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A Young Man Wanted to Be an American. He Was Killed by the Racism of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Their MAGA Followers.

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2026 //
4

“The photograph of his leg, posted on Instagram, documents his sense of shame at having to wear the device, at being branded somehow a criminal. His short life had followed the same arc as hundreds of millions of Americans, immigrants or descendants of immigrants, who came here seeking hope, opportunity and a chance for dignity. He wanted to grow and prosper and be free of tyranny — in this case, the tyranny of crime and instability.”

Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post wrote about the death of Pierre Damas Bel.

Kennicott says we all share responsibility for his death. I disagree. Pierre’s death belongs to Stephen Miller, who wants to expel as many dark-skinned immigrants as possible. His death belongs to Donald Trump, who knew that racism and hatred was a good political issue for him, who told Republicans in the Senate not to pass a bipartisan immigration bill in 2024 because he wanted to run in the issue. His death belongs to the Republican elected officials who bowed to Trump’s wishes and have failed to rein in the heartlessness of ICE. His death belongs to all those who turn a blind eye to the reign of brutality and violence imposed on anyone who is swept up in the un-American crusade against immigrants, especially those who are black and brown.

Kennicott wrote:

The most haunting photo of the past week shows not a whole human, just part of one. Sometime in the past few weeks, a 20-year-old college kid named Pierre Damas Bel took a photograph of the lower part of one of his legs. He’s wearing black pants and gleaming, thick-soled, black-and-white brogues, the toe so polished it reflects the light. Around his ankle is a heavy plastic GPS tracking device, with a red, LED status light glaring like a demonic eye

Bel was one of about 350,000 Haitian immigrants who lost temporary protected status after a Supreme Court ruling in June. He fled Haiti, a country racked by gang violence and crime, in 2024, and he apparently despaired at the thought of having to return. On Monday morning, he stepped in front of a tractor-trailer on Interstate 70 in Springfield, Ohio, and now he is dead. His family believes he died by suicide, but that doesn’t seem quite the right word. He was desperate and depressed, but that misery was forced on him. No matter how he died, his life was taken from him.

Bel, who is seen in an earlier image in a blue tuxedo jacket beaming as he receives his high school diploma, entered the country legally to rejoin his family and request asylum. He graduated from high school, matriculated at university, joined the ROTC program, and he had a pending asylum hearing. But just after 8 a.m. Monday, he called his father and said, “I’m not feeling okay.” Less than an hour later he was dead.

The photograph of his leg, posted on Instagram, documents his sense of shame at having to wear the device, at being branded somehow a criminal. His short life had followed the same arc as hundreds of millions of Americans, immigrants or descendants of immigrants, who came here seeking hope, opportunity and a chance for dignity. He wanted to grow and prosper and be free of tyranny — in this case, the tyranny of crime and instability.

“I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” he wrote on Instagram in late July. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

Likely, the GPS device made his leg feel foreign to him, just as this young asylum seeker, perhaps an aspiring American, had suddenly been branded foreign to the country he hoped to serve. The weight of the device made it impossible for him to play soccer, a sport he loved; according to his father, it also made him an object of ridicule to his classmates, who mimicked on an interpersonal level what has become the basic tool of this country’s domestic politics and foreign policy: bullying.

No administration in my lifetime has used imagery and narrative more effectively than the Trump administration. A White House webpage called “Aliens” uses “X-Files” music and text to suggest that we have been secretly invaded, and that President Donald Trump alone can repel the enemy living among us.

“Millions arrived under the cover of darkness and embedded themselves directly into our society,” reads the scrolling text, with a spooky electronic, sci-fi soundtrack suggesting the invaders are extraterrestrials. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences,” the site also says. “With one exception — they do not belong here.”

From emphasizing the supposed criminality of immigrants, the administration moves on to stressing their normality. The very things that are, for so many Americans, definitive markers of being American — living peacefully, shopping, learning — become markers of suspicion. And so we are invited to look at ourselves as Bel looked at his leg, the normal as abnormal. Even people who abhor this cruelty face what is essentially an existential question: If I am American, and America does this, what am I? To remain within this ugliness is insufferable; to flee would only make it worse.

“I do not know how long it will still physically be possible to breathe this European air,” wrote critic Walter Benjamin in 1938, as the Nazi’s made life unlivable for Jews. He killed himself in 1940, in a small border town in Spain, where he was denied entry after fleeing France. That, too, was an act of desperation.

The loss of temporary protected status for Haitians means that the U.S. will have to find tens of thousands of new health care workers to staff an already overburdened system. A recent study by the Yale Budget Lab found that even if immigration returned to normal after the Trump administration, by the 2030s there will be thousands fewer new businesses than would be expected, and the economy will be smaller than it could be, with effects lasting as far as 2075.

And thus, another metaphor travels through the body, upward and outward, from the death of a young man on a highway in Ohio to include all of us. Bel was desperate, and his death is a kind of murder, but what the U.S. is doing to itself is simply suicide.

Categories Bigotry, Citizenship, Extremism, Immigration, Trump

Paul Krugman: Reality and Evidence Are Not to Be Trusted!

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2026 //
2

Paul Krugman is the Nobel-Prize winning economist who was a columnist for The New York Times for many years. He here captures brilliantly the MAGA refusal to accept reality and evidence. How was the mainstream of the Republican Party either captured or cowed by this delusional mindset?

Krugman writes:

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rakeits 2 million square miles of boreal forest.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election.

Communism is the greatest threat facing America.

The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates scientists.

What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.

Of course, motivated reasoning isn’t confined to the right. Some people on the left insist that zoning restrictions have no role in causing high housing prices, that it’s all about Wall Street greed. Many centrists insist that being in the middle on a left-right scale — which isn’t even how most voters think about politics — is the secret to electoral victory. And so on.

I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.

But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning. It’s something far more extreme.

If believing something suits MAGA’s prejudices and interests, they don’t hesitate: they simply insist that it’s true. They routinely dismiss scientific and statistical evidence, but they don’t stop there. They’re perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the face.

Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has “blackouts and brownouts every weekend,” when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that you must show ID to buy groceries, which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.

Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.

George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all about this mindset. In his essay “Looking back on the Spanish war” he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:

In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.

Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed. Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:

If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.

If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?

What’s remarkable is the extent to which Republican politicians act as if they are living in a totalitarian state, when they aren’t — not yet, anyway. ICE would clearly like to be an American Stasi, policing any deviation from the party line, but it’s not able, so far, to arrest members of Congress who express skepticism about the president’s claims. And many Republican politicians still, I believe, know the difference between fantasy and reality.

But they behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments,” because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping.

The susceptibility of the GOP to this totalitarian mindset has come as a surprise even to cynics. I have some idea of how this happened: It involves a confluence of big-money corruption, crony capitalism, religious fanaticism, and the ever-present forces of racism and sexism. But that’s a subject to be delved into another day.

