I will be in conversation with Todd Scholl of the Center for Educator Wellness & Learning in South Carolina tonight February 15 at 7 pm EST.
We will talk about privatization of public schools and the attacks on public schools.
The conversation will be livestreamed on Facebook.
Tonight February 15 at 7 pm.
The supermajority of Republicans in the Tennessee legislature are driving fast and hard to enact universal vouchers, which means the state will subsidize the tuition of students in private and religious schools, regardless of family income. In every other state that has adopted universal vouchers, most of the students who sought them had never attended public schools. The voucher was used by families who could afford to pay tuition. The voucher was a nice plum for families that didn’t need it. And many of the voucher/receiving schools were openly discriminatory—against students not of their own religion, against LGBT students, against students with disabilities.
The Unity Group is a coalition of African American community leaders in Chattanooga.
It released the following statement:
February 6, 2024
Cc: Unity Group of Chattanooga Opposition to Universal School Voucher Program
This week, the Tennessee General Assembly is expected to begin the process of crafting legislation that would permanently affix universal school vouchers throughout the State.
On the surface, this would appear to be a worthwhile and noble goal. We hear numerous romanticized soliloquies to describe why this is justified, such as providing expanded access, flexibility, choice, and opportunity. The glossy and rosy pictures they paint would have one to believe that universal vouchers were the best thing for schools and students since assorted Crayola boxes, number two pencils, and Mr. Rodgers and Sesame Street starting on PBS.
Yet, the research and data paint a starkly different picture. In fact, at a budget hearing held in November 2023, the State’s own Department of Education had to concede that 63 of the 75 schools that received funding from the State’s budget program, well over 80%, were “private “religious “schools in nature. Even more shocking is that last week, a report from the Education Trust concluded that 39% of TN school districts receive less in per-student funding than students that used private school vouchers.
Also last week, a draft plan of the proposed legislation was leaked that illustrated that the expanded voucher program would have no accountability measures, no anti-discrimination provisions, and no safeguards for students with disabilities. It is no wonder that there was consideration to forgo federal education funding because not only does this proposal not pass the smell test, but it very well could be in violation of federal law under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
As a matter of record, there have already been multiple lawsuits launched that have challenged the constitutionality of the State’s voucher program, and in fact in January the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled that Davidson and Shelby County families could go forward with a potential suit.
From a fiscal management sense, the projected amount universal vouchers will cost Tennessee taxpayers is murky at best. If the budget shortfalls we have seen occur in other States are any indicator, then we can expect major cost overruns that will go down the well so deep it will eventually run dry.
A 2023 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Education Law Center provides a good analysis on this. In The Fiscal Consequences of Private School Vouchers, it was found that between 2008-2019, voucher disbursements in at least 7 states doubled in contrast to initial budgetary projections.
In Arizona alone, voucher spending for the current academic year is more than 300 million over initial estimates; it is expected that the State may spend close to 1 billion dollars for their voucher program. In North Carolina, there were reports where some schools received more vouchers than they had students. There are also numerous reports that voucher recipients from states across the country have made highly questionable purchases like theme park tickets, kayaks, trampolines and yes, in one instance a chicken coop.
It does beg the question, will one able to use universal voucher funds to build a chicken coop in Tennessee as we have witnessed in other states.
Perhaps most profoundly, the process in which the universal voucher program is being crafted is both procedurally and fundamentally flawed. While there has been a basic framework “leaked” to the public, there remains critical questions about transparency, accountability, and oversight. The general publichas received little to no official details on this plan, only that the voucher program is being filed as a caption bill which, if we can borrow from a metaphor taught to our youngest students, lacks the “who, what, when, where, why, and how.”
In a perfect world, legislation of such consequence would merit a public hearing where experts on all sides would gather to provide analysis, evaluation, insights, and recommendations. The directly impacted people such as your local school boards and local education agencies would be invited to detail if the proposed legislation would have a positive or negative effect on them. The people of Tennessee, the taxpayers who would ultimately have to foot the bill, would be allowed to give sworn testimonies like they do in their city councils, county commissions and school boards.
Without such a process along these lines, can the legislators in Nashville really be able to measure the temperature across the State? Will they truly be able to establish public faith, confidence or trust if a potentially harmful program is simply ramrodded down the taxpayer’s proverbial throats?
