Republican politicians and sympathetic media outlets are claiming that America is in the midst of a violent “crime wave,” driven in part by undocumented immigrants. New data, however, demonstrates that there was not a spike in violent crime in 2023. Instead, across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states.
In January 2024, the Republican National Committee claimed that “crime continues at historic highs in Democrat-run cities.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) declared in February 2024 that “[i]n Joe Biden’s America you get…cities plagued with crime.” These claims, however, are not supported by facts.
The most comprehensive look at violent crime in the United States in 2023 will come when the FBI publishes its national Uniform Crime Report. But that will not happen until the fall. But, as crime analyst Jeff Asher explains in his newsletter, the FBI report is based on individual Uniform Crime Reports submitted by each state. Asher identified 14 states that have released their Uniform Crime Reports publicly. The data has not been completely finalized and could be adjusted slightly before formally submitting it to the FBI. But this data is the best early look at violent crime trends last year.
Asher found that both murder and violent crime declined in 12 of 14 states.
The only states that saw murders increase or stay flat, Rhode Island and Wyoming, had a very small number of total murders relative to other states — 28 and 14, respectively. This confirms previously available data from major cities in 2023 that showed sharp declines in murder and a smaller, but still significant, decline in violent crime. St. Louis and Baltimore saw their lowest murder rates in about a decade. Detroit was on pace for its lowest murder rate since 1966.
Republicans and aligned media outlets claim that undocumented immigrants are driving the purported increase in crime. In a recent speech at the border, Former President Donald Trump falsely claimedthat the “United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime.” Trump has made the issue a central focus of his campaign.
Other politicians are following Trump’s lead. On a March 3rd appearance on Fox News, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said that “[w]e face a growing migrant crime wave because Biden has released into America tens of thousands of illegal migrants who were criminals in their own country.” In Arizona, Kari Lake – a Trump ally who is currently running for Senate – claimed Biden was allowing “literal foreign armies” to cross the border. The House GOP also issued a press release this month with the headline: “Joe Biden’s Open Borders Have Unleashed A Catastrophic Crime Wave Across The Country.”
On Fox News, “migrant crime” has emerged as a coverage staple in less than two months. Host Jesse Watters told viewers in late February that “[t]here is a migrant crime spree killing Americans.” According to the Washington Post, “Fox News hosts, guests and video clips have mentioned ‘migrant crime’ nearly 90 times” in the month of February.
Notably, the two border states that have completed their Uniform Crime Reports saw particularly sharp declines in murder in 2023, with 15% drop in Texas and 8.8% drop in Arizona. Both states also saw significant declines in violent crime overall. If undocumented immigrants were driving a violent crime surge, as Republicans and some media outlets suggest, you would expect to see it show up in the data from Texas and Arizona.
Every act of violent crime is significant, and the modern media environment allows news of individual offenses — like the alleged murder of Laken Riley by an undocumented immigrant — to travel widely. But Asher told Popular Information that “discussion of an increasing violent crime trend driven by migrants is lacking in any factual basis.” He noted that “violent crime rates in Texas border counties have remained relatively low and below both the rest of Texas and the US as a whole” over the last decade. That is not the kind of data one would expect to see “if a surge in violent crime was being driven by migrants.” Therefore, Asher said, “any hypothesized increases in crime committed by migrants is either too small to show up in reported crime data or the hypothesized increases are not occurring.”
Republicans, including the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC), are also claiming that “noncitizen crime including, homicide, burglary, battery, and sexual offenses has risen 514.7% since Biden took office.” This is false.
The data linked to by the NRCC tracks people who are arrested at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that have a prior criminal record in any country. It has nothing to do with new crimes that occurred in the United States. The most common prior convictions for people arrested at the border are illegal crossing and other immigration offenses. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an expert at the American Immigration Council, notes, the CBP arrested over 2 million people at the border in Fiscal Year 2023, which covers October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023. Of those arrestees, just 6,477 (0.3%) had a prior criminal conviction unrelated to their immigration status.
Researchers who studied the issue have found that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. From 2012 to 2022, undocumented immigrants were 14% less likely to be convicted of murder and 41% less likely to be convicted of any criminal offense. Similar research by Michael Light at the University of Wisconsin found lower rates of “homicides, sexual assaults, violent crimes, property crimes, traffic and drug violations” among undocumented immigrants. [Emphasis added.]
For a change, good news on the culture wars front arrives in Florida by way of successful activism, a less sycophantic Legislature — and a significant court settlement reached in a constitutional challenge to the state’s “Don’t Say Gay law.”
Students and teachers will be able to discuss LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom — as long as it’s not in the lesson plans. New, detailed guidelines from the state Department of Education about whatcan and can’t be said regarding sexual orientation and gender identity are supposed to be coming soon to school districts.
One can only hope these spelled-out rules focus on helping kids understand — and respect — all kinds of families that aren’t going away just because religious zealots desire it. And that they leave out the political hysterics of past years.
In other words, the rules need to be useful.
