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New Republic: Elon Musk is the Biggest Scoundrel of 2023

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2023 //
27

The New Republic has named Elon Musk its scoundrel of the year. Forbes Magazine just named him as the richest man in the world, with assets of more than $250 billion. Just goes to show, I suppose, that you can’t buy respect, although he could easily buy The New Republic and make Mark Zuckerberg the biggest scoundrel next year. Musk has welcomed all previously banned characters back to Twitter, be they fascists, Neo-Nazis, bigots, election-deniers, or COVID liars. So go to Twitter to read the latest thoughts of Alec Jones or Mr. MAGA. However, I will note with protest that my brother was banned from Twitter five years ago for writing an offensive tweet about Trump. When he read that Musk was allowing everyone back, he appealed to have his Twitter account restored, he was rejected. Alec Jones, ok; Donald Trump, ok; my brother, Sandy S., rejected.

Alex Shephard wrote in The New Republic:

In one sense, Elon Musk has gotten exactly what he wanted. For all his talk about free speech, his primary motivation for sinking $44 billion into buying Twitter last year was clearly an unquenchable desire to be the center of attention. After Donald Trump’s defenestration in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, there was a main-character-size hole on the social network: Enter Musk and his infantile need for validation.

That Twitter—now renamed X, for reasons only Musk really understands—is now teetering on the brink of collapse and worth less than half what the world’s second-richest man paid for it is funny. It elicits deserved schadenfreude. Musk entered Twitter’s office carrying a sink—a terrible joke, and one of his better ones—last fall and has subsequently made countless decisions, big and small, all of which have made the platform significantly less viable and less worth spending any amount of time on. It is hard to think of a billionaire who has done more to damage their own reputation in such a short period of time.

Not so long ago, Musk was seen by many as a good tech billionaire, if not the good tech billionaire. While others like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg built digital trinkets that actively made the world a worse place, Musk was something different: a visionary intent on building real things, whether they be electric cars or rockets, that were aimed at accelerating a Jetsons-like vision of the future. While rivals at Google and Facebook—and, for that matter, Twitter—were hauled before Congress to testify about the deleterious effects of their creations, Musk remained relatively unscathed. Now it is clear that he is not just more villainous than all of them but that he is also a deeply stupid and unserious person.

Elon Musk is evil. While he has mostly made headlines for his incompetence, he has unleashed and legitimized truly heinous forces on Twitter: He has welcomed back some of the world’s most toxic people—Alex Jones, Donald Trump, innumerable Nazis and bigots—and has gone out of his way, again and again, to validate them. That Musk would endorse a heinous antisemitic conspiracy theory, as he did last month, is both unsurprising and reprehensible. It is, more than anything else, a reflection of who he is: He may be fantastically wealthy, but he is also deeply hateful, someone who has decided to devote his fortune and his time to attacking diversity and progress on nearly every front.

Musk has insisted again that he bought Twitter to save it from itself—that the platform had become too restrictive and that, to become a true “digital town square” where the best ideas rise to the top, it needed to welcome everyone. It is now abundantly clear that Musk’s real intention is and always has been to put his thumb on the scale: to elevate his own hateful views about, in no particular order: liberals; the media; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; trans people; and liberal Jews. He sees Twitter as a weapon, a way to not only push his agenda but to sic his army of loyalist losers on anyone he deems an enemy.

For all of the talk about Musk being a “real life Tony Stark,” he has always been a deeply uncool person’s idea of a cool person: He is, in many ways, a sentient m’lady Reddit postcirca 2011. It’s hard to think of a more pathetic figure now: someone scraping the internet for conspiracy theories and “jokes” aimed at affirming his status and influence. He has, again and again, done the opposite: Far from showing himself as a swaggering, popular figure, he has revealed himself to be a venal, thin-skinned moron. He may very well be the most unfunny person alive, a fact reified dozens of times a day.

This was most apparent late last month, when Musk appeared at The New York Times’ glitzy annual DealBook conference and delivered a near-perfect encapsulation of the particularly toxic mixture of megalomania and neediness that has defined nearly everything he does. Asked by Andrew Ross Sorkin about a wave of advertiser defections in the wake of Musk’s embrace of an antisemitic conspiracy theory—via a post on X, of course—that suggested that Jews were secretly working to bring in troves of minorities to dilute America’s white population, Musk recoiled.

Bob Iger, the chairman of Disney—one of many companies to cease advertising on X in the wake of Musk’s comments—could “go fuck himself,” Musk said. It was clearly a pre-planned moment: an instant that Musk thought would bring him a wave of adulation and support that would force Disney back to his precious platform. Iger would be faced with the massive mistake he was making and come crawling back. Instead, there were a few awkward laughs and audible rustling. This was not a triumphant moment but a sign of a meltdown: a fabulously wealthy adult behaving like a toddler. Musk responded by telling Iger to go fuck himself again—as if it would somehow work this time. It hasn’t. Of course it hasn’t: Musk may have immense wealth, but his time at Twitter is a reminder that even that has its limits. Iger is also very rich; Disney is worth nearly 10 times what X is. Disney doesn’t need X. It certainly doesn’t need Elon Musk. X and Elon Musk need Disney.

