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Politico: The New Speaker of the House is Deeply Conservative

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2023 //
15

The Republicans in the House of Representatives finally united to elect Rep. Mike Johnson as the new Speaker of the House. Johnson was elected to Congress in 2016. He was a leading figure in the effort to overturn the election in 2020. He gathered signatures among his colleagues to support an appeal by the Texas Attorney General to the U.S. Supreme Court to disqualify the votes cast in contested states. The Court didn’t hear the case, ruling that Texas did not have standing to reverse the results in other states.

So, yes, Johnson is an election denier. Less well known are his deeply conservative views on social issues. He opposes abortion and gay marriage. As a representative of oil country, he dismisses claims that fossil fuels contribute to climate change.

Politico wrote about Johnson:

BROADCAST NEWS — It’s finally over. After more than three weeks without a leader, House Republicans came together to unanimously select Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as the 56th Speaker of the House of Representatives. Johnson served as a consensus pick among the numerous factions, appeasing both the right flank of the party that tossed out former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and moderates. While he’s served as vice chair of the Republican Conference, he has served just four terms in Congress and remains little-known within Washington.

What’s clear, however, is that Johnson is a social conservative’s social conservative — the most culturally conservative lawmaker to ascend to the speakership in decades, if not longer.

He has longstanding ties to the evangelical activist group Family Research Council — which could one day prove discomfiting to members from swing districts or of a more secular orientation.

His first brush with national prominence came in April 2015, when Johnson, then a Louisiana state legislator, proposed a bill called the Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act that would have prevented “adverse treatment by the State of any person or entity on the basis of the views they may hold with regard to marriage.” Critics called it legalized discrimination against married gay couples, and the bill failed, but the media attention got him on the radar of the influential FRC and its president, fellow Louisiana native Tony Perkins.

Perkins, who hosts a national radio show called Washington Watch, began tapping Johnson to guest host. Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, appeared to be a natural — by December 2015, local Shreveport, La. ABC affiliate KTBS said he “may have a budding second career on the airwaves.”

The FRC and Perkins are political lightning rods among non-evangelicals — some of Perkins’ stances, like his argument that natural disasters are divine punishments for homosexuality, don’t sit well with broad swaths of the electorate. But Johnson’s political and religious beliefs dovetail with Perkins’ views. In a 2004 op-ed, Johnson argued that “homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural… society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle.”

When he ran for Congress in 2016, Johnson placed his faith at the center of his campaign, telling the Louisiana Baptist Message, “I am a Christian, a husband, a father, a life-long conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order.”

His connection with Perkins — and his interest in evangelical radio as a political tool — continued after he was elected to the House in 2016. As a freshman lawmaker, Johnson announced his bid to lead the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus that currently counts 156, on Washington Watch with Perkins. He won the election.

Johnson used the skills he sharpened on talk radio and in televised FRC interviews to start a weekly podcast in 2022 with his wife, called “Truth be Told with Mike and Kelly Johnson.”

During the first episode in March 2022, entitled “Can America be Saved?” Johnson says that “we’ll review current events through the lens of eternal truth,” and noted that in each podcast they intended to incorporate a themed scripture because “the word of God is, of course, the ultimate source of all truth.” Guests have included Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Charlie Kirk and Jordan Peterson.

On occasion, Kelly Johnson will tee up her husband for an answer. “Why are we the freest, most powerful, most successful, most benevolent nation in the history of the world, and why does every other nation on the planet look to us for leadership and even expect it of us?” she asks in one episode. Her husband responds explaining that America is the only country in the world founded upon a creed, or a “religious statement of faith.”

As a matter of fact, Kelly Johnson is wrong. The Constitution of the United States does not include a creed or a “religious statement of faith.” It specifically mandates freedom of religion and prohibits the establishment of any religion. It also bars any religious test for officeholders.

Mike Johnson is an evangelical Christian whose strong personal views are bound to affect his political views and actions.

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Religion, Republicans, Trump

Illinois: Parent Groups Decry Governor Pritzker’s Decision to Endorse State Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2023 //
3

The advocacy group Illinois Families for Public Schools were shocked by Governor Pritzker’s decision to extend the state voucher program. They were shocked because of his campaign promises not to support schools that discriminate, and they were shocked by the data showing that discrimination against students with disabilities and LGBT students is widespread among voucher schools. Most voucher schools are religious, and they are free to exclude any student they don’t want.

Illinois Families for Public Schools’ Statement on Gov. Pritzker’s Vow to Sign an Extension of the Illinois Voucher Program

Friday October 20, 2023

Illinois Families for Public Schools is profoundly disappointed at Governor Pritzker’s statement yesterday that he is committed to signing any bill sent to him that would extend the Invest in Kids voucher program.