In addition to the court settlement, there were positive developments in the Legislature: Harmful censorship and rights bills infringing on free speech and a free press, and to ban abortion in the state, were left to die on the floor or in committees.
To save face and ego, the discriminatory “Don’t say gay” law’s chief instigator, Gov. Ron DeSantis, claimed the settlement as a victory over “activists and extremists.” As if we’re all blind to the fact that the activists at work spinning rage-provoking misinformation were, among right-wingers, the Moms for Liberty he heralded, a group now losing ground here and all over the country.
As for the state’s chief extremist, it’s DeSantis himself.
It bears repeating: Gender identity and sexual orientation was never part of the curriculum in kindergarten through third grade in Florida. As the legal challenge made clear, the overblown outrage created by falsehoods and exaggerations about “pornographic” books available to children was circulated by Republicans to set the stage to pass legislation.
They used the first ban on elementary school-aged kids as the conduit to extend anti-gay laws to prohibit the free speech of mature high school students. The courts saw that for what it was: an attempt to send back to the closet an entire community by silencing it.
Didn’t ‘stay the course’
Voters are tired of dogmatic hogwash hijacking educational institutions.
From the offensively watered-down teaching of Black history to the redefinition of subjects areas like civics — only patriotism allowed — plus, the more recent attempt to wipe out sociology the way diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs were, all these initiatives have brought negative, world-wide attention to Florida.
To add insult to the injury, the free-speech restrictions in public education are happening at a time when a voucher system allows parents to afford whatever private education they choose for their children. But it’s never enough. Republicans want to impose conservative ideology on the rest of us.
Some eager-beaver legislators heard him. But key players like Senate President Kathleen Passidomo of Naples and House Speaker Paul Renner of Palm Harbor didn’t follow his mandates this time like bobble-heads.
Perhaps they took their cues from Iowa caucus results: DeSantis pitched his “Make America Florida” — and got a no, thanks.
A new report ranks US states in terms of how well their legislatures are protecting public schools and the students who attend them. From expanding charters to launching illiberal attacks on kids and families, a worrying number of states failed the test.
State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe. (SDI Productions / Getty Images)
On February 8, sixteen-year-old nonbinary sophomore Nex Benedict died of causes that have yet to be explained to the public. The day before, Nex had told a police officer they were beaten by three schoolmates in a bathroom at their Oklahoma high school. Sue Benedict, Nex’s grandmother and adoptive parent, told the Independent that Nex suffered from identity-based bullying, beginning shortly after Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a lawforcing trans students to use bathrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificates.
In addition to the bathroom ban, Stitt has signed severalotherlaws targeting trans youth. There are currently fifty-four other anti-LGBTQ bills before the Oklahoma legislature. While the exact cause of Nex’s death remains unverified, it’s clear that the violence preceding it occurred in an increasingly hostile environment for LGBTQ youth in the state of Oklahoma.
According to the American Medical Association and the National Institutes of Health, bathroom bans put vulnerable kids at risk for serious harm. And even when anti-LGBTQ laws don’t pass, researchindicates that young people are adversely affected by proposed legislation that puts their safety and humanity up for debate, fueling a climate of tension and suspicion which can exacerbate bullying behavior and mental health issues. Per 2019 data, majorities of LGBTQ kids have experienced harassment or bullying in school, leading to increased absences and potentially dire long-term consequences. But LGBTQ students in schools with LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and policies are more likely to feel safe and report that their peers accept them.
In other words, adults — from educators to social media personalities to lawmakers — set a tone that appears to be highly determinative of whether school is a place where kids like Nex can safely be themselves.
This pattern is hardly restricted to LGBTQ issues. State-level legislation shapes the societies in which kids live and schools operate. For this reason “Public Schooling in America,” the latest data-packed national report card from the Network for Public Education (NPE), focuses on the extent to which each state legislature protects young people, both in and out of public school systems.
While the previous two NPE report cards have focused primarily on school privatization, this one goes further, connecting the dots between seemingly distinct attacks on public schooling that are advancing as part of the push for Christian nationalism: charter and voucher expansion, publicly funded homeschooling, defunding of public schools, and illiberal restrictions on kids and educators.
Using a points system based on how statehouses treat the above topics, NPE awarded “A” grades to five states, both red and blue, that demonstrate a strong commitment to students and democratically governed public schools: 1) North Dakota, 2) Connecticut, 3) Vermont, 4) Illinois, and 5) Nebraska. Seventeen states — all but two of which are governed by a Republican trifecta— earned “F” grades. The poorest scoring of these “F” states will come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to school privatization or the anti-LGBTQ laws curtailing kids’ and educators’ rights: 47) Arkansas, 48) North Carolina, 49) Utah, 50) Arizona, and 51) Florida.
Ultimately the report underscores a critical point: while schools are directly tasked with prioritizing child well-being and student safety, they don’t perform these duties in a vacuum. State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe — or, in many cases, severely undermining them.