Twitter, for all of its many flaws, was once a vital breaking news service. It is not that now. It’s not entirely clear what it is, beyond a toxic cesspool increasingly made in the twisted image of its deeply unwell owner. Changes to its verified user system, Musk’s decision to open the floodgates to bigots and trolls, and his own presence on the site have destroyed any utility it once had. It is now a source of endless misinformation and propaganda, a place where a pro-Putin conspiracy theorist can become a widely read source for information on the Israel-Hamas war, and where Alex Jones can spew lies about children murdered in schools. This is by design. Musk hates the media, but he also hates the truth and would rather live in a fantasy world in which his many enemies are destroying the world around him. It is, it practically goes without saying, actually Musk who is making the world worse in innumerable ways.

X is hanging on by a thread. After waves of layoffs, there is seemingly almost no one left minding the store. Musk dismantled Twitter’s Trust and Safety team almost immediately. As a result, hateful content often stays up for days, if not longer. The wave of advertiser defections means that the platform is also peppered with advertisements for ridiculous companies and scams. If Musk is still in charge of the platform in a year, it would be a shock. If it exists in a year at all, it would be a surprise.

X features heavily in Musk’s year in review, if only because he has successfully used it as a vehicle to make himself inescapable. But it is not his only venture, and it is not the only reminder that he is actually a deeply stupid and incompetent person. Tesla, his main business, just recalled nearly all of its vehicles because its much-hyped self-driving feature keeps causing cars to crash into people and things. Its much-hyped Cybertruck is unbelievably dumb-lookingand pointless: It is bulletproof, for some reason—exactly the kind of silly detail on which Musk would fixate to look cool, even as his cars … keep killing people. The rockets from his rocket company, SpaceX, keep exploding. (Musk says this is a good thing.) Everywhere you look, there is more evidence that Elon Musk is an idiot.

Behind all of the bloviating and attention-seeking is a small man who is simply not very good at anything. Musk has long wanted to present himself as a world-historical genius—and was recently minted as such by world-historical genius-minter (and world-historical toady) Walter Isaacson—but the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. Musk was able to parlay early wealth (via a disastrous tenure at PayPal) and, perhaps more importantly, fantastically low interest rates, into seed capital for lots of silly ideas. But the bill came due in 2023. Musk’s self-image is in tatters. What’s left is what we saw at the DealBook conference: a puffy, pathetic man increasingly untethered from reality. This is funny, in many ways. It is certainly funnier than anything Musk has ever tweeted.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Disruption, Economy, Extremism

Heather Cox Richardson: Nikki Haley and the Death of the Republican Party

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2023 //
139

Heather Cox Richardson sees something more ominous in Nikki Haley’s failure to mention slavery as “a cause” or “the cause” of the Civil War. She sees the death of what were once Republican Party ideals and the emergence of new style of authoritarianism, closely linked to parties that have effectively squelched the rights of their people.

She writes:

When asked at a town hall on Wednesday to identify the cause of the United States Civil War, presidential candidate and former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley answered that the cause “was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do…. I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are…. And I will always stand by the fact that, I think, government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people.”

Haley has correctly been lambasted for her rewriting of history. The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, was quite clear about the cause of the Civil War. Stephens explicitly rejected the idea embraced by U.S. politicians from the revolutionary period onward that human enslavement was “wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.” Instead, he declared: “Our new government is founded upon…the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” 

President Joe Biden put the cause of the Civil War even more succinctly: “It was about slavery.” 

Haley has been backpedaling ever since—as well as suggesting that the question was somehow a “gotcha” question from a Democrat, as if it was a difficult question to answer—but her answer was not simply bad history or an unwillingness to offend potential voters, as some have suggested. It was the death knell of the Republican Party.

That party formed in the 1850s to stand against what was known as the Slave Power, a small group of elite enslavers who had come to dominate first the Democratic Party and then, through it, the presidency, Supreme Court, and Senate. When northern Democrats in the House of Representatives caved to pressure to allow enslavement into western lands from which it had been prohibited since 1820, northerners of all political stripes recognized that it was only a question of time until elite enslavers took over the West, joined with lawmakers from southern slave states, overwhelmed the northern free states in the House of Representatives, and made enslavement national. 

So in 1854, after Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that allowed the spread of enslavement into previously protected western lands, northerners abandoned their old parties and came together first as “anti-Nebraska” coalitions and then, by 1856, as the Republican Party. 

At first their only goal was to stop the Slave Power, but in 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln articulated an ideology for the new party. In contrast to southern Democrats, who insisted that a successful society required leaders to dominate workers and that the government must limit itself to defending those leaders because its only domestic role was the protection of property, Lincoln envisioned a new kind of government, based on a new economy.

Lincoln saw a society that moved forward thanks not to rich people, but to the innovation of men just starting out. Such men produced more than they and their families could consume, and their accumulated capital would employ shoemakers and storekeepers. Those businessmen, in turn, would support a few industrialists, who would begin the cycle again by hiring other men just starting out. Rather than remaining small and simply protecting property, Lincoln and his fellow Republicans argued, the government should clear the way for those at the bottom of the economy, making sure they had access to resources, education, and the internal improvements that would enable them to reach markets. 

When the leaders of the Confederacy seceded to start their own nation based in their own hierarchical society, the Republicans in charge of the United States government were free to put their theory into practice. For a nominal fee, they sold farmers land that the government in the past would have sold to speculators; created state colleges, railroads, national money, and income taxes; and promoted immigration. 

