Blogger Michelle H. Davis watched the Texas GOP convention so others wouldn’t have to. What happens there tends to leech into the national GOP, at least its most extreme elements. This is part 2 of her coverage.
She writes:
We’re on day four of the Republican Party of Texas (RPT) 2024 Convention, and it hasn’t gotten any less deranged. Today, the General Session began and featured speeches from Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton, Sid Miller, and your regular cast of degenerates. If you’re interested in watching, you can find it here.
Lt. Governor Dan Patrick chose to spend his time on stage licking Trump’s boots. He told the audience how he went to New York to show his allegiance to Mango Mussolini during his criminal trial and complained about how rundown the courthouse was. He shouted on stage that Trump was innocent, and there were no facts or evidence showing otherwise.
Baltimore-Dan also spoke heavily about the legislative process and how he changed the Senate rules to ensure Democrats had no voice. Then, he claimed that any bills from the House and a majority of Democrats voting on them would wind up in the trash. Because who cares about what’s doing best for Texans? It’s all partisan politics for them.
One Republican woman is becoming famous for all the wrong reasons.
I posted this same video on Twitter, and it’s currently going viral. The video shows a Republican woman/precinct chair pushing back against the Republican’s “abolish abortion” plank and comparing the Republican Party of Texas to the Taliban. Near the end of the video, she’s confronted by two wombless men who seem to be disgusted with her position.
The GOP is obsessed with preventing abortion, no exceptions. Here is their language:
The legislative priorities committee gave an explanation for each one of their priorities, which you can see here. It’s important to point out what their reason is for the “abolish abortion” priority.
The Republicans plan on going after abortion pills and websites like Plan C Pills and Hey Jane. They also want the legislature to make laws to go after abortion clinics in other states legally. It’s important to note that their language in this explanation includes “the moment of fertilization.” That’s going to be their excuse to ban IVF and certain forms of birth control, perhaps all forms of birth control.
No exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother, or the ago of the female. A 10-year-old who was by her father must deliver the baby! A woman whose life is endangered must prepare to die!
The Republican Party of Texas’ 2024 platform is going to be bat-shit crazy.
I’m still watching the platform committee videos. The Texas GOP’s platform is just as nuts as it was in 2022, if not more. It’ll give content creators something to talk about for months. They will vote on the final platform tomorrow or Saturday. A political party’s platform is essential because it tells us what a party believes and works toward.
For example, the RPT’s platform calls for banning all forms of sex education in Texas, and they call for an end to any mental health counseling in public schools.
Michelle H. Davis writes a gutsy blog called LoneStarLeft. She watched the state GOP conventions we didn’t have to. The party is the extreme edge of the white Christian nationalist movement. Thanks, Michelle.
If you aren’t already following me on Twitter (I’ll never call it X), that’s where I’ve been posting all of the bat-shit crazy video clips I’m seeing at the 2024 Republican Party of Texas (RPT) Convention. For some reason, I thought their convention didn’t start until this weekend, but I forgot it’s an entire week long, and their committees are meeting for 15 hours a day. My week is committed. I’ll listen for all the juicy tidbits and report all the crazy back to you. Get ready because some of this stuff is full-blown bananas….
I’ve been mainly watching their Legislative Priorities Committee and their Platform Committee, but their Rules Committee has also been meeting. I have to catch up on it later.
The Legislative Committee will make 15 planks the highest priority of the RPT. These are the 15 items they expect the Republicans in the legislature to pass and vote in favor of. If the GOP officials do not pass these “legislative priorities,” they risk being censured by the Republican Party of Texas, which, personally, I love. They bully their own, and it’s pure entertainment for the rest of us.
The Legislative Priorities Committee lets their delegates argue about which planks stay and which go. These speeches are giving us little gems like this one, where a woman discusses enacting MORE abortion restrictions on Texas women. (More on that later.)…
Why am I watching the RPT Convention?
I likely have spent more time watching Republican conventions, hearings, debates, and town halls than any other Democrat in Texas. I find them extremely entertaining, but I also watch the Legislature and Congress. Maybe I’m just that type of nerd. …😉
Women have a lot of reasons to be concerned in Texas right now.
The “abolish abortion” issue seems to be a big topic at this convention, even more so than the 2022 convention. You’re thinking, but hasn’t abortion already been abolished in Texas? It sure has, but when Republicans say “abolish abortions,” they don’t just mean abortions.
Two months ago, Lone Star Left was the first to break the story of the emerging Abolish Abortion movement in Texas, which we learned about through a leaked video at a True Texas Project meeting.
In March, Michelle wrote this about the “Abolish Abortion” issue.
The abolish abortion movement seeks to ban IVF and certain forms of birth control in Texas; they also are seeking legislation to give the death penalty to women who have abortions, even if they are minors, even if they are a rape victim….
There was also discussion about preventing women from traveling out of state to get an abortion. Some women objected by the men shut them down.
Davis believes that Democrats have an opportunity to capitalize on divisions within the Republican Party in Texas. The big issues in their 2024 debates were centered on “God and Jesus, putting more Christian values in our government, and persecuting the LGBTQ community. Every single one of them was a carbon copy of the other. The RPT is in shatters, and there is no one out there who can fix them.”
In Ohio, as in every other state, most children go to public schools. You would think that their elected officials would work hard to ensure that their district’s public schools are well-funded. In red states like Ohio, you would be wrong. Safe in their gerrymandered districts, Republicans are shoveling money to charters and vouchers, not public schools. Their generosity to nonpublic schools ignores the long list of scandals associated with charters, as well as their poor performance. Nor are Republicans concerned by the lack of accountability of voucher schools, not to mention their discriminatory practices.
On Tuesday, the Ohio Capital Journal’s Susan Tebben reported: “Ohio House Democrats have laid out a plethora of bills targeting the education system in the state, impacting everything from teacher pay to oversight of private school vouchers and the overall funding of the public school system…’Our principles are pretty clear on that front,’ said House Minority Whip Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati. ‘There is no better investment we can make in the future of our state than investing in the education of our students, and that every kid, no matter which corner of the state they grow up in, deserves a world class education.’
