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Trump Officials Order Removal of Signage and Exhibits about Slavery at Federal Sites

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2025 //
2

The Trump administration is well on its way to re-enacting George Orwell’s novel 1984, where unwanted facts and history disappeared down a memory hole. The Washington Post reported that officials have ordered the removal of all signage, exhibits, and photographs that depict slavery. Trump intends to eliminate history that he does not like.

Most notably, museums and parks have been told to remove an iconic photograph from 1863 of a slave showing deep scars on his back.

Jake Spring and Hannah Natanson wrote:

The Trump administration has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks, according to four people familiar with the matter, including a historic photograph of a formerly enslaved man showing scars on his back. The photo is called “The Scourged Back.” It is reproduced in many high school American history textbooks. Will they be revised too to cancel unpleasant parts of history?

“The Scourged Back”

The individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media, said the removals were in line with President Donald Trump’s March executive order directing the Interior Department to eliminate information that reflects a “corrosive ideology” that disparages historic Americans. National Park Service officials are broadly interpreting that directive to apply to information on racism, sexism, slavery, gay rights or persecution of Indigenous people.

Following Trump’s order, Interior Department officials issued policies ordering agency employees to report any information, including signage and gift shop items, that might be out of compliance. Trump officials also launched an effort asking park visitors to report offending material, but they mostly received criticisms of the administration and praise for the parks.

The latest orders include removing information at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia, two people familiar with the matter said, where the abolitionist John Brown led a raid seeking to arm slaves for a revolt. Staff have also been told that information at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia, where George Washington kept slaves, does not comply with the policy, according to a third individual.

Categories Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Ethics, Fascism, Freedom to Learn, History, Trump

Jamelle Bouie: I Mourn Charlie’s Death But Not His Ideology

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2025 //
15

Jamelle Bouie is one of the best, most interesting opinion writers for The New York Times. As a subscriber to that newspaper, I signed up for Bouie’s newsletter, which is where these thoughts of his appeared.

Jamelle Bouie writes:

Virtually every person of note in American politics has, rightfully, condemned the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk and expressed their deep concerns about the growing incidence of political violence in the United States. Wherever we stand politically, we all agree that he should still be alive.

There has been less agreement about Kirk’s life and work. Death tends to soften our tendency to judge. And sudden, violent death — especially one as gruesome and shocking as this one — can push us toward hagiography, especially in the immediate wake of the killing.

So it goes for Kirk.

“Charlie inspired millions,” President Trump said in an Oval Office speech on Wednesday. “He championed his ideas with courage, logic, humor and grace.”

“The best way to honor Charlie’s memory,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California declared, “is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.”

Kirk’s approach, wrote the editors of Politico’s Playbook, “was to persuade, to use charm and charisma and provocation and the power of argument to convince people of the righteousness of his cause.”

There is no doubt that Kirk was influential, no doubt that he had millions of devoted fans. But it is difficult to square this idealized portrait of Kirk as model citizen with the man as he was.

Kirk’s eulogists have praised him for his commitment to discourse, dialogue and good-faith discussion. Few if any of them have seen fit to mention the fact that Kirk’s first act on the national stage was to create a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics. Kirk urged visitors to the website to report those who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

The list, which still exists, is a catalog of speech acts in and outside the classroom. The surest way to find yourself on the watchlist as an academic is to disagree, publicly, with conservative ideology, or even acknowledge ideas and concepts that are verboten among the far right. And the obvious intent of the list is made clear at the end of each entry, where Kirk and his allies urge readers to contact the schools and institutions in question. Targets of the watchlist attest to harassment and threats of violence.

The Professor Watchlist is a straightforward intimidation campaign, and you can draw a line directly from Kirk’s work attacking academics to the Trump administration’s all-out war on American higher education, an assault on the right to speak freely and dissent.

To speak of Kirk as a champion of reasoned discussion is also to ignore his frequent calls for the state suppression of his political opponents.

