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The Five Biggest Charter School Grifts

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
4

Bruce Baker taught for many years at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He now teaches education policy at the University of Miami. He will have many opportunities to observe and document edu-grifting in Florida.

In this post, he identities the five biggest charter scandals and explains how they worked. Much of what you will read was called “legal graft” by past pundits. In other words, the charter operators collect millions in public funds while providing a dubious education, and they get away scot-free.

In other words, take the money and run. No consequences.

He writes:

Five cases, four mechanisms, one ranking: this post lines up the biggest fraud prosecutions, the biggest company-store combination, and the biggest sweeps contract in the charter sector’s history against the single largest real-estate deal any operator has ever built, and asks which one moved the most money. The answer isn’t the one with an indictment attached.

In The Grift Model I group the ways charter operators route public money into private hands into four repeating types: enrollment inflation (getting paid for students who aren’t really being educated — phantom seats, unverifiable attendance, ghost enrollees); related-party transactions (a school’s own board or executives sitting on both sides of a contract); the company store (a captive vendor a school is required to buy from — curriculum, credentials, back-office services — that happens to be owned by the people running the school); and real estate (buying, or arranging for a related party to buy, the very buildings public dollars already financed, then leasing them back at a markup).

What I hadn’t done before is put the five biggest documented cases — regardless of category — on the same page and rank them by dollar figure. A caveat before I do: these numbers come from different kinds of documents (a criminal restitution order isn’t the same instrument as a municipal bond prospectus), cover different time spans, and in a couple of cases reflect an auditor’s or a prosecutor’s counting choice as much as anyone’s. I’m ranking them anyway, because the comparison itself is the point — and because the single largest number on this list isn’t attached to anyone’s indictment.

Here they are, five to one.

5. White Hat Management, Ohio: about $100 million over a decade

White Hat’s “sweeps” contracts with ten Hope Academy and Life Skills Center campuses in Cleveland and Akron routed roughly 95 percent of each school’s state funding to the management company, which then handled teacher salaries, facilities, and operations with minimal board oversight — company-store logic applied to an entire school’s back office rather than one vendor line. Over a decade that added up to something like $100 million. When several of the nonprofit boards tried to switch management companies, White Hat argued the computers, furniture, and classroom equipment it had bought with that money belonged to White Hat, not the schools — meaning the boards would have to buy back the property their own public funding had already paid for once.

In 2015, a divided Ohio Supreme Court sided with White Hat, 4–3, upholding the buy-back scheme as an enforceable contract term. Justice Paul Pfeifer’s dissent put it about as plainly as a judicial opinion gets: “the contracts require that after the public pays to buy those materials for a public use, the public must then pay the companies if it wants to retain ownership of the materials.” Justice William O’Neill called it, in a dissent The Progressive covered in full, “a fraudulent conversion of public funds into personal profit.” Neither dissent changed the outcome. Nobody broke a law here — a state’s highest court looked at the arithmetic and, on the merits, said it was fine. (Court News Ohio’s case summary has the full procedural history.)

4. ECOT, Ohio: $117 million ordered repaid

Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow was, at its peak, Ohio’s largest online charter school. Ohio funds schools on a formula built around enrollment and documented hours of learning activity — a formula that works fine when “attendance” means a body in a classroom, and considerably less well when it means a login timestamp nobody is verifying. A state audit covering fiscal years 2016 through 2018 found ECOT couldn’t substantiate the participation hours behind a large share of the funding it had claimed. The Ohio Auditor of State’s officeultimately found the school owed $106.6 million to the Ohio Department of Education, plus additional findings against ECOT-affiliated management entities, for a combined total just over $117 million. ECOT shut down in January 2018 rather than pay it back; Ideastream’s coverage of the final audit and the Dayton Daily News both note the state has spent the years since trying to collect. A related judgment against affiliated entities separately reached $161.6 million. It remains the largest attendance-fraud clawback in the sector’s history: virtual schools, virtual kids, real dollars.

3. Chester Community Charter School / CSMI, Pennsylvania: roughly $122 million combined

This is the case I use to show what happens when the company store, related-party real estate, and plain self-dealing all show up in a single school under a single owner. Chester Community Charter, Pennsylvania’s largest brick-and-mortar charter, is managed by CSMI, a company controlled by Vahan Gureghian. A 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer public-records fightestablished that CSMI had been paid roughly $60.6 million in management fees since 1999. In 2010, Gureghian sold the school’s buildings — which he owned personally — to a newly created nonprofit, for the specific and sole purpose of leasing them back to the school, for $50.7 million, financed through municipal bonds and requiring roughly $4 million a year in lease payments; Pennsylvania’s Auditor General found the school had also improperly claimed $1.27 million in state lease reimbursements on buildings the program’s own rules made ineligible, because the “related parties” on both sides of the lease were, functionally, the same person before and after the sale. Then, in 2016, a federal Office of Inspector General audit found that the school’s CEO — Gureghian himself — had written checks to himself totaling $11 million without board approval. Add the pieces up and you get a single owner, across roughly fifteen years, sitting on every side of upward of $122 million in transactions with the school he ran. No criminal charges resulted from any of it.

2. The A3 charter network, California: $400 million generated, about $80 million allegedly diverted

Between 2015 and 2019, Sean McManus and Jason Schrock used a network of 19 online charter schools, partnerships with struggling private schools, and summer athletic programs to enroll thousands of students who, per prosecutors, never took a class. The scheme generated roughly $400 million in California public education funding; investigators alleged about $80 million of it was funneled into companies the two men controlled. Voice of San Diego’s account calls it, by the state’s own description, one of the largest charter-school fraud cases in the country’s history — and yet neither man served a day in prison. McManus, an Australian citizen, was sentenced to four years but served it under house arrest with an ankle monitor in Australia; Schrock’s ankle-monitor time was credited against his sentence. Nine other defendants pleaded to reduced or misdemeanor charges. Both men paid roughly $19 million each in fines and restitution, and the California State Controller’s office says the state has recovered more than $240 million overall — real money back, on a fraud whose architects never spent a night in a cell.

