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Passau, Germany: The Worst Floods Ever

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2023 //
11

We are in Passau. The water level on the Danube River is so low that we exited our ship from the top deck, which is not customary. The water level is so low that the ship can’t go to Nuremberg. Passau has experienced dramatic floods and droughts this year. A month ago, the lower part of the town was flooded. Not an unusual occurrence in this town. But only a month later, there is a drought and water levels are very low.

Passau is a beautifully preserved model of a 15th century town. The houses are low-rise. Only the churches rise above the skyline. The streets are paved with cobblestones.

What you see in this photo is the high-water marks of historic floods. The marks are recorded on the City Hall, which fronts the Danube. You can see the marks in comparison to a lofty front door, about 10-12 feet high. The worst flood, it is believed, occurred in 1501. The second worst flood was in 2013, when the water level reached about 15′.

Our guide, a law student, said that all higher education in Germany is tuition-free. But you can’t be admitted without passing an exam. You pass more exams to check your progress. If you don’t pass the exam, you get booted out. Students who are committed to their education are likely to retain their places. Those who are not keeping up are at risk of being kicked out.

I learned that Germans put a high value on education. Parents can send their children to religious and private schools, but such schools must follow the same standards and curriculum as public schools. Home schooling is not permitted.

I asked about Jews in Passau, and our guide–a law student–said the Jews left Passau 500 years ago. Later, I googled and learned that in the fifteenth century, a petty thief confessed that he stole the Host and sold it to Jews. Ten Jews were accused of stabbing the Host until it bled. The Jews were tortured until they confessed, and they were put to death along with their accuser. In the aftermath, the synagogue and Jewish homes were burned. A few dozen Jews converted to Christianity, and the rest of the small Jewish community packed up and left Passau. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/passau

We visited the main church in town. It was stunning, a magnificent combination of gothic and baroque styles.

In the evening, back on our ship, an oompah band played, and it was delightful. I feel a keen sense of double identity, first, as an American enjoying their performance and singing along with familiar songs and polkas. (“I love to go a wandering, along the mountain track, and as I go, I love to sing, my knapsack on my back.”)

Yet as a Jew, I can’t help looking at these friendly, jovial faces and wondering whose grandfather was a Nazi. None of them? Maybe.

Mary says I’m obsessed with the Holocaust. I don’t think so. But to be in Germany and Austria is to be constantly reminded of the horrors that befell people whose only crime was to be Jewish.

Friday we visit the infamous Treblinka concentration camp in the Czech Republic. I will go there to honor the dead and to pray, “Never again.”

These are measures of how high the flood rose and the year in which it happened. The worst flood occurred in 1501. The second worst was 2013.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Personal, Religion

Alan Singer: This Is Banned Books Week. Support the Freedom to Read!

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2023 //
13

Alan Singer is a professor of secondary education at Hofstra University in New York. He is a consistent defender of the right to read. He writes here about Banned Books Week. This recognition is of extraordinary importance this year because of the surge in book banning, fueled by Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, Governor Greg Abbott in Texas, and extremist groups like Moms for Liberty.

He writes:

This year Banned Books Week is October 1 – 7, 2023. The theme is “Let Freedom Read!” Banned Books Week draws national attention to the harms of censorship. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) compiles lists of challenged books as reported in the media and submitted by librarians and teachers across the country.

Sixty percent of all banned book demands come from just eleven people who are virtually prurient porn purveyors who see pornography everywhere, but especially in any book that includes homosexual characters or where teenagers have sex. An article in The Washington Post focused on a woman from Spotsylvania County, Virginia who purchases “suspect” books on Amazon, bookmarks pages with color-coded post-it notes, highlights the “disgusting” passages she doesn’t like, and has filed 71 complaints with the local public school board. Based on her complaints, two members of the board recommended burning the books.

Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a surge in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools. The annual event highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community — librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.