There is a problem, however, blocking most pro-public school legislation. Only 32 of 99 Ohio House members are Democrats, and in the Ohio Senate, only 7 Democrats serve in a body of 33 members. Due to gerrymandering, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected the district maps that are being used today, but the Court did not enforce its ruling. This means that, except in the state budget where compromises sometimes are demanded, most of the Democratic priorities languish. In the recent budget, the legislature enacted a second stage of the three-budget, phase-in of a new public school funding formula, but it was accompanied by a universal private school tuition voucher expansion.
Here, according to Tebben, is what has happened to a bill to prioritize and protect the new public school funding formula:
“At the top of the (Democrats’) list is House Bill 10, which seeks to hold legislators to the six year phase-in plan that was assigned to the Fair School Funding Plan, legislation that funds public schools based less on property values and more on the needs of individual school districts. HB 10 is a bipartisan bill which simply ‘expresses the intent of the General Assembly to continue phasing in the school financing system,’ which was inserted in the 2021 budget bill, ‘until that system is fully implemented and funded,’ according to the language of the bill. The bill was introduced in February 2023 and quickly referred to the House Finance Committee, but has not seen activity since.”
Ohio’s gerrymandered Republican supermajority won’t commit to the eventual full funding of the state’s public school system because, they say, revenue projections are unsure in the context of growing privatization and years of cutting taxes in budget after budget.
Ohio’s gerrymandered Republican legislators instead operate ideologically and far to the right. After Governor Mike DeWine vetoed a bill to deny medical care for transgender youths last winter, legislators immediately overrode the veto. Far-right bills from the American Legislative Exchange Council and other bill mills, and bills endorsed by the extremist but powerful Columbus lobby, the Center for Christian Virtue, now housed in the building it purchased across the street from the Statehouse, dominate legislative deliberation and get lots of press.
In October, 2018, on the night of a high-school homecoming dance in Southlake, Texas, a group of white students gathered at a friend’s house for an after-party. At some point, about eight of them piled together on a bed and, with a phone, filmed themselves chanting the N-word. The blurry, seesawing video went viral, and, days later, a special meeting was called by the board of the Carroll Independent School District—“Home of the Dragons”—one of the wealthiest and highest-rated districts in the state. At the meeting, parents of Black children shared painful stories of racist taunts and harassment that their kids had endured in school. Carroll eventually convened a diversity council made up of students, parents, and district staffers to address an evident pattern of racism in Southlake, although it took nearly two years for the group to present its plan of action. It recommended, among other things, hiring more teachers of color, requiring cultural-sensitivity training for all students and teachers, and imposing clearer consequences for racist conduct.
As the NBC reporters Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton recounted in the acclaimed podcast “Southlake,” and as Hixenbaugh writes in his new book, “They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms,” Southlake’s long-awaited diversity plan happened to emerge in July, 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police brutality across the United States. It was also the same month that a journalist named Christopher Rufo published an article in City Journal headlined “Cult Programming in Seattle,” which launched his campaign to make “critical race theory”—an academic discipline that examines how racism is embedded in our legal frameworks and institutions—into a right-wing panic button. A political-action committee called Southlake Families pac sprang up to oppose the Carroll diversity plan; the claim was that it would instill guilt and shame in white children and convince them that they are irredeemably racist. The following year, candidates endorsed by Southlake Families pac swept the local elections for school board, city council, and mayor, with about seventy per cent of the vote—“an even bigger share than the 63 percent of Southlake residents who’d backed Trump in 2020,” Hixenbaugh notes in his book. Some nine hundred other school districts nationwide saw similar anti-C.R.T. campaigns. Southlake, where the anti-woke insurgency had won lavish praise from National Review and Laura Ingraham, was the blueprint.
“Rufo tapped into a particular moment in which white Americans realized that they were white, that whiteness carried heavy historical baggage,” the education journalist Laura Pappano writes in her recent book “School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education,” which also digs into the Southlake controversy. Whiteness could feel like a neutral default mode in many communities because of decades of organized resistance to high-density housing and other zoning measures—the bureaucratic backhoes of suburbanization and white flight. Today, the Carroll school district, though still majority white, has significant numbers of Latino and Asian families, but less than two per cent of the district’s students are Black.
In this last regard, Southlake is not an outlier, owing largely to persistent residential segregation across the U.S. Even in highly diverse metro areas, the average Black student is enrolled in a school that is about seventy-five per cent Black, and white students attend schools with significantly lower levels of poverty. These statistics are dispiriting not least because of ample data showing the educational gains that desegregation makes possible for Black kids. A 2015 analysis of standardized-test scores, for instance, identified a strong connection between school segregation and academic-achievement gaps, owing to concentrated poverty in predominantly Black and Hispanic schools. A well-known longitudinal study found that Black students who attended desegregated schools from kindergarten to high school were more likely to graduate and earn higher wages, and less likely to be incarcerated or experience poverty. Their schools also received twenty per cent more funding and had smaller classroom sizes. As the education reporter Justin Murphy writes in “Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York,” this bevy of findings “lends support to the popular adage among desegregation supporters that ‘green follows white.’ ”
These numbers, of course, don’t necessarily reflect the emotional and psychological toll of being one of a relatively few Black kids in a predominantly white school. Other recent books, including Cara Fitzpatrick’s “The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America” and Laura Meckler’s “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity,” have also considered how those costs have been weighed against the moral imperative of desegregation. This is the axial force of a lineage that runs from the monstrous chaos that followed court-ordered integration in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and the busing debacles of the seventies to the racist slurs thrown around at Southlake. As my colleague Louis Menand wrote last year in his review of Rachel Louise Martin’s “A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation,” “It was insane to send nine Black teen-agers into Central High School in Little Rock with eighteen hundred white students and no Black teachers. . . . Desegregation was a war. We sent children off to fight it.” To Rufo and his comrades, there was no such war left to be fought; there were only the bitter-enders who hallucinate microaggressions in the wallpaper and whose books need to be banned from school libraries. A mordant irony of Rufo’s imaginary version of critical race theory is that Derrick Bell, the civil-rights attorney and legal scholar who was most closely associated with C.R.T., eventually came to be skeptical about school-integration efforts—not because racism was effectively over or because legally enforced desegregation represented government overreach, as the anti-C.R.T. warriors would hold today, but because it could not be eradicated. In a famous Yale Law Journal article, “Serving Two Masters,” from 1976, Bell cited a coalition of Black community groups in Boston who resisted busing: “We think it neither necessary, nor proper to endure the dislocations of desegregation without reasonable assurances that our children will instructionally profit…”
In the years before Brown v. Board of Education was decided, the N.A.A.C.P.—through the brave and innovative work of young lawyers such as Derrick Bell—had brought enough lawsuits against various segregated school districts that some states were moving to privatize their educational systems. As Fitzpatrick notes in “The Death of Public School,” an influential Georgia newspaper owner and former speaker of the state’s House declared, in 1950, “that it would be better to abolish the public schools than to desegregate them.” South Carolina, in 1952, voted 2–1 in a referendum to revoke the right to public education from its state constitution. Around the same time, the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman began making a case for school vouchers, or public money that parents could spend as they pleased in the educational marketplace. White leaders in the South seized on the idea as a means of funding so-called segregation academies. In 1959, a county in Virginia simply closed down its public schools entirely rather than integrate; two years later, it began distributing vouchers—but only to white students, as Black families had refused to set up their own segregated schools.