“‘Investigate first, define the crimes later’ should be the order of the day,” Kirk declared in an editorial demanding the legal intimidation of anyone associated with the political left. “And for even the most minor of offenses, the rule should be: no charity, no goodwill, no mercy.”

Speaking last year in support of Trump’s plan for mass deportation, Kirk warned that the incoming president would not tolerate dissent or resistance. “Playtime is over. And if a Democrat gets in our way, well, then Matt Gaetz very well might go arrest you,” he said.

It is also important to mention that Kirk was a powerful voice in support of Trump’s effort to “stop the steal” after the 2020 presidential election. His organization, Turning Point USA, went as far as to bus participants to Washington for the rally that devolved into the Jan. 6 riot attack on the Capitol.

And then there is Kirk’s vision for America, which wasn’t one of peace and pluralism but white nationalism and the denigration of Americans deemed unworthy of and unfit for equal citizenship.

On his podcast, Kirk called on authorities to create a “citizen force” on the border to protect “white demographics” from “the invasion of the country.” He embraced the rhetoric of white pride and warned of “a great replacement” of rural white Americans.

“The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different,” he said last year. “You believe in God, country, family, faith, and freedom, and they won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated.”

Kirk also targeted Black Americans for contempt. “Prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people — that’s a fact,” he said in 2023. Kirk was preoccupied with the idea of “Black crime,” and on the last episode of his show before he was killed, he devoted a segment to “the ever-increasing amount of Black crime,” telling his audience, falsely, that “one in 22 Black men will be a murderer in their lifetime” and that “by age of 23, half of all Black males have been arrested and not enough of them have been arrested.”

Kirk told his listeners that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson of the Supreme Court “is what your country looks like on critical race theory,” that former Vice President Kamala Harris was “the jive speaking spokesperson of equity,” and that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “was awful.”

“I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it,” Kirk said at a 2023 event. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”

This is just a snippet of Kirk’s rhetoric and his advocacy. He also believed that there was no place for transgender people in American society — “We must ban trans-affirming care — the entire country,” he said in 2024 — and has denounced L.G.B.T. identities as a “social contagion.”

It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk’s influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.

We can mourn Kirk. We can send prayers to his friends and family. We can take stock of the gravity of this event. We can — and should — do all of this and more without pretending he was something, as a public figure, that he was not.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Reform, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Gender, Racism

Charlie Kirk Was the Voice of MAGA

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2025 //
15

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was vile, disgusting, and abhorrent. The perpetrator has apparently been identified and will be held accountable, as he should be.

Charlie was a bright star in the orbit of Donald Trump, and his many fans and admirers are raising him up on a pedestal because of his tragic death. A Florida member of Congress has proposed erecting a statue to him in the halls of Congress. Trump is awarding him the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Senator Jim Banks spoke to Indiana Republicans after Charlie’s death and urged them to use redistricting to eliminate every Democratic Congressman because “they” killed Charlie. Of course, we now know, as Senator Banks did, that Charlie was not killed by Democrats or a cabal of left wing fanatics, but by a young white Utah man who was raised in a staunchly Republican home. At this writing, we do not know why he killed Charlie. We don’t know his views about politics, whether he objected to Charlie’s views from the left or from the far-far right.

Although his death has been mourned by people of all political views, it’s important to acknowledge what Charlie advocated and what he opposed.

The New York Times published a summary of some of his views. For example:

He opposed gay rights and transgender rights.

He opposed gun control and argued that more people should have guns. A few deaths every year, he said, was a small price to pay to preserve the Second Amendment.

He opposed the civil rights movement and belittled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an “awful” man. In 2021, he referred to George Floyd as a “scumbag.”

He opposed affirmative action. He called Justice Ketanji Brown Harris “a diversity hire.”

He opposed gender equality.

He published a list of academics called ProfessorWatch. They are/were people who teach about “gender ideology” and racial justice. On social media, professors whose names were on Charlie’s list said they were threatened, doxxed, suspended, harassed, even fired. So while he is supposedly a champion of free speech, he encouraged suppression of free speech by professors on his Watchlist.