Reading advocate, writer, and television and film star LeVar Burton is the honorary chair of Banned Books Week. Burton will headline a live virtual conversation with Banned Books Week Youth Honorary Chair Da’Taeveyon Daniels about censorship and advocacy at 8:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, October 4. The event will stream live on Instagram (@banned_books_week). Visit BannedBooksWeek.org for more details.

Saturday, October 7 is “Let Freedom Read Day,” a day of action against censorship. Call community decision-makers, write them letters, and buy a banned book. For information about ways to participate and resources, visit bannedbooksweek.org/let-freedom-read-day/.

PEN America is calling on supporters to email to their Congressional Representative urging them to support House Resolution 733 introduced by Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI). The resolution recognizes Banned Book Week and expresses concern about “the spreading problem of book banning and the proliferation of threats to freedom of expression in the United States.”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Creativity, Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries

Miami Herald: We Are #1 in Drug Quackery and Book Bans!

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2023 //
13

Readers of this blog are well aware that Florida Governor DeSantis is running for the Republican nomination as an extremist on key issues like his opposition to abortion, to COVID vaccines, and to gays.

His views don’t seem to be helping his campaign. He keeps falling further behind Trump. It just goes to show that no one can run to Trump’s right.

The Miami Herald editorial board has had enough. They published a scathing editorial lambasting DeSantis for his appeals to ignorance and bigotry. In Florida, people are free to ignore science and “free” to get sick. Free to be ignorant and free to be a bigot.

Florida’s extremism has come home to roost. The Sunshine State has the distinction of championing misinformation on COVID-19 vaccines and intolerance on book bans.

Just as Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration recommended people under age 65 do not get the new COVID-19 vaccine boosters, the state led the country in coronavirus hospitalizations.

During the week ending Sept. 9, Florida’s hospitalization rate reached 10.65 per 100,000 residents, Politico reported. That’s a small number compared to the peak of the pandemic, but emblematic of how Floridians have paid the price for the ignorance DeSantis has labeled “freedom.”

While his hand-picked surgeon general didn’t rule out vaccinations for those most vulnerable to the virus, people ages 65 and up, he left enough room for anti-vax fears to set in. He recommended they consult with their healthcare providers, including about“potential concerns” he’s raised about the shots that have saved nearly 20 million lives worldwide, according to a study published last year.

DeSantis’ hope is that his approach to the pandemic — ignoring and ridiculing mainstream public health recommendations — will help his presidential campaign resurface in the polls. But, as Politico reported last week, the pandemic, once a driving issue among Republicans, doesn’t appear to be top of mind for voters anymore.

When blue states were shutting down businesses, mandating masks and closing schools, DeSantis could draw a clear contrasting line. But now that most of the country has moved on from strict restrictions, all DeSantis has left is his dangerous rhetoric against vaccines. If elected president, he told ABC News he wouldn’t support further federal funding for immunizations.

Florida is no beacon of freedom as the governor is selling it to the rest of the nation. We have become the poster child for what happens when ideas leave the fringes of political discourse and are instituted as public policy.

Florida also is No. 1 — and by far — in taking books off school shelves.

Of 3,362 instances of book bans in public schools in the United States, 40% took place in the Sunshine State, according to a tally by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression. Most book removals in the country were classified as “banned pending investigation,” meaning a book has been removed during review, the Herald reported.

Thanks to Florida’s expanded law known as “Don’t say gay,” any resident can object to instructional or library materials and get them removed until a school district conducts an investigation. The law also prohibits instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity and has driven groups to request banning books dealing with LGBTQ issues.

DeSantis has also signed laws to restrict how teachers speak about race and racism. His appointees, in their takeover of New College of Florida in Sarasota, voted to eliminated a major deemed too “woke,” gender studies.

This is Florida, where knowledge is restricted and free thinking is admonished. But you’re free to spew as much dangerous information to the public — the crazier and more conspiratorial, the better.

This time, it doesn’t feel good to be No. 1.

Please don’t make America like Florida!