Privatization: Vouchers and Charters
Vouchers, which subtract taxpayer dollars from public education and turn them over to privately operated schools and service providers (including for-profit and religious schools), have notched considerable statehouse wins in recent years. In 2023 alone, seven states launched new voucher plans, while others made existing programs available to wealthy families who have never sent their kids to public schools.
Significantly, while voucher programs’ costs to taxpayers have mushroomed since 2000, bathing state budgets in red ink, overall private school enrollment actually decreased from 11.38 percent in 1999 to 9.97 percent in 2021. That’s because vouchers aremostpopular among privileged parents whose kids were already attending private schools. These privatization schemes may be propping up academically impoverished religious schools, but they are not incentivizing an exodus from public education.
Vouchers take various forms, including traditional vouchers or tuition grants, tuition tax-credit scholarship programs (TTCs), and education savings accounts (ESAs), which turn large sums of public money over to parents with virtually no strings attached. With all vouchers, and ESAs in particular, there are few or no safeguards to prevent fraud or ensure that kids are actually learning core subjects.
Vouchers are a preferred tool of religious extremists seeking state-funded Christian education, but most state constitutions have clauses prohibiting public funding of religious institutions. ESAs and TTCs are designed to evade these restrictions by funding families rather than schools (ESAs), or allowing people to donate to private school scholarships instead of paying their taxes (TTCs). Generally speaking, voucher-funded private schooling is rife with discrimination that would be illegal in public school systems. A 2023 report by the Education Voters of Pennsylvania, for example, found that 100 percent of surveyed voucher schools have policies that overtly discriminate against kids based on LGBTQ identity, disability status, academic ability, religion, pregnancy or abortion history, or other factors.
Vouchers have made splashier headlines than charter schools of late, as Republicans abandon the decades-old bipartisan education reform truce. But Christian nationalists have also been using charter schools to press their agenda, with a significant increase in right-wing “faith-friendly,” “classical,” or “back-to-basics” charter schools (and at least one officially religious church-run charter school on track to open in Oklahoma). Another in-depth report from NPE documents this rise, noting that these charter schools, which market themselves to conservative white families, are nearly twice as likely to be run by for-profit corporations as the charter sector at large.
The growth of online charter schools, which have terrible academic track records, and charter schools run for a profit has continued apace. Thirty-five states allow for-profit corporations to manage nonprofit charter schools, and in six states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and West Virginia), for-profits manage over 30 percentof all charter schools. Fraud and mismanagement result in the frequent shuttering of publicly funded charter schools, sometimes leaving families in the lurch mid–school year. Since 2019, NPE has been collecting news stories of charter school malfeasance and abrupt closures (charter churn). Thirteen states have racked up at least fifty such reports: California takes the prize for one hundred and eighty charter scandal stories, and Pennsylvania comes in second.
Though often cleverly referred to as “public,” charter schools are not equally accessible by all kids. In School’s Choice, researchers Wagma Mommandi and Kevin Welner show how charter schools use branding and promotional strategies to sway enrollment toward students with more resources and fewer needs than the general population.
In an even more blatant example of the nonpublic nature of charter schools, NPE points to the phenomenon of workplace charters. Under Florida law, such schools are permitted to restrict enrollment to the children of a specific firm’s employees — functioning as a form of labor discipline reminiscent of the last century’s coal “company towns.” At the Villages Charter School (VCS)’s six campuses, parental employment is verified monthly. If a VCS parent hates working at the Villages (a large, highly profitable retirement community) and wants to quit, they had better be prepared to upend their kids’ educational and social lives.
Homeschooling
The number of homeschooling families spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to rise. Journalists at the Washington Post found a 51 percent increase over the past six years in states where it’s possible to track homeschooling trends. Once a practice found mainly among fundamentalist Christians in rural areas, it is now the fastest growing education sector.
Thirteen states directly subsidize homeschooling through vouchers or tax credits. A flourishing tech-based industry (including charter schools for homeschooling families) has emerged to cash in on these state subsidies, with parents putting taxpayer dollars to questionable uses. In Arizona, a proliferation of news stories has documented homeschooling families spending ESA money on things like LEGO sets, snowboarding trips, ninja training, and aeroponic indoor gardens. Very few states have regulations in place to ensure that homeschooled children are receiving basic academic instruction. In fact, most states allow parents to issue a diploma with no verification of student learning.
Culture warriors like Chaya Raichik have used the slippery concept of “grooming” to gin up fears about adults hurting kids in public schools. In reality, because public schools are governed by strict child safety laws including background checks and mandated reporting, they are much more likely to detect and prevent abuse than minimally regulated private schools and totally unregulated homes. Eleven states don’t even require parents to report that they’re homeschooling their kids, while fourteen more just require a onetime notice with no follow-up. Only Pennsylvania and Arkansas conduct any form of background check on homeschooling parents.
