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Maurice Cunningham on the Rise and Fall of Moms for Liberty

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2023 //
5

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

Maurice Cunningham wonders how this checkered organization will survive.

He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2023 //
7

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

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

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

He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Right-Wing War on Public Schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Censoring Books is a Betrayal of the Right to Read, Learn, and Teach

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2023 //
13

Maureen Downey of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution posted an article on her blog “Get Schooled” about the dangers of book banning and censorship and the advantages of learning about the real world. It was written by Becky Pringle, president of the NEA, and authors Caroline Tung Richmond and Ellen Oh.

They wrote:

Books that once lined the shelves of the library in a Jacksonville, Florida, elementary school are now stored in boxes. The school librarian spends her days vetting titles to comply with new censorship laws passed by the state.

In Spotsylvania County, Virginia, educators spent up to 40 hours a week reviewing titles after a mother of two students single-handedly challenged over 70 books in her school district. In one Utah district, 199 of 205 challenges were tracked to one married couple. Areview of those titles took 10,000 hours of staff time at a cost that exceeded $100,000. None of the educators will receive compensation for the extra work.

In Niles, Michigan, the school board recently blocked the circulation of nearly 200 diverse children’s titles that the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books donated. The donation included an illustrated version of the beloved Langston Hughes poem “I, Too, Am America,” with art by Bryan Collier, and the picture book “Grandma’s Purse” by Vanessa Brantley-Newton, about a young Black girl who playfully looks through her grandmother’s handbag. Although district teachers selected the texts, the school board — most of whom received backing from the conservative We the Parents political organization — refuses to release the books to school libraries.

These stories are not unique. Nationwide, educators continue to face an unprecedented number of book challenges — a figure that was 33% higher last school year than the year before.

While there is no doubt that Florida and Texas lead the country when it comes to banning books, the epidemic isn’t isolated to traditionally red states. In the midst of a climate that is hostile to books that contain diverse characters and storylines that don’t match some people’s view of the world, educators nationwide are overwhelmed and afraid. They are self-censoring their classroom bookshelves, and forgoing lessons focused on Pride Month or Black History Month. Some educators fear for their safety and livelihoods. In fact, 1 out of 4 school librarians have reported being harassed about books or displays in their library.

Extremist politicians and pundits stoke this fear mongering under the guise of “parental rights” while cultivating ties with far-right organizations, like those who attacked our democracy on Jan. 6, 2021. Despite clear proof from some polling that 75% of Americans oppose book bans, which voters heartily indicated by standing with pro-public education candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, the use of book bans to whitewash our nation’s history —– to mount.

Precious district resources continue to go to waste, along with taxpayer money. And our students are robbed of material that encourages them to develop critical thinking skills by learning to understand the world that surrounds them.

We know the intended target of these bans. According to PEN America, 30% of banned titles feature LGBTQ+ characters or themes, while 30% feature BIPOC characters or contain themes related to race. Further, the top four most-challenged books in 2022 were all written by diverse authors and featureddiverse protagonists. Make no mistake, this is a concerted effort to erase diverse books from public schools and suppress marginalized voices.

At NEA and We Need Diverse Books, we recognize the power of a diverse bookshelf. The simple act of reading allows students to gaze into mirrors and see themselves, and through windows that allow them to see others.

A Washington and Lee University study offers proof. After participants read a 3,000-word excerpt of the novel “Saffron Dreams” by Pakistani American author Shaila Abdullah, their bias toward the Muslim community decreased. The study offers what educators already know to be true: When students have access to diverse books, they collectively read at least four more hours a week.

When access to these titles is lost, our students also lose the opportunity to build empathy toward others who might not look, or live, like them. Every student deserves to see themselves in the books they read. It is how they learn that their stories and their lives matter.

This nation’s founding documents contain one powerful phrase: “We the people.” That means all of us, across race, place, gender and religion. All educators deserve the freedom to teach. All students deserve the freedom to learn this nation’s history in its entirety so they can fully participate in creating its bright future.