1. National Heritage Academies, Michigan and six other states: $853.6 million

In 2021, National Heritage Academies — the country’s third-largest for-profit charter operator, with more than 90 schools — arranged to sell 69 of its campuses across seven states to Campus Partners 1, a nonprofit newly created for the transaction, with no operating history and, at the time reporters looked, no registration on file with Michigan’s attorney general. NHA’s owner, J.C. Huizenga, controls both the seller’s side (through Charter Development Co., which retained the facility-maintenance and ground-lease contracts) and, through his general counsel installed as the new nonprofit’s president, effectively the buyer’s side as well. The purchase was financed through $853.6 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds, issued by an industrial development authority in La Paz County, Arizona — a jurisdiction with no obvious relationship to any of the seven states where the schools actually sit. The schools then signed 30-year leases back to the very entities that had just “sold” them. Network for Public Education’s account and NCSPE’s coverage at Teachers College, Columbia University both flag the same detail: nothing about this required hiding anything, and no one has been indicted. Local commissions in Michigan raised transparency objections and briefly slowed a few approvals, but the deal closed.

It is, by a wide margin, the largest single dollar figure on this list — more than double the other four cases combined — and it’s the cleanest illustration in the sector of this project’s core argument: the extraction that scales isn’t the kind that needs a prosecutor. It’s the kind a bond market is happy to underwrite.

Open the link to see his comparisons of these five top educators-grifts.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Cheating, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Funding, Hoax, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: The Plot to Disenfranchise Millions of Voters This Fall

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2026 //
3

Trump is obsessed with stopping mail-in Voting, although he votes by mail. He has spent his time in office sowing doubt in our elections, which are the basis of our democracy. The very fact that this crooked con man was returned to the Presidency makes me doubt the security of our elections.

Nonetheless, a whistleblower at the United States Postal Service leaked a complaint claiming that the USPS is planning to take measures that will throw the midterms into chaos, thus giving Trump a reason to discredit the expected Blue Wave, which will sweep away Republican majorities in the House and possibly the Senate. In brief, Trump intends to use the USPS to determine which votes count. Bear in mind that the Cinstututuin explicitly assigns responsibility to the states, not the federal government.

The actions Trump is taking to discredit the midterm elections are unprecedented. But then so was his demolition of the East Wing of the White House, so are his efforts to control the media, universities, and law firms. So are his efforts to overturn civil rights laws. So is his defunding of medical and scientific research. So are his attacks on freedom of the press. So are his efforts to control the curriculum of the nation’s schools.

Heather Cox Richardson explains:

Yesterday, by a vote of 5–4, the United States Supreme Court allowed Trump to continue to build his ballroom. The five right-wing justices concluded that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which had sued to stop the construction of the ballroom, did not have legal standing to sue and that national security considerations came down on the side of construction.

The majority said it was not resolving the issue of whether the project is legal.

It was Chief Justice John Roberts who covered that aspect of the controversy. He wrote in dissent that the project is “likely unlawful.” “The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” Roberts wrote. He wrote that it is critical to “ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”

Nonetheless, as Josh Gerstein of Politico reported, the project will likely be completed before the question of its legality is resolved.

Trump’s behavior in his second term is a logical outcome of the theory of the “unitary executive.” Under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, those eager to stop Congress from passing legislation that benefited the American people at the expense of businessmen began to argue for the idea that because the president was the head of one of the three branches of the U.S. government, he could not be checked by either of the other two branches: the legislative branch (Congress) or the judicial branch (the courts).

On July 1, 2024, the United States Supreme Court, stacked with Trump’s appointees, took this theory to a conclusion that overturned the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law.

It decided that the president of the United States has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well, unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president ever asserted that he was above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law.

This permission structure appears to have convinced Trump he can do whatever he wishes, including rigging elections so he cannot lose.

Yesterday Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exposed what appears to be a plot to steal the 2026 midterm elections.

Blumenthal released a letter he had written to Postmaster General David Steiner calling attention to an official whistleblower report, which he attached to the letter.

It’s eye-popping.

The whistleblower warns that there are “potentially catastrophic problems in the development of the United States Postal Service’s…new system for handling federal election ballot mail.” According to the whistleblower, the “process for the creation and implementation of an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” for delivering ballots to voters for the midterm election has been “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”

The whistleblower says “the administration has hidden the high likelihood that the new ballot mail verification processes will result in major disruptions in mail ballots ever getting delivered to voters. As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state—effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters.”

The complaint continues: “Even under ordinary circumstances this would be problematic because of predictable errors in any barcode scanning process.” But the rushed IT development of the new system means it “will almost certainly have significant operating problems when released to the public.” The whistleblower notes that multiple officials from the USPS have described the development process for the system as “a sh*t show.”

The whistleblower said that work on the “USPS election ballot mail IT project” began in June 2026 and has continued despite an injunction from a federal court ordering work on it to stop. Normally, it would take “nine months to a year or more” to roll out a project “of this complexity, magnitude, and importance.” Considering the rush and the consequences, the whistleblower wondered “whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.”

The complaint says: “The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk. Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”

Blumenthal noted that the USPS has a restrained role as a mail carrier. It has never before played a gatekeeping function and yet is now building an entirely new system to put itself “in a position to refuse to mail ballots that state election officials have determined should be sent out.” He called for Postmaster General Steiner to “to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS.”

Blumenthal demanded Steiner answer no later than Friday whether the USPS has stopped work on the project as ordered by the courts, as well as provide the names of those who worked on the project and the dates they were active. By September 8, he wants to see all records about the project.

Blumenthal told reporters: “The main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.”

The administration’s attack on elections is especially concerning considering the recent suggestions that Trump is spending most of his time on his legacy projects like the ballroom, leaving him largely unaware of what is going on in the administration. Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic reported yesterday that when Army Secretary Dan Driscoll went directly to Trump with his concerns about what Hegseth is doing to the Army, Trump was surprised to learn “how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion under Hegseth” and “expressed concern about the deep cuts to the Army’s senior leadership.”

Driscoll resigned yesterday.

As for the plan to sabotage mail-in voting? Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on House Administration, which oversees the administration of federal elections, posted: “These whistleblower allegations are extraordinary. If Trump Administration officials knowingly built a system designed to prevent Americans from receiving their ballots, that is not election security. It is a betrayal of our Constitution and the American people.”