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education has cataloged about one hundred and eighty horrific stories of homeschooled children suffering and even dying from neglect, abuse, and torture in their educational settings. Nicole and Jasmine Snyder, for example, experienced things like having their heads bashed against a wall, being forced to stand in a dark hallway for long stretches, and having urine and feces smeared on their faces as punishment for potty accidents. They starved to death in 2016 and 2017, weighing five and ten pounds respectively. Because they were homeschooled, no one outside the family had any idea the abuse was happening. Their murders were not revealed until 2021.
Public School Financing
Researchers have clearly established the relationship between school funding and student learning outcomes. And because school funding enables everything from adequate staff-to-student ratios to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems to essential structural repairs, it’s undeniably a student safety issue.
To rank school funding, NPE looked at the following metrics from the Education Law Center, which issues an annual school funding report: funding levels (cost-adjusted, per-pupil revenue from state and local sources), funding distribution (how states allocate funds to high-needs schools serving economically disadvantaged students), and funding effort (the relationship between a state’s GDP and its investment in schools). They also looked at average teacher salaries, adjusted for each state’s cost of living.
The states that earned the most points for funding public education and narrowing resource discrepancies were New York, New Jersey, and Wyoming. Florida lost every single available point for school funding, while Arizona, Idaho, and Nevada lost all but one. Washington, DC, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all stand out for having exceptionally low teacher pay despite relatively high per-pupil spending.
It’s important to recognize that numerous GOP-controlled states are in the process of defunding their public schools — through spending cuts and policies that drain public coffers by enabling skyrocketing voucher costs coupled with generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. If this experiment is allowed to continue, it will ultimately disfigure the landscape of community life and civic participation.
Freedom to Teach and Learn
Because the right-wing attacks on students and educators have ramped up in conjunction with efforts to defund public schools and boost private alternatives, this NPE report card includes a new category, Freedom to Teach and Learn, which encompasses a range of factors pertaining to student safety and well-being: laws protecting LGBTQ students in public schools, corporal punishment bans, censorship and curriculum bans, collective bargaining for teachers, and teacher quality…..
[Please open the link to read the rest of this important article.]
The Republican candidate for Governor in North Carolina is Mark Robinson, who is currently Lt. Governor. He just won the Republican primary, which says a lot about the state party. Robinson is a Black man, and there is a long list of groups that he is denounced.
Faced with questions about whether he is antisemitic, homophobic, anti-Muslim and misogynistic, Robinson, who is Black, naturally responded by arguing that, actually, he is the real victim of bigotry.
When Kirk asked why Robinson believes he’s such a threat to the “MSNBC crowd,” the candidate cried racism. According to Robinson, liberals are only reminding people of his extremism because they fear a Black man holding power in the Republican Party might appeal to disaffected Black voters in the Democratic Party.
He said:
In my case, what they really see is they see a candidate that is able to reach out to those folks, bring common sense solutions to the problems they face, and then they see someone who looks like them and ultimately what happens there is we get into office and there’s success, and all of a sudden voting dynamics in North Carolina are changing for decades. And quite possibly, it starts across the nation. They’re very afraid of that. They don’t want that to happen. They cannot have a conservative Black man at the helm in North Carolina or in any state. Because it’s gonna show the great results of what president Trump did at the national level.
(Robinson has conceded at times that he wrote posts that were “poorly worded” but claims that they were not antisemitic.)
null
As for Robinson’s supposed strategy, there’s no evidence he has any sort of broad appeal among Black voters. In his 2020 lieutenant governor’s race, his opponent won, by a large margin, all of the majority-Black counties in the state. Robinson is, however,the type of candidate Republicans like to prop up to give voters the impression that far-right ideals have valence among Black folks — Black men in particular.
But the fact that he’s shrouding himself in victimhood, portraying himself as some sort of Black icon under attack from leftists, suggests he recognizes that the remarks may be hurting him in the general election. And he’s looking for some way — any way — to get past them.
The oil-and-gas Christian nationalists swamped a number of Republican primary races in Texas with millions of dollars. One big issue was vouchers; the other was payback for trying to oust the state’s corrupt Attotney General, Ken Paxton.. They managed to defeat rural Republicans who are conservative but voted against vouchers for religious schools and/or voted to impeach the state’s corrupt Stste Attorney General. And of course, Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass and Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos tossed in more millions.
Having Trump’s name at the top of the ticket made have made a difference too.
West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks entered the 2024 primary election cycle wounded.
Their political network was in the middle of a scandal over its ties to white supremacists. Republicans were calling on each other to reject the billionaires’ campaign money. And their enemies believed they were vulnerable — one bad election day from losing their grip on the state.
Instead, Dunn and Wilks emerged from Tuesday perhaps stronger than ever — vanquishing old political foes, positioning their allies for a November takeover of the state Legislature, and leaving little doubt as to who is winning a vicious civil war to control the state party.
In race after race, more moderate conservative incumbents were trounced by candidates backed by Dunn and Wilks. Their political network made good on its vows for vengeance against House Republicans who voted to impeach their key state ally, Attorney General Ken Paxton, advancing more firebrands who campaigned against bipartisanship and backed anti-LGBTQ+ policies. Tuesday’s election also paved the way for the likely passage of legislation that would allow taxpayer money to fund private and religious schools — a key policy goal for a movement that seeks to infuse more Christianity into public life.