We must defend these rights for every student. We must make our voices heard at school board meetings, and support educators who demand honesty in education. And we must run for school board positions ourselves. In 2022, extreme right organizations endorsed and funded over 500 candidates for local school boards. While that number is small compared to the 71% of pro-public education candidates who won over culture war candidates, unless we rise up to challenge them, these new members will continue the practice of whitewashing our history by taking books from our students, as they march toward their ultimate goal: the destruction of our democracy.

To fight these book bans, we must continue to, in a multiracial coalition, promote, protect, and strengthen public education. No matter how long it takes, we must continue to fight to put books where they belong: in the hands of our students.

Middle school teacher Becky Pringle is president of the National Education Association. Caroline Tung Richmond is executive director of We Need Diverse Books and an award-winning author of young adult historical fiction including “The Only Thing to Fear,” “Live In Infamy” and “The Great Destroyers.” Ellen Oh is a founding member, president and CEO of We Need Diverse Books. She is the author of several middle school and young adult books, including the “Prophecy” trilogy, as well as “A Thousand Beginnings and Endings” and “You Are Here: Connecting Flights.”

Categories Censorship, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read

Jason Garcia: DeSantis vs. the First Amendment

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2023 //
39

Jason Garcia is an investigative journalist who persistently exposes Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s attacks on the Constitution and dubious dealings.

In this post, he details DeSantis’s determined efforts to silence those who disagree with him.

“Don’t Say Gay” is the centerpiece of his attack on the First Amendment, but the attack radiates out to anyone who takes issue with DeSantis, like the Disney Corporation, which had the temerity to defend its free speech rights. The result: DeSantis took control of the entity that runs Disney World and engaged in a public battle with the state’s biggest employer.

This may impress some voters but it must frighten other corporations. Imagine an elected official empowered to take charge of your business because you disagreed with his extremist policies.

DeSantis’s war on the Disney Corporation should frighten every big corporation. How dare he?

Florida is the state where freedom of speech goes to die.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Democracy, DeSantis, Florida, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The GOP Protects Criminals, a Sign of Authoritarianism

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2023 //
14

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor at New York University and an authority on fascism and dictatorship. Here, she analyzes the shocking decision by Mike Johnson, the House Spraker, to release the tapes of the January 6 insurrection with the faces of participants blurred so they can’t be identified and prosecuted. If they are releasing tapes of criminal activity, why are they blurring the faces of criminals? To protect them.

She writes:

Authoritarianism revolves around the power to commit crimes with impunity. That is why protecting and promoting criminals and turning violent and corrupt activities into patriotic and necessary actions are always priorities of authoritarian parties and governments. The statement by Speaker of House Mike Johnson (R-LA) that House Republicans will blur footage from the Jan. 6 attack to help participants avoid being brought to justice is symptomatic.

When autocratic forces triumph, the rule of law becomes rule by the lawless. If Donald Trump returns to the White House, this will be the situation in the United States.

The party took a big step forward in the process of normalizing impunity when they made the methods and philosophy of the Jan. 6 attempted coup into party dogma. A 2022 GOP resolution decreed the assault on the Capitol to be “legitimate political discourse.” This rhetorical defense provides an “intellectual” rationale for the overturning of our democracy.

Normalizing impunity also means actively shielding participants in the coup attempt from being brought to justice and discrediting democratic institutions of justice in the eyes of the public. This is what keeper of the MAGA cult Johnson sought to do with his statement. “We have to blur some faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” he said.

As with everything Johnson says and does, this declaration was meant for an audience of one. It was a loyalty performance meant to reassure Trump that the GOP will defend those who tried to save him from the awful fate of accepting democratic precedent and leaving office when he was voted out.

Johnson’s statement also sends a strong message to MAGA thugs and fanatics that the Republican party will defend them if they engage in acts of political violence going forward. And it reduces the DOJ’s actions to hold criminals accountable to “retaliation.”