Despite these disgraceful origins, vouchers remain the handmaiden of conservative calls for “school choice” or “education freedom.” In the run-up to the 2022 midterms, Rufo expanded his triumphant crusade against C.R.T. into a frontal assault on public education itself, which he believed could be replaced with a largely unregulated voucher system. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public-school distrust,” Rufo explained. He had been doing his best to sow that distrust during the previous two years.
Twenty states currently have voucher programs; five states launched universal voucher programs in 2023 alone. But reams of evidence show that vouchers negatively impact educational outcomes, and the money a voucher represents—around eight thousand dollars in Florida, sixty-five hundred in Georgia—is often not nearly enough to cover private-school tuition. In practice, then, vouchers typically act as subsidies for wealthy families who already send their children to private schools; or they pay for sketchy for-profit “microschools,” which have no oversight and where teachers often have few qualifications; or they flow toward homeschooling families. Wherever they end up, they drain the coffers of the public schools. Arizona’s voucher system, which is less than two years old, is projected to cost close to a billion dollars next year. The governor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and former social worker, has said that the program “will likely bankrupt the state.”
Back in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has become the Captain Ahab of school choice—he fanatically pursued a voucher program through multiple special sessions of the state legislature, failed every time to sink the harpoon, and then tried to use the rope to strangle the rest of the education budget, seemingly out of spite. Abbott’s problem is not only that Democrats don’t support vouchers but that they’ve also been rejected by Republican representatives in rural areas, where private options are scarce and where public schools are major local employers and serve as community hubs. (Southlake’s state representative, a Republican with a background in private equity, supports Abbott’s voucher scheme—a bizarre stance to take on behalf of a district that derives much of its prestige, property values, and chauvinism from the élite reputation of its public schools.) White conservatives in Texas and elsewhere were roused to anger and action by Rufo-style hysteria. But many of them may have realized by now that these invented controversies were just the battering ram for a full-scale sacking and looting of public education.
Good news in New Hampshire! Federal Judge Paul Barbadoro threw out the state’s “divisive concepts” law, which banned the teaching of anything that might be “divisive.” The same kind of law has been used in other states to ban the teaching of historical facts and literature about Blacks and gays. The judge declared it was too vague to be Constitutional and created confusion about what was and was not allowed in the classroom. In an ironic twist, the law that censors teaching and curriculum is titled “The Law Against Discrimination.”
Nancy West of InDepthNH.com wrote about the decision, which certainly must have upset State Commissioner Frank Edelblut and Governor Chris Sununu, as well as the state’s busybody Moms for Liberty.
West writes:
CONCORD – A federal judge on Tuesday struck down the state’s controversial ‘divisive concepts’ law, which had its roots in an executive order by former President Trump, that limited how teachers can discuss issues such as race, sexual orientation and gender identity with students.
The law, passed in a budget rider in 2021, created a chilling atmosphere in classrooms around the state with teachers unsure of what they could discuss about those issues without fear of being suspended or even banned from teaching altogether in the state.
The four banned concepts include: That one’s age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, or color is inherently superior or inferior; that an individual, by virtue of age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color…is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; that an individual should be discriminated against because of his or her age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color; and that people of one age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color…cannot and should not attempt to treat others without regard to age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color…., according to the judge’s ruling.
In New Hampshire it’s called the Law Against Discrimination and makes it unlawful for a public employer to “teach, advocate, instruct, or train” the banned concepts to “any employee, student, service recipient, contractor, staff member, inmate, or any other individual or group.”
U.S. District Court Judge Paul Barbadoro ruled the law is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment because it is too vague.
In the suit filed against Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and the Department of Education by the National Education Association of New Hampshire and the American Federation of Teachers of New Hampshire, Barbadoro sided with the teachers and granted their motion for summary judgment.
“The Amendments are viewpoint-based restrictions on speech that do not provide either fair warning to educators of what they prohibit or sufficient standards for law enforcement to prevent arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement. Thus, the Amendments violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Barbadoro wrote…
The controversy escalated after Edelblut posted a page of the Department of Education website to file complaints against teachers for allegedly discriminating and a group called Moms for Liberty offered a $500 reward “for the person that first successfully catches a public school teacher breaking this law.”
Barbadoro wrote: “RSA § 193:40, IV provides that a “[v]iolation of this section by an educator shall be considered a violation of the educator code of conduct that justifies disciplinary sanction by the state board of education.
“An ‘educator’ is defined as ‘a professional employee of any school district whose position requires certification by the state board [of education].’ RSA § 193:40, V. Potential disciplinary sanctions include reprimand, suspension, and revocation of the educator’s certification.
“In other words, an educator who is found to have taught or advocated a banned concept may lose not only his or her job, but also the ability to teach anywhere in the state,” Barbadoro wrote…
Barbadoro was critical of Edelblut’s two op-ed pieces in the New Hampshire Union Leader.