The Economic Policy Institute released a rather frank and somber assessment on the growing school voucher moment in 2023 entitled, “State and local experience proves school vouchers are a failed policy that must be opposed.” They noted that at least 23 voucher bills were introduced in state houses last year, with universal bills passing. They noted that there is, “growing evidence that voucher programs do not serve students and may deepen educational and economic inequality.”
Further assessments found within the report are: (1) Evidence and research suggests vouchers do not improve academic achievement or education outcomes; (2) Vouchers represented a redistribution of school funding; (3) Vouchers benefited more wealthy and affluent areas over low income and rural. Amongst other major points of contention, one of the more profound conclusions of this analysis is that universal vouchers are, “Ineffective, inefficient, and inequitable.”
A decision that will affect schools and districts throughout the State, rural and urban, merits greater public discourse, fiscal analysis, and research-based evidence. The lack of this type of transparency will truly make the universal voucher program, “Ineffective, inefficient, and inequitable.” For these reasons, the Unity Group of Chattanooga must be adamantly opposed because this program will not solely be about autonomy, school choice or expanded options, rather, it will be ushering in a new era of Separate but Equal; and for the sake of our children, we must be better than that.
Yours in Abundance,
Unity Group of Chattanooga
When an education story is featured by a major media outlet like CNN, you can bet it’s captured mainstream attention.
Many educators have worried about the pernicious agenda of “Moms for Liberty,” which arrived on the scene in 2021 with a sizable war chest.
What is that agenda? Defaming public schools and their teachers. Accusing them of being “woke “ and indoctrinating students to accept left wing ideas about race and gender. Banning books they don’t like. Talking about “parental rights,” but only for straight white parents who share their values.
M4L got started in Florida, as do many wacky and bigoted rightwing campaigns, but it has been shamed recently by the sex scandal involving one of its co-founders, Brigitte Ziegler. The two other co-founders dropped her name from their website, but the stain persists.
CNN reports that this rightwing group is encountering stiff opposition from parents who don’t share their agenda and who don’t approve of book banning.
The story begins:
Viera, FloridaCNN —
In Florida, where the right-wing Moms for Liberty group was born in response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates, the first Brevard County School Board meeting of the new year considered whether two bestselling novels – “The Kite Runner” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” – should be banned from schools.
A lone Moms for Liberty supporter sat by herself at the January 23 meeting, where opponents of the book ban outnumbered her.
Nearly 20 speakers voiced opposition to removing the novels from school libraries. One compared the book-banning effort to Nazi Germany. Another accused Moms for Liberty of waging war on teachers. No one spoke in favor of the ban. About three hours into the meeting, the board voted quickly to keep the two books on the shelves of high schools.
RELATED ARTICLEOusted Florida GOP leader Christian Ziegler won’t be charged with sexual battery
“Why are we banning books?” asked Mindy McKenzie, a mom and nurse who is a member of Stop Moms for Liberty, which was formed to counter what it calls a far-right extremist group “pushing for book banning and destroying public education.”
“Why are we letting Moms for Liberty infiltrate our school system?”
Florida blogger Billy Townsend was delighted to see Ron DeSantis get booted from the Republican primaries after the Iowa caucuses. DeSantis had large ambitions, thinking that the nation wanted his harsh rightwing policies. But he made the mistake of thinking he could run to the right of Trump. There’s no space there.
Billy hopes that voters saw through the hype about “the Florida Blueprint” and DeSantis’s promise to “Make America Florida.”
Before the primaries, in March 2023, he predicted that DeSantis would flounder, and he was right:
The same Florida state “government” of gangsters that destroyed the Florida state education system will invade the United States of America in 2024. Whoever wins this civil war-as-referendum — the gangsters or the country — will control the U.S. Military and federal law enforcement power.
We don’t know who will command Florida’s invasion yet — tiny Emperor Ron DeSantis (with his pseudo VP Jeb Bush) or Florida-ism’s Pope Donald Trump. But it makes no difference. Whoever wins their gross song of ice and fire will then lead Florida’s army of the dead right toward Colorado and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Florida’s political and cultural invasion of the country should be laughable. The Florida “blueprint” has made us a hollowed out shell of a state — pleasantly livable for people with capital (like me) because a few big private interests team up to “govern” our warm spaces enjoyably for customers who can pay. And a few cities, like mine (Lakeland), which is blessed with a money-belching socialist power utility, create a nice and warm urban experience.