Crime, and the law, have a different meaning for authoritarians and their enablers. In the amoral and transactional world of leaders such as Trump, all means are justified to get to power and stay there. So, actions that might be defined as criminal in a democracy take on a different meaning in an autocracy. Elites and foot soldiers are rewarded for engaging in corruption, lying, and violence.

Creating an environment propitious to such violence is a key element of preparing for and managing autocracy. Spouting dehumanizing and violence-inciting rhetoric is not enough: you have to give people incentives to engage in corrupt and violent acts.

The promise and reality of pardons plays a role here. MAGA loyalist Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) used the idea of a ” blanket pardon” to get people to participate in the insurrection. Trump has deployed this ever since. “If I run, and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” the former president stated at a Jan. 2022 rally. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.”

As I observed in an earlier Lucid essay, illiberal leaders have long used pardons to corrupt people, discourage dissent in and outside of the party, hide their crimes, and free up the most criminal and unscrupulous elements of society for service to the party and the state.

Benito Mussolini inaugurated this strategy. In 1925, soon after he declared himself dictator, he pardoned all “political criminals,” meaning the Blackshirts whose violence had helped him come to power in 1922 and intimated and killed people ever since. Murderers, specialists in torture, and more were now available to serve in Il Duce’s new militia or take jobs in the party and the state bureaucracy.

Five years after the 1973 coup destroyed Chilean democracy, dictator Augusto Pinochet amnestied all political criminals. Tellingly, the junta pardoned not just “authors” and “accomplices” of crimes, but also “concealers” of those crimes, so that military and security service agents who had committed human rights abuses now had their service records cleansed of incriminating evidence.

In blurring the faces of those who engaged in violent actions on behalf of an autocrat, and stating that they do not want those who assaulted the Capitol to be brought to justice, Johnson and the GOP place themselves in authoritarian tradition. They are releasing the altered footage because they need to consolidate a revisionist narrative about Jan. 6 for campaign purposes.

The DOJ has the unaltered footage, and living in a democracy means evidence of actions that incriminate those who commit violence on behalf of the powerful cannot easily be destroyed. The GOP intends to cleanse the DOJ if they return to power and likely scrub all such evidence. In the meantime, they must settle for blurring the faces of those they want to use for future anti-democratic actions. “We don’t want them…to be charged by the DOJ,” Johnson said. This is why.

If Trump and the GOP have their way, as of 2025 the DOJ would be remade to serve autocratic goals, protecting criminals rather than holding them accountable.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Republicans, Trump

Robert Kagan: Will Trump End Democracy?

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2023 //
36

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few quotes from his article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orlando Sentinel to Zieglers: Resign! I Disagree.

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
26

Christian and Bridget Ziegler have been leaders of the extreme rightwing in Florida. They are (or were) close to Governor DeSantis and Donald Trump. But when they became ensnared in a sex scandal, they were exposed as rank hypocrites. Christian thus far insists he won’t step down as chairman of the Florida Republican Party. Bridget Ziegler was one of the three co-founders of Moms for Liberty, which led the fight to ban books about homosexuality and to harass transgender students. The website of Moms for Liberty now claims there were only two co-founders; she has been written out of their narrative. She’s a non-person. The editorial board of the Orlando Sentinel says it’s time for both of them to resign. Karma is a bitch.

The deepening troubles of Christian and Bridget Ziegler would be just another local news story if they were two private people. But they are highly public figures who are suddenly in a heap of trouble, and their sex life is in headlines.

He is chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, close to both Gov. Ron DeSantis and former president Donald Trump. She is a nationally known conservative culture warrior, a Sarasota County School Board member and a co-founder of the book-banning Moms for Liberty, which denounces all things LGBTQ. She is also a DeSantis appointee to the Disney World oversight board.

Christian Ziegler is accused, though not formally charged, of raping a woman at her apartment in Sarasota. She told police of a previous three-way sexual encounter with both Zieglers and said she was “mostly in” for Bridget — not him.