Finally, with the Civil War over and the Union restored on their terms, in 1865 they ended the institution of human enslavement except as punishment for crime (an important exception) and in 1868 they added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to make clear that the federal government had power to override state laws that enforced inequality among different Americans. In 1870 they created the Department of Justice to ensure that all American citizens enjoyed the equal protection of the laws.

In the years after the Civil War, the Republican vision of a harmony of economic interest among all Americans quickly swung toward the idea of protecting those at the top of society, with the argument that industrial leaders were the ones who created jobs for urban workers. Ever since, the party has alternated  between Lincoln’s theory that the government must work for those at the bottom and the theory of the so-called robber barons, who echoed the elite enslavers’ idea that the government must protect the wealthy. 

During the Progressive Era, Theodore Roosevelt reclaimed Lincoln’s philosophy and argued for a strong government to rein in the industrialists and financiers who dominated society; a half-century later, Dwight Eisenhower followed the lead of Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and used the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. 

After each progressive president, the party swung toward protecting property. In the modern era the swing begun under Richard Nixon gained momentum with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Since then the party has focused on deregulation, tax cuts, privatization, and taking power away from the federal government and turning it back over to the states, while maintaining that market forces, rather than government policies, should drive society. 

But those ideas were not generally popular, so to win elections, the party welcomed white evangelical Christians into a coalition, promising them legislation that would restore traditional society, relegating women and people of color back to the subservience the law enforced before the 1950s. But it seems they never really intended for that party base to gain control.

The small-government idea was the party’s philosophy when Donald Trump came down the escalator in June 2015 to announce he was running for president, and his 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy indicated he would follow in that vein. But his presidency quickly turned the Republican base into a right-wing movement loyal to Trump himself, and he was both eager to get away from legal trouble and impeachments and determined to exact revenge on those who did not do his bidding. The power in the party shifted from those trying to protect wealthy Americans to Trump, who increasingly aligned with foreign autocrats.

That realignment has taken off since Trump left office in 2021 and his base wrested power from the party’s former leaders. Leaders in Trump’s right-wing movement have increasingly embraced the concept of “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” as articulated by Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has demolished Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship. On the campaign trail lately, Trump has taken to echoing Putin and Orbán directly.

Those leaders insist that the equality at the heart of democracy destroys a nation by welcoming immigrants, which undermines national purity, and by treating women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people as equal to white, heteronormative men. Their focus on what they call “traditional values” has won staunch supporters among the right-wing white evangelical community in the U.S.

Ironically, MAGA Republicans, whose name comes from Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again,” want the United States of America, one of the world’s great superpowers, to sign onto the program of a landlocked country of fewer than 10 million people in central Europe.

MAGA’s determination to impose white Christian nationalism on the United States of America is a rejection of the ideology of the Republican Party in all its phases. Rather than either an active government that defends equal rights and opportunity or a small government that protects property and relies on market forces, which Republicans stood for as recently as eight years ago, today’s Republicans advocate a strong government that imposes religious rules on society. 

They back strict abortion bans, book bans, and attacks on minorities and LGBTQ+ people. Last year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis directly used the state government to threaten Disney into complying with his anti-LGBTQ+ stance rather than reacting to popular support for LGBTQ+ rights. Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey early this month used the government to go after political opposition, launching an investigation into Media Matters for America after the watchdog organization reported that the social media platform X was placing advertising next to antisemitic content. “I’m fighting to ensure progressive tyrants masquerading as news outlets cannot manipulate the marketplace in order to wipe out free speech,” Bailey said. 

Domestically, the new ideology of MAGA means forcing the majority to live under the rules of a small minority; internationally, it means support for a global authoritarian movement. MAGA Republicans’ current refusal to fund Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression until the administration agrees to draconian immigration laws—which they are also refusing to participate in crafting—is not only a gift to Putin. It also suggests to any foreign government that U.S. foreign policy is changeable so long as a foreign government succeeds in influencing U.S. lawmakers. Under this system, American global leadership will no longer be viable.

When Nikki Haley said the cause of the Civil War “was how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do,” she did more than avoid the word “slavery” to pander to MAGA Republicans who refuse to recognize the role of race in shaping our history. She rejected the long and once grand history of the Republican Party and announced its death to the world. 

—

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Fascism, Republicans

Maurice Cunningham on the Rise and Fall of Moms for Liberty

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2023 //
5

Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor who is a specialist in dark money in education politics, surveys the meteoric rise and fall of the rightwing group Moms for Liberty in The Progressive. First, the recently formed organization gathered plenty of publicity as a fearsome force censoring books, accusing teachers of “indoctrinating” students, attacking anything in the schools that acknowledged the existence of gay students or families, and opposing teachers unions. The Moms launched with a big budget, more than anyone could gather at a bake sale. But came the school board elections of 2023, and their candidates took a shellacking. Recently came news that one of their prominent co-founders, Bridget Ziegler, was caught in a sex scandal—a threesome—and the organization was publicly humiliated.

Maurice Cunningham wonders how this checkered organization will survive.

He writes:

On June 30, 2023, a Washington Post headline declared “Moms for Liberty didn’t exist three years ago. Now it’s a GOP kingmaker.” On November 10, 2023, after a raft of school board elections across the country, the Post ran another headline: “Voters drub Moms for Liberty ‘parental rights’ candidates at the ballot.” Moms for Liberty (M4L) not only didn’t make any kings, it didn’t even make many school board members. What happened?