But as a state, rather than a vacation destination, retirement home, or temporary crash pad for remote workers and tech bros, we are: extremely high cost, extremely low wage, extremely corrupt, high inflation, nation’s worst education “learning rate,” bad public service, high crime, low birth rate, high and spiking abortion rate, and very very old.
If America fully grasps that Florida Blueprint by 2024, I feel quite certain that we will repulse this absurd invasion-by-mafia. The referendum on Florida should not be a close run affair.
But our worst American billionaires and mouthiest showboating sheriffs like hollowed out states; and they far prefer mafias to unions or citizens mobilized politically around public good.
Florida is their model state for decadent capital cut free from any public oversight, public good, or sense of shared citizenship. And they will try to impose that Florida on everybody else by pretending that Florida is not Florida. Anti-civic capital is often dumb. But it’s heavily armed; and it has great sway — although not total away — over what the public is told.
Crushing Florida’s invasion — explicitly rejecting the failed “Florida Blueprint” at the national level — is crucial to any effort to reform Florida at home. The Florida Blueprint must culminate, in the military sense, as an expansive political force. That’s the sine qua non of Florida’s future…
Well, MAGA Pope Trump’s GOP smashed the tiny emperor’s irrationally cocky army of Pushaws and private jet jockeys as easily as Trump gropes unwilling women. (Sorry Trumpers, he is who he is. I can’t make your citizenship choices for you. But you will own them. Expect no moral mercy or understanding from me this time around.)
Trump’s formally adjudicated sexual abuse and Capitol Lynch Mob leadership aside, his defenestration of DeSantis is a useful first step. It’s good for Florida and America.
Even better, when America as a whole saw the “Florida Blueprint” personified by Gov. High Heels, America as a whole rejected Gov. Pudding Fingers thoroughly and humiliatingly, with the national contempt growing almost by the moment. Watching DeSantis in the polls has been like watching the Enron stock price circa October 2001 (go Google it, youngs).
Yes, in large part, that’s because he’s personally very weird and off-putting and cruel in the way that people who torture cats are weird and off-putting and cruel.
But it was also because Florida, as a model for America, got a thorough thrashing — including by Trump himself. Of all people, Florida Man Bonesaw Jesus himself attacked the Florida Model of “governing” a week or two after I published my piece.
He sounded just like me. LOL. I’d bet a lot of money his gross people read my stuff.
The GOP primary campaign ended that day, with the Trump campaign’s unanswered dismantling of Florida as an expansive idea. A loooooonnnnnng, slow humiliation ensued, tempered only by extensive luxury travel.
In some ways Trump is now running as the ultimate Florida man — full of gross indulgence and utterly devoid of any concern for the state where he lives. Only a Florida Man would have the chutzpah to run against Florida from Florida when the party he owns has been in power here for a generation…
Anyway, ya’ll will generally share my mirth for now in laughing at DeSanctimonious. We can do that together. Trump gives you permission.
But then you’re all gonna try to convince yourselves it’s fine to line up behind a more senile version of the Zieglers writ large — the Capitol Lynch Mob leader with a terrible economic record, a jury-adjudicated sexual abuser, a criminal openly running on “retribution” and “dictatorship on Day 1,” who you all know would rape your wife and daughter and force them to have an abortion after getting rid of Roe v. Wade.
If you are enjoying the news from Florida, open the link and keep reading.
The Florida Center for Government Accountability reviewed a police report about Christian and Bridget Ziegler.
Christian Ziegler was recently ousted as chair of the Florida Republican Party after a woman told the police that he had raped her. They had previously had sexual relations, and Christian contended that the encounter was consensual. Also revealed in the investigation was that Christian and Bridget had had a threesome with the accuser, and the accuser expected to do it again, but not without Bridget.
Bridget Ziegler is a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, an organization that lectures everyone about family values, encourages book bans, and accuses public schools of harboring pedophiles. M4L is especially indignant about any recognition of students who are LGBT or about books that include LGBT characters.
Bridget Ziegler is a member of the Sarasota school board and was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to the board created by the legislature to take control of Disney World after the Governor engaged in a public dispute with Disney’s management. Disney spoke out against DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, and DeSantis retaliated by dissolving the Disney board that managed Disney World in Orlando.