“Despite the fact that the articles offer minimal interpretive guidance, Department of Education officials have referred educators to them as a reference point. For example, after showing two music videos to her class as part of a unit on the Harlem Renaissance, Alison O’Brien, a social studies teacher at Windham High School, was called into a meeting with her principal and informed that she was being investigated by the Department of Education in response to a parent’s complaint.
“Department of Education Investigator Richard Farrell recommended that Windham’s administrators consult Edelblut’s April 2022 opinion article to understand the context of the investigation against O’Brien, without otherwise explaining why O’Brien’s lesson warranted investigation. After witnessing her experience, O’Brien’s colleagues grew anxious about facing similar actions,” Barbadoro wrote.
What did she do wrong? She doesn’t know.
Edelblut, the state’s top education official, homeschooled his children. He was appointed by Governor Sununu. The governor likes to pretend he is a Republican moderate. Don’t be fooled.
Judge Barbadoro was appointed by President George H.W. Bush.
Politico reporters Liz Crampton and Andrew Atterbury report on Governor Greg Abbott’s determination to purge the Republican Party in Texas of any elected official who opposes vouchers. He managed to defeat some rural Republicans who put the needs of their communities over the demands of the governors. He has driven the state party to the extremist right by targeting moderate Republicans. He is fighting for a voucher program that will cost the state $2 billion a year by 2028 and serve mainly students already in private schools. In effect, the state would transfer billions to the mostly white, affluent kids in private schools while underfunding the public schools that enroll five million children, mostly black and brown.
Today are the runoffs that will determine whether Abbott has enough votes to pass a voucher bill. If he wins, he can deliver a plum to his wealthy and upper-middle-class supporters who send their kids to private schools.
Crampton and Atterbury write:
When nearly two dozen Republican state lawmakers defied Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to oppose a centerpiece of his agenda — the creation of a school voucher program — they knew they’d face political payback.
But Abbott’s vengeance has been ferocious, even by Texas standards.
He helped knock off seven incumbents in the Republican primary in March and is targeting a handful more contests at the end of the month by handpicking conservative challengers and collecting millions of dollars from donors in Texas and beyond. Another two anti-voucher incumbents lost even though they weren’t specifically blacklisted by Abbott.
The enormous amount of money pouring into Texas Republican primaries from national pro-school-choice groups sets a new precedent as national interests become increasingly intertwined in state legislatures. Abbott’s targeting of former allies has escalated a Republican civil war that is defining Texas politics today, all in pursuit of enacting a voucher law that stands to remake K-12 education in the nation’s second biggest state.
“It’s just so unusual for an incumbent governor to campaign against members of his own party,” John Colyandro, a Texas lobbyist and former top aide to Abbott, said in an interview. “He was the pivot around which everything turned here.”
Gov. Greg Abbott’s targeting of former allies has escalated a Republican civil war that is defining Texas politics today. | Ricardo B. Brazziell/Austin American-Statesman via AP
Backed by deep-pocketed conservative figures like former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, the school-choice movement has leveraged Republican majorities in state legislatures across the country to pass laws that provide families with lump sums to spend on private school tuition. The efforts, according to supporters, are meant to bolster parental rights by giving families the financial freedom to choose a different option for schooling their children.
Anti-voucher Republicans “thought they had a stronghold,” said Hillary Hickland, a candidate who was backed by Abbott and won her race in March. “They had this elitist air, that they know better for a community than the taxpayers, or the parents. And they were wrong.”
[Of course, it’s the height of irony to refer to the supporters of public schools as “elitists.” Abbott could not have knocked off his critics without the millions sent by out-of-state billionaires DeVos and Yass and in-state billionaires Dunn and Wilks.]
Ten states passed or expanded school-choice laws in 2023 alone. There are now 18 states that have education savings accounts, which allow parents to spend state funding on a variety of choices including private schools. Students are flocking to these programs, yet data shows that the majority of scholarships or vouchers are going to wealthier families already enrolled in private schools — not students leaving their traditional public schools.
But despite all the momentum across the country, voucher bills have repeatedly failed in Texas. That’s why Abbott and pro-school-choice advocates are continuing their big money push as early voting is underway for the primary runoffs next week. Even after knocking out a number of party defectors in March, Abbott and aligned Republicans are teetering on securing enough votes to pass school-choice when the Legislature returns with a new class in January 2025.
“We’re not counting our chickens, not stopping, not laying off,” said David Carney, a consultant with Abbott’s campaign, in an interview.
Abbott’s vendetta comes as other GOP figures are also going after fellow Republicans for perceived crimes against the party, notably Attorney General Ken Paxton’s targeting of incumbents for voting to impeach him. House Speaker Dade Phelan is among those under siege as he fights to defend his own hold on power in the runoffs next Tuesday.
In prior years, state legislature races in Texas typically cost about $250,000. But spending in some of these primaries has been upwards of $1 million, thanks to the involvement of pro-voucher interests attacking Republicans.
“We are outgunned here big time,” said Rep. DeWayne Burns, a Republican lawmaker fighting to keep in his seat representing a district encompassing Cleburne, Texas, a town on the outskirts of Dallas-Fort Worth. “This is a true David v. Goliath situation and I’m the David here.”
The negative attacks on anti-voucher Republicans financed by PACs have gone beyond school-choice and targeted the incumbents for lacking conservative bona fides on issues like guns and the border — often in false or misleading mailers, texts and advertisements.
In one example, residents of Mineral Wells, Texas received mailers paid for by Libertarian PAC Make Liberty Win going after incumbent Rep. Glenn Rogers, who lost his primary in March to an Abbott-backed challenger. That mailer accused him of being “anti-gun” and warned that “if we don’t vote Rogers out, he will only drift further left.”
Rogers, a fifth-generation rancher and veterinarian who was first elected in 2021, said that he was also accused of being soft on the border, an attack line he believes Abbott chose because that issue resonates more with voters than vouchers.
“If you tell a lie often enough, it becomes truth to a low-information voter,” Rogers said. “Unfortunately we have a lot of low-information voters. That doesn’t have anything to do with their mental ability, it has to do with them keeping up. Eventually it becomes truth in their minds.”