The pre-election headline reflected the messaging skills that M4L has carefully honed to make itself more palatable. By November, however, the reality on the ground became clear.

To learn the origins and context of this group, open the link and read on. The article doesn’t mention the Ziegler sex scandal. Cunningham wrote about that in an article in the Tampa Bay Tribune, but it’s behind a paywall. The Moms are on a downhill slide as a result of their election losses, followed by Bridget’s bisexual tryst. Her ex-friends removed her name from the Moms website.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, DeSantis, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Freedom to Read, Gender, Hypocrisy

An Israeli Professor at Yale Denounces Efforts to Squelch Palestinian Protests and Harass University Leaders

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2023 //
31

Naftali Kaminski is a professor of medicine at Yale University and an Israeli. He speaks out here in the Israeli publication Haaretz against efforts to shut down Palestinian protests, as well as the vilification of university presidents who insist on free speech.

Dr. Kaminski writes:

In the flurry of denouncements, op-eds, and social media posts that followed the testimony in Congress by three elite university presidents’, the subsequent resignation of Elizabeth MaGill president of the University of Pennsylvania, and the unprecedented congressional resolution calling on Harvard President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth to also resign, a picture began to emerge, one that eerily reminded me of a poem we read when I was a boy in Israel.

The poem, written in 1943 by Nathan Alterman, one of Israel’s most beloved poets, uses the Greek philosopher Archimedes’ statement about the law of the lever “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth” as a metaphor for the role of antisemitism in politics. He suggests demagogues and tyrants use antisemitism as the ultimate “Archimedean Point”, a leverage point allowing them to achieve their most outrageous goals.

This, I think, is what we are experiencing, but now the Archimedean Point is the claim that university presidents are “not doing enough about antisemitism”. It is used with the immediate aim of suppressing pro-Palestinian voices as well as the strategic and, as now is being more explicitly stated, long- term ominous aim of reversing progress towards diversity, equity and inclusion at American universities.

I am aware this is a far-reaching statement. As an Israeli, a son to Holocaust survivors, my family history is one of oppression, discrimination, and genocide. Before joining Yale, my family lived in Pittsburgh and were members of the Tree of Life congregation in Pittsburgh, site of the deadliest attack ever on Jews on American soil.

The Hamas atrocities of October 7 triggered fears and thoughts I never thought I had. I find displays of support or efforts to minimize them despicable. I fear the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. and believe it should be fought. I also feel that the current rage against university presidents of elite institutions is not indeed targeting antisemitism. And this feeling is colored by my own experiences in the last few months.

Waking up on that cursed morning in October and hearing about the Hamas attacks, I was immediately caught up in a flood of communication as I frantically sought to confirm that friends and family in Israel were safe, offer help, sympathy, horror and support.

But then I received a different kind of message myself. It was from an American Jewish faculty member at Yale. There was no expression of concern or empathy, no check-in about my well-being or the safety of my friends and family. Instead, it spoke about “Yale antisemites” and requested we “act preemptively” to “alert” Yale leaders. The message suggested a campaign of letter writing. It was obvious to me its intention to help foster an atmosphere that would label any pro-Palestinian expressions as antisemitic.

That message and those that followed were deeply distressing to me. They sounded as if they assumed that the president of Yale, himself Jewish with strong ties to Israel, would not do anything unless cajoled and pressed. There was never an expression of concern about me, or other Israelis on campus, except in one context – fighting the perceived threat of antisemitism by using the horrors to score ideological points.

In the following days, as the unfathomable extent of Hamas atrocities was coming to light, my attention was all on the suffering and killing in the region. I helped the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Office at Yale School of Medicine organize a solidarity event in which Israeli members of the Yale community who had family or friends who were victims of October 7 attack spoke, and shared their experiences. The event was well publicized and attended and supported by leadership.

On subsequent days, I was on a previously scheduled lecture tour — five talks in ten days at different institutions and venues. I felt I could not simply speak about science and medicine, and decided to start each talk by introducing myself as a Jewish Israeli, and saying “I am shocked and infuriated by the atrocities launched last week in southern Israel, I am also deeply concerned and horrified by the ongoing violence and exponentially escalating threat to civilians in the region. I hope and pray that violence ends, those abducted are released and threats to civilians are stopped and that all people in the region, regardless of ethnic or religious identity, will finally be allowed to live in peace, freedom, and dignity.” The statement was accepted nearly universally with applause.

In the meantime, at Yale, there were pro-Palestinian demonstrations, pro-Israeli vigils, as well as educational events; I did not attend most, and if I did, I might have probably not agreed with everything said, but I doubt I would feel unsafe. Indeed, despite the attempts by some provocateurs, the events were decidedly non-violent. On one Friday, at the Beinecke Plaza at Yale, there were three contrasting events, including an Israeli Palestinian Humanity vigil, attended by Israelis and Palestinians on campus, but there were no conflicts or arguments. There were no calls for genocide or threats of violence.

At the Yale-Harvard football game, I was walking to my seat, when a pro-Palestinian protest erupted; the students waved flags, chanted their slogans, but there was no sense of threat. There was definitely no call for genocide for Jews. Some in the crowd cursed the protesters and one even spit at them, but they did not respond, and the protest ended with the opposing students staging a walk out.