Charlie, the Times reported, “rejected the idea that climate change posed an existential threat to humanity, describing it as ‘complete gibberish, nonsense and balderdash’ in December 2024 to members of Turning Point UK, the British offshoot of Turning Point USA.”

In another source, Charlie stated his absolute opposition to abortion. Charlie compared abortion to the Holocaust. When a questioner asked what he would do if his daughter was raped and became pregnant at the age of 10, he said the baby should be born.

A reader of this blog who is called Quickwrit posted the following comment about Charlie’s ideology:

Kirk’s view of women clearly stated in a comment he addressed to Taylor Swift on her announcement of her engagement to Travis Kelce:

“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, August 26, 2025

Kirk comments on Civil Rights and race:

“We made a huge mistake when we passed the civil rights act in the 1960s” — at America Fest, December 2023.

“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, January 23, 2024

“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” – The Charlie Kirk Show, May 19, 2023

“If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?” – The Charlie Kirk Show, January 3, 2024

“Michelle Obama and [U.S. Representative] Sheila Jackson Lee and [U.S. Supreme Court Justice] Ketanji Brown Jackson…You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to be taken somewhat seriously.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, July 13, 2023

“The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, March 20, 2024

“Islam is not compatible with western civilization.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, June 24, 2025

“Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” — Charlie Kirk post on X September 8, 2025

“There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, July 6, 2022. (But in fact, in the First Amendment, the Constitution clearly forbids religion in government, and Founding Father James Madison, who our nation honors with the title “Father of the Constitution” made it clear why he and the other Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution very deliberately left out any mention of God, let alone of Jesus, in the Constitution; here is what The Father of our Constitution declared: “The religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man. [Government] MUST NOT PREFER ONE RELIGION OVER ANOTHER OR PROMOTE ANY RELIGION OVER NONBELIEF.”

Here are video clips of some of these comments.

The New Yorker wrote about the outpouring of grief for Charlie at Texas A&M, where he had spoken to a large audience about his evangelical Christian views.

Kirk’s evangelicalism inflected both the tone and content of his message. He was open to talk with anyone, but steadfast in his confidence that his path was the correct one. “If you do not have a religious basis, specifically a Christian one, for your society, something else is going to replace it,” he said at the Texas A. & M. event. He and his followers were locked in a battle with an enemy that was not just ideologically opposed but unwell, possibly evil. Democratic leaders, Kirk said, were “maggots, vermin, and swine”; transgender identity was a “middle finger to God.”

Charlie had every right to express his views and advocate for them. His murder was an abomination and a stain on our nation. Unlike Charlie, I support gun control. I don’t believe that the Second Amendment gives everyone a right to carry arms at will.

I disagreed with Charlie Kirk on every issue. I would have urged him to eliminate ProfessorWatch, which endangers professors who did not agree with him; it suppressed their free speech rights.

As Americans, our freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment. We are entitled to believe what we want. No one should ever be murdered because of their views.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Extremism, Gender, Racism

Federal Judge Overturns Ban on DEI

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2025 //
23

A Trump-appointed judge overturned the Trump administration’s ban on policies of diversity, equity and inclusion in schools and colleges, according to Collin Binkley of the AP. Will her ruling stand?

WASHINGTON (AP) – A federal judge on Thursday struck down two Trump administration actions aimed at eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the nation’s schools and universities.

In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher in Maryland found that the Education Department violated the law when it threatened to cut federal funding from educational institutions that continued with DEI initiatives.

The guidance has been on hold since April when three federal judges blocked various portions of the Education Department’s anti-DEI measures.

The ruling Thursday followed a motion for summary judgment from the American Federation of Teachers and the American Sociological Association, which challenged the government’s actions in a February lawsuit.

The case centers on two Education Department memos ordering schools and universities to end all “race-based decision-making” or face penalties up to a total loss of federal funding. It’s part of a campaign to end practices the Trump administration frames as discrimination against white and Asian American students.

The new ruling orders the department to scrap the guidance because it runs afoul of procedural requirements, though Gallagher wrote that she took no view on whether the policies were “good or bad, prudent or foolish, fair or unfair.”