Although Republicans boast big majorities in both chambers and control the governorship, school-choice proposals were repeatedly swatted down in 2023, even after Abbott made them a top priority and called special sessions to address the issue. The latest proposal would have given around 40,000 students access to about $10,500 in vouchers for private schooling or $1,000 toward homeschooling.
Republicans, many from rural areas, who have long been opposed to vouchers over concerns that it would jeopardize public education funding, banded with Democrats for an unlikely alliance that proved to be a thorn in Abbott’s side. Those lawmakers were spooked by an estimate that the vouchers program would cost the state more than $2 billion annually by 2028.
“I voted for my district and I have no regrets,” said San Antonio Rep. Steve Allison, who lost his primary. “What the governor did is extremely wrong. Me and the others that he came after have been with him 100 percent of the time on every issue except this one.”
Abbott has major money on his side. Among the constellation of PACs and donations from wealthy political players dumping money into Texas elections this year, there’s Pennsylvania billionaire Yass. A major school-choice supporter, Yass personally cut a check to Abbott for $6 million last year, which the governor called the largest single donation in Texas history.
Yass has also given to PACs backing pro-voucher candidates, like the School Freedom Fund, which is affiliated with the Club for Growth and has run multi-million-dollar TV blitzes.
DeVos’ PAC, the American Federation for Children Victory Fund, has pumped $4.5 million into the races — nearly half of what the PAC has promised to spend nationwide this cycle. Of the 13 anti-school-choice lawmakers zeroed in on by the PAC, 10 candidates either lost their race or were forced into an upcoming runoff.
“If you’re a candidate or lawmaker who opposes school-choice and freedom in education — you’re a target,” Tommy Schultz, CEO of AFC, said when the fundraising organization was createdin 2023. “If you’re a champion for parents — we’ll be your shield.”
Another group, the Family Empowerment Coalition PAC, launched in June 2023 with the singular goal of defending incumbents from both parties who voted for school-choice. But the organization expanded its mission a few months later to include supporting primary challengers to incumbents who voted against the measure — and has spent at least $1.4 million this election cycle, according to data from Transparency USA, a political spending database.
Texas is just one state where the groups are getting involved. Make Liberty Win is also singling out anti-voucher Republicans in Tennessee and Ohio.
All that outside money comes on top of typical spending from big-name conservative donors in Texas, like Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks who each have donated at least $1.7 million to various lawmakers since July 2023, according to data from the Texas Ethics Commission compiled by Chrisopher Tackett, a campaign finance watchdog.
Abbott’s own PAC has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars this cycle to candidates seeking to unseat incumbents who opposed vouchers. He has handed out endorsements to challengers and shown up for appearances to back them on the campaign trail.
The Abbott campaign is projected to spend some $11 million during the primary races, including $4 million on the runoffs alone, Carney said. That’s a massive jump from the $500,000 he would typically spend for primaries, he said.
The governor touts school-choice as a means for parents to leave struggling campuses, often using districts in Houston and Dallas as punching bags. He recently pointed to Dallas schools having a resource guide about students identifying with a different gender and a Lewisville teacher dressing in drag as examples of why vouchers are needed — demonstrating how Republicans are leveraging the culture war to bolster support for vouchers.
“If you’re a parent in that situation, should you be trapped within a school district that’s focusing on issues like that?” Abbott said during a keynote address to the Texas Public Policy Foundation in March. “Of course not.”
By Abbott’s math, the Texas House is sitting at 74 votes in favor of school-choice considering who won their primary race and the candidates that reached a runoff. That count, though, would still put the House two votes shy of passing the landmark policy — upping the stakes for the runoffs.
“I came out with no ambiguity about where I stood or what I expected,” Abbott said. “If the governor puts something on the emergency item list, that means this is something that must pass. And if it doesn’t pass, there’s going to be challenges to deal with.”
As young Georgians, we share the belief that all children should have the freedom to pursue their dreams and that our futures depend on receiving a great education. To get there, we must equip every public school with the resources to deliver a quality education for every child, no matter their color, their ZIP code or how much money their parents make.
Unfortunately, we find ourselves in yet another moment of massive resistance to public education with increasingly aggressive efforts on behalf of the state of Georgia to privatize our public schools and return us to a two-tiered system marked by racial segregation. As public school students in high schools across Georgia, we believe that the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education is not just a cause for celebration but an invitation to recommit ourselves to the promise of a public education system that affirms an essential truth: Schools separated by race will never be equal.
Even as our country celebrates the anniversary of Brown this month, we know that our state actively worked to obstruct desegregation, which did not meaningfully take place for another 15 years. Seven years after the Supreme Court’s ruling that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional, the Georgia General Assembly revoked its school segregation law in 1961. Another 10 years later, a court-ordered desegregation plan finally took effect — in 1971.
In 2024, educators across Georgia, from Albany to Atlanta, from Valdosta to Vinings, from Dalton to Dublin, and everywhere in between, are working hard to provide students like us with a quality education, empowering us to build a brighter future in Georgia for all. Yet politicians in the Georgia Capitol seem dedicated to resegregating and privatizing our public schools by taking tax dollars meant to support all of the students in our communities and giving it to unaccountable voucher programs that favor the wealthiest few.
The long and shameful history of vouchers is something that politicians who forced them to become law this year don’t want us to know. In many cities, public education funding was funneled to private “segregation academies” where white children received better resources than children of color. Instead of making our public schools stronger and moving us all forward together, these politicians are defunding our public schools by more than $100 million and working to drag us backward to the days when Georgia was still resisting court-ordered desegregation.
We want our leaders to get serious about what works: fully funding our public schools so that we can improve our neighborhood schools. That’s where 1.7 million public school students in Georgia learn and grow, and where we all can have a say. Research all across the country shows that voucher programs will not improve student outcomes in Georgia, but we know what will best serve students.
Young Georgians like us need investments in our public schools so we have the opportunity to learn and thrive. Gov. Brian P. Kemp has $16 billion of unspent public funds — enough to cover the costs of funding our schools and investing in our communities. Georgia has one of the highest overall rates of child poverty in the nation. Yet our state is one of only six states that provides schools with no specific funding to support children living in poverty. By refusing to give our schools what they need, we are setting our schools and our students up for failure.