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, DeSantis, Elections, Extremism, Florida, Freedom to Read, Health

Who Are the Billionaire Wilks Brothers of Cisco, Texas?

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2023 //
2

Dan and Farris Wilks are politically powerful billionaires who live in Cisco, Texas. They both finished high school but went no further. They got into fracking early on and sold their oil and gas business to the government of Singapore for $3.5 billion in 2011.

They are passionate evangelical Christians. They fund Christian nationalist groups. They fund anti-gay organizations and anti-abortion groups. They consider climate change a hoax. They are major funders of voucher advocacy. They would like to see every student enrolled in a private Christian school or home-schooled.

The brothers are closely associated with ALEC and the Koch network. They are big contributors to Senator Ted Cruz.

Dan and Farris Wilks are major funders of PragerU videos, which present history and economics from a rightwing perspective, echoing the views of Dennis Prager, the talk-show host who created the videos.

Read about Dan Wilks here.

Read about Farris Wilks here.

The Wilks brothers have been described as “the Koch brothers of the Christian right” for their funding of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTgroups. In addition to a variety of groups on the Religious Right, the brothers have funded organizations associated with the Koch brothers’ political network such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN). Farris Wilks runs The Thirteen Foundation, which has been described as “one of the biggest and quietest anti-abortion donors in the United States.”

The Guardian summarized their negative influence here.

Experts who follow the influence of the Wilks brothers say their sprawling agendas and big checks spark strong concerns.Videos denying climate science approved by Florida as state curriculum

“Farris and Dan Wilks, who believe their billions were given to them by God, have spent the last decade working to advance a dominionist ideology by funding far-right organizations and politicians that seek to dismiss climate change as ‘God’s will’, remove choice, demonize the LGBTQ community, and tear down public education, all to turn America into a country that gives preference to and imposes their extreme beliefs on everyone,” said Chris Tackett, a Texas-based campaign finance analyst.

“The goal of [the] Wilks and those that share their ideology is to gain control of levers of power and control information. That’s why they invest heavily into politicians, agenda-driven non-profits and media organizations like PragerU and the Daily Wire. It is all connected.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Racism, Religion, Republicans, Vouchers

Houston Chronicle Editorial: Three Theocratic Billionaires Threaten U.S. Democracy

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2023 //
2

The Houston Chronicle published a blistering editorial about the power of three billionaires who control Republican politics in Texas and threaten American democracy—not only in Texas. The three are adherents of Christian nationalism and dedicated funders of school vouchers. Their dream is to abolish public schools and enroll every student in a Christian school or home-schooled. They funded State Attorney General KennPaxton’s impeachment defense, and they are now funding Governor Greg Abbott’s campaign for vouchers.

The editorial board wrote:

Since its founding in the early 1880s, the little town of Cisco, 45 miles east of Abilene, has been in the news twice. In 1919, Conrad Hilton paid $40,000 for the Mobley Hotel in downtown Cisco, which eventually gained fame as the first in a worldwide chain of Hilton hotels. Eight years later, two days before Christmas 1927, Santa Claus and three of his helpers robbed the First National Bank of Cisco.

National notoriety will again fall on Cisco if Texas voters — Republican, Democrat and independent — don’t get engaged with their democracy sometime soon. The little town is home to the Wilks brothers, Dan and Farris, oil and fracking billionaires who, by playing Santa Claus to Republican officeholders receptive to far-right extremists, are on a mission to transform Texas into a Christian nationalist state. Their efforts, in conjunction with an even more influential West Texas oil billionaire, Tim Dunn of Midland, was on insidious display during the recent impeachment trial of the most corrupt state attorney general in America.

Ken Paxton skated, not necessarily because he was innocent of the charges that 121 House members, including 60 Republicans, brought against him. He’s back on the job and baying for RINO blood because most Republicans in the Texas Senate are either in thrall to the West Texas triumvirate or they tremble in terror at the prospect of being “primaried” by a Wilks-and-Dunn-anointed challenger. All 19 Republican senators and at least half of the Republican House members have taken money from the West Texas billionaires or their affiliated PACs and organizations.