On that day I also saw the infamous doxing van, showing photos of young students, naming them as Harvard or Yale’s top antisemites. I felt it was a blatant and despicable “attempt to intimidate and harass” students as Yale’s president said.

At a panel discussion on the Public Health Implications of the Israeli-Gaza war, at Yale’s School of Public Health, discussions were concrete, professional and somber. One heckler was quickly silenced, and the rest of the event was very civil. This past Saturday, a pro-Palestinian protester hung briefly a Palestinian flag on a public Hanukkah Menorah in New Haven. The protester quickly removed it at the urging of other participants in the protest. This event met with wide condemnation by the organizers of the protest, Yale president and local officials, and local vigils were held in response

On social media, I have received multiple solidarity notices from colleagues and friends, Jewish and Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian. I have gotten some antisemitic responses, but mostly from bots. Notably, most of the personal attacks I experienced were from self-proclaimed friends of Israel, even colleagues of mine, especially when I expressed support for the first ceasefire and hostages release, when I expressed concerns about the toll on Gazan civilians from Israel’s response or when I mentioned that Palestinians in the West Bank were targets of an unprecedented wave of violent attacks by Jewish settlers.

When one such acquaintance attacked me, I did not hold back, and reminded them that unlike them, I had served in the Israel Defense Forces, and had saved Israeli lives as a physician. The argument ended there, but I couldn’t help but reflect, if this was how I was treated as an Israeli, a tenured professor, how are Palestinians being treated? Are they silenced by the fear of being tagged as antisemitic, for expressing their anguish?

I am not making this digression to dismiss or minimize the rise of antisemitism or threat and isolation of Jewish faculty, staff and students feel, but to highlight how my own experience allowed me to realize that the anguish experienced by Jewish students and communities has been weaponized to suppress and delegitimize pro-Palestinian voices.

Moreover, and worse, for some groups this looked like the perfect opportunity to reverse the progress American Academia has made towards more diversity, inclusion and equity. And now this coalition of populists, rich donors, politicians known to be enemies of science and democracy and other bigots, is feverishly hoping that their Archimedean point will bring them a first achievement: the reversal of one of most impressive achievements for equity for women in recent American academic life – by forcing the presidents of Penn, Harvard and MIT to resign.

Watching that congressional hearing felt like revisiting the public hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy Years. The presidents made powerful statements, expressed shock at Hamas atrocities, denounced antisemitism and described actions they took on campus. But what followed was a highly orchestrated circus, with targeted questions, aimed to trap them into indefensible answers. In the public eye, the five-hour hearing, crystalized into 30-second viral clips, based on misrepresentations and lack of nuance made the university presidents look indecisive and equivocal, while their previous statements and actions were not.

And when I watched the public shaming of these amazingly accomplished women, one voice kept ringing in my head, that of Counsel Joseph Welch words to Joseph McCarthy “Have you no sense of decency?”.

I hope the decision by Harvard to retain President Claudine Gay, despite the powerful campaign and false allegations against her, will once be remembered the same way Joseph Welch’s statement is now remembered, a turning point. A moment in which voices of reason, rejected the use of the justified fear of antisemitism as an Archimedean Point, and allowed all of us to focus on continuing making our universities and colleges more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and safe for all.

Naftali Kaminski MD is an Israeli Physician-Scientist and Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine. On Twitter/X @KaminskiMed 

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Reform, Higher Education, International

Josh Cowen: 2023 Was a Banner Year for Vouchers, Censorship, and Attacks on LGBT Kids

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2023 //
7

Writing in the Washington Spectator, veteran voucher researcher Josh Cowen reports that 2023 was a good year for some very bad ideas, many supported by prominent rightwingers and Dark Money, whose sources are hidden.

He finds it unsurprising that the voucher movement works closely with book banners and efforts to humiliate LGBT youth.

Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University who has studied vouchers since 2005.

He writes:

Over the past 12 months, the decades-long push to divert tax dollars toward religious education has reached new heights. As proclaimed by EdChoice—the advocacy group devoted to school vouchers—2023 has been the year these schemes reached “escape velocity.” In strictly legislative terms, seven states passed new voucher systems, and ten more expanded existing versions. Eleven states now run universal vouchers, which have no meaningful income or other restrictions.

But these numbers change quickly. As late as the last week of November, the Republican governor of Tennessee announced plans to create just such a universal voucher system.

To wit: successful new voucher and related legislation has come almost exclusively in states won by Donald Trump in 2020. And even that Right-ward bent required substantial investment—notably by heiress and former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Koch network—in state legislative campaigns to oust voucher opponents. Instructively, many of those opponents were often GOP legislators representing rural districts with few private schools to benefit.

As a scholar who has studied voucher systems—including through research funded by conservative organizations—I have been watching these developments with growing concern. It can all be difficult to make sense of, so let’s walk through it.

Vouchers Hurt Kids, Defund Public Schools and Prop-Up Church Budgets

First, why are these new voucher schemes such bad public policy? To understand the answer, it’s important to know that the typical voucher-accepting school is a far cry from the kind of elite private academy you might find in a coastal city or wealthy suburban outpost. Instead, they’re usually sub-prime providers, akin to predatory lenders in the mortgage sector. These schools are either pop-ups opening to cash in on the new taxpayer subsidy, or financially distressed existing schools desperate for a bailout to stay open. Both types of financially insecure schools often close anyway, creating turnover for children who were once enrolled.

