scholarships.

Grassroots organizing can expose these policies for what they are: vouchers by another name. In Idaho, we’ve invested time and energy in community meetings across the state where the goal is to share information with local public-education supporters about the mechanics of ESAs, tax-credit scholarships, and other policy schemes. Such meetings have prepared local citizens to speak out forcefully against thinly veiled attempts to siphon funds out of their public schools. Local advocates have written to their legislators, published op-eds and letters to the editor, spoken with friends and neighbors, and—most importantly—many have shown up to testify before the legislature. With so many grassroots advocates raising their voices and telling the truth about these policies, it’s been very difficult for privatizers to maintain the public narrative that they are promoting something other than a repackaged voucher scheme.

Please open the link and finish reading the rest of this excellent article.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Idaho, Parents, Resistance, Rural Schools, Vouchers

Chris Tomlinson: Texas Oilmen Spreading Hate and Lies

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
5

Chris Tomlinson is an award-winning columnist for the Houston Chronicle. He uses his space to combat bigotry, stupidity, and lies. He is not a “both sides” kind of journalist.

He writes here about the infamous oil billionaires who use their money to spread their religious views, attack public schools, and encourage indoctrination.

He writes:

Texas oilman H.L. Hunt may have been the first to spend millions to promote right-wing media and extremist ideas, but he was far from the last.

Most Texans, let alone Americans, had never heard of Farris and Dan Wilks or Tim Dunn before this year. But journalists have revealed them as key supporters of some of the most controversial figures in Texas politics and bankrollers of political action committees staffed by Christian nationalists and antisemites.

The reclusive billionaires and their allies rarely respond to requests for comment from mainstream media and did not respond to my messages.

Farris Wilks, fracking billionaire and pastor of the Assembly of Yahweh (7th Day) Church, preaches that the Bible is “true and correct in every scientific and historical detail” and that abortion, homosexuality and drunkenness are serious crimes, according to the church’s doctrinal statement, the Reuters news agency reported.

Dan Wilks attends church with his brother, with whom he co-founded Frac Tech, a company they sold for $3.5 billion. They have since become some of the largest donors in Texas GOP politics, giving $15 million in 2016 to a political action committee backing Sen. Ted Cruz.

Like Hunt, who broadcast his extremist commentary on radio stations nationwide, the Wilks brothers have also invested in media, supporting conservative mouthpieces like The Daily Wire and Prager University. Their PAC bought ads disguised as articles in the Metric Media news network, which includes 59 pseudo-local news sites in Texas, the Columbia Journalism Review reported.

The Wilks brothers have enjoyed their greatest success by joining Dunn to move the Republican Party of Texas as far right as possible through Empower Texans, one of the most influential dark-money political action committees.

Empower Texans shuttered in 2020 after spinning off operations into Texans for Fiscal Responsibility and Texas Scorecard, which rank politicians by their adherence to the group’s ideology. Dunn and the Wilks brothers have provided most of the financing and set the agenda for conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan, who has led all three organizations.

In 2016, the groups opposed Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, whom they considered too moderate. They also ran ultra-conservative candidates against Republicans who ranked poorly on their scorecard. When Straus, who is Jewish, invited Dunn for a breakfast meeting, he reportedly said only Christians should have leadership positions, Texas Monthly reported in 2018. This is a sentiment he’d previously expressed in a 2016 Christian radio interview.

Republicans have long struggled with antisemitism. In 2010, State Republican Executive Chairman John Cooke wrote an email proclaiming, “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it,” the Texas Observer reported.

Dunn and the Wilkses also finance special interest PACs. In 2017, Empower Texans supported and advised Texans for Vaccine Choice, an early anti-vaccination movement, former state Rep. Jonathan Stickland told the Washington Post.

Stickland left elected office to start Pale Horse Strategies, a political consulting firm that ran a new Dunn and Wilks PAC, Defend Texas Liberty. The PAC defended Attorney General Ken Paxton against corruption allegations and provided $3 million to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick weeks before he presided over Paxton’s impeachment trial, where he was acquitted.

Fresh from that victory, a Texas Tribune reporter observed Stickland, Republican Party of Texas chair Matt Rinaldi, prominent white supremacist Nick Fuentes and Black Lives Matter shooter Kyle Rittenhouse enter the Pale Horse Strategies office in Fort Worth on Oct. 6.

Fuentes was driven to the meeting by Chris Russo, who used Dunn and Wilks money to found Texans For Strong Borders PAC. Russo has past ties to Fuentes, the Tribune reported.

When current GOP House Speaker Dade Phelan demanded Patrick give away the $3 million donation, Patrick said Dunn had called him to apologize.

Dunn “is certain that Mr. Stickland and all PAC personnel will not have any future contact with Mr. Fuentes,” Patrick explained.