What’s clear is that the war on reality is exacting a high price on America as a whole.

Remember, 1.2 million Americans died from Covid — a number that would have been much lower if MAGA misinformation hadn’t caused so many people to refuse vaccination. Now we’re seeing a frightening rise in measles and other infectious diseases, and God help us if another pandemic strikes with Trump or his successor still in charge.

Climate denial and hostility to renewable energy will mean more pollution even as it consigns the U.S. to energy and economic backwardness.

And the Iran war — which Trump started and now refuses to end because he won’t accept reality — has destroyed America’s credibility and depleted our weapon stocks with stunning speed.

But anyone pointing out the obvious is, of course, a Communist.

Categories Accountability, Hoax, Trump, Ethics, Bigotry, Lies, Fascism, Extremism

Florida: Voters Oust Key Right-Wing School Board

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2026 //
4

If there was one school board in Florida that was the beachhead for Moms for Liberty’s efforts to push their agenda of censorship and right-wing ideology, it was the school board of Sarasota County. Last Tuesday, voters replaced the Moms for Liberty majority with moderates who want to make their public schools better, rather than a battleground for culture war issues.

The right-wing culture warriors won school board elections in other counties in the state, but Sarasota County is where their organization was born and gained national notoriety.

Lauren Lumpkin of The Washington Post reported:

A Florida school board that was at the epicenter of national debates over covid mask mandates and book bans lost its conservative majority this week, a change that some say signals a priority shift among voters.

Two Democratic-backed candidates beat out conservatives in Tuesday’s school board election in Sarasota, Florida, flipping the board’s majority. Helmed for the past year by a co-founder of Moms for Liberty — a conservative group that gained a national following with its parents’ rights messaging — the board is moving in a new direction, the winners said. A third Democratic-backed candidate will head to a runoff election against a contender endorsed by Republicans in November.

“I really think at the end of the day, regardless of political affiliation, our community was just tired of the culture wars, the political theater and being the center of national attention for all the wrong reasons,” said Megan Tennimon, a former teacher who won election to the board on Tuesday.


While Democrats say the flip indicates voters want to move on from fights over social issues, Moms for Liberty points to conservatives’ wins in other parts of Florida.


“Every couple of years someone in the media writes our obituary, and every couple of years parents show up and prove them wrong,” Tina Descovich, Moms for Liberty co-founder and chief executive, said Wednesday. “School boards are ground zero in the fight for parental rights, and last night Florida parents made that clear.”

During covid, the Sarasota County school district was among those that saw heated board meetings and headline grabbing debates over parents’ rights. High-profile conservative leaders with documented ties to the county include former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Charlie Kirk, the head of a pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA who was killed last year.

The Sarasota County School Board had been controlled by conservatives since 2022, on the heels of the pandemic. As school board meetings and elections, typically quiet and uncontroversial, became partisan battlegrounds, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) got involved around that time by endorsing candidates, something governors have rarely done.
His involvement in the local races came as he pushed an education agenda that included a ban on teaching young students — and later all students — about sexual orientation and gender identity.

Among those who won DeSantis’s support was Sarasota County School Board Chair Bridget Ziegler, first elected in 2014.

Ziegler, who was embroiled in a sex scandal in 2023 and refused to step down when her husband was accused of sexual assault, did not run for reelection this year. Ziegler’s husband was cleared of the sexual assault charge in 2024. She did not immediately return requests for comment.

Elsewhere in the state on Tuesday, a Democratic-backed school board candidate flipped a conservative seat in Orange County, one of the largest school districts in the country. On the same ballot, a democratic socialist won an upset primary victory in the U.S. Senate race.

“I think that they realized how destructive those divisive policies really were,” Beth Mayberry, another Democratic-backed winner in the Sarasota County School Board race, said about voters. A retired educator, Mayberry’s campaign focused on school funding and mental health.

“What they’ve seen in the last four years, with basically the tabloid happenings on the school board and a lot of the policies and resolutions that were being made, our general community did not agree with,” Mayberry said.

Another candidate endorsed by the local Democratic Party, Jimmy Glover, won the most votes in his race against two Republican opponents, but failed to capture more than 50 percent of the votes. This will trigger a runoff election in November.

If Glover wins, the board will be completely Democratic-backed — and he will be the first person of color to serve on the Sarasota County School Board, said David Dean, chair of the county’s Democratic Party.

Two other members, who were also supported by Democrats and have previously opposed conservative members, round out the five-member board.

While school board elections are nonpartisan, political parties typically endorse candidates they believe will support their priorities. Dean echoed sentiments that residents are fed up with the culture wars and instead want their school board to focus on teachers and students.
“School board meetings should be boring. They shouldn’t make the national news,” Dean said. “There’s certainly a shift in attitudes toward the MAGA agenda, even here.”

Led by conservatives, the Sarasota County School Board voted last year to remove references to race, sexuality and disability from its anti-bullying rules. In January, it reaffirmed the district’s stance to cooperate with law enforcement, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Ziegler, at the time, said it was a safety measure. “Our School District cannot provide safe harbor to criminals, including those who violate our immigration laws,” she wrote on social media.
However, the measure did not change anything because the district had already agreed to work with authorities, Tennimon said. “That resolution was designed to do nothing but instill fear in our community.”


Sarasota is still deep red — many voters support voucher programs and religion in schools.
Moms for Liberty rose to prominence during the pandemic, when conservative parents demanded more say over what their children learned in school — particularly around topics including race, sexuality and gender.


The group has expanded to about 130,000 members in 48 states since its founding in 2021, according to its website, hosting Donald Trump and DeSantis at its summit in 2023 in a run-up to the presidential election. It has since accrued influence in the GOP, in school board elections nationwide, and was called upon by the Trump administration to help shape national education programming.

The group has regularly attacked the LGBTQ+ community and spread “messages of anti-inclusion and hate” while aligning itself with extremist groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But organization leaders are pushing back against reports that their influence on school board elections in their home state of Florida has waned. Moms for Liberty officials said 11 of the 15 school board candidates it endorsed in other races across the state won or advanced on Tuesday.

Heidi Brandt, a conservative who will face Glover in the runoff in November, said she was disappointed with the school board election outcome, but hopes the newcomers will concentrate on schools. Like the Democratic-backed candidates, she said she wants to remove political fights from the board.

“This is about our students and our teachers and our families, it’s not about a conservative or liberal majority or minority,” Brandt said. “I understand the celebrations and the turning of the tables, but I’m just truly praying that it’s not going to be about politics.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Education Reform

Thom Hartmann: Trump Finds New Ways to Grift and Grab

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2026 //
6

Thom Hartmann is a diligent journalist who digs deep into the corruption of this regime.