The biggest recipient by far in this state is none other than Paxton himself. It’s likely that the Wilks and Dunn trio paid for his $4 million impeachment defense, which included the time and effort of very expensive Houston lawyers, Tony Buzbee and Dan Cogdell.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the judge during the impeachment trial, also is beholden to the West Texans. Their Defend Texas Liberty PAC donated $1 million to the lite guv, while loaning him another $2 million. The PAC largesse came shortly before Patrick began presiding over Paxton’s trial, a trial that ended with a fiery Patrick speech denouncing the impeachment process.

In addition to being fossil-fuel billionaires, both Dunn and Farris Wilks are Christian nationalist evangelists — Dunn as a lay preacher for the Midland Bible Church, Wilks as a preacher for a Cisco congregation founded by his father called the Assembly of Yahweh Seventh Day Church. Dan Wilks and his wife oversee the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, a group funded with a portion of the $3.2 billion the brothers made when they sold the majority stake of their Cisco-based oil field trucking company, Frac Tech Services.

From the pulpit to the campaign pockets of politicians, the West Texans are on what they see as a God-imbued mission to transform Texas and beyond. Over the past 20 years, they’ve contributed nearly $100 million to think tanks, nonprofits, fundraising committees, websites and Texas candidates who support their crusade.

In their preaching and practice, climate change is merely God’s will; homosexuality is an evil on par with incest, bestiality and pedophilia; abortion is murder, unlawful with no exceptions; gun owners enjoy a God-given right to carry their weapons in public without permits or training; only Christians have the God-given right to hold leadership positions in government (which, as Texas Monthly reported, left former House Speaker Joe Strauss, who is Jewish, beyond the pale). Also, oil and gas is a gift from God to be used with gratitude. (They don’t mention God’s gift of sunlight and wind.)

Kel Seliger, a longtime GOP state senator from Amarillo, ran afoul of the triumvirate in recent years. Reasonable, affable and conservative, Seliger is no longer in the Legislature. “It’s a Russian-style oligarchy, pure and simple,” he told CNN last year. “Really, really wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money to get policy made the way they want it — and they get it.”

What those “really, really wealthy people” want these days is to destroy Texas public education, a hotbed, as they tell it, of critical race theory and other elements of what one Dunn-and-Wilks-backed group calls “Marxist and sexual indoctrination,” all funded by “far-Left elites for decades.” (That would be the Texas taxpayer.) [Bold-face added by DR, here and below.]

Their strategy, as Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor, told Chron.com, is to recruit a generation of Wilks and Dunn-funded mouthpieces in state and local positions to push the narrative that public schools are harmful to students and their parents. Once public education is weakened beyond repair, they offer private religious schools as “a better way.”

With an insidious, well-funded effort, our home-grown theocrats will make sure that Gov. Greg Abbott has all the financial ammunition he needs in the next few weeks for his last-ditch, special-session effort to persuade lawmakers to use taxpayer money in the form of vouchers for private, often Christian-based schooling. Abbott calls it “school choice.” Rural lawmakers, who’ve fought the plan for years, know it’s school suicide.

The West Texans “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools,” former state Sen. Bob Deuell, a northeast Texas Republican, told CNN. Deuell, a physician, got crossways with the West Texans when he supported a bill that updated the state’s end-of-life procedures. Dan Wilks, falsely claiming that the legislation would “strengthen Texas’s death panels,” backed tea party activist Bob Hall, who defeated Deuell in 2014. Hall was one of Paxton’s most outspoken supporters during the impeachment trial.

Texas is a big state, but the West Texans have Christian nationalist ambitions beyond our borders. They are reliable supporters of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and, of course, former President Donald Trump, who decried Paxton’s “shameful impeachment.” In an expansive, post-impeachment mood these days, Paxton seems to be pondering a larger field of dreams for himself. He told Tucker Carlson last week he may challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn. “His time is done,” Paxton told a radio talk-show host.