Yet, when the Tribune’s Robert Downen kept digging, he found that Pale Horse’s social media manager, Elle Maulding, had called Fuentes the “greatest civil rights leader in history” and shared photos of them together. Shelby Griesinger, Defend Texas Liberty’s treasurer, has said Jews worship a false god and depicted them as the enemy on social media.

Dunn and the Wilks brothers have spent $100 million on ultra-conservative candidates, political action committees in Texas, and radical nonprofits. They finance a movement staffed by publicly antisemitic foot soldiers.

Conservatives considered H.L. Hunt a crackpot in his day. But this new generation has the GOP falling into a goose step.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ignorance, Lies, Religion, Stupid, Texas

Florida: GOP Leader Under Investigation for Sexual Battery

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2023 //
13

Christian Ziegler is state chairman of the GOP. His wife Bridget Ziegler is founder of Moms for Liberty. They are exceedingly sanctimonious and know what is and is not moral.

For other people.

Sadly, Christian Ziegler is under investigation for sexual battery.

The Sarasota Police Department is investigating an allegation of sexual battery against Florida GOP Chair Christian Ziegler, according to a report by the Florida Center for Government Accountability.

Citing anonymous sources close to the investigation, the government watchdog group says police seized Ziegler’s cell phone and “investigators continue to conduct a forensic examination of the electronic device.”

Multiple GOP sources with knowledge of the investigation confirmed the sexual battery investigation and said the probe also involves allegations of illegally taping sex acts.

The USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida has requested documents from the Sarasota Police Department but has yet to receive them.

“Records is in the process of redacting the report. It is still an open and active investigation,” said Sarasota Police spokeswoman Cynthia McLaughlin.

Ziegler and his wife, Sarasota County School Board member and Moms for Liberty founder Bridget Ziegler, have emerged as one of the most prominent political couples in the state in recent years.

A former Sarasota County Commissioner, Christian Ziegler took over the Florida GOP in February after years of grassroots GOP activism.

Sources told the Florida Center for Government Accountability that the woman accusing Christian Ziegler of sexual battery “alleged that she and both Zieglers had been involved in a longstanding consensual three-way sexual relationship prior to the incident.”

The allegations are sure to reverberate across Florida’s political landscape, throwing the Florida GOP into turmoil at a time when the party is gearing up for the 2024 election.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Florida GOP.

Categories Accountability, Florida, Hypocrisy

One Brief Shining Moment When Peace in the Middle East Seemed Possible

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2023 //
6

David Kurlander, assistant to Preet Bharara at Cafe Insider, takes us back to the Clinton era, when peace between the Palestinians and Israel seemed to be a real possibility.

Kurlander writes:

The situation in Israel and Gaza is continuing to escalate, spawning overlapping humanitarian crises, regional instability, and fiercely competing narratives of culpability. Amid the carnage, President Biden visited Tel Aviv on Wednesday to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden’s diplomatic move both mirrors and devastatingly diverges from another visit concerning Gaza by an American leader: President Clinton and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat’s optimistic December 1998 meeting in Gaza City. 

In sharp contrast to today, the outward dynamic between Israel, the United States, and Gaza in late 1998 was briefly hopeful. 

I am by no means an expert, and I’m wary – given the extreme sensitivity of this issue right now – of being glib or biased in any way here, but I’m still going to endeavor to give a brief leadup to the visit: Five years earlier, in September 1993, Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin had signed the Oslo Accords, a plan to transfer governing control of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Authority over the following five years. 

In November 1995, an Israeli right-wing extremist hostile to Oslo assassinated Rabin during a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Netanyahu, skeptical of Oslo’s aims, came into the Prime Ministership and – at least in part spurred by a series of suicide bombings by Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv– stalled the proposed transfer of Gaza and the West Bank and supported the expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory. 

Still, at an October 1998 meeting in Maryland brokered by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Arafat and Netanyahu signed the Wye River Memorandum. Most notably, the agreement pushed Netanyahu to resume the transfer of 14.1% of the West Bank to Palestinian control. 

The provisions on the Israeli side also concerned Gaza. They included declarations of support for the opening of an airport in Gaza, and for safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank. 

On the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) side, Arafat agreed to remove several controversial articles from the 1968 Palestinian National Covenant, including those calling for Palestinian “armed struggle” and one calling Zionism “fascist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods.” The PLO also agreed to anti-terrorism enforcement efforts. 

In his remarks at Wye River, Netanyahu underscored the significance of the compromise: “This is an important moment to give a secure and peaceful future for our children and the children of our neighbors, the Palestinians. We have seen this moment.”