—

Notes:

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/31/supreme-court-white-house-ballroom-john-roberts-dissent-01057685

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/08/driscoll-hegseth-military-resignation/688479/

Categories Cheating, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fascism, Fraud, Lies, Republicans, Scandal, Trump

Houston: How the State-Appointed Superintendent Cheated His Way to “Success”

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2026 //
1

Texas has a bizarre and punitive approach to public school accountability. If only one school in a large district is “low-performing,” the state can take control of the entire district. Houston is under state control because of only one school, as is Fort Worth.

The State Commissioner of Education, Mike Morath, is not an educator. He served on the Dallas School Board, but he is a businessman.

In Houston, he appointed former military man Mike Miles, to be the state-appointed superintendent. Miles is a “graduate” of the Broad Superintendents’ Academy, where would-be school leaders were taught to be tough, make demands, close schools, and enforce top-down commands. As a military man, Miles flourished in this environment. He led the Dallas school district, but things didn’t work out because of a exodus of teachers.

He then crested a charter chain based in Colorado. And now controjj on a the Houston Independent School Disrrict.

Daniel Dawer and Ruth Kravetz dissect Mike Miles’ “success” in Houston, which they call a shell game.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Cheating, Houston, Texas

Have You Ever Been the Victim of a Scam?

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2026 //
13

I have. Three times. But fortunately I was skeptical enough not to take the bait.

A widow in Minnesota was not so lucky, although she prevailed in the end. Someone got her credit card number (a Costco-branded Visa card) and charged more than 1,700 small transactions to her account. An article in The Washington Post described her persistence in pressing Citibank to remove the charges.

Imagine you receive your credit card statement and find 32 pages of more than 1,700 unauthorized charges, made one right after another over three days. The majority of the debits are for $4.38, with about a dozen for $2.19, all to the same vendor, totaling close to $8,000.
Simple to fix, right?

Well, for one 66-year-old widow from Minnesota’s Twin Cities, getting those transactions removed became an odyssey. Her story is a warning for anyone — and that’s many of us — who ever has to dispute fraudulent activity on a credit card.

She was persistent, encountered foot-dragging, and eventually got the charges removed.

As for me, I was on the receiving end of three attempts to fall for a scam.

In the first one, I’m sitting at my desk working, and the phone rings. I pick up, and a teen boy says, “Grandma?” I say, “yes.” He says “It’s your grandson.” I’m not sure about the voice, so I say, “Which one?” He says, “Guess.” I have four grandsons. So I guess: “Alden?” He says, “you got it.” I say, “Are you okay?” He says, “Not really, I ran a red light and hit a car driven by a pregnant woman. I’m in trouble. Right now, I’m at a police station. I need bail, cash bail. $7,000.”

I said, “Did you call your mother?” He said, “I tried, she didn’t answer. Please help me. Here’s the number of the police officer who arrested me,” and he gave me a number.

Instead of calling the police officer, I called his mother. She answered right away. I told her what happened, and she said, “That’s ridiculous. Alden is in his dorm, studying for finals.”

That ended that.

The second scam occurred when I was a passenger in a car. The caller ID said that my bank was calling. I picked up, and a secretary answered. She transferred my call to a customer service representative. He asked me if I had transferred $5,000 by Zelle to someone I never heard of. I said no. He said I had been the victim of a scam, and I should follow his instructions to reverse the payment. He gave me a “case number,” which I wrote down. Then he told me to open Zelle and follow his instructions. He gave me the name of a person and a phone number. Then he said, “Write in $5,000 and press send.”

I stopped and wondered, “Why is the bank telling me to send someone $5,000? How will that help me get my money back?” I opened my bank account and saw no evidence that anyone had withdrawn $5,000, though I was on the verge of sending that amount to a stranger. A light bulb turned on, and I said to the “customer service representative,” that this call was a scam, and I would not send money to anyone.

End of that scam.

Third scam was very recent. I got an online ad for a non-prescription supplement that supposedly had a dramatic effect on cognition. The supplement reversed the tolls of aging and enabled you to improve your memory. The real inducement in the ad was that the research for the supplement was funded by Bill Gates. He spoke at length about his pursuit of this “fountain of youth” supplement. It involved honey sourced from Sardinia and other natural ingredients. At one point in the 30-minute video, Dr. Sanjay Gupta spoke enthusiastically about the product.

The product is called Memopezil.

I intended to try one bottle but the more you ordered, the lower the price, so I ordered more. When I finished ordering, another supplement popped up that was a multiplier for the first one. Etc.

As soon as I placed the order, I googled Bill Gates and Memopezil. Half a dozen websites warned that the video was a fake, that Gates had nothing to do with the supplement, and that the pitch was a scam. I immediately wrote trying to cancel my order. No response. The next day I called Amex, my credit card company, and alerted them.

Eventually, a large box was delivered to me, which I promptly returned. Eventually I got full credit. American Express is super-good in protecting its cardholders.

Three scams. Three escapes from the consequences. Have you been scammed!?

Now, I have learned to check carefully for scams before ordering. Online is loaded with alluring offers that are fake. While writing this, I came across a claim that appeared to be on the AARP website. It said that a Japanese scientist had discovered a way to reverse dementia. Bill Gates was cited. Clint Eastwood used it and came back. But I asked Google whether it was a scam. The answer was yes.

https://youtu.be/WPDKgv5UCwU?is=wD7_ceeFDFosBvY8

A basic rule of thumb for the Internet. If you are enticed into watching a 30-minute video; if the video promises miraculous results; if the video features a trusted celebrity; if the video says that a multibillion dollar industry is threatening to take down the video because the product will bankrupt the industry: it’s a scam.

Don’t believe anything until you have thoroughly vetted it.

One source I like for vetting: Trust Pilot.

Or ask AI or Google: “Is this product a scam.”

Categories Cheating, Personal

Joyce Vance: Trump Plans to Rig the 2026 Elections

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2026 //
13

Joyce Vance, former federal prosecutor for northern Alabama, sounds the alarm about a looming threat to the integrity of the fall elections. Trump knows he is likely to lose control of the House and possibly even the Senate. His own poll numbers are very low, in the mid-30s. His war on Iran is unpopular. Consumer prices are rising. Everyone feels the pain at the gas pump. The state of the economy is a millstone around his neck. Prominent MAGA boosters have defected, such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly.

Trump’s strategy: Eliminate the guardrails and put election deniers in charge, the people who think that Trump won in 2020, despite the fact that his claims were rejected in more than 60 courts, including the Supreme Court. In other words, cheat.