Politicians brag about Georgia’s teachers being among the highest paid in the South even though they know they have created a crisis around public education that puts our teachers, our parents and students like us in an impossible position. Right now, nearly every school district in Georgia operates with a waiver to avoid adhering to classroom size restrictions because they cannot afford to hire enough teachers. And though the American School Counseling Association recommends a counselor-to-student ratio of 1:250, Georgia mandates a counselor-to-student ratio of 1:450 students. Many schools cannot even meet that ratio because of a lack of funding. All of that is by design because politicians have refused to update Georgia’s school funding formula for nearly 40 years.
This year, as we celebrate 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education, we invite every Georgian to join us in our call for fully funded neighborhood public schools so that every Georgia student has an inviting classroom, a well-rounded curriculum, small class sizes and the freedom to learn.
The writers are members of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition. Nia G. Batra is a sophomore at Decatur High School. Hunter Buchheit is a senior at Walton High School. Ava Bussey is a senior at Marietta High School. Keara Field is a senior at McDonough High School. Saif Hasan is a junior at Lambert High School. Jessica Huang is a senior at Peachtree Ridge High School. Shivi Mehta is a junior at the Alliance Academy for Innovation. Bryan Nguyen is a senior at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. Rhea Sethi is a senior at North Gwinnett High School. Maariya Sheikh is a senior at Campbell High School. Harrison Tran is a junior at Jenkins High School. Sharmada Venkataramani is a sophomore at South Forsyth High School. Thomas Botero Mendieta is a junior at Archer High School. Kennedy Young is a senior at Campbell High School.
Steve Suitts wrote an important essay on the continuity between the “school choice” movement of today and its roots in the fight against the Brown decision in the 1950s.
Charter schools and vouchers are not innovative. Their most predictable outcome is not “better education,” but segregated schools.
Suitts’ essay delves into the issue, state by state. I encourage you to open the link and read it in full. I skipped over large and important sections. Read them.
He begins:
Overview
On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education—the US Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in the nation’s public schools—Steve Suitts reveals an emerging, seismic shift in how southern states in the United States are leading the nation in adopting universal private school vouchers. Suitts warns that this new “school choice” movement will reestablish a dual school system not unlike the racially separate, unequal schools which segregationists attempted to preserve in the 1960s using vouchers.
INTRODUCTION
On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools, the states of the southern US are pushing to reestablish publicly financed, dual school systems—one primarily for higher-income and white children and the other primarily for lower-income and minority children. This seismic shift in how states fund K–12 education through universal vouchers isn’t confined to the South. But it is centered among the states that once mandated racially separate, unequal schools and where segregationists in the 1960s attempted to use private school vouchers to evade the watershed US Supreme Court decision.
More than thirty-five states have created voucher programs to send public dollars to private schools. At least nineteen, including most in the South, have adopted or are on a path to enact legislation making state-funded “Educational Savings Accounts” (ESAs)—the newest type of voucher approach—available to all or most families who forego public schools. These families can use the funds to send their children to almost any K–12 private school, including home-schooling, or purchase a wide range of educational materials and services, such as tutoring, summer camps, and counseling.
In recent times, private school vouchers were pitched to the public for the purpose of giving a targeted group of disadvantaged children new educational options, but legislatures are now expanding eligibility and funding for vouchers to include advantaged students. By adopting universal or near universal eligibility for ESAs, states will be obligating tens of billions of tax dollars to finance private schooling while creating a voucher system for use by affluent families with children already attending or planning to attend private school.
States are rushing to enact ESAs while they still have the last of huge federal COVID appropriations to distribute among public schools. This timing allows ESAs’ sponsors—Republican legislative leaders and governors—to entice once-reluctant, rural legislators to support vouchers. It also camouflages the severe fiscal impact this scheme will have on routinely underfunded public schools after the special federal funds run out.
The states adopting ESAs are also structuring this emerging, publicly funded, dual system so that private schools and homeschooling remain free of almost all regulations, academic standards, accountability, and oversight. These sorts of rules and regulations are always imposed by state legislatures on public schools and are understood as essential to protect students and to advance learning. Even as legislatures are adding restrictive laws on how local public schools teach topics involving race, sex, ethnicity, and gender they are providing new state funding for private schools and home-schooling that will enable racist, sexist, and other bigoted teaching.
If state legislatures succeed in establishing and broadening this dual, tax-funded system of schools, the tremors will transform the landscape of US elementary and secondary education for decades to come. Calling for “freedom of choice,” a battle cry first voiced by segregationists who fought to overturn the Brown decision,1 predominantly white Republicans will take states back to a future of separate and unequal education.
THE UNIVERSAL VOUCHER SYSTEM
By the seventieth anniversary of Brown, five states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina) have enacted ESA programs that allow all or a vast majority of families with school-age children to send their children to private schools with state funds that equal or closely match the states’ per pupil expenditures for public schools. South Carolina adopted a “pilot” ESA last year, and a bill making its program permanent has already passed one chamber. The lower house of the Louisiana legislature passed a bill for a statewide universal ESA program to start next year, but the state senate is likely to delay adoption for another year to confirm estimated costs. Both states have governors who are likely to push adoption again next year.2
The Tennessee legislature adjourned in April without passing either of two pending universal ESA bills—only because Governor Bill Lee and legislative leaders failed to agree on which voucher bill to enact. They vow to pass legislation next session. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott used campaign funds from a Pennsylvania billionaire in the state’s Republican primary to defeat a handful of legislators who blocked his ESA bill last year. Abbott expects to defeat the two remaining state house members who failed to vote for his legislation—giving him the number he needs to pass his bill, while sending a political message that will keep his supporters in line…3
The historical context is shameful. Five of the southern states that now have universal vouchers also enacted open-ended vouchers in the 1960s—attempting to defeat Brown’s mandate for school desegregation. All but three of the states that have already embraced publicly financed ESAs were the only states authorizing segregated public schools on the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision.9
The fiscal impact of this rush to fund private schooling will be devastating to public schools. In 2018, all fifty states allocated $2.6 billion to finance private school vouchers. In 2021, legislatures increased the total amount to $3.3 billion and more recently to over $6 billion. If the eleven southern states enact the bills currently adopted or pending in their legislatures, their total funding for vouchers will be as much as $6.8 billion in 2025–26 and, according to independent estimates, as much as $20 billion for private schooling in 2030. This sum would equal the total state funds to public schools among six southern states in 2021.10
In 1950, about 400,000 students in the South attended private schools. By 2021-22, the number of private school students was about 1.8 million.