On the deregulation of public lands: Trump is allowing destruction of parts of Big Bend National Park, to make way for its exploitation. No complaints from Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

He writes:

— Trump has figured out a way to grift off the plight of immigrant kids. A Texas law firm with virtually no immigration experience, but multiple people close to Trump or accused of being open racists, just got a $150 million sole-source contract to replace the public defenders defending kids being held in Trump’s concentration camps for brown-skinned people. Meanwhile, ICE says that, sure, they’ll wear body cameras when they beat up and murder people, but they’ll only share those videos when they make them look good. Don’t expect to see any released that actually show criminal activity by armed, masked ICE thugs. Sounds over the top? Here’s their exact language: they’ll only release body camera footage when “it is in the best interests of the agency.” Trump has built his SA/SS force of violent, unaccountable modern-day Klan members to intimidate and even kill anybody who dares defy this regime, and it’s not about to start following the law or even behaving morally any time soon. 

— Trumponomics is even worse than Hoovernomics or Reaganomics. Since he fired his statistics person at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with a hand-picked toady, the numbers have been looking weird. For example, the regime reported 57,000 new jobs in May, then later quietly revised that down to 20,000 (although the headlines of 57,000 are still out there); they reported 129,000 new jobs for June, then quietly revised that down to 63,000 (ditto on the headlines). And this week we found that instead of the anticipated creation of 80,000 new jobs, the American economy actually lost 23,000 jobs last month (and expect that number to get worse when they “revise” it in 2 months). No matter how hard they try, they can’t keep Americans from noticing that housing, groceries, gas, transportation, drugs, medicine, and pretty much everything else are more expensive while billionaires and the Trump Crime Family get richer and Republicans continue to refuse to allow an increase in the minimum wage or the right to unionize. Eventually, reality catches up with politics, no matter how fast and furious Trump and his lickspittles try to keep us distracted or hating on each other, and hopefully it’s going to catch up in a big way this November. 

— Over at Montana Dispatch, Ryan Busse lays out the five Big Lies Republicans are using to steal our public lands. Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, for example, recently lied to his constituents that the Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments President Obama designated were brought into being no public comment or input when, in fact, over 2.7 million people weighed in during the comment period. Another Big Lie is that we must let drilling companies exploit our public lands to become “energy independent,” a designation we reached during the Obama years. They’re also trying to tell us that the way to prevent forest fires isn’t to cut back on climate-change-causing CO2 from burning fossil fuels but, instead, to log those trees and leave behind nude wastelands (which actually catch on fire even more easily, because all the wood debris there is dead). Trump — who’s probably never walked through an old-growth forest in his life — tried pitching the lie that people can’t and don’t use our public lands for recreation like camping and fishing. And they try to tell us that we’re not subsidizing the oil and cattle industries with our public lands when in fact we’re handing them the equivalent of billions of dollars every year. Hopefully one of these days there’ll be a cost to these Republicans for the continuous streams of lies they keep pouring out on dozens of topics. 

— Trump has figured out a new grift to let his oil company donors profit from his drawing down the National Oil Reserve. Here’s how it works. Normally, when we release oil from the strategic reserve we sell it on the open market at market prices. That would mean that the oil Trump’s releasing would go for around $100 a barrel, paid by the oil companies. When the oil shortage is over, the government would go onto the public market and buy the oil back for, say, $50 a barrel and refill the reserve. It actually makes a profit for the government. But what Trump’s doing is “loaning” our oil to the oil companies at no charge. They then sell it for $100 barrel and when it’s time to “return” the oil to the reserve they’ll buy it on the market at $50 a barrel (or however low it goes when the crisis is over). The entire profit — quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars — instead of going to us taxpayers, goes to the oil companies who funded Trump’s campaign for president. Lever News has the entire sordid story broken down on their site in an article by Freddy Brewster. 

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Trump

Unprecedented: Retired Judges Act to Protect the Rule of Law

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2026 //
1

We live in strange and dangerous times. For the first time in memory, maybe ever, the rule of law itself is under attack. Our Dear Leader has threatened judges who rule against his wishes. He and his lawless administration ignore decisions they don’t like. He installed a Supreme Court majority who were vetted by the far-right Federalist Society. That majority proceeded to overturn Roe v. Wade, despite their repeated pledges not to do so, and to gut the Voting Rights Act, terminating guarantees of equal rights for Black Americans.

At this time when the rule of law itself is disregarded by the President, who is himself ruled only by whim and self-aggrandizement, two retired judges expressed their concern in The Guardian.

Judge Michael P. Connelly and Judge Robert F. Orr wrote:

Last October, US lawyers, judges and rule-of-law advocates traveled to Warsaw as guests of the Carter Center. Neither of us was among them. But when our colleagues returned, their stories inspired us.

They told us about judges and lawyers across central Europe who had been surveilled, smeared, prosecuted and sometimes jailed for standing between political power and courts meant to remain independent.

And they kept going.

Poland’s example was especially compelling. When its government sought greater control over the judiciary, Polish judges put on their robes and marched through Warsaw. Judges from across Europe joined them in what became the March of 1,000 Robes.

Then they left their courthouses and traveled through towns and villages, explaining what an independent judiciary means to a farmer, shopkeeper, parent or business owner. They talked about law not as an abstraction, but as protection against arbitrary power.

They understood a truth Americans can no longer overlook: judicial independence cannot survive merely because judges believe in it. The public must understand why it matters.

That lesson brought us on to a bus.

Last month, shortly after the United States celebrated its 250th birthday, the Justice in Motion tour traveled from western Pennsylvania through Ohio and into Michigan. Thirty sitting and retired judges, lawyers and advocates handed out pocket constitutions, met students and asked a question Americans do not consider often enough: what does the rule of law mean in everyday life, and what happens when we take it for granted?

In Columbus, we did something neither of us imagined during our years on the bench. We put on our robes and marched from the federal courthouse toward the supreme court of Ohio, carrying purple flowers, an international symbol of judicial independence.

American judges do not ordinarily march in the streets. Nor should they. The judiciary derives much of its legitimacy from restraint. Judges do not campaign for particular outcomes or answer criticism with press conferences. They speak through their decisions. But these are no ordinary times.

And our Polish colleagues taught us that silence can carry its own risk.

Our march was not about Democrats or Republicans, nor about defending particular judges or decisions. It was about defending the system that allows legal disagreements to be resolved according to law rather than political power.

One of us was elected to the supreme court of Ohio as a Democrat. The other was elected to the supreme court of North Carolina as a Republican and is now an independent. Through two long careers, we have disagreed about plenty.

That is precisely the point.

The rule of law is not a partisan possession.

Both sides enter a courtroom with the right to be heard. Judges must apply the law to the facts without regard to which party is more powerful, popular or politically useful.

Sometimes judges get it wrong. That is why we have appellate courts. Sometimes courts issue decisions that elected officials or citizens strongly dislike. That is unavoidable in a constitutional democracy.

The answer is appeal, legislation where constitutionally permissible, or constitutional amendment. It cannot be intimidation, retaliation for unpopular rulings or the suggestion that compliance with lawful court orders is optional.