All told, 11 of the 28 House candidates supported by the two billionaires won their primaries outright, and another eight are headed to runoffs this May. And, in a sign of how much the state party has moved rightward, five of their candidates beat incumbents in rematches from 2022 or 2020 — with some House districts swinging by double-digits in their favor. Of the candidates they backed, they donated $75,000 or more to 11 of them — six who won, and four who went to runoffs.
Tuesday was a stark contrast from just two years ago, when Dunn and Wilks’ top political fundraising group poured $5.2 million into a host of longshot candidates — much more than what they spent in the current election cycle. They lost badly that year — 18 of the 19 challengers to Texas House members they backed were defeated. Their only successful House candidate that year was Stan Kitzman of Pattison, who toppled former Rep. Phil Stephenson of Wharton in a runoff.
Among the triumphant on Tuesday was Mitch Little, aided by at least $153,000 in Dunn and Wilks cash, who defeated Rep. Kronda Thimesch in a campaign that focused on Little’s defense of Paxton from impeachment charges in the Senate trial last summer. Three days before he won, Little appeared at an eventin Denton County with Paxton and, among others, Steve Bannon, the political operative who helped rally the far right behind then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016.
And another Dunn and Wilks candidate, David Covey, stunned the state by winning more votes than House Speaker Dade Phelan — the No. 1 target of the state’s far-right in part because of his role in the Paxton impeachment and refusal to ban Democrats from House leadership positions. Phelan now faces a runoff from Covey and the prospect of being the first Texas Speaker since 1972 to lose his primary.
Certainly, Tuesday’s dark-red wave can’t be attributed solely to Dunn and Wilks. Texas GOP primaries have historically been decided by small shares of voters, many of them further to the right of even the party’s mainstream. This election cycle, the billionaires’ targets also overlapped with an unlikely ally, Gov. Greg Abbott, who poured more than $6 million into his quest to rid the Texas House of Republicans who defied his calls for school voucher legislation last year. (Dunn and Wilks’ political groups supported Abbott’s opponent in his 2022 gubernatorial primary.)
Meanwhile, Paxton barnstormed the state as he sought retribution against incumbents who supported his impeachment. And, perhaps most importantly, former President Donald Trump was active in many contests — following the lead of Paxton and his other ally, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and offering late endorsements that bolstered right-wing candidates.
Even so, the billionaires’ fingerprints appear all over the outcomes. Since January, they spent more than $3 million to support candidates through a new political action committee, Texans United For a Conservative Majority. That PAC is a rebrand of Defend Texas Liberty PAC, which has been at the center of a political maelstrom since early October…
Subsequent reporting by The Texas Tribune revealed other ties between white supremacists and groups funded by Dunn and Wilks, prompting outcry from some Republicans and calls for the Texas GOP to distance itself from Stickland’s groups.
As votes continued to tally in the far right’s favor this week, Stickland returned from a post-scandal social media sabbatical to gloat.
“We warned them,” Stickland wrote Wednesday on X, one of the handful of posts he’s made since shrinking from the public eye after the Fuentes meeting. “They chose not to listen. Now many are gone.”
Dunn and Wilks both made their fortunes in West Texas oil and, in the last 15 years, have poured more than $100 million into a constellation of political action committees, dark money groups, nonprofits and media websites that they have used to push the state GOP further to the right.
Their strategy has been to incrementally move the party toward their hardline views by painting fellow conservatives as weak and ineffectual — as “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only — and promising well-funded primary challengers to lawmakers who defy their network and its aims. With almost endless wealth, they have poured millions of dollars into inexperienced candidates who often lose but advance the far right’s long-term goals by slowly normalizing once-fringe positions, bruising incumbents, depleting their campaign coffers and making them more vulnerable in the next election cycle.
For years, many Republicans have denounced the strategy, noting that the state Legislature is routinely ranked as the most conservative in the country and warning that Dunn and Wilks’ no-enemies-to-our-right approach to politics would eventually cost the party elections and open the doors to outright extremists.
This year’s elections show just how successful the billionaires have been in pulling the party toward their hardline views.
Open the link to finish the story and read about the extremists installed by the billionaires to promote “Christian values,” like no gun control.
NBCT teacher Justin Parmenter has been reviewing the religious schools that now receive public funding and frequently posts his findings on Twitter (X is banned here).
Taxpayers in North Carolina should be outraged to learn where their dollars are going.
He writes:
A Union County pastor is under fire for saying from the pulpit that he would not convict a rapist if his victim were wearing shorts. And if you’re a taxpayer in North Carolina, you are funding his organization….
Tabernacle Christian School has received voucher dollars every school year since 2014-15 for a grand total of $3,649,766 in public taxpayer funds (that data available here).