Joyce Vance warns us about what is happening and what we can do.

She writes:

My friends at Fair Fight, the Georgia-based pro-voting and pro-democracy organization reviewed the results of a ProPublica investigation into how Trump is systematically removing election protections, and produced this summary, that brings you up to date and also provides an important suggestion for what you can do.

We’re all responsible for protection the right to vote. So this is important information to take in.

Trump Has Eliminated Election Safeguards and Installed Loyalist Election Deniers in Key Roles

“The election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government.”

On Monday, ProPublica released a massive new investigation breaking down how Donald Trump has dismantled federal guardrails that stopped him from overturning his 2020 election loss.

The 4,700+ word investigation, based on interviews with about 30 current and former executive branch officials, provides an unprecedented and detailed account of how thoroughly critical election security guardrails have been gutted within the federal government ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Key Findings from ProPublica’s Investigation:

We read the entire piece (twice) to make sure you’re aware of the findings.

  • Career officials who protected elections are gone – election deniers have taken over. ProPublica found that at least 75 career officials across several agencies who played key roles in safeguarding the 2020 election have been fired, resigned, or reassigned. They have been replaced by roughly two dozen political appointees Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Many are election deniers and ten actively worked to reverse Trump’s 2020 loss.
  • Federal programs designed to safeguard elections have been dismantled. Since Trump took office, nearly all federal election protection programs have been eliminated, severely defunded, or had nearly all their staff removed or reassigned:
    • CISA election team
    • NSC election security group
    • ODNI Foreign Malign Influence Center
    • DOJ Public Integrity Section
    • DOJ Civil Rights Division’s voting section
    • FBI Public Corruption Team
    • FBI Foreign Influence Task Force
    • FBI and DOJ Election Day command posts
  • False claims and politicization now drive federal election policy. ProPublica reports that White House election lawyer Kurt Olsen – sanctioned by judges for false 2020 claims – pressured the FBI’s Atlanta chief to seize Fulton County’s 2020 ballots using a discredited report. When the FBI chief examined the evidence and found it didn’t hold up, and was already dismissed by Georgia Republican officials, he was forced out. The raid happened anyway – using a version of the same rejected evidence. Former DOJ Public Integrity lawyers said they likely would have tried to block the investigation.

Trump is “flooding the zone” to distract us. Billionaires are trying to control what you see, buying up media and controlling algorithms. Share this. Help spread the word.

Comment from Lauren Groh-Wargo, Fair Fight Action CEO: “Let’s be clear about what ProPublica has documented – the federal officials who stopped Trump from overturning his 2020 election loss have been systematically removed and replaced by the same people who tried to help him do it. At least eight key election security programs have been gutted since Trump took office. This is a coordinated effort to ensure there are no guardrails left when Americans go to vote in 2026 – everyone must understand what’s at stake.”

This Investigation Builds on a Pattern of Reporting

ProPublica’s investigation is revealing a coordinated effort to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections:

  • In February, they revealed that several high-ranking Trump officials – including Kurt Olsen and DHS election integrity official Heather Honey – attended a summit convened by Michael Flynn where election deniers with White House access and influence discussed plans to declare a national emergency to take over the midterms.
  • In March, ProPublica reported that David Harvilicz, the DHS official in charge of voting machine security, has called to ban voting machines, questioned the validity of Democratic wins, and pushed for Republicans to overhaul election systems to their advantage. Harvilicz co-founded a technology company an election denier who participated in attempts to seize voting machines and spread false claims which Trump considered using as a basis to declare martial law and seize voting machines in 2020.
  • Taken together, the reporting reveals an effort to embed election deniers inside key federal government roles and use government power to reshape the 2026 midterms.

The Election Integrity Network is the Connective Tissue

The Election Integrity Network, founded by Cleta Mitchell after Trump’s 2020 loss, is the organizational thread connecting these appointees. Mitchell played a central role in efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss, she joined Trump’s infamous phone call to “find” votes in Georgia, was later subpoenaed by the House January 6th Committee and recommended to face charges by a Georgia grand jury.

At least 11 Trump officials have ties to Mitchell’s election denial network – they’ve been installed in agencies like DHS, DOJ, and CISA. One key example is Heather Honey, often seen as a protege of Mitchell. Honey falsely claimed more ballots were cast in Pennsylvania than there were voters in 2020, a claim Trump cited on January 6th – now holds a newly created DHS election integrity role and still gives EIN members private briefings from inside the government. Experts warn this coordination would likely have violated ethics rules under previous administrations, including Trump’s first term.

What Can You Do?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Trump and his allies are trying to put their thumb on the scales ahead of the 2026 midterms. They’ve spread false conspiracy theories about voting machines and voter rolls – and reporting shows those claims are now being used to justify federal action.

Trump’s March 2025 executive order attempted to force the decertification of voting machines used in multiple states. Courts blocked it – but the people who pushed for it are still in charge. False claims assembled by election deniers were used to justify the FBI’s seizure of 2020 ballots in Fulton County and federal power is being used to pressure states into handing over their un-redacted voter rolls containing Americans’ personal, private information.

This isn’t a red state or blue state issue. These efforts can target elections anywhere in the country. Regardless of who you support politically, you should want your vote to be protected and your elections to be fair.

Call your Secretary of State (contact info):

  • Tell them: False claims about elections are being used at the highest levels of government to justify seizing ballots and targeting voter rolls.
  • Ask them: What are you doing to protect our votes in 2026?

They have a duty to protect the integrity of our elections – make sure they know you expect them to do it.

Speak up. Remain vigilant. Be ready to vote.

Fair Fight Action Team

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.
Categories Accountability, Cheating, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

Paul Krugman: Treason in the Oil Markets

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
14

Paul Krugman, Nobel-Prize winning economist, writes about shady speculation in the oil futures market. He says it’s not just insider trading, it’s treason.

He writes:

Source: Yahoo Finance


Over the weekend Donald Trump threatened dire vengeance on Iran unless its government opened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, a deadline that would expire Monday evening in Washington. Specifically, he announced that the U.S. would begin bombing power plants — plants that supply electricity to Iran’s civilian population — unless the Strait was cleared.

But at 7:05 AM Monday Trump called the whole thing off — for five days, he said, but many people are assuming that the threatened action, which would have been a massive war crime, is now off the table.