Once adherence to judicial decisions depends upon whether the politically powerful agree with them, we have left the rule of law behind.

In Wooster, Ohio, about 150 people gathered across from the historic courthouse. The discussion was not about red America or blue America. It was about ordinary life.

The rule of law is why you can deposit money in a bank and expect it to be there tomorrow. It is why contracts mean something, property can be protected and an individual citizen can enter a courthouse and challenge the government.

These protections seem ordinary only because generations before us built institutions strong enough to make them ordinary. When the rule of law works, it is almost invisible.

Judges are trained – rightly – to exercise restraint. During our years on the bench, we spoke through our rulings. That tradition is essential to maintaining confidence in an impartial judiciary.

But restraint should not be confused with silence about the survival of the institution itself.

When judges are threatened because of their rulings; when an adverse decision is answered not with an appeal but with demands for retaliation; when courts are judged legitimate only when they produce politically desired outcomes, those who understand the system have an obligation to explain what is being lost.

Our Polish friends understood this before we did. Their circumstances differ from ours, and comparisons should be made carefully. But the lesson travels well.

The rule of law does not defend itself. Neither does an independent judiciary. Constitutions are pieces of paper unless citizens and public officials possess the courage and habits necessary to honor them.

Four days on a bus will not persuade a nation. The purpose was more modest: to begin conversations, one community and one citizen at a time, about institutions Americans have been fortunate enough to take for granted.

That work belongs not only to judges and lawyers, but to all of us.

The rule of law is not something judges possess. It is something citizens inherit.

And every generation must decide whether to preserve it.

What’s giving us hope now

Justice Robert F Orr (retired): What gives me hope is the scope of individuals and groups now focusing and talking about the rule of law and the independence of our judiciary. Our bus trip had a great mix of backgrounds and experience both in the judges participating and meeting us at stops as well as the young people who amplified the message across various media platforms. It’s genuinely a national movement.

Justice Michael P Donnelly (retired): What gives me hope is the genuine appreciation we encountered during the bus tour for the role of an independent judiciary in protecting individual rights and civil liberties. The people we met understood that these freedoms, defended at great sacrifice throughout our history, cannot be taken for granted – and that each generation must be willing to stand up for them.

  • Michael P Donnelly is a retired justice of the supreme court of Ohio
  • Robert F Orr is a retired justice of the supreme court of North Carolina. Both participated in the Justice in Motion tour organized by the Democracy Rising Collaborative and Keep Our Republic

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Justice, Trump

Will a Fascist, Racist, Anti-Semite Win a Major Election in Texas?

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2026 //
5

Bo French is an uber-bigot who is running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission. Don’t be misled by the title. The Railroad Commission has very little to do with railroads. It oversees the oil and gas industry in Texas and wields enormous power over an essential industry.

You might want to learn about Bo French, because he is running for an important statewide seat. Also because he voices the sentiments of the dark underbelly of American political life.

The Texas Monthly reports on the ascent of a native fascist:

Last week Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Railroad Commission of Texas, sent out a bizarre fundraising email. Framed as a reminder of the 108th anniversary of the Communist overthrow of Russia, the email included an AI-generated image of his Democratic opponent, Jon Rosenthal, smiling in the chambers where the country’s then-ruling Romanov family was executed in 1918. Rosenthal, French’s campaign continued, has “much in common with the Marxist revolutionaries who brutally executed” the Romanovs, and has plans for his own “infernal revolution” of Texas. “My opponent has spent his time in office mocking Christianity, the Virgin Birth, and Christian Communion, while voting against religious liberty and for the spread of Islam,” the email continued. 

If you’re wondering what, exactly, a century-old Russian coup has to do with the railroad commission, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, then you’re likely not alone. But among a small audience—those attuned to white supremacist dog whistles—the accusation almost certainly perked up some ears. 

You see, Rosenthal is Jewish. And while French did not explicitly name the Bolshevik revolutionaries who overthrew Russia a century ago, the email appears to be nodding to an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims there is a Jewish Communist cabal intent on controlling the world and stamping out Christianity. Known as Judeo-Bolshevism, the theory was crucial to Adolf Hitler’s rise and a key justification for the Holocaust. It remains central to the worldviews of many modern fascists, who maintain that communism—and, by extension, immigration—are tools used by Jews to destroy the West and white people.  

In a statement to Texas Monthly, Rosenthal called French’s post “true to form.” The Texas House member from the Houston area and longtime mechanical engineer in the oil and gas industry continued: “While I’m working on substantive solutions for the people of Texas and our energy grid, his whole campaign is about pejorative and racist attacks.” 

Neither French nor his campaign responded this week to numerous requests for an interview, or to clarify whether he intended to invoke the conspiracy theory. But his other recent posts make clear he has a deep familiarity with esoteric racist views that were once largely confined to fringe corners of the far right. 

This week, in response to a video that purported to show nonwhite people trespassing in a restricted part of Yellowstone National Park, French posted a quote from “The Camp of the Saints”—an obscure French dystopian novel that depicts immigrants as diseased, feces-eating hordes and has enjoyed a recent resurgence among the global white nationalist movement. “Your universe has no meaning to them,” French wrote on X to his 80,000 followers, without revealing the source of the quote. “They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door . . .”

Citing fears of “gay race communism,” an impending “massacre of heritage Americans,” and the nation ending up like modern South Africa, French has called for the United States to “be Rhodesia,” the African pseudostate in the sixties and seventies in which Black people were violently oppressed by a ruling white minority. Rhodesia has inspired numerous racist killers—most infamously Dylann Roof, the self-described “Last Rhodesian” who massacred nine Black congregants at a South Carolina church in 2015.

“We are all Rhodesians now,” French wrote in January. 

It wasn’t long ago that such views were largely relegated to the online backwater of the neo-Nazi movement or manifestos left by fascist mass shooters, according to Wendy Via, a veteran researcher of the far right and cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “They are well-known to people who study extremism,” Via told me. “But they’re not well-known to even your average racist. These are the ideological basis for the white supremacist movement.” 

Even if they’re not yet widely accepted, she said, such views are slowly being normalized by President Donald Trump, the scaling back of moderation on many social media websites, and the proliferation of the “great replacement” theory—which claims there is an intentional, often Jewish-driven, effort to demographically replace white people in Western countries. In May, for instance, Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol commander-at-large under Trump, spoke to a global conference of neo-Nazi-affiliated activists and extreme far-right political figures who had gathered in support of the “remigration” movement, which seeks to forcibly remove people of color, including legal citizens, from their countries. (Detractors have another name for such efforts: “ethnic cleansing.”) 