Sarasota police and the Florida Trident — the reporting arm of the nonprofit Florida Center for Governmental Accountability — say Bridget Ziegler confirmed the previous threesome. They had recorded Christian Ziegler promising his accuser that there would be another. Text messages showed that the woman had told him not to come to her house without Bridget. He went there anyway and admits to having sex with her, but insists it was consensual.

DeSantis wants Ziegler out, but claims to be powerless to remove him. (To that we say: Since when has that stopped him?) So do other leading Republicans: Sen. Rick Scott, all three Cabinet members and both leaders of the state Legislature. Conspicuously missing from their statements are expressions of concern for the possible rape victim.

The state party vice chairman, Evan Power, has called a closed-door Dec. 17 executive committee meeting in Orlando to “censure or discipline” the chairman after Ziegler refused to call the meeting himself.

Bridget Ziegler remains on the school board, feeding the nationwide mockery over the blatant hypocrisy between her private life and her public preaching. She is also under pressure to resign.

The presumption of innocence

Christian Ziegler is legally innocent unless he’s convicted. There is nothing on the public record that Bridget Ziegler could be charged with, since hypocrisy is not a crime. Neither is a ménage à trois among consenting adults. Her virulent hatred for all things LGBTQ in public while conducting a bisexual tryst in private is damning only in the court of public opinion.

But the Zieglers show contempt for public opinion and for the Republican political machine that enriched them and made them prominent public figures. They should retire discreetly to private life while the criminal investigation proceeds.

Whether she can ever again be a credible member of a school board, or maintain any connection with Moms for Liberty, is in serious doubt. She should resign, too.

Even if she doesn’t, DeSantis clearly holds power over the position he gave her, on the board of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. Why hasn’t he yanked that appointment, or demanded that she step down?

“She is nothing but a distraction from before and only getting worse and it will never go away as long as she sits there,” fellow School Board member Tom Edwards told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

A pariah to the cause

Some organizations see the hypocrisy in the own ranks.

Moms for Liberty, its credibility further damaged, raced to distance itself from Ziegler and announced that she left its national leadership three years ago, even as she continued to propagate its ideology of intolerance.

She’s also been jettisoned from an organization that “trains conservatives.” Her latest financial disclosure form lists $64,101 in income from the Leadership Institute LLC in Arlington, Va., nearly twice her school board salary of $33,916. Until Wednesday, it listed her as vice president of its School Board Leadership Program. Her name disappeared later that day from the staff list…

Christian Ziegler, meanwhile, regurgitates the standard defense of influential men accused of sexual assault. He claims he’s the victim, if you can believe that.

‘A country to save’

“We have a country to save, and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for the process to wrap up,” he said.

Like Trump, who supported his election as party chair, and like DeSantis, whose slogan is “Never Back Down,” Ziegler advised a Moms for Liberty national conference to “Never apologize. Ever.” It was a reference to a Moms for Liberty chapter that apologized for using a quote from Adolf Hitler in its newsletter.

As a political strategist, he is ruthless. “Until we get every Democrat out of office and no Democrat considers running for office, we’re going to continue to step on the gas and move forward in Florida,” he said on X, formerly Twitter, last February, when he was elected party chairman.

Until no Democrat dares to run?

Across Florida, teachers are afraid to acknowledge to their students that same-sex relationships exist. Books are being taken off library shelves because they tell the truth about the modern implications of slavery and racism. Works of towering literary merit are being treated like smut because of brief passages describing sexual encounters. Teenaged victims of rape face the possibility that they will be forced to carry their attackers’ babies to term. Transgender Floridians are terrified they’ll lose access to the health care they depend upon.

This is the world the Zieglers helped to make. Now they should live by its narrow, hateful strictures.