The reason for the about-face, he claimed, was that the U.S. was engaged in productive negotiations with Iranian officials — although this seems to have come as news to the Iranians, who denied that any such negotiations are taking place. Sad to say, in this case, as I tried to explain yesterday, the fanatical, brutal Iranian regime is more credible than the president of the United States. Is he lying or living in a fantasy world? Neither possibility is comforting.

But in any case, Trump’s sudden climb-down was startling. Who could have seen this coming?
The answer is, the person or people who bought large quantities of stock market futures and sold large quantities of oil futures around 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement. As CNBC reports,

At around 6:50 a.m. in New York, S&P 500 e-Mini futures trading on the CME recorded a sharp and isolated jump in volume, breaking from an otherwise subdued premarket backdrop. With thin liquidity typical of early trading hours, the sudden burst stood out as one of the largest volume moments of the session up to that point.
A similar pattern was observed in oil markets. West Texas Intermediate May futures also saw a noticeable pickup in trading activity at roughly the same time, with a distinct volume spike interrupting otherwise quiet conditions.

This “sharp and isolated jump in volume” — which you can see for the oil futures market in the chart at the top of this post — was especially bizarre because there were no major news items — no major publicly available news items — to drive sudden big market transactions. The story would be baffling, except that there’s an obvious explanation: Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits.

This wasn’t the first time something like this has happened under Trump. There were large, suspicious moves in the prediction market Polymarket before previous attacks on Iran and Venezuela. But this front-running of U.S. policy was really large: the Financial Times estimates the sales of oil futures in that magic minute Monday morning at about $580 million, and that doesn’t count the purchases of stock futures.

When officers of a company or people close to them exploit confidential information for personal financial gain, that’s insider trading — which is illegal. But we have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit. That word is “treason.”

Why is profiting from insider information about national security decisions effectively a form of treason? First, it’s hard to think of a more fundamental principle for officials we entrust with important decisions, especially those that involve national security, that they or people they know should not be allowed to exploit their positions for personal gain.

Second, financial trading based on what should be closely held secrets reveals information to current or potential foreign adversaries. To exaggerate a bit, but only a bit, who needs to bribe agents within the government, or recruit them with honey traps, when you can infer the same information by keeping track of transactions on futures markets?

Finally, there isn’t that big a gap between using knowledge of national secrets to make lucrative financial trades and simply selling those secrets to the highest bidder. Once you’re breached the line that says you shouldn’t profit personally from access to information that is or should be highly classified, the line between trading based on state secrets and selling those secrets directly is a blurry one.

In fact, I’d very much like to know exactly who was making those trades yesterday morning. Were they people directly in the know, or billionaires/traders who paid people in the know for tips?

I’m sure we’ll find out once Kash Patel’s FBI carries out its careful, no-holds-barred investigation.

For the humor-impaired, that was a joke. However, I do believe that the culprits will be easy to determine once Democrats are back in power, and they must apply the full force of law to the people responsible.

One question that may be harder to resolve is the extent to which the possibility of insider trading may actually have influenced policy. Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest? If you dismiss this as unthinkable, you just haven’t been paying attention.

There’s a broader lesson here: You can’t trust a corrupt government to protect national security. And our government is now utterly corrupt: It’s hard to find a single senior official, from the president on down, who treats public office as a grave responsibility rather than an opportunity for personal self-aggrandizement and profit.

Among other things, deeply corrupt governments tend to be very bad at waging war, no matter how much they may exalt “warrior ethos” and “lethality.” When we do a post-mortem on how the Iran debacle happened, arrogant ignorance may still get top billing. But grotesque venality will come a close second.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Cheating, Corruption, Fraud, Trump

GOP Begins Rigging the Vote in 2026 and 2028

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2026 //
7

Greg Palast and Thom Hartmann write together about the Trump administration’s early steps to rig the vote in 2026 and 2028.

The Republican-sponsored SAVES act has been passed by the House but not the Senate. It would cancel online registration. It requires voters to present a birth certificate or a passport. Millions of American citizens do not have either. Women, in particular, would be disadvantaged because the name on their birth certificates do not match their married names. .

Like me, you probably read that the FBI raided the office of the Fulton County voting headquarters in an effort to prove that the 2020 election was rigged. Just another evidence of Trump’s paranoia.

No, say the authors. That’s a cover story. The truth, they say, is that the raid was intended to rig the elections of 2026 and 2028. It was part of the GOP’s long-running effort to cancel the votes of Blacks and students, groups that favor Democrats.

Palast and Hartmann write:

For god’s sake, let’s get to the REAL agenda behind Wednesday’s-FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office. IT’S NOT ABOUT THE 2020 ELECTION. The warrant says the FBI wants the envelopes from the 2020 election to hunt for crimes. But that’s just the legal excuse for the storm trooping.

This is NOT, as the media seems to think, about Trump’s attempt to prove he won the 2020 race, as if he’s some political Captain Ahab was trying to chase the Moby Dick of 2020 revenge.

This is all about 2026 and 2028. Look at a map. Fulton County is the heart of “Blacklanta.” And Atlanta is the electoral heart of Georgia. And Georgia is the swingiest of swing states. If Republicans don’t cut down the Black vote in Atlanta, they lose the crucial seat now held by Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff. And in 2028, the GOP, if they don’t suppress the vote in Fulton, they lose the White House. Fulton was the fulcrum of Trump’s loss in 2020 and could spell doomsday for Republicans in 2028.

So, how exactly do you stop Fulton County Black folk (and the LGBTQ community and the hipsters who left rural Georgia because they hate their parents) from voting? The answer is in one word: DROP-BOX.

Surveillance footage of a drop box in Atlanta, used in the film 2000 Mules as evidence of a “mule” whom filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza claimed was paid to stuff this and 26 other ballot boxes. According to D’Souza, this was “the smoking gun! O.J. Simpson…leaving the scene of a crime!” But it doesn’t show anything more than a Black man voting.

Follow me on this.

First, let me explain to my White readers a fact about African-Americans: In the majority, they vote early, having suffered the cruel absurdity of six-hour lines on Election Day. (And remember, it’s a FELONY crime in Georgia to give an elderly voter standing in line, thirsty a bottle of water). From long, sad experience, Black voters have learned to use early voting opportunities, especially mail-in ballots that can be placed in a drop-box.