This commitment contradicts the statements he made when he ran for governor in 2018, including his response to our candidate questionnaire:

“I oppose Bruce Rauner’s backdoor voucher program that was inserted into the school funding reform bill last year. As governor, I will work to repeal that measure.”

Worse yet, it conflicts with the values Pritzker has espoused again and again in his time in office: That Illinois is a welcoming and inclusive state where it is unacceptable to treat individuals differently because of their identity, where justice and equity make Illinois a safe space for all, where we want our young people “to become critical thinkers, exposed to ideas that they disagree with, proud of what our nation has overcome, and thoughtful about what comes next”, where K-12 schools are “liberatory learning environments that welcome and affirm LGBTQ+ young people, especially those how are transgender, nonbinary, intersex, Black, Indigenous, people of color, people with disabilities, and all communities that experience marginalization.”

Since 2018, the Invest in Kids voucher program has diverted more than $250 million in state funds to private schools, 95% of which are religious. Religious schools, even those getting public dollars, can and do legally discriminate against nearly any protected category of student, family or staff:

  • At least 85 schools in the Invest in Kids program, nearly 1 in 5, have anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
  • Only 13% of private schools in the Invest in Kids program last year reported to the Illinois State Board of Education that they served any special education students. The majority of schools in the program are Catholic schools, and four of six Catholic dioceses in Illinois have policies that say schools may refuse to accommodate students with disabilities.
  • Policies that discriminate against pregnant and parenting students, students who have had an abortion, English-language learners, students with disabilities, undocumented students, and more are widespread in Illinois voucher schools as well.

Due to recent Supreme Court decisions, there is essentially no way to have a state voucher program that only funds non-religious schools or alternatively prohibits religious schools from discriminating based on religious belief. As such, there is no way to end discrimination in voucher schools in Illinois short of ending the program altogether.

Extending the voucher program is supported by anti-public good extremist groups, including Betsy DeVos-funded Illinois Federation for Children, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, Awake Illinois, and Moms for Liberty Lake County.

Access to a well-resourced public education is a fundamental right. Illinois public schools are still short billions of dollars in state funding needed to educate their students.

Public dollars must be for used public schools that welcome and educate all children, as well as protect their civil rights. Strong public schools are the foundation of a healthy, pluralistic democracy and are a public good that benefits everyone in Illinois.

It is unacceptable to continue the Invest in Kids program in any form.

Why is Governor Pritzker thinking so small when it comes to our public schools?

###

Contact: 

Cassie Creswell, 773-916-7794, info@ilfps.org

About Illinois Families for Public Schools

Illinois Families for Public Schools (IL-FPS) is a grassroots advocacy group that represents the interests of families who want to defend and improve Illinois public schools. Founded in 2016, IL-FPS’ efforts are key to giving public ed parents and families a real voice in Springfield on issues like standardized testing, student data privacy, school funding and more. IL-FPS connects families and public school supporters in more than 100 IL House districts. More at ilfps.org.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Industry, Illinois, Injustice, Vouchers

Randi Weingarten On “”The War on Woke”

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2023 //
11

The New Republic convened a meeting to discuss Trump, book banning and the culture wars. Randi Weingarten described the attack on schools as a coordinated strategy to destroy public schools and promote vouchers. Edith Olmsted of The New Republic interviewed her. None of this is new to readers of this blog, but the American public needs to hear this message. Again and again.

Book Bans Are a Conservative Plot to Destroy Public Schools, Says Randi Weingarten, The teachers union head denounced the “extremist strategy,” which also includes voucher campaigns and manufactured outrage over critical race theory.

DANIEL BOCZARSKI/GETTY IMAGES FOR MOVEON

Teachers union head Randi Weingarten says that the campaign by conservatives to ban books isn’t about the books at all, but part of a broader strategy to destroy public schools—one that was supercharged by the pandemic.

“You take the agita and the anxiety that people had at Covid, that fear, and you combine it with a right wing who has wanted to kill public schools for years and take that money for vouchers, and you have the scenario we have,” Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Wednesday at The New Republic’s Stop Trump Summit.

Vouchers, which use public education dollars to fund private and religious school attendance, are just one pillar of the conservative campaign to “undermine, destroy, and defund” public schools, she said. The other two are book banning and manufactured outrage over critical race theory.

Weingarten pointed to conservative activist Chris Rufo and a comment he made at Hillsdale College, a Christian nationalist school, in which he admitted that focusing on these issues was all part of a master plan to promote universal vouchers: “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”

In an interview with TNR after the event, Weingarten explained the “extremist strategy” Rufo and other conservatives have used to defund public schools. “The hook was trust. If you really create as much distrust as possible in public schooling, then parents will look at privatization as an option,” she said.

That’s where critical race theory comes in.

“[Rufo] tried to make a term that nobody knows so toxic, so that you can weaponize it and make fear,” she said. “Conversations about hard subjects became weaponized as indoctrination. Which is patently ridiculous, and dangerous.”