In Texas, French has been a key purveyor of similarly extreme rhetoric, and he helped make anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry mainstream in the broader state GOP. He’s called for 100 million people—nearly a third of the American population—to be deported, and for two nonwhite Texas House members to be stripped of their citizenship and removed from the country. He wants some Native Americans—“third world savages”—to be kicked out of America too. French says Texas needs to “ban Islam” and “round upevery Muslim” for deportation. Last week he toldhis followers it was “time to go round up all the Chinese and send them packing!” McCarthyism and the Christian Crusades, he argues, didn’t go far enough. And this week he referred to America’s “not in labor force” population—an economic term for nonworkers that includes retirees, students, and those with serious handicaps—as “low IQ parasites.” 

Categories Texas, Bigotry, Racism, Evil, Fascism, Elections, Extremism

Vasquez-Heilig: Real Republicans Don’t Impose Their Views on Others

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2026 //
5

I remember, a time long ago, when Republicans believed in small government. Except for public health, they believed in allowing localities and states to make their own decisions.

Trump Republicans, however, believe in imposing their beliefs on everyone else . They use the power of the federal government to enforce their views.

We have seen this with the executive orders that Trump has signed, making programs in “diversity,equity, and inclusion” a reason to defund research grants at institutions of higher education. I can’t imagine President Eisenhower or President Bush (either of them) wielding that stick. And I haven’t forgotten that President Nixon initiated affirmative action, which the Trump administration considers illegal and “racist.”

Similarly, we have seen the Trump administration demanding tribute from law firms, major media, and universities, in exchange for freedom from federal harassment. It vigorously fought the right of women to control their own bodies. It demanded that transgender members of the military be fired, without regard to their years of service or commendations from superior officers.

Julian Vasquez examines the latest Trump administration effort to coerce universities to accept the Trump agenda.

He writes:

When the Trump administration issued its February 2025 Dear Colleague letter attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion in education, I responded nationally on Democracy Now! I warned that higher education had not faced political interference this serious since McCarthyism and asked whether universities would “surrender or resist.”

That Dear Colleague letter went down in flames. Federal courts blocked the directive, finding serious constitutional and procedural problems. In August 2025, a federal court vacated both the letter and its associated certification requirement. The administration eventually abandoned its appeal. Now the Trump administration is trying again.

On August 3, 2026, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon issued “A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards.” It calls on every college and university to publish a statement by the end of 2026 explaining how it will address admissions, faculty hiring, academic viewpoints, grading, artificial intelligence, foreign influence, research, affordability, and national priorities.

This letter is more carefully written than its failed Dear Colleague predecessor. It does not explicitly threaten universities with the loss of federal funding. It presents itself as an invitation to restore public trust and even acknowledges that there is “no single template for academic excellence.”

But universities should recognize the pattern. When the courts stop one attempt at political control, the administration repackages the same objective and returns through another channel. Expect more legal battles. If the administration tries to transform this ostensibly voluntary letter into funding conditions, investigations, accreditation pressure, or binding institutional obligations, expect it to lose again.

Red States Will Likely Embrace the Letter

In Republican-controlled states, many governing boards and university presidents will likely treat McMahon’s letter as federal permission to intensify attacks on faculty work, tenure, diversity programs, student expression, and academic freedom.

The letter gives presidents and boards a ready-made list of questions. Are academic departments sufficiently “pluralistic”? Are faculty hiring and evaluation practices considering the “right” perspectives? Is research sufficiently aligned with the “national interest”? Are universities placing American priorities ahead of global commitments? These questions sound reasonable until politicians begin supplying the answers.

A board, president, provost, or dean that wants to target a professor, academic department, research center, or student organization can now point to the secretary of education and claim that Washington has demanded action. The letter could become a pretext for investigations, curriculum reviews, program closures, hiring interference, and ideological screening. It does not create those powers. But it may embolden political officials to exercise powers they do not legally possess.

In blue states, many university presidents and boards will probably roll their eyes. They will recognize the document as political theater written by officials with limited understanding of university teaching, research, and shared governance. But they cannot safely dismiss it. The Trump administration has already demonstrated its willingness to use federal funding to reward allies and punish perceived opponents.

Political Retaliation Is Not Hypothetical

The administration acknowledged in court that it canceled approximately $7.6 billion in grants based on whether the affected states voted for Donald Trump in 2024. The canceled projects were concentrated in 16 states that supported Kamala Harris. A federal judge concluded that the politically selective cancellations violated constitutional equal-protection requirements. The Associated Press reported on the ruling.

That episode should concern every university president. If an administration will cancel billions of dollars in congressionally authorized grants based on how a state voted, universities must consider whether this new letter identifies the new political tests that could later determine which institutions receive grants, face investigations, or become targets of federal enforcement.

This is more of the same. Political loyalty is being substituted for neutral governance for all. Red-state institutions may be rewarded for adopting the administration’s agenda. Blue-state institutions may be punished for resisting it. In both cases, federal power becomes an illegal tool for encouraging political conformity.

Please open the link, which shows that Secretary of Education Linda McMahon may well be the least qualified person to serve as Secretary of Education.

Yet, here they are, Trump and McMahon, trying to use their political leverage to reshape higher education.

They are not Republicans. They are not libertarians. They are authoritarians.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Extremism, Higher Education, Trump

Meet Cassandra Williamson, the “Transgender Terrorist”

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2026 //
3

What is life like for a military veteran who is transgender, caring for her Trump-loving relatives, living in Trump country? The Washington Post recently featured this interview of Cassandra Williamson, who lives a life of contradictions and faces it with equanimity.

It begins:

The day that a gunman killed Charlie Kirk in Utah, Cassandra Williamson was at home in rural Kentucky, washing laundry and checking her mom’s vital signs. Williamson, 66, is a veteran of both the Marine Corps and the Navy, and for the last few years, she has been the primary caregiver for her mother and two siblings. Williamson is also transgender — a fact that has put her at odds with her Trump-loving family and a growing network of conservatives who want to strip trans people of rights.

Kirk was an outspoken part of that network. He described trans people as “one of the most destructive social contagions in human history” and said transgender troops damage the nation’s security.

When prosecutors and public officials said Kirk’s alleged shooter was in a romantic relationshipwith a person who is transitioning from male to female, prominent Republicans called for trans activists to be institutionalized and labeled terrorists. For Williamson, the suggestion felt ludicrous. How could she be a threat to the nation she fought to protect?

Williamson started a satirical blog called “A Day in the Life of a Transgender Terrorist” in which she recounts the activities of her daily life as a caretaker. (Video: Cassandra Williamson)

She decided to start a satirical blog.

In “A Day in the Life of a Transgender Terrorist,’ Williamson recounts in intimate and often humorous detail the chores and conversations that make up her days. She changes soiled bedsheets. She deploys “a full-scale tactical assault on the laundry pile with extreme prejudice (and a little bit of OxiClean).” She pushes Ensure on her ailing mom, and she makes sure her sister’s Trump hat sits just right on her head as she watches Fox News. In one entry, Williamson writes, “Good to know the best and brightest minds in D.C. are focused on the real threat: a veteran from coal country who can operate a glucometer and a washing machine. Sometimes simultaneously.”