For example, in the election run-off following the 2020 vote, which put two Georgia Democrats into the US Senate, over a million mail-in ballots (1,084,021) were cast, mainly in drop-boxes, mostly in Fulton/Atlanta.

Republicans took note. So, in a bill signed by GOP Governor Brian Kemp, the infamous SB202, the state declared all-out war on early voting, especially early votes placed in secure drop-boxes.

First, the state slashed the number of drop-boxes allowed in Atlanta and Savannah the two big cities with the urban Black population, by 77%.

Early voting days, when you can use the drop box, were cut from 60 to just seven (!). And drop boxes — meant to serve voters who can only vote when they get off work at night — were sealed up at night in state office buildings.

The result, not reported by a single US outlet (except, God bless him, Thom Hartmann) was that the number of mail-in ballots cast dropped by 83% — 83%! — from over a million to 0.2 million (191,286) by the run-off of 2022.

Why? It goes back to what Donald Trump calls, correctly, one of the most influential documentaries of all time: 2000 Mules. The film, premiered by Trump at Mar-a-Lago, accused 2000 Black men of taking $10 from George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg and Stacey Abrams to stuff drop-boxes with tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots, especially in Fulton County. It was the perfect Sturm for the right, a stimulating concoction of racism and anti-Semitism.

There wasn’t a bit of evidence, of course, but it looked convincing to MAGA-nauts. Every single drop-box in Georgia has a video camera over it to prevent fraud, and the videos are public. So, the Trump front called True the Vote, showed videos of Black men “stuffing” the drop boxes with extra ballots.

Except it wasn’t true. The “star” criminal was a Black man accused of “running from the scene of crime like OJ Simpson.” In fact, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is Republican controlled, ran all over the state to arrest each Black alleged ballot stuffer (a felony crime) — but found that every one, EVERY ONE, was a legal voter. The man accused of thievery was Mark Andrews, who is a Verizon executive who legally dropped his family’s ballots in the drop box. But, as LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter says, “He was seen guilty of a crime because he was Black.” That, literally, was the only “evidence” of the crime.

Note: I want you to see Mark Andrews, supposed Black “criminal” supposedly caught in the act of VWB, Voting While Black. Next Thursday, February 5, at 6:30pm Central time (4:30pm Pacific), chapters of Indivisible will host a special online showing of my film, Vigilantes Inc., America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, which rips Trump’s True the Vote a new one. If you’re in the Chicago area, you can attend the live showing with Q&A to follow.

Early voting, mail-in voting and casting an early vote in a drop were the keys to Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, key to a huge surge in minority and student votes nationwide.

And massive suppression of early, mail-in and drop-box votes were key to Trump’s triumphant return. (Did anyone note that, seen from the Oval, the demolition of the East Wing only leaves the Right Wing.)

Following the 2020 election, over 20 Red States passed laws eliminating or restricting drop-boxes. And in every single case, legislators cited the bullshit “evidence” of 2000 Mules. Fact check: The state of Georgia recounted and reviewed every single Fulton County drop-box and mail in ballot and didn’t find one single forged ballot. Every vote had an identified, verified vote. Not ONE ballot.

White Democrats don’t seem to understand how important early drop-off votes mean to Black and student communities. But the Republicans understand it completely. In fact, GOP Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that, had he not gone to court and stopped Houston from mailing out absentee ballots to all voter, “Donald Trump would have lost Texas.” Texas! (Note: Houston has the largest number of Black voters of any city in America.

By seeking every envelope from drop-box and absentee voters, Attorney General Pam Blondi is saving her job by saving the GOP from the voters’ wrath. The game is to force a state (i.e. Republican) takeover of Fulton County voting (possible under SB 202). And you can’t separate the invasion of Atlanta voting offices from the Purge’n General Blondi’s demand that Minnesota hand over its voter rolls.

The underlying purpose of Blondi’s seizure of Minnesota’s voter files is the restoration of two other racially poisonous vote suppression tricks. One is the return of the “Interstate Crosscheck” purge program and its sister, the purge of “aliens” from the rolls. Interstate Crosscheck cost nearly one million voters their registrations in 2016, key to Trump’s first election. Crosscheck was ruled illegal through a grassroots campaign led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sen. Bernie Sanders and litigation brought by PUSH, the NAACP and the ACLU based, I’m proud to say, on the evidence presented to the courts by the Palast Investigative Fund. But. now, Crosscheck is BAAAACK! Want to know about Crosscheck. Read my investigation for Rolling Stone.

And there’s the canard of allegedly MILLIONS of alien voters swimming the Rio Grande just to vote for Democrats. When Florida used the ICE lists to purge 187,000 (!) voters from the rolls, mostly Hispanics, it turns out only ONE was an illegal alien: A Republican from Austria.

But that’s a story for another day — and for our film, Vigilantes Inc. Grab some popcorn and save America.

The Palast team is preparing to launch a full-scale, national investigation of vote suppression in coordination with PUSH, Black Voters Matter Fund, the NAACP and the Transformative Justice Coalition. But dammit, we can’t do it without funding. We don’t need a lot, but if you don’t stand up and help, who will?

Greg Palast Investigates is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Originally posted on

Greg Palast Investigates

Greg Palast

Investigative journalist and author of the NY Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse + The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. See my latest film at: https://WatchVigilantesInc.com

Categories Atlanta, Cheating, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Georgia

How Jeffrey Epstein Became Wealthy: The New York Times Investigates

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2025 //
8

This is a link to a gift article.

Several reporters at The New York Times worked together for months unraveling the secrets of Jeffrey Epstein’s financial success. How did he go from being a high school math teacher to a multimillionaire? His greatest trick, it appears, was cultivating and leveraging friendships among people who were wealthy and powerful. Name-dropping was a tactic. So were lying and boasting, as he rose in elite circles, cultivating contacts, references, women, and friends.

Categories Character, Cheating, Corruption, Ethics, Evil, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, Scandals

Jennifer Berkshire: A New Path, with Less Opportunity and Less Social Mobility

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2025 //
10

Jennifer Berkshire sums up the malicious goals that are embedded in Trump’s One Big Ugly Budget Bill. It will widen the distance between those at the bottom and those at the top. It will reduce the number of students who can pay for graduate degrees. All to assure that the very rich get a a tax break.