In 2021-22, 38.9% of white students attended public schools, and 63% enrolled in private schools.
AS VOUCHERS SPREAD, BROWN’S PROMISE DIES
During the last seventy years, the nation’s public schools have struggled in meeting the promise of Brown, despite clear proof that racially integrated, well-funded schools improve outcomes for Black children.39 This promise has been especially important to the South, where the states’ first education laws prohibited Black persons from being taught to read or write; where racially segregated schools offered children of color an inferior education across more than a half century. Due to stubborn, racially defined housing patterns, increasing class disparities, adverse, even hostile Supreme Court decisions, a lack of local, interracial community support, and, as recent research confirms, the growth of school choice, public schools continue to face far too many hurdles in providing all children with a good education.40
Mural by Michael Young celebrating the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court decision, in the Kansas State Capitol, Topeka, Kansa, May 23, 2019. Photograph by Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
The South’s new dual school system renounces and annuls the mandates and hopes of Brown v. Board of Education. As universal vouchers spread, Brown’s promise dies. By their design, vouchers are an abandonment of Brown’s goal of equality of educational opportunity.
Reestablishing a dual school system will damage the prospects of a good education for all who attend public schools—not just low-income and minority children. The southern states were not able to finance two separate school systems during the era of segregation, even though Black students received a pittance of funding. Today that inability remains. The South continues to be far behind the rest of the nation in state and local funding of public schools. The new schemes of universal Education Savings Account vouchers will exacerbate the lack of sufficient funds for all except those higher-income families whose school-age children can attend private schools or home-schools and enjoy the enhancements and enriching experience that vouchers will subsidize.
Parents, grandparents, and others who support public schools and the democratic promise of public education must raise our voices against this reactionary movement and in furtherance of the importance of public schools. Like democracy itself, public schools may be the worst system for delivering all children an equal opportunity for a good education—except for all the others. We must not betray or abandon public education if we are committed to the democratic goal of a more perfect union and a good society for all.
Robyn Dixon and other staff of The Washington Post wrote a stunning account of the “new Russia” that Putin is determined to create. It’s worth subscribing to read it in full. The “new Russia” is militaristic; dissent is forbidden; women are encouraged to have eight children; LGBT people and symbols are stigmatized; Stalin is revered.
Here are some excerpts from an important and upsetting article:
Vladimir Putin is positioning Russia as America’s most dangerous and aggressive enemy, and transforming his country in ways that stand to make it a bitter adversary of the West for decades to come.
Over more than six months, The Washington Post examined the profound changes sweeping Russia as Putin has used his war in Ukraine to cement his authoritarian grip on power.
The Russian leader is militarizing his society and infusing it with patriotic fervor, reshaping the education system, condemning scientists as traitors, promoting a new Orthodox religiosity and retrograde roles for women, and conditioning a new generation of youth to view the West as a mortal enemy in a fight for Russia’s very survival…
Russia’s leader-for-life is working to restore his country’s global power of the Soviet era — not as a Communist bulwark but as a champion of Orthodox Christian values and an opponent of liberal freedoms in permanent conflict with the West, in a world redivided by big powers into spheres of influence where authoritarianism is an accepted alternative to democracy. Flouting global norms and thumbing his nose at international institutions, Putin is forging military partnerships with other totalitarian regimes that also view the United States as a threat, including China, Iran and North Korea.
The new Russia claims to defend Orthodox values against Western cultural influences.
In November 2022, Putin signed a decree defining Orthodox values, puritanical morality and the rejection of LGBTQ+ identity as crucial to Russia’s national security. Putin has outlined a messianic mission to save the world from what he calls a decadent, permissive West, an approach he hopes will resonate in socially conservative nations in the Global South. The highly politicized judicial system and media heavily controlled by the Kremlin are being used to crack down on nightclubs and parties, and new patriotic mandates are being imposed on artists, filmmakers and cultural institutions.
The new Russia is militarizing society and indoctrinating a new generation of patriots.
Harnessing the war in Ukraine, Putin has engineered a deeply militarized society, rewarding war veterans and their children with places in higher education; introducing military training in schools; and elevating those involved in the war into leadership roles. Telegram channels tell women how to be good soldiers’ wives (by not complaining or crying); schoolchildren make drone fins, trench candles and custom socks for soldiers with amputed limbs. The education system has been imbued with patriotic fervor. Liberal humanities programs are shut down in favor of programs that promote nationalist ideology, and partnerships with Western schools have been canceled.
The new Russia is glorifying Stalin and rewriting history to whitewash Soviet crimes
Some people who had close contact with Putin in his early years as president described his fervent mission to rebuild Russia as a superpower and his admiration not only for imperial czars but also for the Soviet dictator and wartime leader Joseph Stalin, who engineered the Great Terror, the purges of the mid-to-late 1930s, sent millions to the gulag system of prisons and forced labor camps, and had about 800,000 people executed for political reasons. At least 95 of the 110 Stalin monuments in Russia were erected during Putin’s time as leader.
The new Russia is crushing all dissent and restricting personal freedoms.
Putin has squashed the political opposition in Russia making protests illegal, criminalizing criticism of the war, and designating liberal nongovernmental organizations and independent media, journalists, writers, lawyers and activists as foreign agents, undesirable organizations, extremists or terrorists. Hundreds of political activists have been jailed. Tens of thousands of Russians have fled in a historic exodus, with some worried they would be cut off from the world by sanctions, some afraid of being conscripted and sent to the front, and others fearing they would be persecuted for opposing Putin or the war.
MOSCOW — As Vladimir Putin persists in his bloody campaign to conquer Ukraine, the Russian leader is directing an equally momentous transformation at home — re-engineering his country into a regressive, militarized society that views the West as its mortal enemy.