Race, as well as gender, is the subject conservatives have focused on in their campaigns to ban books in public schools and libraries.

“What [Republican Governor Ron] DeSantis is doing in the so-called ‘war on woke,’ is exactly part of their playbook—to make people afraid of books, and afraid of what we do in school,” Weingarten said. According to Pen America, Florida passed 15 “educational intimidation” bills in the last two and a half years.

The “parents’ rights” movement is made up of a loud minority, Weingarten said, and actively undermines what most parents want. “What we see in Florida is that 60 percent of the book banning has been done by 11 people,” she said.

The AFT has partnered with The New Republic in fighting back against such bans. TNR’s Banned Books Tour has been delivering thousands of banned books across the country this month, most recently in Florida.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Curriculum, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom to Read, Privatization, Racism, Vouchers

The Man Who Selected the Rightwing Supreme Court Justices

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2023 //
16

ProPublica researched the power of Leonard Leo, the man most responsible for the rightwing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court and other levels of the federal judiciary. Few people know who he is. Now you are among them.

ProPublica writes:

The party guests who arrived on the evening of June 23, 2022, at the Tudor-style mansion on the coast of Maine were a special group in a special place enjoying a special time. The attendees included some two dozen federal and state judges — a gathering that required U.S. marshals with earpieces to stand watch while a Coast Guard boat idled in a nearby cove.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the nation’s highest court.

Caterers served guests Pol Roger reserve, Winston Churchill’s favorite Champagne, a fitting choice for a group of conservative legal luminaries who had much to celebrate. The Supreme Court’s most recent term had delivered a series of huge victories with the possibility of a crowning one still to come. The decadeslong campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade, which a leaked draft opinion had said was “egregiously wrong from the start,” could come to fruition within days, if not hours.

Over dinner courses paired with wines chosen by the former food and beverage director of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., the 70 or so attendees jockeyed for a word with the man who had done as much as anyone to make this moment possible: their host, Leonard Leo.

I can’t think of anybody who played a role the way he has.

– Richard Friedman, a law professor and historian at the University of Michigan

Short and thick-bodied, dressed in a bespoke suit and round, owlish glasses, Leo looked like a character from an Agatha Christie mystery. Unlike the judges in attendance, Leo had never served a day on the bench. Unlike the other lawyers, he had never argued a case in court. He had never held elected office or run a law school. On paper, he was less important than almost all of his guests.

If Americans had heard of Leo at all, it was for his role in building the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. He drew up the lists of potential justices that Donald Trump released during the 2016 campaign. He advised Trump on the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Before that, he’d helped pick or confirm the court’s three other conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. But the guests who gathered that night under a tent in Leo’s backyard included key players in a less-understood effort, one aimed at transforming the entire judiciary.

Many could thank Leo for their advancement. Thomas Hardiman of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled to loosen gun laws and overturn Obamacare’s birth-control mandate. Leo had put Hardiman on Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist and helped confirm him to two earlier judgeships.

Kyle Duncan and Cory Wilson, both on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, both fiercely anti-abortion, were members of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, the network of conservative and libertarian lawyers that Leo had built into a political juggernaut. As was Florida federal Judge Wendy Berger, who would uphold that state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Within a year of the party, another attendee, Republican North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr. (no relation), would write the opinion reinstating a controversial state law requiring voter identification.

Duncan, Wilson, Berger and Berger Jr. did not comment. Hardiman did not comment beyond confirming he attended the party.

The judges were in Maine for a weeklong, all-expenses-paid conference hosted by George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, a hub for steeping young lawyers, judges and state attorneys general in a free-market, anti-regulation agenda. The leaders of the law school were at the party, and they also were indebted to Leo. He had secured the Scalia family’s blessing and brokered $30 million in donations to rename the school. It is home to the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, named after the George H.W. Bush White House counsel who died this May. Gray was at Leo’s party, too.

A spokesperson for GMU confirmed the details of the week’s events.

The judges and the security detail, the law school leadership and the legal theorists — all of this was a vivid display not only of Leo’s power but of his vision. Decades ago, he’d realized it was not enough to have a majority of Supreme Court justices. To undo landmark rulings like Roe, his movement would need to make sure the court heard the right cases brought by the right people and heard by the right lower court judges.

Leo began building a machine to do just that. He didn’t just cultivate friendships with conservative Supreme Court justices, arranging private jet trips, joining them on vacation, brokering speaking engagements. He also drew on his network of contacts to place Federalist Society protégés in clerkships, judgeships and jobs in the White House and across the federal government.

He personally called state attorneys general to recommend hires for positions he presciently understood were key, like solicitors general, the unsung litigators who represent states before the U.S. Supreme Court. In states that elect jurists, groups close to him spent millions of dollars to place his allies on the bench. In states that appoint top judges, he maneuvered to play a role in their selection.