While the media may have moved on from the big awful bill that is now the law of the land, I continue to mull over its mess and malice. The single best description I’ve come across of the legislation’s logic comes from the ACLU’s Stefan Smith, who reminds us that the endless culture warring is all a big distraction. The real agenda when you add up all of the elements is “creating more friction for those climbing up the economic ladder in order to ease competition for those already there.” In the future that this legislation entrenches, rich kids will have an even greater advantage over their poor peers, of whom there will be now be many more. Smith calls this “reordering pipelines;” moving the rungs on the ladder further apart or kicking the ladder away works too. However you phrase it, our ugly class chasm just got wider by design.

This is why, for instance, the legislation includes seemingly arbitrary caps on how much aspiring lawyers and doctors can borrow in order to pay for school. By lowering that amount, the GOP just narrowed the pipeline of who can, say, go to med school. As Virginia Caine, president of the National Medical Association, bluntly put it: “Only rich students will survive.” Indeed, college just got more expensive and a lot less accessible for anyone who isn’t a rich student. Meanwhile, cuts to federal Medicaid funding will lead to further cuts in spending on higher education—the sitting ducks of state budgets—meaning higher tuition and fewer faculty and programs at the state schools and community colleges that the vast majority of American students attend. All so that the wealthiest among us can enjoy a tax cut.

This is also the story of the federal school voucher program that has now been foisted upon us. While the final version was an improvement over the egregious tax-shelter-for-wealthy-donors that the school choice lobby wanted, the logic remains the same, as Citizen Stewart pointedly points out:

It’s a redistribution of public dollars upward. And it’s happening at the exact moment many of the same politicians championing school choice are cutting food assistance, slashing Medicaid, gutting student loan relief, and questioning whether children deserve meals at school.

In their coverage of the new program, the education reporters at the New York Times, who’ve been pretty awful on this beat of late, cite a highly-questionable study finding that students who avail themselves a voucher are more likely to go to college. In other words, maybe vouchers aren’t so bad! Except that this sunny view misses the fast-darkening bigger picture: as states divest from the schools that the vast majority of students still attend, the odds of many of those students attending college just got steeper. That’s because as voucher programs balloon in cost, states confront a math problem with no easy answer, namely that there isn’t enough money to fund two parallel education systems. (For the latest on where the money is and isn’t going, check out this eye-opening report from FutureEd.)

Add in the Trump Administration’s decision to withhold some $7 billion from school districts and you can see where this is headed. In fact, when the folks at New America crunched the numbers, they turned up the somewhat surprising finding that the schools that stand to lose the most due to the Trump hatchet are concentrated in red states. Take West Virginia, for example, which is home to 15 of the hardest-hit districts in the land. The state’s public schools must 1) reckon with $30 + million in federal cuts even as 2) a universal voucher program is hoovering up a growing portion of state resources while 3) said resources are shrinking dramatically due to repeated rounds of tax cuts for the wealthiest West Virginians. That same dynamic is playing out in other red states too. Florida, which is increasingly straining to pay for vouchers and public schools, just lost $398 million. Texas, where voucher costs are estimated to reach $5 billion by 2030, just lost $738 million. While 28 states are now suing the administration over the funding freeze, no red state has spoken up.

Shrinking chances

On paper, budget cuts can seem bloodless. Part of the Trump Administration’s strategy is to bury the true cost of what’s being lost in acronyms and edu-lingo, trusting that pundits will shrug at the damage. But as states struggle with a rising tide of red ink, what’s lost are the very things that inspire kids to go to school and graduate: extra curriculars, special classes, a favorite teacher, the individualized attention that comes from not being in a class with 35 other kids. That’s why I’ve been heartened to see that even some long-time critics of traditional public schools are now voicing concern over what their destabilization is going to mean for students. Here’s Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, warning that the explosion of vouchers in red states is going to have dire consequences, not just for students in public schools but for the states themselves:

Enrollment loss will likely reduce the quality of schools that will continue to educate most children in the state. States will be left with large numbers of students who are unprepared for college and career success. 

David Osborne, who has been banging the drum for charter schools since the Clinton era, sounds even more worried. 

Over time, as more and more people use vouchers, the education market in Republican states will stratify by income far more than it does today. It will come to resemble any other market: for housing, automobiles or anything else. The affluent will buy schools that are the equivalent of BMWs and Mercedes; the merely comfortable will choose Toyotas and Acuras; the scraping-by middle class will buy Fords and Chevrolets; and the majority, lacking spare cash, will settle for the equivalent of used cars — mostly public schools.

Meanwhile, the billions spent on vouchers will be subtracted from public school budgets, and the political constituency for public education will atrophy, leading to further cuts.

We’ve seen this movie before

Well, maybe not the exact same movie but a similar one. Anybody recall Kansas’ radical experiment in tax cutting? Roughly a decade ago, GOP pols slashed taxes on the wealthiest Kansans and cut the tax rate on some business profits to zero. Alas, the cuts failed to deliver the promised “trickle-down” economic renaissance. What they did bring was savage cuts in spending on public schools. As school funds dried up, programs were cut, teachers were pink slipped, and class sizes soared, all of which led to a dramatic increase in the number of students who dropped out. Meanwhile, the percentage of high schoolers going to college plunged. 

Young people in the state “became cannon fodder in the fight to redistribute wealth upward,” argues Jonathan Metzl, a scholar and medical doctor, who chronicled the impact of Kansas’s tax-cutting experiment in Dying of Whiteness. Just four years of school budget cuts was enough to narrow the possibilities for a generation of young Kansans. 

But by taking a chainsaw to the public schools, the GOP also gave rise to a bipartisan parent uprising. And not only were lawmakers forced to reverse the tax cuts and restore funding for schools, but voters, who could see with their own eyes what the cuts had meant for their own kids and kids in their communities, threw the bums out the next time they had a chance. Today we’re watching as a growing number of states, with the aid of the federal government and the ‘big beautiful bill,’ embark on their own version of the Kansas experiment—slashing spending, destabilizing public schools, and limiting what’s possible for kids. They’re betting that red state voters will fall in line, sacrificing their own schools, and even their own kids, to ‘own the libs.’ That’s what the ideologues in Kansas thought too.