Two months later, Clinton traveled to Gaza. When he arrived on December 14th, 1998, he first participated in a ribbon-cutting with Arafat at the brand-new Gaza Airport. Next, he traveled to the main cultural center in Gaza City, where he and Arafat spoke before 1,200 civic leaders, including some 450 members of the Palestine National Council. 

The speeches are available in their entirety on the William J. Clinton President Library’s YouTube channel. 

The words of the two leaders are full of hope, even if they ultimately did not totally reflect the realities on the ground. Arafat both called out the pain that the occupation had caused Palestinians, but also argued, in decidedly poetic terms, that a new future was dawning: 

Mr. President, the beginning of this century marked a major injustice inflicted on our Palestinian people. Today, we see a nearing, shining light. We feel a renewed hope due to your support. We hope that the end of this century will witness the correction of the injustice and the inauguration of a new era: The era of peace and freedom, peace of the brave. Didn’t I tell you that I see that light at the end of the tunnel? 

Arafat predicted that Palestinians would embrace the new aims of Wye River and help to defend the security protocols outlined in the agreement: 

Our people will not go back to the ways before peace. And we will not allow or tolerate any violence or anyone to mess with the security of both sides, both sides, both sides. And we will confront all attempts of violence and jeopardizing security no matter what is the source, no matter where is the source.  

Arafat ended his remarks by broadening out his wishes for peace to the entire region: 

And now, my brothers and sisters — and here I am talking from my heart to your hearts — we are talking for peace for the Palestinian land for the Holy Land, in Israel and in Palestine, and in Golan, and in South Lebanon, and in the Middle East.  

Clinton followed Arafat. He stopped short of calling for a Palestinian state explicitly – something that only former President Carter had done to that point – but he opened his remarks with a vision of Gaza, assisted by the airport, as an independent member of the global economic and political community: 

Hillary and I, along with Chairman and Mrs. Arafat, celebrated a place that will become a magnet for planes from throughout the Middle East and beyond, bringing you a future in which Palestinians can travel directly to the far corners of the world; a future in which it is easier and cheaper to bring materials, technology and expertise in and out of Gaza; a future in which tourists and traders can flock here, to this beautiful place on the Mediterranean; a future, in short, in which the Palestinian people are connected to the world.  

Addressing Israelis, Clinton acknowledged the difficult road to implementing Oslo, and nodded obliquely to Netanyahu’s support for settlements and aversion to the process:

I want the people of Israel to know that for many Palestinians, five years after Oslo, the benefits of this process remain remote; that for too many Palestinians lives are hard, jobs are scarce, prospects are uncertain and personal grief is great.   

I know that tremendous pain remains as a result of losses suffered from violence, the separation of families, the restrictions on the movement of people and goods. I understand your concerns about settlement activity, land confiscation and home demolitions. I understand your concerns, and theirs, about unilateral statements that could prejudge the outcome of final status negotiations. I understand, in short, that there’s still a good deal of misunderstanding five years after the beginning of this remarkable process.

Clinton then focused in on children, detailing parallel interactions from the previous day with Palestinian and Israeli children whose parents were the victims of violence between the two sides: 

I’ve had two profoundly emotional experiences in the last less than 24 hours. I was with Chairman Arafat and four little children came to see me whose fathers are in Israeli prisons. Last night, I met some little children whose fathers had been killed in conflict with Palestinians, at the dinner that Prime Minister Netanyahu had for me. Those children brought tears to my eyes. We have to find a way for both sets of children to get their lives back and to go forward.

I ask you to remember these experiences I had with these two groups of children. If I had met them in reverse order I would not have known which ones were Israeli and which Palestinian. If they had all been lined up in a row and I had seen their tears, I could not tell whose father was dead and whose father was in prison, or what the story of their lives were, making up the grief that they bore. We must acknowledge that neither side has a monopoly on pain or virtue. 

As he wound up his address, Clinton explicitly thanked the Council for ratifying Arafat’s agreement to cut out the most intense Articles of the Covenant, arguing that Israel would respond with generosity and empathy to the change: 

I thank you for your rejection — fully, finally and forever – of the passages in the Palestinian Charter calling for the destruction of Israel. For they were the ideological underpinnings of a struggle renounced at Oslo. By revoking them once and for all, you have sent, I say again, a powerful message not to the government, but to the people of Israel. You will touch people on the street there. You will reach their hearts there. 

And – just as Clinton had highlighted the pain of the Israeli occupation, he also criticized Palestinians who had supported the acts of violence by Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad in the years since Oslo: 

The time has come to sanctify your holy ground with genuine forgiveness and reconciliation. Every influential Palestinian, from teacher to journalist, from politician to community leader, must make this a mission to banish from the minds of children glorifying suicide bombers; to end the practice of speaking peace in one place and preaching hatred in another; to teach school children the value of peace and the waste of war; to break the cycle of violence. Our great American prophet, Martin Luther King, once said, “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.” 