The Washington Post interviewed Williamson about her life, this tumultuous political moment and what she sees as the way forward in an increasingly divided nation. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What were you thinking when you heard Charlie Kirk had been shot?

The first thought that occurred to me when Charlie Kirk had been shot was that I hoped this was not in any way associated with transgender people. I was really sad about it all because I hate seeing someone killed over their political beliefs. It just goes against everything I believe in. And even though he and I would disagree on everything, I don’t want to see people killed over their beliefs. He has a family, he’s got children, he’s got a wife, he’s got a sister. And it pains me enormously the loss that they are feeling now.. Those are all the things that went through my head all within a matter of a couple of seconds.

Why were you scared that it might have a connection to the trans community?

I didn’t want there to be an association because I knew that it would be weaponized against the entire community. And they already have a bull’s eye on our back, essentially, without this.

You posted a video the day after Kirk was shot, and you called for a moment of silence for him, his family and his supporters. Tell me about that.

He’s an American. His family is American. And in that moment of tragedy, it was important for me to show my community, my part of this American community, another life had been lost. I think that we needed to have that moment of silence, recognizing that there are people who do agree with him. We don’t agree with him or them, but they’re still Americans and they deserve that respect.

And you’re someone who has served this country.

I served for everyone, even the ones I disagree with, even the ones who want to kill me, even the ones who see me as less than. And I would go to the grave defending their right to believe those things. They might not do that for me, but that’s on them, not on me.

Republican lawmakers Nancy Mace and Ronny Jackson have called for trans people to be treated as “terrorists” and institutionalized. You decided to start a blog called “A Day in the Life of a Transgender Terrorist.” Why?

Well, I didn’t know how else to address what they were trying to say. I know that I cannot persuade people to come along with anything that I’m trying to tell them. I can give them numbers. They don’t care. I can give them a mountain of evidence. They don’t care. The only thing left is trying to find some humor in all of this, at least, satirically.

You’re calling me a terrorist and here I am, getting up at 7 a.m., making sure my mom gets her shots and her medicine and breakfast, making sure my brother’s all right, sister’s all right. And then mom pees in the bed.

Look, there’s a lot of humor in what I’m doing here. I mean, there’s a lot that can be used to show people we can laugh even though you want to traumatize us. I can let this thing beat me up. But I decided that somebody’s got to be the example that says there is a way through this, and here it is.

Tell me what’s going on with your family.

Mom is almost 87 years old. She’s been losing the battle with her cognitive abilities. She can’t see real well. She can’t hear real well. And her mobility is extremely limited. Brother has COPD, very severe. He worked in the coal mines for all of his life. And it’s difficult for him to breathe. And he has to keep oxygen around. He’s very weak. My sister has some physical mobility issues, as well as educational deficiencies. She doesn’t have the ability to talk in any way that you can understand her. You really have to listen closely to the sounds that she makes to kind of interpret what she wants to eat.

You have posted some pictures of them wearing Trump hats.

This whole area is Trump country. This whole region of Pike County, eastern Kentucky, it is Trump country, period. And when I came here, the first thing I noticed is that Fox News was on all the time in every room and loud.

I had to go to my granddaughter’s graduation in Texas this past year. So I stopped at this place down in Tennessee on the way back. It’s called the Trump Superstore. I go in and buy [my sister] Irma a pair of short pants that says Trump. And I got my brother a shirt that says Trump, and I got my sister one of those gold-plated $50 bills for five bucks. And it has Trump on it. They’re entitled to believe what they want, and it does not hurt me or offend me in any way, even though I know that what they are supporting is harmful to me and those like me. I can’t demand that they treat me another way from how they’ve always done things. So I don’t worry about all of that. If I did, I would be one sour person. I wouldn’t be able to exist here. So you have to find a way to survive.

Do you all talk about transgender issues?

My brother and I had a good conversation just a couple days ago. He had seen what was going on with Jackson and Mace and the Heritage Foundation wanting to institutionalize all of us. And he knows that it doesn’t apply to me. Right now, I am the one who represents all transgender people. And he noticed that I’m not like any of those things that he hears. He puts more faith in what they’re saying about it in a broader perspective. And I’m not gonna change his mind on a lot of that. We can have those conversations, but it’s a very slow process. The more they get to interact with me as just being a normal person, like anyone else here in this community, the more they see that we’re just as real as they are.

You came out in 2016. You were in your mid-50s. How did you decide it was time?

I was living with this girl. She had this tube of Premarin in her bathroom. The warning label said men should not touch this thing because it can cause breast development. I think I passed out. I saw that and I went, “Oh, my God, there’s a way.” That was in 2004. It took me another five years to study and think through all these things. And then in 2009, I decided I’m going to order this stuff from overseas. I would get that stuff in. I’d get scared. I’d flush it down the toilet. I’d go buy more.

I have known who I am for a long, long, long, long, long time. But that little box with that warning label was the key that said, “There is a way.”

I ended up taking a picture with family, and I’m in a big, baggy shirt, trying to scrunch. I’d been hiding completely. I decided then that I couldn’t hide anymore. I went to my therapist and they said, “You’re gonna have to help me write a letter.” I took the letter, gave it to all my kids, my ex-wife. I posted it on Facebook. The kids came to me within like four hours and said, “What do you want us to call you?” And I said, “Whatever you want. I’m good with it.” My ex-wife, it took her about 12 hours.

So, I’d sent that letter to my brothers and sisters. I’m the oldest of six. And they let me know that they didn’t want mom to know. They thought it would probably kill her. And so, I waited, but then on a Monday, I called mom, and I said, “Mom, I’ve got something to tell you, but, but I’m not going to tell you today. I want you to go into your prayer closet and pray. And then I’m going to call you back in a couple of days.” So I called back Wednesday and said, “Mom, have you prayed? You ready?” She’s Southern Baptist. And she said, “I think I’m ready.” And I said, “So I’m one of those transgender people you’ve heard of, Mom.” She said, “Oh, I thought it was worse than that.” And we just carried on a conversation after that. And she didn’t die, thank goodness.

Did she accept you?

No, she did not accept me. Her faith wouldn’t allow for that. And even today, she gets confused sometimes because I’ll come through in a really low-cut dress. And she’s asked me, “So, who are you?” And I said, “I’m Cassandra, your oldest child.”

But I’m good with that. I am really thrilled to be able to spend time with my mom, brother and sister here. That’s important to me, regardless of how they feel.

How do things feel for you now compared to when you first came out?

If I take a global perspective, we’ve come a long way. But we’ve also experienced a lot more difficulties since then, too. When [former defense secretary] Ash Carter announced [in 2016] that he was lifting the trans ban for service in the military, it was like a whole new world was in front of us. It was exciting. Little did we know, in just a few months, Trump would take office and send out his infamous tweets on trans people serving in the military. It was really devastating when he started trying to strip trans military people of their rights.