If Trump wins the presidential election next year, the disgraced Texas AG would be a prime candidate to head the U.S. Justice Department. (His paramour, the woman he brought from San Antonio to Austin, could be installed in a Georgetown townhouse, only a short Uber ride away from Justice.) He (they) would be right at home in a Trumpian Washington, where, as U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney said to The Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

The party’s presidential nominee in 2012 has said he worries about the survival of America’s democratic experiment.

Whether it survives depends in large part on what happens here in Texas, where the national far right comes for funding and ideas. Decades of one-party rule have contributed to voter apathy and made our state a fertile testing ground for extreme policies. It’s telling, for example, that the AG was reelected last year with the support of about 13 percent of the populace (4 million votes out of a population of nearly 30 million). Paxton and other Dunn and Wilks dependents only have to listen to their West Texan Santa Claus trio, not to the people of Texas.

On a Friday morning in Cisco nearly a century ago, a little girl was among the first to notice that the Santa who stepped out of a stolen Buick and into the lobby of the First National Bank was a fake (and a dangerous one, at that). In Texas these days, maybe we’ve grown jaded. Perhaps it will be young voters of all political persuasions who will take the lead in calling out — and rejecting — the dangerous extremists in our midst. Perhaps taking heart from the brave Republicans who dared impeach an errant AG, they’ll elect representatives of the people, not altar boys and girls on call for Christian nationalists.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Dark Money, Democracy, Freedom, Funding, Home Schooling, Religion, Republicans, Texas, Trump

Florida Education Official Paid with Federal $$ to Promote DeSantis’s Extreme Views

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2023 //
7

The Orlando Sentinel reported that the DeSantis administration used federal funds to create a new office to network with rightwing school boards, headed by Terry Stoops. DeSantis wants to stamp out anything he thinks is “woke,” that is, any instruction about racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other form of injustice or bigotry.

Leslie Postal writes:

A new Florida Department of Education employee who’s reaching out to conservative school board members makes $126,000 a year, a salary funded by a federal grant designed to boost “well-rounded educational opportunities,” health and safety and effective use of technology.

Terry Stoops was tapped in April to head the department’s new office of Academically Successful and Resilient Districts. Most of his contacts during his first months on the job were to school board members who’d been endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and representatives of conservative groups, his emails and calendar show.

In April, for example, he met several school board members at a “Learn Right” summit in Sarasota spearheaded by a founder of Moms for Liberty, the conservative group launched in Florida and focused on schools.

He emailed more than a dozen school board members endorsed by the governor in the 2022 election cycle and others who had the backing of Moms for Liberty, including Alicia Farrant, elected to the Orange County School Board in November.

And in May, Stoops met with the Herzog Foundation; its goal is “Advancing Christian Education.”

Apolitical school boards have not been contacted.

DeSantis, who is running for president, told Fox News in June that if elected he would try to abolish the federal education department and other agencies. If Congress would not approve doing that, “I’m going to use those agencies to push back against woke ideology and against the leftism we see creeping into all institutions of American life,” he said in that interview on June 28…

Stoops also met with people who were not school board members but seemed to share his political views. For example, he attended a virtual meeting about American Birthright, a blueprint for how to teach students social studies that embraces “the ideals of conservative Americans.”

Stoops, who spent nearly two decades in North Carolina mostly working on education policy for the conservative John Locke Foundation, was on the executive committee that helped devise American Birthright, which was released last year.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Racism

Justin Parmenter: North Carolina Funds Bigoted Christian Academy

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2023 //
2

NBCT high school teacher Justin Parmenter frequently tweets (X’s) about politics and schools in North Carolina. He has been reviewing the religious schools that take vouchers. Here is the latest.

Fayetteville Christian got $1.3m NC taxpayer dollars this year. They deny admissions to non-Christians and LGBTQ (whom they refer to as “deviate and perverted”).