I believe you have gained more in five years of peace than in 45 years of war. I believe that what we are doing today, working together for security, will lead to further gains and changes in the heart. I believe that our work against terrorism, as you stand strong, will be rewarded – for that must become a fact of the past. It must never be a part of your future.  Let me say this as clearly as I can: no matter how sharp a grievance or how deep a hurt, there is no justification for killing innocents.

Like Arafat, Clinton ended with a sweeping and forward-looking note, listing other diametrically-opposed societies who had found peace over the course of the previous century and arguing that Israel and Palestine were on their way: 

Think of all the conflicts in the 20th century that many people thought were permanent that have been healed or are healing. Two great world wars between the French and the Germans; they’re best friends. The Americans and the Russians, the whole Cold War; now we have a constructive partnership. The Irish Catholics and Protestants; the Chinese and the Japanese; the Black and white South Africans; the Serbs, the Croats and the Muslims in Bosnia – all have turned from conflict to cooperation.

Obviously, Israel and Palestine have not joined the list of reconciled adversaries that Clinton outlined. And despite Arafat and Clinton’s soaring oratory, many on the ground met the meeting with skepticism. 

In the Jabalia refugee camp, 55-year-old Abdul Jalil Freih was pessimistic about the prospects for Palestinian autonomy, telling the Los Angeles Times, “Clinton will not do anything for us. It doesn’t matter to us whether he comes or goes.” 

Sure enough, 1999 and 2000 would be deeply painful. The Netanyahu government would collapse shortly after the Clinton and Arafat addresses, in part due to the Prime Minister’s opposition to Wye River and further implementation of the Accords. The 2000 Camp David Summit between Clinton, Arafat, and Prime Minister Ehud Barak would end without an agreement. And the violent Second Intifada – stoked, arguably, by both a bellicose and violent turn by Arafat and by Israeli politician Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount – broke out soon thereafter. A blame game followed: the Israeli government viewed Arafat as backing the Intifada, while Palestinians highlighted Israeli resistance to the Accords. 

But even if the Clinton and Arafat speeches were ultimately unfulfilled visions of a peaceful future, they can perhaps show that the despair of the current moment has not always been total, and that the prospect for diplomacy and non-violent change can some day be realized in the wrenching conflict.

For more on the current conflict, listen to Preet and Carnegie Endowment for Peace Senior Fellow Aaron David Miller’s conversation last week on Stay Tuned with Preet. And for more on the history of Gaza, read my Time Machine article, “‘History is Unfortunately Repeating Itself’: The Aroyo Murders, Ariel Sharon, and the Pain of 1971 Gaza,” written during the 2021 Israel-Palestine Crisis.

And head to my Twitter account for supplemental archival threads on each Time Machine piece: @DavidKurlander.

Categories Accountability, International

Florida: New College Wants $400 Million to Expand

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2023 //
24

New College in Sarasota is the state college that used to be progressive. Then Governor DeSantis filled its board with rightwing cronies with the goal of turning it into the Hillsdale of the South. To change the culture, the politician who became its president has been recruiting athletes. They are not the type to want to major in gender studies.

Now, Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell reports, New College wants $400 million to grow. That’s a lot of money for a small college. The Florida press will have to keep watch on where the money goes.

Maxwell writes:

Today we’re catching up on controversy at New College, revisiting one of Central Florida’s stranger environmental debates and bidding adieu to one of Florida’s funniest novelists.

We start with what increasingly looks like the biggest public money-grab in Florida — the orgy of incestuous spending at New College of Florida.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ trustees at this school already generated national controversy when they hired former House Speaker Richard Corcoran, a guy with no higher ed experience, as the school’s president and hiked his compensation package to up to $1.3 million a year — all to run a school that says it has fewer students (698) than many elementary schools. (Seriously, Apopka Elementary has more than 800.)

But now New College wants more money — a lot more.

The Sarasota Herald Tribune recently reported that its tiny hometown college has requested a “minimum” of $400 million in additional public money to spend over the next five years and increase enrollment by a few hundred students.

Even if the school grew to 1,200 students, you’d be talking about $333,000 per student. For that price, we could practically buy every student their own school. Or at least a classroom.

If only Florida’s political policymakers were as eager to fund public education when their buddies aren’t involved.

Given the cronyism at play — New College also hired a former senate president as its general counsel and the wife of a former GOP party chair as a fundraiser — there will be a lot of people watching to see who gets the contracts dished out when the new largesse is spent.

Then there’s the lawyer

Speaking of New College’s general counsel, that’s former Senate President Bill Galvano, who generously offered to serve the school and President Corcoran “at a reduced rate of $500 per hour.”