Bridget has pushed many DeSantis-backed measures in Sarasota schools that have been widely criticized as discriminatory to the LGBTQ community and also helped formulate Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Why would a woman who has engaged in lesbian sex devote her energies to demonizing LGBT students and teachers? It’s a puzzlement.
Michael Barfield of the Florida Center on Government Accountability began his commentary:
While Republican power couple Christian and Bridget Ziegler publicly pushed for “family values” and backed an agenda widely viewed as anti-LGBTQ, they were secretly on the “hunt” for threesome lovers and had prior concerns the woman who alleged Christian sexually assaulted her was too “broken” to properly consent to their advances, newly released police reports from the now-closed rape investigation reveal.
Among the startling evidence recovered from Christian’s cell phone, according to the report, was a list of women, including the alleged sexual assault victim’s name, with a one-word subheading: “Fuck…”
The report indicates that the couple first engaged in a three-way sexual encounter with the woman roughly three years ago, and it was on Feb. 19, 2021 that Christian texted his wife to “come home, stop, and pick up [the woman] to play again and be crazy,” according to the police report.
Hypocrisy. Rank hypocrisy.
A federal judge in Florida ruled against Disney in its battle with Governor DeSantis. The Disney Corporation sued Florida Governor DeSantis for violating its right to free speech. Disney spoke out against the governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. DeSantis urged the legislature to dissolve Disney’s governing board and replace it with a board appointed by DeSantis.
Disney sued, claiming it was punished for exercising free speech. Disney says it will appeal.
Now that DeSantis is out of the presidential race, America’s businesses will breathe a sigh of relief. Only in Florida will businesses be punished for disagreeing with the governor.
The federal judge in the case—Alan Winsor– was appointed by Donald Trump.
Thom Hartmann is at his best in this column. He writes about the current GOP obsession with a “Christian America” and compares it to what the Founding Fathers wrote about the role of religion in their new nation. Added to the current pandering is the fact that we now have a Supreme Court majority of six-three that elevates “religious freedom” above the Constitutional prohibition of “establishment” of religion. That means trouble for those of us who do not want to live in a theocracy.
He writes:
Monday, in addition to being Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, was National Religious Freedom Day. But what does that mean, and for whom? What would the “Christian America” that Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are calling for look like?
When I was a kid, my parents and our pastor taught me that Jesus specifically, and religion more generally, was all about peace, love, and people caring for each other. That’s what’s explicitly at the core of Jesus’ most famous and clear teachings at the Sermon On The Mount and in the Parable of the Goats and Sheep.
But the Republican Party, thirsting for more voters in the 1980 Reagan vs Carter election, realized that Southern Baptists had helped give the White House to Carter in 1976 (he’s a Southern Baptist). If they could just peel those voters away from Carter and the Democratic Party, they believed they could win big.
The issue the Reagan campaign decided to use to bring religious voters to Republicans in that election was abortion, a topic Jesus never discussed.
Up until that election, both former Governor Reagan and former CIA Director Bush had been open supporters of a woman’s right to choose; in the run-up to the primaries Reagan became an unabashed foe of abortion, and George H.W. Bush changed his position on the issue when he joined the ticket in 1980.The legacy of those decisions has brought us Trump, Qanon, and badly damaged large parts of what’s left of Christianity in America (church attendance is collapsing). It’s turned both religion and politics into armed camps. At the founding of our Republic, if there was any one topic that the Framers of the Constitution were mostly in agreement about, it was the importance of keeping religion separate from government.
More recently, even uber-Catholic Antonin Scalia wrote, in the 1990 Employment v Smith case rejecting Native Americans’ petition to overrule federal regulations and legally use peyote (an outlawed substance) for religious purposes:
“The rule respondents favor would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind ranging from compulsory military service to the payment of taxes; to health and safety regulation such as manslaughter and child neglect laws, compulsory vaccination laws, drug laws, and traffic laws; to social welfare legislation such as minimum wage laws, child labor laws, animal cruelty laws, environmental protection laws, and laws providing for equality of opportunity for the races. The First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty does not require this. …
“To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
Don’t tell today’s Republicans that’s a bad thing, though: Scalia’s list is a good summary of many of the realms they’re currently targeting. The six Catholic extremist Republicans on the Court appear anxious to overturn any final semblance of secular primacy in law, using religion as their excuse.