Gallagher, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, rejected the government’s argument that the memos simply served to remind schools that discrimination is illegal.

“It initiated a sea change in how the Department of Education regulates educational practices and classroom conduct, causing millions of educators to reasonably fear that their lawful, and even beneficial, speech might cause them or their schools to be punished,” Gallagher wrote.

Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy firm representing the plaintiffs, called it an important victory over the administration’s attack on DEI.

“Threatening teachers and sowing chaos in schools throughout America is part of the administration’s war on education, and today the people won,” said Skye Perryman, the group’s president and CEO.

The Education Department did not immediately comment on Thursday.

The conflict started with a Feb. 14 memo declaring that any consideration of race in admissions, financial aid, hiring or other aspects of academic and student life would be considered a violation of federal civil rights law.

The memo dramatically expanded the government’s interpretation of a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring colleges from considering race in admissions decisions. The government argued the ruling applied not only to admissions but across all of education, forbidding “race-based preferences” of any kind.

“Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices,” wrote Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of the department’s Office for Civil Rights.

A further memo in April asked state education agencies to certify they were not using “illegal DEI practices.” Violators risked losing federal money and being prosecuted under the False Claims Act, it said.

In total, the guidance amounted to a full-scale reframing of the government’s approach to civil rights in education. It took aim at policies that were created to address longstanding racial disparities, saying those practices were their own form of discrimination.

The memos drew a wave of backlash from states and education groups that called it illegal government censorship.

In its lawsuit, the American Federation of Teachers said the government was imposing “unclear and highly subjective” limits on schools across the country. It said teachers and professors had to “choose between chilling their constitutionally protected speech and association or risk losing federal funds and being subject to prosecution.”

Categories Bias, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Gender, Inequity, Trump

Columbia and Brown Agree to Give Trump Administration All Data on Race and Test Scores of New Admissions

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2025 //
6

In recent decades, many universities have sought to increase racial and ethnic diversity in their student body and faculty. In addition to grades and test scores, they looked at many other factors, such as talents, life experiences, meeting challenges. This process meant that more students of color were admitted, while some students with higher test scores were rejected.

The Trump administration adamantly opposes this process, known as affirmative action. Its view is that scores on the SAT and ACT and grades should be the most important, if not the only criteria for admission. Those scores, to Trump officials, are synonymous with merit. Any deviation from their view will be grounds for investigating violations of civil rights laws.

Sharon Otterman and Anemona Hartocollis reported in The New York Times yesterday:

As part of the settlements struck with two Ivy League universities in recent weeks, the Trump administration will gain access to the standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants, including information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter competitive college admissions.

That aspect of the agreements with Columbia and Brown, which goes well beyond the information typically provided to the government, was largely overlooked amid splashier news that the universities had promised to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle claims of violations of federal anti-discrimination laws, including accusations that they had tolerated antisemitism.

The release of such data has been on the wish list of conservatives who are searching for evidence that universities are dodging a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring the consideration of race in college admissions, and will probably be sought in the future from many more of them.

But college officials and experts who support using factors beyond test scores worry that the government — or private groups or individuals — will use the data to file new discrimination charges against universities and threaten their federal funding.

The Trump administration is using every lever it can to push elite college admissions offices toward what it regards as “merit-based” processes that more heavily weigh grades and test scores, arguing that softer measures, such as asking applicants about their life challenges or considering where they live, may be illegal proxies for considering race.

The additional scrutiny is likely to resonate in admissions offices nationwide. It could cause some universities to reconsider techniques like recruitment efforts focused on high schools whose students are predominantly people of color, or accepting students who have outstanding qualifications in some areas but subpar test scores, even if they believe such actions are legal.

“The Trump administration’s ambition here is to send a chill through admissions offices all over the country,” said Justin Driver, a Yale Law School professor who just wrote a book about the Supreme Court and affirmative action and who said he believed that the administration’s understanding of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decisionwas wrong. “They are trying to get universities to depress Black and brown enrollment.”