Well, keen Orlando Sentinel readers noticed that Galvano’s name also popped up in other stories the Sentinel has written about a lawsuit filed by a GOP Senate candidate from Lake County who claims former party officials conspired to sabotage her campaign in favor of another Republican candidate.

Corcoran has been subpoenaed in that case. And Galvano is representing him — meaning the school’s president is now using the school’s attorney for personal legal needs. How convenient.

Galvano said in an email last week that Corcoran is paying his legal fees but wouldn’t say if Corcoran is getting a discounted rate or answer questions about whether the school’s trustees approved the overlapping representation, saying he considered those details “confidential attorney/client information that I do not disclose.”

Theoretically, it’s up to the trustees to ask probing questions about all that and share the details with taxpayers to instill public confidence. Also theoretically, I could enter and win a bikini pageant.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Education Industry, Florida, Funding, Higher Education

Elon Musk Sues Critic for Scaring Away Advertisers

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2023 //
11

An organization called Media Matters reviewed Twitter content and determined that the ads placed by major corporations were sometimes posted next to Nazi or other anti-Semitic tweets. Some of these corporations responded by suspending their ads, thus hurting Twitter’s revenues. Elon Musk has sued Media Matters.

My view: Musk owns Twitter (X); he can put up any content he wants. Media Matters is free to comment on the content of Twitter and warn reputable advertisers that their ads are being placed next to offensive content. Big advertisers are free to place their ads wherever they want and they are free to object to advertising alongside Nazi tweets. Everyone is free.

Greg Sergeant of The Washington Post reviewed the situation. If you are able to open his article, you will see the Nazi tweets.

He begins:

Elon Musk’s new lawsuit against Media Matters, which X Corp. filed late Monday, has been dismissed by legal experts as a frivolous effort to bully a prominent critic into silence. But some Republicans apparently see this as a feature, not a bug: They are allying themselves with Musk’s effort for precisely this purpose.

Musk’s suit charges that Media Matters deliberately and deceptively harmed X (formerly Twitter) with a widely-publicized investigation showing that posts containing pro-Nazi content appeared on X alongside advertisements from leading companies. That, along with a surge in antisemitic content, has advertisers fleeing the site, sparking a slide in ad revenue.

Republicans are eagerly rushing to Musk’s rescue — and not just rhetorically. Two GOP state attorneys general — Ken Paxton in Texas and Andrew Bailey in Missouri — have responded by announcing vaguely defined investigations into Media Matters.

Meanwhile, Trump adviser Stephen Miller is urging Republican law enforcement officials to probe Media Matters for “criminal” activity. And Mike Davis, who is touting himself as Donald Trump’s next attorney general, has declared that Media Matters staff members should be jailed.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas, doesn’t deny that the juxtapositions between ads and pro-Nazi postings are real. Rather, it accuses Media Matters of creating an account following only fringe content and endlessly refreshing it until it finally generated the juxtapositions. Those are “extraordinarily rare,” the suit says, but were deliberately engineered to disparage X, harm its revenue stream and interfere with its contracts with advertisers.

It’s a weak case, as experts point out. The Media Matters article said it had “found” the juxtapositions, which X calls “false,” insisting they were “manipulated” into existence. But even if you question Media Matters’s presentation of the facts, it still wouldn’t show that it did “all of this to harm X’s market value,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“If Media Matters doctored the images and couldn’t replicate those results, then maybe there would be a claim here,” Vladeck told me, stressing that it did prove “possible to see those ads” alongside Nazi-related content. He noted that Media Matters plausibly wrote about these juxtapositions not to hurt X, but because they’re “newsworthy.”

When I asked Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, whether it’s misleading to say these images were “found,” he rejected the premise. He noted that Media Matters’s goal was to show that despite X’s assurances to the contrary, internal safeguards had failed to prevent those juxtapositions from actually happening.

“The point that we’ve been making is that the filters that they say exist are not working the way that they claim,” Carusone said of X. “Ads can and do run alongside extremist content.” That’s something those companies would surely want to know about — and avoid.

The lawsuit might get dismissed. But if not, Carusone said, Media Matters would probably pursue discovery, seeking to learn whether Musk and X executives “knew internally” that these juxtapositions were happening, what they communicated with advertisers about this, and how Musk internally discussed procedures for handling extremist content.

Discovery would also seek communications about Musk’s public antisemitism, Carusone said. Musk recently endorsed a posting that some Jewish communities are pushing “hatred against whites,” resulting in “hordes of minorities flooding” into Western countries — classic white genocide theory. Carusone noted that discovery could establish whether Musk’s “seeming endorsement of the white genocide worldview” was a major reason for “advertisers to reassess.”