And the voucher results reflect that educational vulnerability: in terms of academic impacts, vouchers have some of the worst results in the history of education research—on par or worse than what COVID-19 did to test scores.

Those results are bad enough, but the real issue today is that they come at a cost of funding traditional public schools. As voucher systems expand, they cannibalize states’ ability to pay for their public education commitments. Arizona, which passed universal vouchers in 2022, is nearing a genuine budget crisis as a result of voucher over-spending. Six of the last seven states to pass vouchers have had to slow spending on public schools relative to investments made by non-voucher states.

That’s because most new voucher users were never in the public schools—they are new financial obligations for states. The vast majority of new voucher beneficiaries have been students who were already in private school beforehand. And for many rural students who live far from the nearest private school, vouchers are unrealistic in the first place, meaning that when states cut spending on public education, they weaken the only educational lifeline available to poorer and more remote communities in some places. That’s why even many GOP legislators representing rural districts—conservative in every other way—continue to fight against vouchers.

Vouchers do, however, benefit churches and church schools. Right-wing advocacy groups have been busy mobilizing Catholic school and other religious school parents to save their schools with new voucher funding. In new voucher states, conservatives are openly advocating for churches to startup taxpayer-funded schools. That’s why vouchers eventually become a key source of revenue for those churches, often replacing the need to rely on private donations. It’s also why many existing religious schools raise tuition almost immediately after vouchers pass.

The Right-Wing War on Public Schools

Victories for these voucher bills is nothing short of an ascendent Right-wing war on public education. And the link to religious nationalism energizes much of that attack.

Voucher bills have dovetailed almost perfectly with new victories for other priorities of the Religious Right. Alongside vouchers, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has also increased: 508 new bills in 2023 alone, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. As has a jump in legislation restricting book access in schools and libraries, with more than half of those bans targeting books on topics related to race and racism, or containing at least one LGBTQ+ character.

It is also important to note the longstanding antipathy that Betsy DeVos, the Koch Network, and other long-term voucher backers have toward organized labor—including and especially in this case, teachers’ unions. And that in two states that passed vouchers this year—Iowa and Arkansas—the governors also signed new rollbacks to child labor protections at almost the exact same time as well.

To close the 2022 judicial session, the Supreme Court issued its latest expansion of voucher jurisprudence in Carson v. Makin, holding that states with private school voucher programs may not exclude religious providers from applying tax dollars specifically to religious education. That ruling came just 72 hours before the Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson removed reproductive rights from federal constitutional protections.

To hear backers of vouchers, book bans, and policies targeting transgender students in school bathrooms tell it, such efforts represent a new movement toward so-called “parents’ rights” or “education freedom,” as Betsy DeVos describes in her 2022 memoir. But in truth this latest push was a long time coming. DeVos is only one part of the vast network of Right-wing donors, activists, and organizations devoted to conservative political activism.

That network, called the Council for National Policy, includes representatives from the Heritage Foundation, the influential Right-wing policy outfit; multiple organizations funded by Charles Koch; the Leadership Institute, which trains young conservative activists; and a number of state policy advocacy groups funded by a conservative philanthropy called the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

It was the Bradley Foundation that seeded much of the legal work in the 1990s defending early voucher programs in state and federal courts. Bradley helped to fund the Institute for Justice, a legal group co-founded by a former Clarence Thomas staffer named Clint Bolick after a personal donation from Charles Koch. The lead trial attorney for that work was none other than Kenneth Starr, who was at the time also in the middle of his infamous pursuit of President Bill Clinton.

In late 2023, the Institute for Justice and the voucher-group EdChoice announced a new formal venture, but that partnership is just a spin on an older collaboration, with the Bradley Foundation as the tie that binds. EdChoice itself, when it was called the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, helped fund the data analysis cited by Institute lawyers at no less than the Supreme Court ahead of its first decision approving vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002).

From these vantage points, 2023 was a long time coming indeed.

And heading into 2024, the voucher push and its companion “parents’ rights” bills on schoolbooks and school bathrooms show no sign of weakening.

Prior to his political career, the new Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, was an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom. That group, which itself has deep ties to Betsy DeVos’s family, has led the legal charge to rollback LBGTQ+ equality initiatives. It was also involved “from the beginning,” as its website crows, in the anti-abortion effort that culminated with Dobbs.

The Heritage Foundation has created a platform called Project 2025, which serves as something of a clearinghouse for what would be the legal framework and policy agenda for a second Trump Administration. Among the advisors and funders of Project 2025 are several organizations linked to Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, and others with ties to the Council for National Policy. The Project’s education agenda includes dismantling the U.S. Department of Education—especially its oversight authority on anti-discrimination issues—and jumpstarting federal support for voucher programs.

A dark money group called The Concord Fund has launched an entity called Free to Learn, ostensibly organized around opposition to the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. In reality, these are active players in Republican campaign attacks around a variety of education-related culture war issues. The Concord Fund is closely tied to Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society chief, Council of National Policy member, and architect of the Roe takedown. Through the Leo connection, the Concord Fund was also instrumental in confirming Donald Trump’s judicial nominations from Brett Kavanaugh on downward.

And so while the 2023 “parents’ rights” success has been largely a feature of red state legislatures, the 2022 Carson ruling and the nexus between Leonard Leo, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Institute for Justice itself underscore the importance of the federal judiciary to Right-wing education activism.