It’s gotten so absurd and frankly obscene that a reporter recently spoke with a woman at a Trump rally sporting a crucifix and a tee-shirt that said “Hang Joe Biden For Treason”; she was essentially arguing that Jesus would be all in favor of watching Biden’s execution.
Monday was Religious Freedom Day because it commemorated the publication of Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. That early publication (he was 33) not only asserted that all citizens should be free to practice whatever religion they wanted but, more importantly, that nobody should be persecuted for holding either a religious belief or no religious belief.
Jefferson thought it was more important than his having been a two-term president: when he wrote his own epitaph, he only included his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, his founding America’s first free university (University of Virginia), and his Statute for Religious Freedom.
Jefferson and Madison had a philosophical debate over which would be more dangerous: a religious individual who wants to bring religion into government like Christian nationalist Mike Johnson, or the government endorsing or subsidizing any particular religious group or belief like Trump is promising.
Jefferson (a Deist) was worried about religious leaders (a letter of his is *footnoted below) corrupting government; Madison (a Christian) was more worried about government corrupting his beloved religion.
For example, on February 21, 1811, President Madison vetoed a bill passed by Congress that authorized government payments to a church in Washington, DC to help the poor. Faith-based initiatives were a clear violation, Madison believed, of the doctrine of separation of church and state, and could lead to a dangerous transfer of both money and political power to religious leaders.
In Madison’s mind, caring for the poor was a public and civic duty — a function of government — and must not be allowed to become a hole through which churches could reach and seize political power or the taxpayer’s purse.
Funding a church to provide for the poor would establish a “legal agency” — a legal precedent — that would break down the walls of separation the Founders had put between church and state to protect Americans from religious zealots gaining political power.
Thus, Madison said in his veto message to Congress, he was striking down the proposed law:
“Because the bill vests and said incorporated church an also authority to provide for the support of the poor, and the education of poor children of the same;…” which, Madison said, “would be a precedent for giving to religious societies, as such, a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, flatly rejected government supporting religion in any way whatsoever, noting in a July 10, 1822 letter to Edward Livingston:
“We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: the Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.”
He added in that same letter:
“I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.”
Now we see that both were right, although Madison probably had the edge: when the GOP offered evangelicals political power and big money in 1980, it so corrupted many conservative Christian churches that they’ve today put Trump above Jesus.
It’s gotten so bad that fully a third of evangelicals polled said they supported violence to advance political goals, which is quite literally the opposite of Jesus’ telling the Pharisees:
“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
Not to mention his extensive preaching about nonviolence. He was MLK’s role model, for G-d’s sake.
Instead, Trump’s followers are busily sharing memes of him as their savior, while Speaker Johnson and his fellow travelers on the Supreme Court are working as hard as they can to open the doors (and money) of government to religious leaders.
Religion has a lot to offer people and often fulfills a basic need to stand in awe of creation, to feel at one with everything and everyone. Every culture all the way back to the Neanderthals have engaged in religious rituals, particularly around funerals: no tribe or group has ever been found that entirely lacked what could be described as religious rituals.
But, as our founders pointed out, religion should be separated from government as far as possible. Jefferson’s Virginia Statute says it explicitly:
“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
Instead, Republicans are exploiting that religious urge built into us humans to cynically pander for the votes of those people who’ve put religion at the center of their lives.
They’re reinventing America as a country where religion dictates women’s healthcare, specifies who can marry whom, and destroys the lives of people who weren’t born heterosexual.
They’re promoting movies/vids portraying Trump as the incarnation of Jesus, a bizarre sort of Second Coming worthy of North Korean propaganda.
They’re using religion as an excuse for bigotry, a rationale for government tax subsidies of churches that promote Republicans from the pulpit, and a weapon to wield against those they condemn as being insufficiently pious.
In the process, they’re harming both religion and our government.
Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke to a summit of Christian school leaders and pledged to them that the state would not prevent them from discriminating against students or teachers or families if they accepted students with vouchers. Governor Sanders, who previously served at Trump’s press secretary, pushed through legislation launching vouchers and protecting the state against indoctrination and “critical race theory,” even though there was never any evidence that teachers were “indoctrinating” students or teaching “critical race theory.” Nothing quite so satisfying as battling non-existent demons, ‘cause you always win. But Governor Sanders had to reassure the church folk that they could go on discriminating.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders made her support of Christian education crystal clear Monday at the Arkansas Christian School Summit held at the Capital Hotel — even hinting to a superintendent that she would fight to allow schools to set their own rules.