I disagree with the editorial. Christian and Bridget committed no crime. He is a bully, but everyone knew that. Let him remain as the face of the state Republican Party. Bridget inveighed against the dangers of gay sex, but she indulged in it herself. She even harassed a member of the Sarasota school board because he is gay. She should remain on the school board and own up to her bisexuality. Maybe contrition will lead her to new views, inspire her to empathy, and enable her to retract her intolerance. We can always hope.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, DeSantis, Florida, Hypocrisy, Scandal, Trump

Virginia: The Long Forgotten Story of the Danville Massacre of 1883

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2023 //
4

Many states have passed laws that ban the teaching of accurate history. Sometimes these laws ban “divisive concepts,” some ban anything that might cause students to feel uncomfortable, some find other language to warn teachers and textbook publishers to omit the shameful events of the past, especially the racist treatment of people of color.

In Florida, where the state went to great lengths to whitewash the teaching of Black history, one man has devoted himself to telling the truth. That man is Dr. Marvin Dunn. Dr. Dunn was a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Network for Public Education. In the meanwhile, you can read his book A History of Florida Through Black Eyes.

In response to Dr. Dunn’s moving presentation, a friend of NPE sent me the following article about the Danville Massacre of 1883. We now know that Reconstruction was a period of impressive racial progress. Formerly enslaved people voted, opened small businesses, and asserted their newly won rights.

But the former Confederates found this rebalancing of racial relationships intolerable. The Danville Massacre put an end to a period of reconciliation and installed Jim Crow, cancelling out the gains of Reconstruction.

The author of the article could not remember learning about this important event in the state’s history.

Learning the truth about history doesn’t make children uncomfortable. It makes them informed.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Cruelty, Extremism, Fake, History, Virginia

Pennsylvania: New School Board President Sworn in on a Stack of Banned Books!

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2023 //
9

On Twitter (“X”), The Recount reports that the newly elected president of the Central Bucks County school board, Karen Smith, was sworn into office on a stack of banned books, not the Bible.

https://x.com/therecount/status/1732425364675203121?s=42&t=9ko2QEoKmRIlvHb1PdtjSw

The new board swept out a board of rightwing zealots.

Categories Censorship, Education Reform, Elections, Freedom to Read, Literacy, Literature, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania: New School Board Tosses Out Rightwing Policies

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2023 //
6

In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, voters elected a new school board pledged to reverse the policies of their Moms-for-Liberty style predecessors. That meant ending censorship of library books and ending the ban on gay-friendly displays, among other things. The old school board gave the retiring superintendent a $700,000 going-away gift; the new one is trying to recover the gift.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

The new Democrat-controlled Central Bucks school board moved quickly Monday to roll back some of its GOP-led predecessors’ most controversial actions — from suspending policies restricting library books to authorizing potential legal action into the former superintendent’s $700,000 payout.

What shape the new board’s actions will ultimately take isn’t yet clear. The board’s new solicitor, for instance, said earlier Monday that he needed to learn more about the separation agreement reached between the prior board and now-resigned superintendent Abram Lucabaugh before pursuing a lawsuit.

But the crowd that lined up outside the Central Bucks administrative building to witness the swearing-in of new members Monday was ready to celebrate regardless — cheering new leadership after what numerous speakers described as two years of “chaos,” bookended by highly contentious, big-money elections.

Republicans who cemented their majority in 2021 enacted bans on teacher “advocacy” in classrooms — including the display of Pride flags — and “sexualized content” in library books, and faced a federal complaint alleging the district had discriminated against LGBTQ students.

But Democrats swept the Nov. 7 school board elections — as they did in a number of area districts where culture-war issues had dominated debate.

“Two years ago, I stood in this room a broken woman,” said Silvi Haldepur, a district parent. But “this community banded together and stood up against the hate.”

Keith Willard, a social studies teacher, told the board it was “incredibly difficult” to work for the district when the previous board had “actively marginalized people” and pushed the “belief that staff are indoctrinating kids.”

“What I ask of this board is that you help steer the ship… and return the stewardship to the people that do the real work every day” — teachers and staff, said Willard, who drew a standing ovation.

The room again broke into applause as the board voted to suspend the library and advocacy policies,as well as a policy banning transgender students from participating in sports aligned with their gender identities — a measure the former board passed at its final meeting in the wake of last month’s elections.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Censorship, Curriculum, Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Gender, Pennsylvania
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