This year has been horrendous on a global scale for rights for every minority in the country and the world, really. This is a conservative reset. And through history, you can actually see that in the 50s, they got tired of all of the LGB people in federal government. They kicked 20,000 people out of the federal government in the 50s for security reasons. Same argument they used today for the military.

You have sent your blog to many prominent right-wing pundits and officials. Have you heard back from any of the politicians like Nancy Mace or anyone else that you’ve tweeted at?

No, and I’m not going to. You know why? They don’t want to be Loomered. Laura Loomer, she’s the one who will go, “You talked to a trans person. We want you fired now.” Or LibsofTikTok: “We want you fired because you had a picture of a trans person standing beside you. We don’t want that.” I know people in the military have been chased out. People will send it to Pete Hegseth for their removal. They’re not going to talk to me because they don’t want the ire of their base raised up against them.

Do you think Charlie Kirk would have talked to you?

Charlie probably would have. That’s the thing that he actually believed in. But I do think that he would have tried to bully me with his vast knowledge. He was a very smart person. I will talk to anyone, whether you agree with me or not.

And that makes me the biggest “terrorist” in the world to people like Trump and Jackson and Mace and the Heritage Foundation. Because I’m changing minds here at the local level. I’m affecting their base in a way they don’t want their base to move. It’s one person at a time, one greeter at Walmart at a time.

Categories Bigotry, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Freedom, Gender, Kentucky, Trump

Trump Lashes Out at Smithsonian Museum for Refusing His Censorship

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2026 //
10

For more than a year, Trump has pestered the Smithsonian Museum to remove exhibits that shine attention on despicable episodes and phenomena in American history. Trump wants a patriotic version of American history.

The Smithsonian has rejected his bullying, so Trump ordered the National Park Service to place signs around the Smithsonian museums warning visitors about their bias in favor of accurate history.

The Guardian reported:

Donald Trump on Friday ordered the interior department to display signs in front of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History that accuse the institution of inaccuracy.

The order escalates the Trump’s attacks against the Smithsonian, which he and his allies accuse of politicizing the institution by focusing too much on injustices in American history, instead of more triumphant moments such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The order directs interior secretary Doug Burgum to huddle with the National Park Service and assistant to the president for domestic policy Vince Haley to come up with some temporary signs to install along the National Parks Service-maintained sidewalks and walkways leading into the museum.

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The White House did not immediately respond to a request for more details about what these signs would say.

The order says the signs “shall notify visitors that the museum exhibits should be renovated consistent with the findings in the report”. The signs should direct the public to other places where they can get better American history information, the order says.

The same group will also have to produce signs for the public criticizing the Smithsonian for not commemorating sufficiently the Declaration of Independence during the 250th anniversary of its adoption.

The American Historical Association, a group composed of professional historians, praised the Smithsonian Institution’s “commitment to scholarship and accuracy” in a statement earlier this month.

“Historians practice our craft with scholarly integrity according to established standards of evidence, historical inquiry, and professional practice,” the AHA statement reads. “Political interference in professional museum work threatens the accuracy of historical interpretation and erodes public trust in one of our nation’s most important institutions.”

The National Museum of American History declined to comment.

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, History, Propaganda, Trump

You Can Help Turn Texas Blue!

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2026 //
2

I am once again posting a fascinating account of an important district in Texas. The district is Tarrant County. It’s the third largest district in Texas. For a long time, it was reliably red. Now, we learn in Michelle H.Davis’s post, it is close to turning blue.

You can help by sending contributions of any size to candidates she describes. I was moved to send $100 to Alisa Simmons, whom she describes near the end of the post. Any of the candidates mentioned would appreciate $10, $25, whatever you can afford.

The best part of the post is that it gives you a flavor of why these races matter. Like the contest for leadership of the prison, where more than 70 prisoners have died while in custody since 2017.

Davis writes:

This is the third installment of this series, where we’re looking at election data from the largest counties to see where we need to be for our hypothetical big blue wave in November. If you missed our previous installments:

Harris and Dallas, the only counties with higher populations than Tarrant, are reliably blue and need to focus on turnout. Tarrant, on the other hand, is where the battleground is. It’s a swing county because Republicans have held the reins of county government for too long. 2026 could be the year that changes. 

Twenty years ago, Tarrant County was over 75% white and the largest red county in America. 

Tarrant County

And of course, we know that Demographics are not destiny, but we can see in Tarrant County that votes have been trending blue for a long time. 

More than that, there’s a heavy burden on Tarrant County, just like Harris and Dallas. In 2024, 7.96% of all Texas Democrats lived in Tarrant County. And in a state as big as Texas, that’s a lot of weight to pull. 

The good old boys are still hanging on. 

Because here’s the thing about Tarrant County. This isn’t a story about demographics slowly working their magic while everybody waits around for the numbers to catch up. This is a county government that knows exactly what’s coming and is doing everything in its power to make sure it never arrives. They’ve gerrymandered maps. The Tarrant County jail that can’t stop killing people. The County Judge told the only Black woman on the Commissioners Court to shut up. This is what a dying regime looks like when it still has its hands on the levers.

Start with Tim O’Hare, the County Judge. Before Tarrant, O’Hare was mayor of Farmers Branch, where he made it his life’s work to run Latino residents out of town, an obsession that ended up costing that city millions in legal fees. He brought the same energy to Fort Worth. He’s taken money from the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, an organization with documented Nazi ties, and he has never denounced it, not once, not even when asked directly. He led the charge to defund Girls Inc. of Tarrant County, a program that serves Black and Hispanic girls. And in April of 2025, in front of the entire Commissioners Court, he told Commissioner Alisa Simmons, a Black woman, to “sit down and be quiet,” then accused her of lacking “a semblance of class.” Read that however you want. 

He’s not doing this alone. Tony Tinderholt, the just-retired state rep, announced he was running for Simmons’ own Precinct 2 seat the day after the county’s gerrymandered map passed. Tinderholt is also one of the Texas House’s top recipients of Defend Texas Liberty PAC cash, and he was one of the few Republicans in the state to vote against the CROWN Act, a bill that simply says you can’t fire someone for their hairstyle.Matt Krause, another commissioner, used to represent a State House district that federal courts had once found to have been racially gerrymandered. This is the bench.

And then there’s the jail. Sheriff Bill Waybourn has been in office since 2017, and in that time, more than 70 people have died in his custody. Anthony Johnson Jr. died of asphyxiation after a jailer knelt on his back for over a minute while he said he couldn’t breathe. Two former jailers are now indicted for murder. The county has paid out more than $4.3 million settling lawsuits over deaths and abuse in that jail. When Commissioner Simmons has tried to get Waybourn to brief the court on what’s happening inside, she’s refused, calling her requests “hostile.” Waybourne has also spoken at a Turning Point USA event, an organization with its own well-documented ties to white supremacist rhetoric.