In the past two years alone, Bobby Leonard’s organization has received nearly $2,000,000 ($902,315 in 2023-24 and $923,328 in 2022-23).
I would venture to say that the vast majority of North Carolinians would prefer NOT to have their hard-earned tax dollars subsidizing institutions that espouse hateful and violent philosophies like Bobby Leonard’s.
Unfortunately, private schools are legally permitted to discriminate against students based on factors like religious beliefs and sexual orientation, even when they’re receiving public funding.
And discriminate they do.
This voucher-receiving school in Fayetteville, NC specifically bans “Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, non Messianic Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists” and refers to homosexuality as “deviate [sic] and perverted.”
Please open the link and see how well compensated these religious schools are by North Carolina’s taxpayers.
Chris Tomlinson is a regular opinion writer for The Houston Chronicle. I tuned in to a zoom with him yesterday and learned that he is known for his fierce independence. I signed up for his column and discovered his thoughts about “the immigration crisis,” which Americans tell pollsters these days is the most serious problem facing the nation. Tomlinson thinks both parties have failed to tell the truth, so he did. Trump, in particular, has demagogued the issue with his fear-mongering.
Tomlinson writes:
The two-ring presidential circus performed along Texas’ border on Thursday, injecting cash into the local economy but adding little to the national debate over one of the year’s most consequential issues.
President Joe Biden met with local officials in Brownsville and blamed Republicans in Congress for blocking new border security spending for political advantage. He correctly stated the broken asylum system encourages desperate people to gamble their life savings for a chance to live in the United States.
“If they get by the first day, they’ve got another five, seven, eight years before they have to do anything because they know (the immigration courts) cannot handle the caseloads quickly, and they’ll be able to stay in this country,” Biden said.
“With the new policies in this bill and the addition of 4,300 additional asylum officers, we’ll be able to reduce that process to less than six months,” he added.
Former President Donald Trump paraded before U.S. flags and uniformed National Guard troops in Eagle Pass. He renewed themes popularized by the Ku Klux Klan a century ago, sowing fear of foreigners and painting his opponent as a friend of dark-skinned criminals.
“They’re coming from jails, and they’re coming from prisons, and they’re coming from mental institutions and they’re coming from insane asylums. And they’re terrorists. They’re being let into our, our country,” Trump said in a rambling, bigoted speech. “It’s not just South America. It’s all over the world. The Congo, very big population coming in from jails from the Congo.”
Immigration is the most critical problem facing the nation, Americans told a recent Gallup poll. The issue was top of mind for 57% of Republicans, 22% of independents and 10% of Democrats.
“A separate question in the survey finds a record-high 55% of U.S. adults, up eight points from last year, saying that ‘large numbers of immigrants entering the United States illegally’ is a critical threat to U.S. vital interests,” Gallup added.
Most voters believe Trump would do a better job on border security, while only 28% of Americans approve of Biden’s immigration policies. Biden is in deep trouble, with only a 38% approval rating and a base already angry over his Middle East policies.
Anyone who’s spent time along the border will tell you most Americans don’t understand what goes on there. For example, asylum seekers are not invading the country; they turn themselves in as quickly as possible. Most of the $29 billion worth of drugs smuggled into the United States crosses at commercial entry points, which are the arterial roads keeping our economy going.
Migrants, documented or not, are critical for our workforce and society. I know people like to draw distinctions between documented and undocumented migrants, but both contribute more to the United States economy than they take. Most undocumented workers would happily pay a fine to get right with the government.
In Houston, immigrants make up almost a quarter of the population and 31% of the workforce, U.S. census data analyzed by the American Immigration Council, the Texas Association of Business and the Center for Houston’s Future found. Immigrants in the Houston statistical area earned $66.5 billion and paid $11.1 billion in federal taxes.
If Trump rounded these people up and deported them, as he promised, the construction, hospitality and hospital services would collapse.
Houston is home to more than 572,000 undocumented migrants whose households earned $13 billion in 2021. Most have fake documents and paid $794.8 million in federal taxes and $595.6 million in state and local taxes, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office reported.
Meanwhile, Biden must come up with a new approach to processing asylum seekers after Congress made it clear they will not help. But he must overcome opposition from within his party and federal courts.
Federal and international law requires the United States to grant asylum to anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution. However, establishing which claims meet that high standard under current policies can take years.
The adoption of voucher programs has been a boon for religious schools. Schools that were financially troubled are now thriving with public subsidies for their students as well as an influx of new students.
This article by reporter Holly Meyer on the Associated Press newswire describes the good fortune of religious schools but does not mention the copious research demonstrating the failure of vouchers.
The Miami Archdiocese’s superintendent of schools says Catholic education is increasingly in demand in South Florida, now that all K-12 students regardless of income are allowed to use taxpayer-funded programs to pay for private school tuition.
Against the backdrop of favorable decisions by the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court, Florida was among nine states that expanded school voucher programs last year. So many families have signed up for the taxpayer-funded tuition reimbursements, some states are already exceeding their budgets….