Categories Civil Rights, Higher Education, Inequality, Race, Trump

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

Jan Resseger: Trump Is Obliterating Civil Rights Laws

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2025 //
4

Jan Resseger is a social justice warrior who worked for the United Church of Christ. In retirement, she writes lucid, carefully researched articles about social policy and its effect on the nation’s most vulnerable people.

I should post everything she writes but I miss some. Here is Jan on Trump’s Big Ugly Bill and how it will hurt the neediest children and families.

This article about Trump’s assault on civil rights law was posted by the National Education Policy Center.

She writes:

On Wednesday, April 23rd, President Donald Trump released an executive order banning the use of disparate impact when the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights investigates disparities in school discipline under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Under the concept of disparate impact, officials in the Office for Civil Rights have been able to document discrimination by measuring the effects of a school’s or school district’s discipline practice on the mass of the  school’s or school district’s students even when there is no proof that staff members intended to punish some students mores severely due their race or ethnicity or sexual orientation. Staff at the Brookings-Brown Center on Education Policy, Rachel Perera and Jon Valant, define “disparate impact”: “Disparate impact is the idea that school discipline policies that disproportionately harm students of color may constitute illegal racial discrimination even if those policies are… applied in an evenhanded way.”

Academic researchers have been examining unjust school discipline policies for decades. In 2014, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA described groundbreaking work to define “the school-to-prison pipeline” as a metaphor for disparate impact in discipline policies across many U.S. public schools. Researchers documented differences in the kind of punishment imposed on students based on their race or ethicity or disability: “The Civil Rights Project has been working on the school discipline issues since 1999, under the leadership of Daniel Losen. Research from CRP’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies… finds that far too many districts suspend students in droves, while many others have little or no racial disparities and adhere to the common sense philosophy that suspensions, expulsions and arrests are strictly measures of last resort.”

In her new book, Original Sins, sociologist Eve Ewing describes how a punitive, prison-like, school culture, including systemic disparate impact, can infuse a school’s treatment of different groups of students because individual teachers and staff just get caught in the system in which they operate every day: “As sociologist Carla Shedd has written, the ‘routines and rituals’ created by carceral logic—everything from interacting with police officers in schools to strict uniform codes of conduct—become integral to the way a school functions, and can ultimately undermine the ostensibly educational purpose of the school building by making students feel unsafe… From within the space of the school, such regimes of discipline can become so routine that they escape notice by those who are accustomed to them.” (Original Sins, pp, 156-157)

For decades, disparate impact in school discipline has been at the heart of many of the complaints filed and consent decrees established between school districts and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. But on April 23, as the NY Times’ Erica Green reports, “President Trump has ordered federal agencies to abandon the use of a longstanding legal tool used to root out discrimination against minorities, a move that could defang the nation’s bedrock civil rights law. In an expansive executive order, Mr. Trump directed the federal government to curtail the use of ‘disparate-impact liability,’ a core tenet used for decades to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by determining whether policies disproportionately disadvantage certain groups… ‘This order aims to destroy the foundation of civil rights protections in this country, and it will have a devastating effect on equity for Black people and other communities of color,’ said Dariely Rodriguez, the acting co-chief counsel at the Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law….”

Green explains: “The disparate-impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more. Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities… Mr. Trump’s order resurrects a last-ditch effort made in the final days of his first term to repeal disparate-impact regulations through a formal rule-making process… Now the Justice Department’s embattled civil rights division has halted the use of disparate-impact investigations altogether, officials said.”

It is important to note that the Trump administration has not attempted, so far, to change the law itself, but instead to amend the federal guidance and rules that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has used in its investigations.  The Washington Post‘s Kim Bellware explains: “Trump’s order directs federal agencies to ‘deprioritize enforcement’ of statutes and regulations that include disparate-impact liability, which has long enabled courts to stop policies and practices that unfairly exclude people on the basis of protected characteristics such as race, gender, and disability.”