And the redistricting, the whole reason Tinderholt is running for Simmons’ seat in the first place, is because the Commissioners Court redrew Precincts 1 and 2, the only Democratic-held seats, and O’Hare admitted on camera it was to lock in a Republican majority. Simmons and her fellow Democratic commissioner had the UCLA Voting Rights Project analyze the new maps, and the conclusion was that every proposed map packed Black and Hispanic voters into a single district to dilute their power everywhere else. Lawsuits were filed. They got dismissed on procedural grounds. The map stands for 2026.

But something has shifted in Tarrant County. Democrats have been sweeping local races, and Taylor Rhemet’s win was the cherry on top.

Last year, Democrats flipped multiple school boards in Tarrant County. This year, they flipped several city council races across the county. And on January 31, Democrat Taylor Rehmet beat Republican Leigh Wambsganss for a state Senate seat that hadn’t gone blue since 1991. Not close, either. 57% to 43%, in a district Trump carried by 17 points just over a year earlier. Wambsganss outspent him by two million dollars. She’s the chief communications officer for Patriot Mobile, the outfit that’s spent the last several years funding the Christian nationalist school board takeovers. 

Hispanic voters did that. In some of the heavily Latino precincts on Fort Worth’s north side, Rehmet outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 numbers by more than 50 points. That’s a mobilization story, the same one I’ve been telling you about Harris and Dallas counties, except this time it happened in a district that hadn’t elected a Democrat to that seat in 35 years. Rehmet and Wambsganss go at it again in November for the full term, and if Tarrant Democrats can do what they did in January one more time, that seat is gone for good.

Down at the State House, the map is a little friendlier, if you squint.

Five Republican-held House seats anchor themselves in Tarrant County, and depending on how big this wave gets, we could see two of them flip. Maybe four. Maybe all five, though that’s the kind of year Democrats haven’t had here in three decades.

HD93 and HD96 are the two to watch first. HD94 is Tony Tinderholt’s old seat, now open since he’s bailing to run for Simmons’ commissioner spot, and Democrat Katie O’Brien Duzan is running there. HD96 has an open seat left by David Cool, defending against Democrat Ebony Turner, in a district that’s been quietly drifting for years.

HD98, Giovanni Capriglione’s old seat covering Keller, Colleyville, and parts of Southlake and Grapevine, is open too after his retirement, with Democrat Cate Brennan running.

HD94 and HD97 round out the list, the kind of districts that turn competitive the moment turnout ticks up, exactly like it just did in SD9.

Two of these flip in a decent night. Four flip if Tarrant does in November what it just did in January. And if all five go blue, that’s no longer a wave. That’s Tarrant County telling the rest of Texas the fight is already over.

Congressional seats to watch.

Tarrant now sits inside four competitive-adjacent congressional districts, and all four have a name on the ballot worth knowing:

  • TX24: Beth Van Duyne vs. Kevin Burge, a Marine Corps veteran who worked in the DIA and served in Biden’s White House Situation Room. Not a top-tier flip on paper, but this is the district that got carved through Tarrant’s fastest-diversifying suburbs, and it’s the one to watch for over-performance.
  • TX12: Craig Goldman vs. Heli Rodriguez-Prilliman, a Fort Worth entrepreneur running her first race. Goldman inherited Kay Granger’s old seat, and this is the most Tarrant-heavy of the four districts.
  • TX25: Roger Williams vs. Dione Sims, who won her primary runoff outright. This district picks up Arlington and Grand Prairie, the same ground that just delivered Rehmet’s win.
  • TX06: Jake Ellzey vs. Danny Minton, though only a sliver of this district touches Tarrant at all, it may be the most populated part of the district.

None of these is the marquee pickup Rehmet already delivered. But they’re the four names that turn a good night in Tarrant into a great one down-ballot, and if the county keeps trending the way Rehmet has shown it can, one of them stops being a long shot sooner than people think.

Now let’s talk about Alisa Simmons, because she’s the whole ballgame.

Simmons is the Precinct 2 commissioner Tim O’Hare told to sit down and be quiet, and this November, she’s running to replace him.

Before politics, Simmons spent 12 years as a broadcast journalist and then 18 years running budgets and public safety communications for the Tarrant County 9-1-1 District, the kind of job where you learn exactly how county government works and exactly where it breaks down. She spent ten years as president of the Arlington NAACP, served as second vice president of the Texas NAACP, and sat on the ACLU of Texas board. She ran for HD94 in 2020 and lost, then won her Precinct 2 commissioner seat in 2022. Since then, she’s been the loudest, most consistent voice on that court, demanding accountability from the jail, fighting the defunding of Girls Inc., and opposing the elimination of free rides to the polls.

When O’Hare and his Republican majority redrew her own precinct to make it harder to hold, Simmons ran countywide instead. And on March 3, she didn’t just win the Democratic primary for County Judge, she buried it.

Her platform is exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s spent years watching this county’s dysfunction up close. A full Department of Justice review of jail operations, independent oversight with actual teeth, and a direct reckoning with the 76 lives lost in that facility since 2017. She’s running on affordability, on fiscal responsibility that doesn’t require dipping into reserves to cover basic obligations, and on ending what she calls the constant partisan theater that’s replaced actual governance on that court. In her own words, it’s time for the Tarrant County government to get to work instead of getting into shouting matches.

I expect her to win in November. I’m not just saying that because I like her, although I do, a lot. I’m saying it because the numbers back it up, because O’Hare’s own party is nervous enough about Tarrant that they’re gerrymandering commissioner precincts mid-decade instead of just running on their record, and because Simmons has already shown she can win a race Republicans specifically redesigned to make sure she couldn’t.

So what does it actually take to get there?

Turnout, same as always. Tarrant County has nearly 1.5 million registered voters, and the difference between a good night and a great one lives entirely in the precincts that already agree with us and just haven’t been asked to show up yet. 

The Hispanic vote that swung so hard left for Rehmet in January has to swing that way again in November, and it will, if the same organizing that worked in that special election gets replicated at scale. 

The Tarrant County Democratic Party fielded its broadest slate of candidates since 1994 this cycle. That’s not an accident either. That’s what happens when people stop waiting for demographics to save them and start building the infrastructure to ensure demographics actually show up.

Tim O’Hare knows what’s coming. That’s why he’s spent his entire tenure trying to outrun it instead of earning it. Alisa Simmons is the one running straight at it.

You can learn more about Alisa Simmons on her website, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads.

If you’re in Tarrant County, please consider volunteering for her campaign.

Donate here if you can.

Tarrant County doesn’t need to wait for a statewide wave to matter.

It needs its own county government back, and it’s closer than it’s been in thirty years.

Rehmet already broke the seal. Simmons is next. Somewhere between two and five House seats are up for grabs. The good old boys know it, which is why they gerrymandered instead of governing.

Show up, and Tarrant stops being the excuse Texas Republicans hide behind. It becomes the county that ends them. And in 2026, Democrats take back Tarrant County.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Texas
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