And he was capable of playing bare-knuckled politics. He once privately lobbied a Republican governor’s office to reject a potential judicial pick and, if the governor defied him, threatened “fury from the conservative base, the likes of which you and the Governor have never seen.”

To pay for all this, Leo became one of the most prolific fundraisers in American politics. Between 2014 and 2020, tax records show, groups in his orbit raised more than $600 million. His donors include hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow and the Koch family.

Leo grasped the stakes of these seemingly obscure races and appointments long before liberals and Democrats did. “The left, even though we are somewhat court worshippers, never understood the potency of the courts as a political machine. On the right, they did,” said Caroline Fredrickson, a visiting professor at Georgetown Law and a former president of the American Constitution Society, the left’s answer to the Federalist Society. “As much as I hate to say it, you’ve got to really admire what they achieved.” Belatedly, Leo’s opposition has galvanized, joining conservatives in an arms race that shows no sign of slowing down.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Civil Rights, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Republicans

Gary Rayno: The World Moral Order Is in Tatters

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2023 //
41

I read the NHInsider regularly to follow the doings of the libertarians and rightwing Republicans who currently control the state. The education articles are written by veteran journalist Gary Rayno. I was very impressed by this article posted yesterday, which aptly summarizes the mess the world is in today, relying on the wisdom of William Butler Yeats. Religious zealots and intolerance are steering events.

He writes:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

This quote from the William Butler Yeats poem “The Second Coming” — written in 1919 just after World War I — often appears in times like these when the world’s moral order crumbles and more resembles “Lord of the Flies.”

Today human tragedy is on the front pages of newspapers, on television and radio news programs, on Twitter (X) and other social media.

The world is teetering on the edge of World War III as some nations try to pull the world’s superpowers into a conflict that millions of people will not survive.

Today’s conflicts in the Mid East and Europe are made more dangerous by technology that can pinpoint artillery shells to blow up a tank or to kill civilians in large numbers depending on the depravity of the shooters.

The Mid East is the founding place of three of the world’s major religions and has seen its share or wars in the last century not just between Arabs and Israelites, but among Arab nations as well.

The region’s long history of conflicts did not prepare anyone for what happened last week on a Jewish holy day when the terrorist group Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip for years, invaded Israel, killed nearly a thousand people, including families with young children, beheaded some, tortured others and took about 150 hostages back to Gaza to use as bargaining chips.

They not only killed, tortured and maimed Israeli citizens, they used their own citizens as human shields by preventing them from leaving Gaza.

The absence of respect for human life and suffering is inconceivable but all too common in today’s polarized world as the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world talk about killing Democrats and Hamas leaders talk about eliminating all Jews.

The Israeli government, as it often does, retaliates with even more force than used against it, and has the stated goal of eliminating Hamas. That objective means lost Palestinian civilian lives seen as collateral damage.

Once the fighting begins, war produces few white hats.

The wars in the Mideast are often both ethnically and religiously driven pitting the Muslim Palestinians against the Jewish Israelites with centuries of history to solidify the beliefs of both sides.

While religion is not the biggest driver for war, intolerance is, it is in the Mideast.

And the problem with religious wars was aptly stated by former President Richard Nixon when he said “In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.”

The Mideast conflict has taken the focus away from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities the Russians have inflicted on the Ukrainians and their country.

The war in Eastern Europe is more ethnically driven than religious.

Until Putin decided to expand the Russian empire, Europe had been largely free of conflicts since World War II, but like the Mideast conflict, attempts are to draw the superpowers into the chaos and expand the carnage.

While the world’s eyes are on the Mideast and Eastern Europe, the United States government is being held hostage by a couple dozen extremists, particularly in the US House, but also the Senate, who want to see chaos and ensure the dysfunction of government as we know it.

The Christian Nationalist movement is the foundation of some of the extremists, but not all of them.

The House decided to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and since that time more than a week ago, nothing is moving and that prevents any help to fund the nation’s allies in the two conflicts or to keep government functioning beyond the middle of November.

Republicans and their slim majority in the House cannot agree on a new Speaker and probably won’t until the crisis threatens to explode and Republicans realize they will pay politically for their inability to solve the civil war within their ranks.

One member of the House Republican caucus called it a clown show.

In the Senate a former football coach, Tommy Tuberville, is holding up hundreds of military appointments at this crucial time over the abortion issue, while others like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz are holding up key appointments like ambassadors etc. that will have a direct effect on what is happening in the world’s hot spots, mostly to create chaos and hits on their Twitter accounts.

The Grand Old Party appears to be more interested in creating chaos than governing.

At the state level, 19 Republican governors, and we all know governors are experts in foreign policy, criticize President Biden’s handling of the attacks on Israel including New Hampshire’s own Chris Sununu.