When disparate impact is cited, the disparities are regularly documented with large data studies.  For example, back in 2008, in his powerful book, So Much Reform: So Little Change, the University of Chicago’s Charles Payne described national data indicating the widespread disparate impact of discriminatory school discipline: “According to data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year, African American students nationally are suspended or expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students. In Minnesota, Black students are six times as likely to be suspended as whites, but that seems downright friendly compared to New Jersey, where they are almost 60 times more likely to be expelled. In 21 states, the percentage of Black suspensions is more than double their percentage in the student body. These disproportions affect middle-class as well as working-class Black students and there is no reason to believe that they can be reduced to actual differences in student behavior. At least some of the discrepancy seems to be about teachers interpreting similar behaviors differently when they come from students of different races… We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that African American students perceive school climate less favorably than white students or staff.” (So Much Reform: So Little Change, p. 112)

In 2014, in its own “Dear Colleague Letter,” the Obama administration announced a formal policy affirming the use of “disparate impact” as evidence in school discrimination cases. Here is constitutional law professor, Derek W. Black, in a 2016 book, Ending Zero Tolerance: The Crisis of Absolute School Discipline: “On January 8, 2014, the Departments of Education and Justice went beyond individual enforcement actions and formally announced their policy on school discipline moving forward… The policy guidance distinguished between disparate treatment (treating minority students and whites differently in terms of discipline) and disparate impact (facially neutral policies that result in racially disparate outcomes). It came as no surprise that schools cannot suspend an African American student for fighting and only send his white classmate to study hall. But the (formal policy) guidance on racial disparities was significant.” (Ending Zero Tolerance, p. 84)

In 2018, the first Trump administration tried to end the use of disparate impact as a way to measure civil rights violations by ending Obama’s rules and guidance. Perera and Valant reported: “When the Trump administration rescinded the Obama Dear Colleague Letter in 2018… it dropped any reference to disparate impact theory and defined much narrower conditions (for) OCR investigations.”

Perera and Valant add that the Biden administration did, in another Dear Colleague Letter, try to restore Obam’s rules and guidance, but they write that Biden administration’s “letter lacks a definition of illegal discrimination, information about how the federal government will enforce civil rights law, guidance for school districts on mandated data collection, or suggested practices and policies to prevent discrimination.”

Nevertheless, despite the weak Biden policy statement, President Biden’s Department of Education continued to investigate and enforce civil rights violations in school discipline based on disparate treatment.

Here we are now in 2025 with President Trump’s new executive order that attempts to cancel the use of disparate impact in civil rights enforcement altogether. Fortunately Trump’s new executive order will likely face lawsuits.  Erica Green explains why: “Mr. Trump’s executive order, which is likely to face legal challenges, falsely claimed that the disparate-impact test was ‘unlawful’ and violated the Constitution. In fact, the measure was codified by Congress in 1991, upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015 as a tool in the work of protecting civil rights, and cited in a December 2024 dissent by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.”

In the meantime in late March 2025, a month before Trump’s new executive order banning the use of disparate treatment in civil rights investigations, Trump’s Office for Civil Rights, in a move demonstrating Trump’s view of civil rights enforcement using “disparate impact,” dismissed a consent degree established in the Biden years to address discriminatory school discipline. The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler describes what happened in Rapid City, South Dakota: “For years, Native American students in the Rapid City, South Dakota, school district were more likely to be disciplined and less likely to enroll in advanced courses than their White peers. In 2010, the Education Department opened an investigation to see if racial discrimination was to blame… The original investigation found that Native American students in the district were twice as likely as White students to be referred for discipline, more than four times as likely to be suspended and more than five times as likely to be referred to law enforcement officials.”

Meckler continues: “The effort lingered until last year, when investigators came to a voluntary agreement with the district. In a 28-page letter signed last May, the federal government outlined its concerns that Native American and White students had been treated differently. The school district, which is the second-largest in South Dakota, agreed to take a number of steps, including staff trainings, better communication with parents and ongoing monitoring.”