Long-term, the goal insofar as school privatization is concerned appears to be nothing short of a Supreme Court ruling that tax-subsidized school vouchers and homeschool options are mandatory in every state that uses public funding (as all do) to support education. The logic would be, as Betsy DeVos herself previewed before leaving office, that public spending on public schools without a religious option is a violation of Free Exercise protections.

Such a ruling, in other words, would complete the destruction of a wall between church and state when it comes to voucher jurisprudence. Earlier Court decisions have found that states may spend tax dollars on school vouchers but, as the Right’s ultimate goal, the Supreme Court would determine that states must.

Closer on the horizon, we can expect to see each of these Right-wing groups acting with new energy as the 2024 campaign season heats up. The president of the Heritage Foundation—himself yet another member of the Council for National Policy—has recently taken over the think tank’s political arm, called Heritage Action. At the start of the year, investigative reporting linked Heritage Action to earlier voter suppression initiatives, signaling potential tactics ahead.

And the money is going to flow—they have all said as much. After Heritage’s merger of its policy and political arms, Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children followed suit by creating the AFC Victory Fund—a new group to spearhead its own campaign activity.

Their plan includes a $10 million base commitment to ramp up heading into 2024. “Coming off our best election cycle ever,” AFC’s announcement declared, “the tectonic plates have shifted decisively in favor of educational freedom, and we’re just getting started.” And, they warned:

“If you’re a candidate or lawmaker who opposes school choice and freedom in education – you’re a target.”

In that threat lies the reality of the latest voucher push, and of this moment of so-called parents’ rights. None of this is a grassroots uprising. “Education freedom” is a top-down, big-money operation, tied to every other political priority of religious nationalism today.

But coming at the end of this past year’s legislative successes, AFC’s warnings are also a very clear statement of what is yet to come. The push to privatize American education is only just getting started.

Vouchers have turned into a campaign to subsidize the tuition of affluent parents while cutting the funding of public schools. This does not augur well for the health and future of our nation.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Catholic Schools, Censorship, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Home Schooling, Ignorance, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy, Literature, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Billy Townsend: Christian Ziegler is the Perfect GOP Leader for Florida. What about Bridget?

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2023 //
4

Florida blogger Billy Townsend agrees with me: Christian Ziegler should not resign as leader of the GOP in Florida. Sure, he was involved in a sex scandal. Sure, he’s a dictator. But he’s the perfect face for the party of Ron Ziegler (a wannabe dictator) and Trump (also a wannabe dictator who’s had his share of sex scandals).

We disagree about Bridget. He thinks she should resign from the Sarasota school board. I want her to stay so she can defend gay students.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, DeSantis, Fascism, Florida, Republicans, Trump

Robert Kagan: Will Trump End Democracy?

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2023 //
36

Over the past week, there was a surge of articles about the danger that Donald Trump poses to our democracy. Trump ratcheted up his threats to punish his enemies and to replace the civil service with Trump loyalists. When his admirer Sean Hannity asked him point blank whether he intended to be a dictator—expecting he would say “of course not”—Trump responded he would be a dictator “only on the first day,” when he would command the completion of the border wall with Mexico and “drill, drill, drill.” Trump’s rhetoric no longer sounds like a normal candidate. But he was never a normal candidate.

Some commentators noted that his threats were unprecedented, yet they barely caused a ripple. He said that certain generals who served him yet denounced him deserved to be executed. What would the press have done if Obama had made such a statement? It would have been front-page news for days, not a blip. Trump has normalized threats of violence. His base has come to expect promises of violence from him. He doesn’t disappoint them.

In his first term, he reached out to some who were not in his personal orbit. He won’t make that mistake if there is a next time.

The article that generated the most attention was written by Robert Kagan in The Washington Post, titled “A Trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly Ibrvitable. We Should Stop Pretending.”

Kagan was a noted neoconservative but left the GOP in 2016 because he couldn’t accept Trump. His recent article is 7,500 words. I read it late at night and couldn’t sleep. Kagan’s article laid out the case that Trump will win the nomination; that no elected Republican will stand up to him; that he stands a good chance of being re-elected; and that if he is, he will surround himself with toadies and wreak havoc on our democracy. He predicted, as the title says, that Trump would have no guardrails, no respect for the norms of the Presidency, and no regard for the Constitution.

He said that would use the Justice Department to harass and punish his enemies.

A few quotes from his article:

Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination.

Once Trump sweeps Super Tuesday, he writes, Republicans will fall in line behind him and so will big donors. All of the other GOP candidates except Chris Christie will endorse him.

Meanwhile, Biden will have trouble unifying his party. The news media love to run stories about disenchanted Democratic voters who will stay home. Biden faces challenges from third-party candidates, including Jill Stein, Robert Kennedy Jr., and possibly a No Labels candidate like Joe Manchin.

Trump “enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.”

Trump enjoys some unusual advantages for a challenger, moreover. Even Ronald Reagan did not have Fox News and the speaker of the House in his pocket. To the degree there are structural advantages in the coming general election, in short, they are on Trump’s side. And that is before we even get to the problem that Biden can do nothing to solve: his age.

Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.

Today, Republicans might be responsible for Washington’s dysfunction, and they might pay a price for it in downballot races. But Trump benefits from dysfunction because he is the one who offers a simple answer: him. In this election, only one candidate is running on the platform of using unprecedented power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing number of Americans claim to want that, in both parties. Trump is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of the system. Advantage: Trump…

If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.