Not that long ago, politics was put aside when the nation faced serious threats such as the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC or the beginning of Desert Storm, but no more.

The head of the National Republican Committee, Ronna McDaniel, referred to the latest conflict in the Mideast as a “great opportunity” to attack Biden.

You did not hear Democrats criticizing President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attack, or President George H. W. Bush after he began Desert Storm.

The nation came together to support their leaders’ actions. And you did not see the demonstrations on college campuses and city streets that happened this weekend pitting Palestinian supporters against those backing Israel.

Like the Palestinians and Israelites, much of what divides the United States has a religious undertone incorrectly based on the notion the United States was established as a Christian country.

That would be very interesting because many early settlers to the “new world” came here to escape religious persecution in nations with state religions.

The Constitution guarantees religious freedom as well as the founding principle of “all men (women) are created equal.”

Many on the right are trying to impose their religious beliefs on issues like abortion or LGBTQ+ rights or what young people can read or watch.

And you don’t have to look to the Mideast to see what can happen when religious beliefs become a driving force in politics.

In Littleton, Theater Up received a $1 million grant to help fix up the town’s aging Opera House, which is on the National Historic Building list, through a long-term lease. The group currently uses the building, but its lease ends in May.

After discussions with the town’s selectmen, one of whom is the state Senator for District 1, Carrie Gendreau, and who objected to murals painted on a private building in town earlier this year saying she objected to its LGBTQ+ theme, the theater group was informed the selectmen were not inclined to help pay for a $2,500 building study to determine what could and could not be done in the historic building.

The decision was due to the group’s affiliation with the LGBTQ+ community and complaints about its production of La Cage aux Follies, the award-winning play about a gay couple, the group was told.

Theater Up was also informed the selectmen continue to explore a ban on public art in the community which would certainly impact the group’s ability to continue its mission.

This is religious oppression in reverse, much like the group that tried to block the state from distributing COVID-19 in a new program serving the elderly two years ago.

This is imposing one’s beliefs on those who do not share them.

The second half of Yeats poem is not so well known as the first, but is more telling about where we might be headed and what a “second coming” could really mean.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Garry Rayno may be contacted at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Religion

A Visit to Terezin, a Nazi Concentration Camp

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2023 //
49

While in Prague, I went with a group of about 25 people to visit Terezin. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had seen a book of drawings created by the children of Terezin. Years ago, I had visited Auschwitz, which was an extermination camp, with gas chambers and huge ovens for incinerating bodies. The displays of luggage, hair, and other reminders of those who were gassed were gruesome and horrifying.

Terezin was not an extermination camp, though thousands of people died there. Most people sent to Terezin were later shipped to Auschwitz to be killed. I recalled reading that the Nazis used it as a propaganda showplace, where they demonstrated to Red Cross officials that the Jews there were living in a place similar to a resort, under idyllic conditions.

Terezin is one hour outside Prague. There were two parts to it. First was an all-male prison where members of the Czech resistance were held, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and others whom the Nazis hated. This facility was a centuries-old fort with high walls and abysmal living conditions. Many prisoners died of malnutrition or disease.

Then we went to the other part of Terezin, about a mile away. Also known as Terezinstadt, it is a picture-perfect town of colorful houses surrounding a park. The Nazis evicted all its inhabitants and used the town to house Jewish families from Czechoslovakia and Germany and eventually from other countries. There was no barbed wire, though every entrance into the town was guarded.

The town originally had 3,000-5,000 inhabitants. After it was turned into an internment camp for Jews, as many as 60,000 people were crammed into the same buildings. Nazis sent out flyers in Germany and Czechoslovakia portraying Terezin as an idyllic town. Wealthy Jews from Germany paid to go there and were allowed to bring a few pieces of luggage.

Once there, all their possessions were taken away, and they were assigned to a crowded dormitory. Men and women lived in separate dormitories, as did children. Families, of course, were separated. Adults were required to work, and children were mostly confined to their dormitories. Workers were paid in scrip, which they could use to buy clothing that had been confiscated from new arrivals.

Food was scarce, and many died of malnutrition and disease. There were regular transports from Terezin to Auschwitz. Somehow the Jews in Terezin knew that it was very bad to be shipped East, so the Nazis compelled some of those who arrived at Auschwitz to write their friends in Terezin to assure them that Auschwitz was a swell place.

In 1944, the King of Denmark asked the International Red Cross to inspect Terezin because Danish Jews had been sent there. The IRC let the Nazis know that there were coming, and the Nazis selected a date that gave them time to clean up the camp and stage a performance. The chiildren played soccer before an enthusiastic audience. A well-known Czech conductor led an orchestra of imprisoned musicians. The Red Cross issued a report praising conditions at the camp.

A few days after the Red Cross inspection, the orchestra conductor was deported to Auschwitz, along with many of the musicians.