Which brings us to a bigger point: Musk’s own antisemitic utterances — and his own website’s handling of antisemitic content — are plainly also key reasons companies are leaving. As First Amendment lawyer Ken White told me, it’s hard to imagine that the Media Matters report alone would have done this damage: “Much of the advertiser exodus resulted from Musk personally and eagerly endorsing explicitly antisemitic rhetoric.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Media

Florida: School Officials Removed for Allowing Trans Girl to Play Girls’ Volleyball

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2023 //
36

The Florida State Education Department applauded the superintendent of schools in Broward County for taking swift and stern action when he learned that a transgender girl was allowed to play on the girls’ volleyball team at Monarch High School. The superintendent received an anonymous tip about the student and reacted by removing the principal, the assistant principal, and members of the athletic staff.

When the word got out, students staged a protest by walking out.

Following the removal of a Broward County high school principal and four employees in response to “allegations of improper student participation in sports,” Florida education officials on Tuesday said they expect “serious consequences for those responsible” and accused them of violating state law.

The comments came hours after Broward County Public School officials confirmed the reassignments of the Monarch High School employees occurred because a transgender female athlete played volleyball at the high school during the fall season and after hundreds of students staged a peaceful walkout during school hours to protest the decision. The students, who gathered on the football field and walked to the parking lot on the north end of the school, shouted, “Let her play,” “Trans rights are human rights” and “Free Cecil now,” referring to Monarch principal James Cecil, who was among the employees reassigned. Kenneth May, the assistant principal; Dione Hester, the athletic director; Jessica Norton, the girls’ volleyball coach; and Alex Burgess, a temporary athletic coach, were also reassigned.

The reassignment of the five staff members is “ridiculous,” said Alexandra Almeida, a senior at Monarch, who participated in the walkout to support her friends. She hoped the walkout, which she heard about through social media Monday, would “bring more awareness to the situation so that people see what’s happening in our Florida schools.”

Safe Schools South Florida in a statement said it is “appalled” by the district’s decision. The organization works with LGBTQ students to promote inclusivity and diversity within the education system “The reassignment of faculty is a measure typically reserved for the gravest of infractions. In this case, it is not only an overreaction but also a glaring misjudgment,” the statement read. “Furthermore, the potential inadvertent outing of a minor, who may not have publicly disclosed their transgender status, is deeply troubling.”

But state officials, in response to a Miami Herald inquiry, said department officials “instructed the district to take immediate action” upon being notified of the issue “since this is a direct violation of Florida law.” During a brief news conference Tuesday, Broward County schools Superintendent Peter Licata said officials spoke to the Florida Department of Education on Monday.

“Under Governor DeSantis, boys will never be allowed to play girls’ sports. It’s that simple,” said Cailey Myers, communications director for the state Department of Education.

There was no mention of the win-loss record of the girls’ volleyball team.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article282411498.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Florida, Gender, Students

Columbia Journalism Review: Yes, There Is Bias in the Mainstream Media

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2023 //
21

Researchers at the esteemed Columbia Journalism Review conducted a study of the election coverage on the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post and concluded, despite the protests of editors, that the pre-election coverage in recent years was not objective. Their biggest complaint was that the newspapers reported the Presidential campaign as a horse race instead of informing readers about real policy differences between the candidates. But there was another kind of bias at work: The New York Times published ten front-page articles about Hillary Clinton’s emails in the months before the election, which turned out to be a phony issue.

The article begins:

Seven years ago, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, media analysts rushed to explain Donald Trump’s victory. Misinformation was to blame, the theory went, fueled by Russian agents and carried on social networks. But as researchers, we wondered if fascination and fear over “fake news” had led people to underestimate the influence of traditional journalism outlets. After all, mainstream news organizations remain an important part of the media ecosystem—they’re widely read and watched; they help set the agenda, including on social networks. We decided to look at what had been featured on the printed front page of the New York Times in the three months leading up to Election Day. Of a hundred and fifty articles that discussed the campaign, only a handful mentioned policy; the vast majority covered horse race politics or personal scandals. Most strikingly, the Times ran ten front-page stories about Hillary Clinton’s email server. “If voters had wanted to educate themselves on issues,” we concluded, “they would not have learned much from reading the Times.”

We didn’t suggest that the election coverage in the Times was any worse than what appeared in other major outlets, “so much as it was typical of a broader failure of mainstream journalism.” But we did expect, or at least hope, that in the years that followed, the Times would conduct a critical review of its editorial policies. Was an overwhelming focus on the election as a sporting contest the best way to serve readers? Was obsessive attention to Clinton’s email server really justified in light of the innumerable personal, ethical, and ultimately criminal failings of Trump? It seemed that editors had a responsibility to rethink both the volume of attention paid to certain subjects as well as their framing.