Putin’s inauguration on Tuesday for a fifth term will not only mark his 25-year-long grip on power but also showcase Russia’s shift into what pro-Kremlin commentators call a “revolutionary power,” set on upending the global order, making its own rules, and demanding that totalitarian autocracy be respected as a legitimate alternative to democracy in a world redivided by big powers into spheres of influence…
To carry out this transformation, the Kremlin is:
Forging an ultraconservative, puritanical society mobilized against liberal freedoms and especially hostile to gay and transgender people, in which family policy and social welfare spending boost traditional Orthodox values.
Reshaping education at all levels to indoctrinate a new generation of turbo-patriot youth, with textbooks rewritten to reflect Kremlin propaganda, patriotic curriculums set by the state and, from September, compulsory military lessons taught by soldiers called “Basics of Security and Protection of the Motherland,” which will include training on handling Kalashnikov assault rifles, grenades and drones.
Sterilizing cultural life with blacklists of liberal or antiwar performers, directors, writers and artists, and with new nationalistic mandates for museums and filmmakers.
Mobilizing zealous pro-war activism under the brutal Z symbol, which was initially painted on the side of Russian tanks invading Ukraine but has since spread to government buildings, posters, schools and orchestrated demonstrations.
Rolling back women’s rights with a torrent of propaganda about the need to give birth — young and often — and by curbing ease of access to abortions, and charging feminist activists and liberal female journalists with terrorism, extremism, discrediting the military and other offenses.
Rewriting history to celebrate Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator who sent millions to the gulag, through at least 95 of the 110 monuments in Russia erected during Putin’s time as leader. Meanwhile, Memorial, a human rights group that exposed Stalin’s crimes and shared the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, was shut down and its pacificist co-chairman Oleg Orlov, 71, jailed.
Accusing scientists of treason; equating criticism of the war or of Putin with terrorism or extremism; and building a new, militarized elite of “warriors and workers” willing to take up arms, redraw international boundaries and violate global norms on orders of Russia’s strongman ruler.
“They’re trying to develop this scientific Putinism as a basis of propaganda, as a basis of ideology, as a basis of historical education,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “They need an obedient new generation — indoctrinated robots in an ideological sense — supporting Putin, supporting his ideas, supporting this militarization of consciousness.”
Kolesnikov, speaking in an interview in Moscow, added: “They need cannon fodder for the future…”
As he fractures global ties and girds his nation for a forever war with the West, riot police in Russia are raiding nightclubs and private parties, beating up guests and prosecuting gay bar owners. Russians have been jailed or fined for wearing rainbow earrings or displaying rainbow flags. Dissidents who were imprisoned in Soviet times are once again behind bars — this time for denouncing the war.
The Kremlin has defended the crackdown as responding to popular demand…
“In Russian families, many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, and even more. Let’s preserve and revive these wonderful traditions,” Putin said in a November speech dedicated to “a thousand-year, eternal Russia.”
The emphasis is on a special and powerful state dominated by Putin, on centuries-old Russian self-reliance and stoicism, and the sacrifice of individual rights to the regime. Men give their lives in war or work. Women should give their bodies by birthing children.
But the main point of his article is that the students protesting against Israel and calling Biden “Genocide Joe” are helping to elect Trump.
Trump will be far harsher towards student protestors than Biden and far closer to Netanyahu. Trump promises to use the National Guard to crack down on student protestors and to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.
He wrote that Trump:
….said he would change the law to reverse “a bias against White” people: “I think there is a definite anti-White feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed.” He walked away from his previous support for a Palestinian state, saying “I’m not sure a two-state solution anymore is going to work.” And he said he wouldn’t hesitate to use the National Guard against pro-Palestinian protesters while also leaving open the possibility of using the broader U.S. military against them.
Those last Trump positions — the restoration of white power, the rejection of a Palestinian homeland, the willingness to mobilize troops against peaceful demonstrators — show how deeply misguided those on the far left are as they protest Biden’s policies on Gaza. Their frustration with the president’s support for Israel is understandable. But in making Biden the enemy, including with chants of “Genocide Joe,” the plans to trash the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the proliferation of vows of the “uncommitted” never to vote for Biden, they are in effect working to elect Trump. This isn’t principled protest; it’s nihilism.
They are working to help return to office an authoritarian who just last week said the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville was “like a peanut compared to the riots and the anti-Israel protests that are happening all over our country.” In recent months, Trump said Israel should be allowed to “finish the job” in Gaza and boasted about cutting off aid to Palestinians. And he has vowed, if elected, to reimpose his travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries and “expand it even further.”
For those student protesters too young to remember, this is the guy who led the anti-Muslim “birther” campaign against President Barack Obama; who claimed thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 terrorist attacks; who said “Islam hates us” and employed several anti-Muslim bigots in his administration; who wanted to have police surveillance of U.S. mosques; who called for a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”; who retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda videos by a white supremacist; and who told figures such as Palestinian American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
So it’s entirely consistent that, in Wisconsin on Wednesday, he said that he’s “restoring the travel ban, suspending refugee admissions and keeping terrorists the hell out of our country.” He went on: “We’ve seen what happened when Europe opened their doors to jihad. Look at Paris, Look at London. They’re no longer recognizable.” Trump, on Hannity’s show this week, called the demonstrators at Columbia “paid agitators” and “brainwashed.” At his Wisconsin rally, he condemned the “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers at Columbia and other colleges.” He called for authorities to “vanquish the radicals,” many of whom “come from foreign countries.”
None of this should be surprising, either, for this is the same guy who called thousands of National Guard troops to Washington and federal police to Oregon to combat racial-justice demonstrators after the George Floyd killing; who held a Bible-wielding photo op in Lafayette Square after authorities cleared a peaceful demonstration with tear gas; who, according to his own former defense secretary, suggested to military leaders that they shoot demonstrators; who calls the free press the “enemy of the American people”; who defended the “very fine people” among the Nazis in Charlottesville and who called those convicted of attacking the Capitol “hostages.”
Yet the pro-Palestinian activists, through their actions, would return the author of this ugliness to the White House. They must have been doing for the last eight years what Trump has been doing in court the last three weeks: napping.
Diane Ravitch's blog 