The Terezin museum was fascinating, and I regretted that we had only an hour there. One room was filled with names of children who passed through Terezin. There were 15,000, but only 8,000 names. Names are added whenever anyone is identified. There was a wall of children’s drawings. And there were beautiful poems written by children who knew they were doomed.

The museum also contained a graphic chronology of anti-Semitism in Hitler’s time—such as the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi leaders agreed on the necessity of a “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem: to kill every one of the 11 million Jews then living in Europe.

The architect of the Final Solution was Rudolph Heydrich, who was the deputy head of the Nazi “Protectorate” that included Czechoslovakia. He was assassinated by partisans in 1942.

In retaliation, the Nazis made an example of the towns of Lidice and Lezaky, believing the assassins came from there. The Nazis murdered every man in Lidice and sent the women to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, where most died. Lezaky was totally destroyed, and its inhabitants killed.

In the midst of great beauty and art that we see today in Central Europe, it’s hard to imagine these horrific events. So much death and destruction. Unthinkable. Unimaginable. But true.

As I left the Terezin museum, I saw a copy of a diary written by one of the children who survived both Terezin and Auschwitz: Helga’s Diary. But the shop was closed. I was the last person to exit. I got on the bus and ordered a copy online.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, International, Propaganda

Joshua Benton: What You Never Knew about Elon Musk’s Grandfather

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2023 //
20

Joshua Benton wrote about Elon Musk’s grandfather in The Atlantic. Benton spent more time researching him than did Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson. It’s not a pretty picture but it might provide insight into Musk’s worldview. I hope not.

Benton wrote:

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.”

But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa. Haldeman had built a comfortable life for himself in Regina, Saskatchewan’s capital. His chiropractic practice was one of Canada’s largest and allowed him to possess his own airplane and a 20-room home he shared with his wife and four young children. He’d been active in politics, running for both the provincial and national parliaments and even becoming the national chairman of a minor political party. Meanwhile, he’d never even been to South Africa.

What would make a man undertake such a radical change? Isaacson writes that Haldeman had come “to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft.” One of Haldeman’s sons has written that it may have simply been “his adventurous spirit and the desire for a more pleasant climate in which to raise his family.” But another factor was at play: his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime.

An examination of Joshua Haldeman’s writings reveals a radical conspiracy theorist who expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and antidemocratic views repeatedly, and over the course of decades—a record I studied across hundreds of documents from the time, including newspaper clips, self-published manuscripts, university archives, and private correspondence. Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled.

Benton writes that Haldeman wrote a self-published book, and there is only one copy in all of North America, at Michigan State University. Benton traveled there to read it. It’s title:

The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa.

In this book, Haldeman expressed his hope that South Africa would become “the leader of White Christian Civilization as she is becoming more and more the focal point, the bulwark, and the subject of attack by anti-Christian, anti-White forces throughout the world.”

He was, quite simply, a vociferous racist and anti-Semite. Isaacson’s father was Jewish. It’s surprising that he paid so little attention to Musj’s lineage.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Racism

Texas: Abbott Calls Special Session to Force Vouchers

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2023 //
12

Governor Greg Abbott really, really wants vouchers. The State Senate agrees with him. The House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans but it thus far has refused to pass them. Rural Republicans in the House have allied with urban Democrats because both know that vouchers will harm their community public schools.

But Abbott is pulling out all the stops. He even refused to raise teachers’ salaries or increase public school funding until he gets a voucher bill.

The Texas Observer comments:

Governor Greg Abbott has called lawmakers back to a special legislative session starting this coming Monday, October 9. His message to them: Pass school vouchers—or else.

“There’s an easy way to get it done, and there’s a hard way,” Abbott said during a September 19 tele-town hall. “If we do not win in that first special session, we will have another special special session and we’ll come back again. And then if we don’t win that time … We will have everything teed up in a way where we will be giving voters in a primary a choice.”

From bullying legislators to “co-opting” churches and religious services, Abbott “wants to force a voucher at all costs,” said Patty Quinzi, legislative director of the Texas American Federation of Teachers. Pulling the purse strings of Abbott’s voucher campaign are a handful of billionaires who have invested millions to weaponize far-right culture war propaganda to fund what the governor has branded as “school choice” for parents.

Meanwhile, many public school districts started this school year with a budget deficit after the Senate refused to use the state’s $33 billion budget surplus to increase school funding without the condition of passing universal vouchers.

During the regular session, the House twice rejected proposals for vouchers or “an educational savings account,” citing constituent concerns that voucher programs would siphon money from public schools. When the Senate attempted to force the House to accept universal vouchers in return for passing its school funding proposal, its author, Representative Ken King, pulled the bill.

“In the end, the Senate would not negotiate at all. It was a universal ESA or nothing,” King wrote in his public statement. “I am committed to protecting the 5.5 million school kids in Texas from being used as political hostages. What the Governor and the Senate [have] done is inexcusable, and I stand ready to set it right and continue to work for the best outcome for our students and schools.”