As I’ve been arguing in these pages, Trump’s education ‘action items’ represent the least popular parts of his agenda. Eliminating the Department of Education is a loser with voters, while cutting funds to schools fares even worse. The idea of cutting funds in order to further enrich the already rich has exactly one constituency: the rich. As the MAGA coalition begins to fragment and fall apart, we should keep reminding voters of all colors and stripes of this fact.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Cheating, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Economics, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fake, Fake News, Higher Education, Ignorance, Immigration, NPE Action Fund, Privatization, Propaganda, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, School Choice

How Republicans Preserve White Supremacy

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2025 //
0

Michelle H. Davis writes a thoughtful blog on Substack called “Lone Star Left,” where she reports incisively on politics in Texas. This column explains how white supremacists keep Blacks and Hispanic unrepresented and disenfranchised: gerrymandering voting district. What’s happening in Texas is happening in other states, especially the South.

It’s hard to remember that Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Davis writes:

In the early 1960s, Black residents in Leflore County, Mississippi, comprised two-thirds of the population. Despite that, they had no political representation. In 1962, when voter registration of Black voters increased, the all-white Board of Supervisors (similar to a Commissioners’ Court in Texas) cut off federal surplus food aid, a lifeline for over 20,000 poor Black sharecroppers and farmworkers. This move came to be known as the Greenwood Food Blockade.

This move by the white Board of Supervisors exacerbated widespread poverty-induced hunger and malnutrition among Mississippi Delta sharecroppers. This laid the groundwork for long-term food insecurity, economic marginalization, and ongoing inequality in Mississippi that persists to this day.

This pattern is not new. Every time Black Americans have taken even a step toward political power, white supremacy has moved to snatch it back. In Greenwood, it meant starving families to stop them from voting. In Tarrant County today, it means redrawing district lines to erase Black representation, again, by a white-majority governing body.

What happened in Mississippi in 1962 wasn’t just about food. It was about control. And what happened in Tarrant County today isn’t just about maps. It’s about the same thing.

Today, the Tarrant County Commissioners Court voted to approve a redistricting map that effectively eliminates the seat of Commissioner Alisa Simmons, the only Black woman on the court.

It’s not a coincidence. It’s not neutral. It’s not “routine.” It is the calculated removal of a voice that dared to speak up for all of us.

Commissioner Simmons has stood firmly against the racist agenda pushed by Judge Tim O’Hare and the Republican Commissioners on the court. She spoke out against the rise in jail deaths under their watch. She called out the cruelty of defunding Girls Inc., a nonprofit that empowers young women of color. She opposed the elimination of free rides to the polls, which made it harder for working-class people, especially Black and brown voters, to cast a ballot.

And now, she’s being punished for it.

Commissioner Simmons wasn’t just a name on a ballot. She is my commissioner. I voted for her. I campaigned for her. And like thousands of others in Precinct 2, I saw her as a voice for the voiceless, a woman unafraid to shine a light on white supremacy, even when it came dressed in a suit and tie.

That light scared them. So they tried to snuff it out.

What we witnessed today was retaliation. It was white supremacy striking back at a Black woman who told the truth. And just like in Greenwood in 1962, they’re using the tools of power, maps, votes, and bureaucratic language, to do what they couldn’t do in public: silence her.

But we see it. We name it. And we will fight it.

The new map that the County Commissioners voted on today.

The Republican Commissioners and their defenders kept repeating the same excuse over and over again, “This wasn’t about race. It was just about politics.”

They said the map was designed to secure a Republican majority, not to silence Black voters. As if those two things aren’t deeply intertwined.

It’s the same argument Greg Abbott’s lawyers made in Shannon Perez v. Abbott, when Texas was caught racially gerrymandering districts. Their defense?

A direct quote from Greg Abbott: 

“It is not our intent to discriminate against minorities. It is our intent to discriminate against Democrats. If minorities happen to vote Democrat, that is their fault, not ours.”

That’s not a denial. That’s a confession….

Let’s stop pretending this distinction between race and party means anything in Texas. In Tarrant County, in Harris County, across the South, voter suppression by “party” is voter suppression by race. When you target the communities who dare to elect Black women, working-class progressives, young organizers, and civil rights leaders, you are targeting those communities on purpose.

They can say it’s about partisanship all they want. But we know what it’s really about.

Because when Conservatives talk about “conserving” something, they mean it.

They want to conserve white supremacy.

They want to conserve inequality, corporate power, and police brutality.

They want to conserve a system where jails are full, books are banned, teachers are silenced, and women don’t have autonomy.

They want to conserve a Texas where your zip code decides your worth, and where Black and brown voices are only welcome if they stay quiet.

And when people like Alisa Simmons refuse to stay quiet, they get erased.

But erasing her seat won’t erase her power, or ours….

And just when we thought we might get a win, it vanished as quickly as it came.

Yesterday, far-right extremist Tony Tinderholt (R-HD94) announced he would not seek reelection to the Texas House. For a brief moment, there was celebration across Arlington. A man who built his career on cruelty, censorship, and conspiracy was finally stepping aside. But the celebration didn’t last.

Because today, just minutes after the Tarrant County Commissioners voted to dismantle Precinct 2, Tinderholt announced he would run for that very seat, Alisa Simmons’ newly gutted district.

And he didn’t come alone.

Cheryl Bean, another far-right extremist and ally of Tinderholt, announced her run for the now-open HD94 seat. A seat that was, conveniently, made safer for someone like her under the new maps.

Bean doesn’t even live in the district. She changed her voter registration to a new address inside it—an address she doesn’t own, according to the Tarrant Appraisal District. Her real home? Still outside the district lines. But facts don’t matter when the plan is to bulldoze through communities with precision and arrogance.

This wasn’t a coincidence. It was a coordinated political hit job, plain and simple.

A rigged map. A choreographed retirement. A handoff. A handpicked replacement. All timed to disempower the voices of Black and brown voters in Tarrant County. All orchestrated by Tim O’Hare and the extremist wing of the Republican Party.

They knew Simmons couldn’t be beaten fairly.

So they changed the lines.

They cleared the field.

And then they tried to rewrite the future.

But we see them.

We know the playbook.

And we’re not going to let this go unanswered.

This is part of a broader, coordinated strategy across Texas to suppress the political power of Black and brown communities under the guise of partisan politics…..

To read the post in full, open the link.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Cheating, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, History, Racism, Republicans, Texas
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