The movement gained momentum amid fallout from pandemic-era school restrictions, debates on how transgender students should participate in school life, and wars over books and curriculum related to race and LGBTQ+ issues….
Some long-running religious schools are now planning for a fuller future after the wave of policy wins for the so-called school choice movement. Others hope voucher expansion comes to their state.
“We are moving into growth mode,” said Jim Rigg, superintendent of the Miami Archdiocese’s 64 schools. Accelerated by the state’s private school scholarship program, enrollment has risen for the last four years, reaching its highest peak in over a decade, he said….
Nearly 80% of private school families choose religious ones, according to P. George Tryfiates, public policy and legal affairs vice president for the Association of Christian Schools International. The association represents about 2,200 U.S. schools.
In a statement, he said Christian schools are, among other things, “a refuge from the cultural wars over sexuality.”
Voucher programs do not include accountability measures nor do they ban discrimination. Religious Scholls are not required to comply with federal laws so they may ban students with disabilities and students of religions different from the sponsor.
Most vouchers are used by students already enrolled in religious schools.
The voucher movement is a not subtle way of gutting civil rights protections.
At DeSantis’s urging, the Florida legislature passed a law known as “Stop Woke.” The law restricts teaching about race and gender in the state’s classrooms and bans “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in the workplace. Several employers sued to block the law, calling it a restriction on free speech. The employers won in the federal District Court, and the state appealed the decision. Today the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Stop Woke Act as applied to employers. It remains in effect for schools.
TALLAHASSEE — A federal appeals court Monday rejected restrictions that Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers placed on race-related issues in workplace training, part of a 2022 law that DeSantis dubbed the “Stop WOKE Act.”
A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the restrictions violated First Amendment rights.
“This is not the first era in which Americans have held widely divergent views on important areas of morality, ethics, law and public policy,” the 22-page opinion said. “And it is not the first time that these disagreements have seemed so important, and their airing so dangerous, that something had to be done. But now, as before, the First Amendment keeps the government from putting its thumb on the scale.”
The panel upheld a preliminary injunction issued in 2022 by Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker of Tallahassee against the restrictions. The law was challenged by Primo Tampa, LLC, a Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream franchisee; Honeyfund.com, Inc., a Clearwater-based technology company that provides wedding registries; and Chevara Orrin and her company, Collective Concepts, LLC.
Orrin and her company provide consulting and training to employers about issues such as diversity, equity and inclusion.
Walker also separately issued a preliminary injunction against part of the law that would restrict the teaching of race-related concepts in universities. The state has appealed that decision.
The workplace-training part of the law listed eight race-related concepts and said that a required training program or other activity that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such individual (an employee) to believe any of the following concepts constitutes discrimination based on race, color, sex, or national origin.”
As an example, the law targeted compelling employees to believe that an “individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin.”
The state disputed that the law violated speech rights, saying that it regulated “conduct.” It said businesses could still address the targeted concepts in workplace training but couldn’t force employees to take part.
But the appeals court flatly rejected such arguments Monday. It described the law as the “latest attempt to control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct. Florida may be exactly right about the nature of the ideas it targets. Or it may not. Either way, the merits of these views will be decided in the clanging marketplace of ideas rather than a codebook or a courtroom.”
Historian Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly analyzes the current moment.
She writes:
Behind the horse race–type coverage of the contest for presidential nominations, a major realignment is underway in United States politics. The Republican Party is dying as Trump and his supporters take it over, but there is a larger story behind that crash. This moment looks much like the other times in our history when a formerly stable two-party system has fallen apart and Americans reevaluated what they want out of their government.
Trump’s takeover of the party has been clear at the state level, where during his term he worked to install loyalists in leadership positions. From there, they have pushed the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and have continued to advance his claims to power.
The growing radicalism of the party has also been clear in Congress, where Trump loyalists refuse to permit legislation that does not reflect their demands and where, after they threw House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of office—dumping a speaker midterm for the first time in history—Trump lieutenant Jim Jordan (R-OH) threatened holdouts to vote him in as speaker. Jordan failed, but the speaker Republican representatives did choose, Mike Johnson (R-LA), is himself a Trump loyalist, just one who had made fewer enemies than Jordan.
The radicalization of the House conference has led 21 members of the party who gravitate toward actual lawmaking to announce they are not running for reelection. Many of them are from safe Republican districts, meaning they will almost certainly be replaced by radicals.
The Senate has tended to hang back from this radicalization, but in a dramatic illustration of Trump’s takeover of the party, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell today announced he would step down from his leadership position in November. McConnell is the leading symbol of the pre-Trump party, a man whose determination to cut taxes and regulation led him to manipulate the rules of the Senate and silence warnings that Russian disinformation was polluting the 2016 campaign so long as it meant keeping a Democrat out of the White House and Republicans in control of the Senate.
The extremist House Freedom Caucus promptly tweeted: “Our thoughts are with our Democrat colleagues in the Senate on the retirement of their Co-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-Ukraine). No need to wait till November…Senate Republicans should IMMEDIATELY elect a *Republican* Minority Leader.”