Brad Jones, the superintendent of Fayetteville Christian School, told Sanders of being forced to display an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission poster that includes sexual orientation as a protected class.
“We were like, ‘Whoa!’ Of course we discriminate, we’re a Christian school,” Jones said, then asked if that non-discrimination requirement could find itself in the LEARNS Act down the road with future administrations.
Sanders said there’s certainly going to be things that are fluid in the future.
“As much as we want things like the banning of indoctrination and CRT that we put into Arkansas LEARNS, that doesn’t mean that a future legislature administration can’t come up behind us and make changes down the line,” she said.
She urged Jones and the others in the room to be diligent about engaging and continuing to build those coalitions of support “to make sure like-minded people are representing you” in the Arkansas Legislature.
One comment said:
It’s disgusting they’re so open in their disdain. Imagine being proud of that.
Pretty sure Jesus didn’t feel that way.
Ryan Walters, State Superintendent of Oklahoma, decided that he needed some out-of-state assistance in banning books from school libraries, so he appointed Chaya Raichik, who runs a far-right social media group, to help him.
NBC News reported:
A far-right influencer who was accused of instigating bomb threats against a school library in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last year has been named an adviser to a state library committee, the head of the state Education Department announced Tuesday.
Chaya Raichik, who runs the incendiary Libs of TikTok social media accounts and is not an Oklahoma resident, was appointed to the Education Department’s Library Media Advisory Committee.
“Chaya is on the front lines showing the world exactly what the radical left is all about — lowering standards, porn in schools, and pushing woke indoctrination on our kids,” state Superintendent Ryan Walters said in a statement. “Because of her work, families across the country know just what is going on in schools around the country.”
Raichik’s Libs of TikTok accounts have more than 3 million combined followers on X and Instagram. Its content — which is often laced with bigoted rhetoric — generally singles out LGBTQ people, drag queens and their employers, and it criticizes them for promoting diversity, inclusion and equity efforts.
In addition to last year’s scare in Tulsa, posts by the account have preceded several bomb threats to schools, libraries and hospitalsacross the country in recent years.
Raichik did not respond to a set of questions. The Libs of TikTok account replied to a request for comment on X with a compilation of drawings seemingly from young adult novels that depict sexual encounters and asked: “Do you think this is appropriate for kids in school?”
Walters said in a statement, “Chaya Raichik and I have developed a strong working relationship to rid schools of liberal, woke values.”
In August, Union Public Schools, a school district that covers parts of Tulsa and some of its suburbs, said it received bomb threats for six consecutive days. The threats came after Raichik shared a critical video about one of its school librarians.
The video Raichik posted showed a school librarian walking next to a bookshelf, and it was captioned: “POV: teachers in your state are dropping like flies but you are still just not quite finished pushing your woke agenda at the public school.” The video replaced the librarian’s original caption, which read: “My radical liberal agenda is teaching kids to love books and be kind — hbu??”
Regular readers of this blog may have noticed (or not) that I never mention artificial intelligence. I think it’s ominous. I don’t like simulations of real people. I don’t like technology that can write even better than most humans. I prefer to deal directly with humans, not fakes.
Artifial intelligence may be deployed as a deceptive weapon in the upcoming elections.
2024 is a crucial year in our politics. On the ballot in the primaries and in the general election will be candidates who are offering theocracy, dictatorship, or democracy. They will use AI to woo and confuse voters.
New Hampshire blogger and former state senator Jeanne Dietsch has posted a warning about deep fake videos. The video she posts is titled “This Is Not Morgan Freeman.” The face is Morgan Freeman, the voice is Morgan Freeman. But it is not Morgan Freeman.
She also offers a warning about the three factions that are competing in New Hampshire.
She writes:
Elected officials no longer act as individuals. They vote as teams. In NH we have three types of teams:
Political parties no longer define the teams in this state. Undeclared voters outnumber either party by a third. In 2020, the “liberty” team temporarily took over the NH House Republican Caucus. Even though they were a minority of the 400 House members, they controlled the agenda. Pro-democracy legislators in both parties were powerless.
The story in DC is similar. The functions of the American republic are being held hostage by a small minority.
Will we fall for the deep fakes? Will we be deceived by AI? Or will we protect our democracy?
Diane Ravitch's blog 