After the 2022 midterms, we checked back in, this time examining the printed front page of the Times and the Washington Post from September 1, 2022, through Election Day that November. As before, we figured the front page mattered disproportionately, in part because articles placed there represent selections that publishers believe are most important to readers—and also because, according to Nielsen data we analyzed, 32 percent of Web-browsing sessions around that period starting at the Times homepage did not lead to other sections or articles; people often stick to what they’re shown first. We added the Post this time around for comparison, to get a sense of whether the Times really was anomalous.

It wasn’t. We found that the Times and the Post shared significant overlap in their domestic politics coverage, offering little insight into policy. Both emphasized the horse race and campaign palace intrigue, stories that functioned more to entertain readers than to educate them on essential differences between political parties. The main point of contrast we found between the two papers was that, while the Postdelved more into topics Democrats generally want to discuss—affirmative action, police reform, LGBTQ rights—the Times tended to focus on subjects important to Republicans—China, immigration, and crime.

By the numbers, of four hundred and eight articles on the front page of the Timesduring the period we analyzed, about half—two hundred nineteen—were about domestic politics. A generous interpretation found that just ten of those stories explained domestic public policy in any detail; only one front-page article in the lead-up to the midterms really leaned into discussion about a policy matter in Congress: Republican efforts to shrink Social Security. Of three hundred and ninety-three front-page articles in the Post, two hundred fifteen were about domestic politics; our research found only four stories that discussed any form of policy. The Post had no front-page stories in the months ahead of the midterms on policies that candidates aimed to bring to the fore or legislation they intended to pursue. Instead, articles speculated about candidates and discussed where voter bases were leaning. (All of the data and analysis supporting this piece can be found here.)

Exit polls indicated that Democrats cared most about abortion and gun policy; crime, inflation, and immigration were top of mind for Republicans. In the Times, Republican-favored topics accounted for thirty-seven articles, while Democratic topics accounted for just seven. In the Post, Republican topics were the focus of twenty articles and Democratic topics accounted for fifteen—a much more balanced showing. In the final days before the election, we noticed that the Times, in particular, hit a drumbeat of fear about the economy—the worries of voters, exploitation by companies, and anxieties related to the Federal Reserve—as well as crime. Data buried within articles occasionally refuted the fear-based premise of a piece. Still, by discussing how much people were concerned about inflation and crime—and reporting in those stories that Republicans benefited from a sense of alarm—the Times suggested that inflation and crime were historically bad (they were not) and that Republicans had solutions to offer (they did not).

I urge you to open the link and read the article. It confirms what many of us suspected: the major media are all too easily sucked into the GOP narrative and parrot it. Expect to see a focus in the lead-up to the 2024 election that emphasizes inflation, crime, fears about Biden’s age, and every verbal slip up he makes, and every other reason either to abstain from voting or to vote for Trump. We will see, as we do already, a drumbeat of articles about why this group or that one will not vote for Biden (so far, I have seen such articles about the youth vote, the Black vote, the Hispanic vote, and the Muslim vote). It would be ironic if Muslims didn’t vote for Biden because of his support for Israel, since Trump tried to ban immigration from Muslim-majority nations and is openly nativist.

Will the major media allow Trump and his enablers again to set their agenda?

Robert Hubbell read this study and remarked that the major media are again treating the Presidential campaign as a horse race between Biden and Trump, as though it were a normal election. It’s not. Trump has already sketched the plans for his second term, and they are a recipe for enhancing his power and destroying his enemies.

Hubbell wrote:

I am going to take this opportunity to make a direct plea to journalists, producers, and editors in the news media who read this newsletter. I know you are out there because I hear from you when you feel that I unfairly bash the news media. I occasionally receive mistaken “reply-to-all” or forwarded emails to your colleagues that inadvertently include me. (Don’t worry; I delete them immediately.) (Hint: Do a Google search for “How to remove a name from autofill in an email address field.”)

Let me start with an olive branch. There are exceptional journalists doing great work every day. I cite them every day. They can’t please everyone all the time. They deserve our support and thanks—and forbearance for the occasional mistake. So here it is: Thank you to every journalist who is doing a tough job well in a news environment that is the equivalent of a war zone of disinformation.

Ignore my whining and carping; dismiss me as a crank if you want. But please ask yourselves whether the news reporting and editorial stances at your outlet are rising to this perilous moment in American history. Everyone—including you—knows in their bones that Trump is a unique threat to democracy. He is consciously emulating the worst dictators of the last century. His aides are leaking their plans to undermine democracy. That existential threat must be in every story you write. If you must, report on polls or horse races or political infighting but do so while acknowledging that one candidate seeks to destroy democracy while the other candidate seeks to operate within its confines.

I believe that Americans will prevail against the threat of MAGA extremism with or without the support of a free press rising to the challenge of this moment. But it would be easier—and victory would be more assured—if major media outlets did not treat Trump as just another candidate after his failed coup and incitement to insurrection.