In early August, the House’s 15-member committee on Educational Opportunity and Enrichment issued its interim report, signaling some members’ willingness to compromise on school vouchers if they were limited to students with special needs and if the money to fund a voucher program came out of the state general revenue instead of the Permanent School Fund. Earlier this year, the Observer revealedhow limited voucher programs in other states served as a trojan horse for larger, universal voucher programs, leaving public schools with large deficits and a loss of federal civil rights protections for parents who took their children out of public schools.

“We are $40 billion below the national average for school funding, so we have no business talking about any kind of program that takes more money out of our public schools,” said Representative Gina Hinojosa, who serves on the committee but declined to endorse its recommendations.

Greg Abbott has vowed to keep calling special sessions until the Legislature passes a voucher bill.

Categories Bigotry, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Propaganda, Rural Schools, Teachers

New Hampshire: Anti-Woke Law Jeopardizes Holocaust Education

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2023 //
37

The Boston Globe reported that teachers in New Hampshire are torn between two laws: one requires teaching the Holocaust, the other bans teaching “divisive concepts.” The reactionary “Moms for Liberty” has offered a $500 bounty to anyone who turns in a teacher for violating the “divisive concepts” law. The Anti-Defamation League has documented a sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents in New England; the majority of those incidents occurred in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire schools have become battlegrounds in the culture wars over racism and gender identity, and comprehensive education on the Holocaust is in danger, experts and teachers say. In 2020, after events including the mass shooting two years earlier that killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, New Hampshire passed a law requiring instruction on the Holocaust and other genocides in grades 8 through 12. But then, in 2021, as part of a backlash to the nation’s racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd, New Hampshire banned the teaching of “divisive concepts” such as implicit bias and systemic racism.

Now these two laws are colliding in the state’s classrooms. Some of the topics that the divisive concepts laws restrict are precisely the ones that Holocaust education experts say must be covered to prevent a repeat of history. A key part of teaching about the Holocaust and other genocides is examining how one group of people could agree to participate in the mass murder of another. The answer, in part, lies in the use of propaganda that asserts one group as inferior. Adolf Hitler modeled his depiction of Jews as an inferior race on America’s racist treatment of Black people and the study of eugenics in this country.

Letters of concern to the New Hampshire Legislature and interviews with teachers reflect that, in teaching about the Holocaust, many feel scared to discuss certain topics as a way to draw contemporary parallels because of the state’s divisive concepts law.

Kingswood social studies teacher Kimberly Kelliher is among them. She says the state’s reporting mechanism for parents to accuse teachers of violating the law — plus a monetary award offered by the parent activist group Moms for Liberty aimed at encouraging such reports — frightens her. “The Holocaust is not a single event. It is a series of attitudes and actions that led to an atrocity,” says Kelliher, who has taught social studies for more than two decades. “When we look at the divisive concepts law, if we are denying people from talking about certain things, then we’re not honestly talking about the attitudes and actions.”

Kelliher, like other teachers I spoke with, said she now avoids the word “racism” when talking to students about the Holocaust. Others say they avoid mentioning current events and hot-button topics such as implicit bias.

But a New Hampshire scholar says it’s impossible to avoid subjects like these if we truly want to learn from the atrocities of the past. “You can’t teach about Nazi perpetrators without teaching about implicit bias. You just can’t do it. What motivates the perpetrator?” says Tom White, the coordinator of educational outreach at Keene State College’s Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Hitler took advantage of implicit bias and conspiracy theories against Jews that had existed through thousands of years of antisemitism. “The central crux of fascism is to make their followers afraid that they’re under attack by another group, that they’re threatened by another group,” White says. “Implicit bias,” he adds, “is the crux of all of this….”

Under New Hampshire’s law, instruction must include facts about the Holocaust and other genocides, plus teach students “how and why political repression, intolerance, bigotry, antisemitism, and national, ethnic, racial, or religious hatred and discrimination have, in the past, evolved into genocide and mass violence.” Teachers, state Department of Education guidelines say, should help students “identify and evaluate the power of individual choices” in preventing such behavior.

Reports of antisemitic incidents and propaganda are on the rise nationally and regionally, according to the Anti-Defamation League of New England. In 2022, the nonprofit tracked 204 antisemitic incidents in New England, a 32 percent increase from the previous year. In New Hampshire, where 183 of those incidents took place, the spike of white supremacist propaganda activity included a classmate shouting antisemitic comments at a Jewish student; a swastika and the phrase “Kill all Jews” scrawled on a rock in a public place; and a neo-Nazi group distributing stickers with the Star of David and message “Resist Zionism…”

The divisive concepts law in New Hampshire prohibits students from being “taught, instructed, inculcated or compelled to express belief in or support” that someone is “inherently superior” to another based on a particular trait, including sex, race, and religion, and also states that students cannot be taught that an individual is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” Educators who run afoul of this provision can face sanctions, including loss of their teaching licenses…

The state’s two largest teacher unions are suing the New Hampshire education commissioner, the attorney general, and the head of the human rights commission to repeal the divisive concepts law, citing the chilling effect it is having on teaching. Deb Howes, president of the American Federation of Teachers-New Hampshire, says the law’s title, which includes the words “Right to Freedom from Discrimination,” is downright Orwellian in its doublespeak, given the law itself “is in effect chilling speech on the very concept of discrimination against various marginalized groups.”