Trump has also taken control of the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself. On Monday, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel announced that she is resigning on March 8. Trump picked McDaniel himself in 2016 but has come to blame her both for the party’s continued underperformance since 2016 and for its current lack of money.
Now Trump has made it clear he wants even closer loyalists at the top of the party, including his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. She has suggested she is open to using RNC money exclusively for Trump. This might be what has prompted the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity to pull support from Nikki Haley in order to invest in downballot races.
But the party that is consolidating around Trump is alienating a majority of Americans. It has abandoned the principles that the party embraced from 1980 until 2016. In that era, Republicans called for a government that cut taxes and regulations with the idea that consolidating wealth at the top of the economy would enable businessmen to invest far more effectively in new development than they could if the government interfered, and the economy would boom. They also embraced global leadership through the expansion of capitalism and a strong military to protect it.
Under Trump, though, the party has turned away from global leadership to the idea that strong countries can do what they like to their neighbors, and from small government to big government that imposes religious rules. Far from protecting equality before the law, Republican-dominated states have discriminated against LGBTQ+ individuals, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. And, of course, the party is catering to Trump’s authoritarian plans. Neo-nazis attended the Conservative Political Action Conference a week ago.
But these changes are not popular. Tuesday’s Michigan primary revealed the story we had already seen in the Republican presidential primaries and caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Trump won all those contests, but by significantly less than polls had predicted. He has also been dogged by the strength of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. With Trump essentially running as an incumbent, he should be showing the sort of strength Biden is showing—with challengers garnering only a few percentage points—but even among the fervent Republicans who tend to turn out for primaries, Trump’s support is soft.
It seems that the same policies that attract Trump’s base are turning other voters against him. Republican leadership, for example, is far out of step with the American people on abortion rights—69% of Americans want the right to abortion put into law—and that gulf has only widened over the Alabama Supreme Court decision endangering in vitro fertilization by saying that embryos have the same rights as children from the moment of conception. That decision created such an outcry that Republicans felt obliged to claim they supported IVF. But push came to shove today when Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) reintroduced a bill to protect IVF that Republicans had previously rejected and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) killed it again.
The party has also tied itself to a deeply problematic leader. Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four different cases—two state, two federal—but the recently-decided civil case in which he, the Trump Organization, his older sons, and two associates were found liable for fraud is presenting a more immediate threat to Trump’s political career.
Trump owes writer E. Jean Carroll $88.3 million; he owes the state of New York $454 million, with interest accruing at more than $100,000 a day. Trump had 30 days from the time the judgments were filed to produce the money or a bond for it. Today he asked the court for permission to post only $100 million rather than the full amount in the New York case, as required by law, because he would have to sell property at fire-sale prices to come up with the money.
In addition to making it clear to donors that their investment in his campaign now might end up in the hands of lawyers or the victorious plaintiffs, the admission that Trump does not have the money he has claimed punctures the image at the heart of his political success: that of a billionaire businessman.
Judge Anil C. Singh rejected Trump’s request but did stay the prohibition on Trump’s getting loans from New York banks, potentially allowing him to get the money he needs.
As Trump’s invincible image cracks with this admission, as well as with the increased coverage of his wild statements, others are starting to push back on him and his loyalists. President Biden’s son Hunter Biden testified behind closed doors to members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees today, after their previous key witness turned out to be working with Russian operatives and got indicted for lying.
Hunter Biden began the day with a scathing statement saying unequivocally that he had never involved his father in his business dealings and that all the evidence the committee had compiled proved that. In their “partisan political pursuit,” he said, they had “trafficked in innuendo, distortion, and sensationalism—all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any.”
After an hour, Democratic committee members described to the press what was going on in the hearing room. They reported that the Republicans’ case had fallen apart entirely and that Biden had had a “very understandable, coherent business explanation for every single thing that they asked for.” While former president Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself more than 440 times during a deposition in his fraud trial, Biden did not take the Fifth at all.
The discrediting of the Republicans continued later. When Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) tried to recycle the discredited claim that “$20 million flowed through” to then–vice president Biden, CNN host Boris Sanchez fact-checked him and said, “I’m not going to let you say things that aren’t true.”
That willingness to push back on the Republicans suggests a new political moment in which Americans, as they have done before when one of the two parties devolved into minority rule, wake up to the reality that the system has been hijacked and begin to reclaim their government.
But can they prevail over the extremists MAGA Republicans have stowed into critical positions in the government? Tonight the Supreme Court, stacked with Trump appointees, announced that rather than let the decision of a lower court stay in place, it would take up the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for his actions in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That decision means a significant delay in Trump’s trial for that attempt.
“This is a momentous decision, just to hear this case,” conservative judge Michael Luttig told Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC. “There was no reason in this world for the Supreme Court to take this case…. Under the constitutional laws of the United States, there has never been an argument that a former president is immune from prosecution for crimes that he committed while in office.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 