Imagine if Hitler had survived WWII and then ran for re-election as Chancellor of Germany from a prison cell. Would any story be written that merely reported on polls discussing the level of voter support for Hitler versus his opponent? Or would every story include discussion of his fascist takeover of Germany, his war on Europe, and his attempt to exterminate the Jewish people? Why does Trump get a free pass in hundreds of articles a day that treat him as the legitimate political opponent of Joe Biden? How can any story be written that asks, “Is Biden too old,” without asking the more urgent question, “Will Trump end democracy in America.”

I have slipped back into offense when I meant to invite you to reflect on the balance and editorial position of your news organization. Tens of millions of Americans are hoping that you will get it right. You don’t have to defend Democrats or Joe Biden. But defending the Constitution and democracy is not partisan. The future of our democracy is partly in your hands. It should be a part of every story you write.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Failure, Hillary Clinton, Media, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Do Not Tire in the Struggle to Defend Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2023 //
16

Heather Cox Richardson wrote a compelling piece about the challenges we face in the year leading up to the 2024 election. The media keeps warning us about ominous polls, about the dangers of Trump, about Biden potentially losing this or that demographic. Trump seems to be driven by two goals: 1) to stay out of prison (as president, he could pardon himself for federal crimes, not state convictions); and 2) the chance to wreak vengeance on his enemies.

Richardson wrote:

Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety. 

One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government. 

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele echoed that observation this morning when he wrote, “We need to stop the false equivalency BS between Biden and Trump. Only one acts with the intention to do real harm.”

Indeed, as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memoputs it, “the gathering storm of Trump 2.0 is upon us,” and Trump and his people are telling us exactly what a second Trump term would look like. Yesterday, Trump echoed his “vermin” post of the other day, saying: “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”   

Trump’s open swing toward authoritarianism should be disqualifying even for Republicans—can you imagine Ronald Reagan talking this way?—but MAGA Republicans are lining up behind him. Last week the Texas legislature passed a bill to seize immigration authority from the federal government in what is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, and yesterday, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that he was “proud to endorse” Trump for president because of his proposed border policies (which include the deportation of 10 million people).

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has also endorsed Trump, and on Friday he announced he was ordering the release of more than 40,000 hours of tapes from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering the demands of far-right congress members who insist the tapes will prove there was no such attack despite the conclusion of the House committee investigating the attack that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and refused to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol. 

Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly spread a debunked conspiracy theory that one of the attackers shown in the tapes, Kevin Lyons, was actually a law enforcement officer hiding a badge. Lyons—who was not, in fact, a police officer—was carrying a vape and a photo he stole from then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and is now serving a 51-month prison sentence. (Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) tweeted: “Hey [Mike Lee]—heads up. A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”)

Both E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted yesterday that MAGA Republicans have no policies for addressing inflation or relations with China or gun safety; instead, they have coalesced only around the belief that officials in “the administrative state” thwarted Trump in his first term and that a second term will be about revenge on his enemies and smashing American liberalism. 

MIke Davis, one of the men under consideration for attorney general, told a podcast host in September that he would “unleash hell on Washington, D.C.,” getting rid of career politicians, indicting President Joe Biden “and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden,” and helping pardon those found guilty of crimes associated with the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents,” Davis said. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

In the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey talked to former Trump officials who do not believe Trump should be anywhere near the presidency, and yet they either fear for their safety if they oppose him or despair that nothing they say seems to matter. John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told Dawsey that it is beyond his comprehension that Trump has the support he does. 

“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” Kelly said.  

Part of the attraction of right-wing figures is they offer easy solutions to the complicated issues of the modern world. Argentina has inflation over 140%, and 40% of its people live in poverty. Yesterday, voters elected as president far-right libertarian Javier Milei, who is known as “El Loco” (The Madman). Milei wants to legalize the sale of organs, denies climate change, and wielded a chainsaw on the campaign trail to show he would cut down the state and “exterminate” inflation. Both Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, two far-right former presidents who launched attacks against their own governments, congratulated him. 

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took on the question of authoritarianism. Robert J. Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran, wrote to Eisenhower, asking him to cut through the confusion of the postwar years. “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth,” Biggs wrote. Eisenhower responded at length. While unity was imperative in the military, he said, “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” 

Dictators, Eisenhower wrote, “make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.” 

Once again, liberal democracy is under attack, but it is notable—to me, anyway, as I watch to see how the public conversation is changing—that more and more people are stepping up to defend it. In the New York Times today, legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that “[o]n the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.”

Sunstein went on to defend liberalism in a 34-point description, but his first point was the most important: “Liberals believe in six things,” he wrote: “freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy,” including fact-based debate and accountability of elected officials to the people.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Politics, Republicans, Trump
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