The vagueness of the divisive concepts law is one of teachers’ biggest concerns, Howes adds. “The divisive concepts law is so broadly worded. None of us are teaching that anyone deserves to be inherently oppressed, but we also know that when you’re talking about either history or the impact of history on current events, there are people who are oppressed and it comes from somewhere,” she says.

Categories Bigotry, Education Reform, New Hampshire, Racism, Republicans

Peter Greene: Norte Dame Law School Joins Rightwing Extremists to Defend Religious Charter School in Oklahoma

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2023 //
7

Peter Greene reports on the status of Oklahoma’s attempt to open the nation’s first openly religious charter school. the State’s Attorney General thinks it’s wrong, so Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walter (a MAGA-nut) is relying on outside help. As Peter explains, the rightwingers are flocking to Walters’ side.

He writes:

Earlier this year, Oklahoma State Attorney General Gentner Drummond issued an opinion about the prospect of the state approving a church-run charter school. He was reversing the opinion of his predecessor, saying that previous opinion “misuses the concept of religious liberty by employing it as a means to justify state-funded religion. If allowed to remain in force, I fear the opinion will be used as a basis for taxpayer-funded religious schools.”

In June, the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board ignored him and approved the St. Isidore of Seville virtual charter, a cyber school that was proposed by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City in collaboration with the Diocese of Tulsa. It was in anticipation of this application that the virtual charter board asked the previous AG for an opinion in the first place.

As an AP report noted, “Archdiocese officials have been unequivocal that the school will promote the Catholic faith and operate according to church doctrine, including its views on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

And just in case you wonder if the state knew what it was doing, or was trying to preserve any plausible deniability, State Superintendent Ryan Walters supported the decision:

This decision reflects months of hard work, and more importantly, the will of the people of Oklahoma. I encouraged the board to approve this monumental decision, and now the U.S.’s first religious charter school will be welcomed by my administration.

And Governor Stitt hailed it as “a win for religious liberty and education freedom in our great state.”

Meanwhile, AG Drummond called the decision “contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interests of taxpayers.” Furthermore, “It’s extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with our tax dollars. In doing so, these members have exposed themselves and the state to potential legal action that could be costly.”

To the surprise of nobody, that lawsuit was filed before summer’s end with Oklahoma Parent Legislative Action Committee and individual parents as plaintiffs in a case that has already been busy and twisty.

The case has drawn a number of national groups to the case, including for the plaintiffs the ACLU, Americans for Separation of Church and State, and the Education Law Center.

The defendant side is a more interesting array. Drummond, having made it clear that he believes the charter proponents are dead wrong, is not using the attorney general’s office to defend them. So the school board, the state department of education, and Ryan Walters are being defended by private attorneys in Oklahoma and some other hired guns.

Two are part of the usual array of legal shops that work to defund and dismantle public education. There’s the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian advocacy group that was incorporated in 1993 by six right-wing luminaries, including Larry Burkett, Bill Bright, and James Dobson. They are supported by a host of right-wing foundations, including the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation. And they oppose abortion, same-sex marriage, most all LGBTQ+ rights. Their track record is sadly successful; these are the Hobby Lobby lawsuit folks. They have a summer legal training program to get Christian law students whipped up for legal careers; Justice Amy Coney Barrett taught at it. They successfully litigated against Vermont, establishing that the state must include Catholic students in its voucher program, a sort of throat-clearing for Carson v. Makin.

There’s First Liberty Institute a Christian conservative firm based in Texas, which co-took Carson v. Makin all the way to SCOTUS, as well as the case of the praying coach.

These are to be expected; getting money away from public education and into church coffers is their thing. But you get a fuller idea of who has a lot riding on this case from the third set of lawyers– the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Clinic….

A Catholic charter in Oklahoma would pretty much erase the difference between charters and vouchers, and the Catholic charter in Oklahoma serves as a proof of legal concept, so this case is a good fit for the church. It is winding through various legal twists and turns (the defendants just moved to have it dismissed), but if it ends up before SCOTUS, it could represent one more reduction of the pile of rubble that now stands where the wall between church and state used to.

Please open the link and finish the article.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Extremism, Gender, Oklahoma, Religion
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