I don’t want my public dollars going to institutions that can discriminate this way. #nced #ncga #ncpol

His Twitter handle is his name.

Categories Bigotry, Education Industry, Extremism, North Carolina, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Vouchers

Michael Hiltzik: Elon Musk Blames “the Jews” for X’s Problems

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2023 //
24

I don’t know about you, but I have trouble referring to Twitter as X. A single letter is not a name. And I have decided to stay on Twitter, because that’s how I reach nearly 150,000 people. When they retweet (re-X?) my posts, I reach even more. So I’m sticking with Twitter, despite Elon Musk and the proliferation of racists and anti-Semites on Twitter.

Michael Hiltzik, my favorite columnist at the Los Angeles Times, recently blasted Musk for blaming the misfortunes of Twitter on the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that fights racial and religious hatred, and especially anti-Semitism. Musk has threatened to sue the ADL for defamation. That’s ironic, almost funny.

Hiltzik writes:

Elon Musk has long been known for blaming everyone else but himself for the various fiascos visited upon his companies — meddlesome bureaucrats for COVID-related production slowdowns at Tesla, the Pentagon and conniving rivals for the loss of a government contract by SpaceX, nasty woke advertisers for the decline of X (ex-Twitter).

So what were the chances that he would get around to blaming the Jews? Based on the evidence at hand, 100%.

Over the weekend, Musk launched a ferocious, spittle-flecked attack on the Anti-Defamation League, which describes itself (accurately enough) as “a global leader in combating antisemitism, countering extremism and battling bigotry wherever and whenever it happens.”

Musk decided that the ADL is responsible for (in his words) “most of our revenue loss [at X]….Giving them maximum benefit of the doubt, I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so ~$4 billion.”

My goodness! When does he blame George Soros?

He asserted that the U.S. advertising revenue at X is “down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!” And he tweeted that he has “no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League.”

Not to put a fine point on things, but all this shows Musk to have gone utterly off the rails and over the edge of conspiracy-mongering paranoia. It’s the most extreme outburst of antisemitism by a purportedly mainstream public figure in more than 100 years.

Musk’s hate-spasm easily outflanks the previous champion of public antisemitism, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was caught on tape in July arguing that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” while leaving Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese relatively immune. It’s as if Musk challenged Kennedy’s effort to seize the antisemitism crown by saying, “Oh, yeah? Watch this.”

Musk’s outburst makes the position of Linda Yaccarino, the formerly respected entertainment executive who accepted the job of X’s CEO to restore the platform to the good graces of corporate advertisers, hopelessly untenable. Why she doesn’t resign is a mystery. His words also should prompt the federal government to question his suitability, and that of his company SpaceX, to hold government contracts of any kind.

Musk has bought into the notion — advanced by openly antisemitic X accounts — that the ADL fosters antisemitism by calling it out wherever it appears.

“The ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform,” he tweeted on Sunday. He was responding to a tweet quoting the far-right conspiracy-monger Alex Jones calling the ADL “the most pro-Hitler organization I’ve ever seen.” He further implied that the ADL is “somehow complicit in creating the very thing they complain about!”

So in this bizarro world, fighting antisemitism promotes antisemitism!

Musk implicitly endorsed the hashtag #BantheADL,” advocating banning the organization from X, by replying, “Perhaps we should run a poll on this.” Surely he knows that his right-wing followers would swamp any such poll on the “yes” side.

It’s crystal clear that X’s revenue problem is Elon Musk and his policies. He has welcomed dispensers of antisemitism, racism and other varieties of hate speech back onto the platform, while amplifying misinformation about purported COVID treatments and homophobic slurs retailed by conspiracy movements such as QAnon.

Corporate advertisers in the consumer market don’t need the ADL to tell them that it’s bad for their brands to be associated with a social media platform bristling with neo-Nazis and other denizens of the cultural underworld.