What limits those powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent. A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?
Will a future Congress stop him? Presidents can accomplish a lot these days without congressional approval, as even Barack Obama showed. The one check Congress has on a rogue president, namely, impeachment and conviction, has already proved all but impossible — even when Trump was out of office and wielded modest institutional power over his party.

Another traditional check on a president is the federal bureaucracy, that vast apparatus of career government officials who execute the laws and carry on the operations of government under every president. They are generally in the business of limiting any president’s options. As Harry S. Truman once put it, “Poor Ike. He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing at all will happen.” That was a problem for Trump is his first term, partly because he had no government team of his own to fill the administration. This time, he will. Those who choose to serve in his second administration will not be taking office with the unstated intention of refusing to carry out his wishes. If the Heritage Foundation has its way, and there is no reason to believe it won’t, many of those career bureaucrats will be gone, replaced by people carefully “vetted” to ensure their loyalty to Trump.

Trump might decide he wants a third term. Who will stop him? The Constitution? The 22nd Amendment? The Congress? Not likely.

Trump as President will pursue those who tried to stop him. He pledged in his Veterans Day speech to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.

What will that look like? Trump has already named some of those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials from his first term such as retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Gen. Mark A. Milley, former attorney general William P. Barr and others who spoke against him after the 2020 election; officials in the FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe; Justice Department officials who refused his demands to overturn the 2020 election; members of the Jan. 6 committee; Democratic opponents including Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.); and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his impeachment and conviction.

But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted. Many will simply be fired, but others will be subject to career-destroying investigations. The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people “work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process.

Prepare for a new McCarthyism as Trump and his MAGA lackeys go after the “anti-American” Democrats whom he calls “”Communists,””Marxists,” “Fascists,” and “vermin.”

How will Americans respond to the first signs of a regime of political persecution? Will they rise up in outrage? Don’t count on it. Those who found no reason to oppose Trump in the primaries and no reason to oppose him in the general are unlikely to experience a sudden awakening when some former Trump-adjacent official such as Milley finds himself under investigation for goodness knows what. They will know only that Justice Department prosecutors, the IRS, the FBI and several congressional committees are looking into it. And who is to say that those being hounded are not in fact tax cheaters, or Chinese spies, or perverts, or whatever they might be accused of? Will the great body of Americans even recognize these accusations as persecution and the first stage of shutting down opposition to Trump across the country?

Kagan says that the odds of a Trump dictatorship are growing by the day. In 2016, it was completely improbable that a man such as trump would win the Republican nomination, and completely unlikely that he would win the Presidency. And it was unthinkable that when he lost in 2020, he would insist that he won in a landslide, and even crazier that his base would believe the Big Lie. Republicans will cower in fear before him; Democrats will protest, maybe take to the streets, but Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act to shut them down.

Who will have the courage to stand up to Trump when the risk is not just losing your political office but arrest, detention, public humiliation, and the loss of your freedom?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Character, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Fascism, Republicans, Trump

The Netherlands: Party of Far-Right Islamophobe Wins Parliamentary Elections

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2023 //
19

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician who has espoused anti-Islamic views for many years. He has campaigned on a platform of putting Dutch people first and blocking immigration from Muslim countries. He has been called the Dutch Trump. In the recent parliamentary elections, his party came in first among a field of 15 parties. It won 37 of 150 seats and will need to persuade other parties to join in a coalition in order to govern. In the past, Wilders has promised to close mosques and Islamic schools, but he is already moderating his hardline views to win over partners. Wilders will need 76 votes—39 more than he has now— to form a new government.

The BBC reported:

Veteran anti-Islam populist leader Geert Wilders has won a dramatic victory in the Dutch general election, with almost all votes counted.

After 25 years in parliament, his Freedom party (PVV) is set to win 37 seats, well ahead of his nearest rival, a left-wing alliance.

“The PVV can no longer be ignored,” he said. “We will govern.”

His win has shaken Dutch politics and it will send a shock across Europe too…

He told the BBC that “of course” he was willing to negotiate and compromise with other parties to become prime minister.

The PVV leader won after harnessing widespread frustration about migration, promising “borders closed” and putting on hold his promise to ban the Koran…

A Wilders victory will send shockwaves around Europe, as the Netherlands is one of the founding members of what became the European Union.

Nationalist and far-right leaders around Europe praised his achievement. In France, Marine Le Pen said it “confirms the growing attachment to the defence of national identities”.

Mr Wilders wants to hold a “Nexit” referendum to leave the EU, although he recognises there is no national mood to do so. He will have a hard time convincing any major prospective coalition partner to sign up to that.

He tempered his anti-Islam rhetoric in the run-up to the vote, saying there were more pressing issues at the moment and he was prepared to “put in the fridge” his policies on banning mosques and Islamic schools.

The strategy was a success, more than doubling his PVV party’s numbers in parliament.

For Americans, the elections in the Netherlands and Argentina raise an urgent question: are these elections a portent of the persistence of far-right politics or are they the after-effects of the Trump era? Are they the future or an echo of the past?

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, International, Trump

Jan Resseger: The Facts About Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
5

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

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

Jan Resseger writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please open the link to read the post in full.

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

Chris Tomlinson: Texas Oilmen Spreading Hate and Lies

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
5

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

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

He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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