It’s true that the ADL has had its eyes on Musk and X for some time. That’s because the platform’s content moderation policies have fostered a documented surge of hate speech since Musk acquired it last October.

In March, the ADL reported that Twitter had refused to remove tweets or accounts that incited violence against Jews. Two months later, it followed up with a report that Musk’s decision to reinstate 65 Twitter accounts that had previously been banned for hate speech had contributed to the antisemitism surge.

The tweet-and-reply threads of many of these accounts, the ADL found, had become “magnets for vile antisemitic content.” They were rife with such “familiar antisemitic tropes” as “conspiracy theories about George Soros and the Rothschild banking family controlling global politics, finance, and media” and accusations that Jews are aiming to “destroy ‘the West’ by promoting transgender identities and lifestyles and ‘replacing’ white people via immigration (e.g., the Great Replacement).”

Tellingly, beyond stating his determination to “clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism,” and declaring, “I’m pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind,” Musk in his weekend outburst made no effort to address the specific points raised by the ADL — he merely asserted that the organization’s accusations were “unfounded.”

Obviously, that won’t do. According to ADL Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt, Yaccarino reached out to him last month, leading to a “frank + productive conversation…about @X, what works and what doesn’t, and where it needs to go to address hate effectively on the platform,” he tweeted.

ADL will “give her and Elon Musk credit if the service gets better… and reserve the right to call them out until it does,” Greenblatt added.

It’s a safe bet that as long as Musk reigns over X, the platform will have a long, long way to go to warrant any credit for eradicating hate speech at all.

There are few precedents in American history for someone with the public renown of Elon Musk voicing or hosting opinions of such unalloyed virulence. The closest analogue is probably Henry Ford, who in 1920 began publishing screeds in the Dearborn Independent, a local weekly he had acquired, alleging the existence of a vast Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination.

“Musk is sometimes compared to the innovator Henry Ford,” Josh Marshall observed Tuesday on his website, Talking Points Memo. “The comparison seems increasingly apt, if not in the way many have intended.”

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Media

Understanding the Voucher Scam

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2023 //
7

A reader who signs as “Retired Teacher” posted this astute analysis of how vouchers work. Why are billionaires like Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, the Waltons, etc. so enthusiastic about vouchers? No voucher will ever be large enough to send a child to the schools their children attend. Why do they want to defund public schools?

During the first phase of the privatization of education was the belief that the private sector can do everything better and more efficiently than the public sector. What ensued was trying to turn education into a commodity. Market based principles applied to education made everything so much worse including hiring the wrong people, endless testing, waste, fraud, firing legitimate teachers and closing public schools. The main goal of privatization has always been to gain access to public funds and transfer it into private pockets. The current interest in vouchers is an extension of this trend. It certainly is not about education as vouchers provide worse education.

Vouchers have always been the goal of DeVos, the 1% and right wing extremists. They are a way to scam the working class out of the public schools that protect their children’s rights and send them to valueless schools with zero accountability while teaching them religious dogma and almost anything else the school deems worthy for less cost. Unfortunately, the students are unlikely get a valid background in science, history, civics or the exposure to diverse students. Vouchers benefit the wealthy and affluent, and they are a losing proposition for the poor and working class.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Billionaires, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Reform, Fake, Hoax, Lies, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: The Lies Embedded in Florida’s Social Studies Curriculum

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2023 //
88

Heather Cox Richardson, a historian, analyzed the controversial Florida social studies curriculum and explains how they attempt to minimize racism and slavery. Their fault lies not in one or two sentences but in their central ideas. The influence of Hillsdale College is blatant in the document’s apologetics. Richardson posted this keen analysis on July 22, but I missed it. I’m pleased to share it now.

She wrote:

The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.

Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson’s impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).

That’s quite a tall order.

But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp. 116–117).

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.

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Notes:

https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/20653/urlt/6-4.pdf

Categories Bigotry, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Florida, History, Propaganda, Racism
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