At the end of March 2025, reports Meckler, “the Trump administration told the Rapid City Area School District it was terminating the agreement.”  But school district personnel in Rapid City did not consider the termination of the consent agreement to be a victory: “The Trump administration letter, sent March 27, came as a shock to the Rapid City Area School District, which did not ask for a change, a district spokeswoman said. She said the district plans to continue to abide by its terms, even though federal officials will not be monitoring to see if it does so. ‘While political priorities may shift, our core educational values remain steadfast,’ Cory Strasser, the district’s acting superintendent said in a statement. ‘Our mission remains to provide a safe, positive, and nondiscriminatory learning environment where all students can achieve their full potential.’ “

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Injustice, Trump

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

Trump Administration Forces Resignation of UVA President Over DEI

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2025 //
7

James Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia since 2018, announced his resignation under intense pressure from the Trump administration.

The Civil Rights Division of the Trump administration pressured the Board of Governors of the university to remove Ryan because of his support for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

They said that he pretended to comply with the federal demands to eliminate DEI but merely renamed them.

For the past half century, DEI was considered a hallmark of compliance with civil rights laws. DEI programs encouraged women and nonehites to enroll in higher education and to study the history of discrimination.

Under Trump, DEI has been reinterpreted to mean favoring those groups at the expense of white men and thus discriminating against white men.

The Trump administration has cut federal grants to universities that are slow or unwilling to dismantle DEI programs.

The New York Times reported that lawyers for the Civil Rights Division demanded Ryan’s ouster.

The demand to remove Mr. Ryan was made over the past month on several occasions by Gregory Brown, the deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, to university officials and representatives, according to the three people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Brown, a University of Virginia graduate who, as a private lawyer, sued the school, is taking a major role in the investigation. He told a university representative as recently as this past week that Mr. Ryan needed to go in order for the process of resolving the investigation to begin, two of the people said.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights lawyer, has also been involved in negotiations with the university. She received her law degree from the University of Virginia, where she was a student in the law school at the same time as Mr. Ryan…

Mr. Ryan, hired in 2018 as the university’s ninth president, has leaned into issues like making the school more diverse, increasing the number of first-generation students and encouraging students to do community service. But his approach, which he says will make the university “both great and good,” has rankled conservative alumni and Republican board members who accuse him of wanting to impose his values on students and claim he is “too woke.”

Before becoming the University of Virginia’s president, Mr. Ryan served as the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was praised for his commitment to D.E.I. programs. Harvard has been one of the Trump administration’s chief targets since it began its assault on higher education.

The administration’s attempt to assert federal influence over state university leadership decisions is also illustrative of how Mr. Trump’s political appointees continue to wield the Justice Department’s investigative powers to achieve policy goals long sought by a top Trump adviser, Stephen Miller.

Legal experts said they could think of few other instances in which an administration had demanded that a school have its president removed in order to resolve a Justice Department investigation.

“This is a tactic you would expect the government to use when it’s playing hard ball in a criminal case involving a corporation accused of serious wrongdoing or pervasive criminal activity,” said Daniel C. Richman, who is a law professor at Columbia University and a former federal prosecutor.

Categories Academic Freedom, Civil Rights, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Higher Education, History, Injustice, Race, Racism, Trump, Virginia

Heather Cox Richardson: Under Our Mafia Boss, Everything Is For Sale

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2025 //
2

Heather Cox Richardson describes the legal corruption that is now out in the open.

Yesterday at the meeting of the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7), a forum of democracies with advanced economies, President Donald Trump told reporters: “The UK is very well protected. You know why? Because I like them, that’s why. That’s the ultimate protection.”

Commenters often note that Trump talks like a mob boss, but rarely has his organized-crime style of governance been clearer than in yesterday’s statement.

Also yesterday, Ana Swanson and Lauren Hirsch of the New York Times reported that Trump has taken unprecedented control over U.S. Steel. Japan’s Nippon Steel has been trying to take over U.S. Steel since 2023, but the Biden administration blocked the deal for security reasons. In order to move it forward, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick demanded an agreement that gives to the president and his successors, or a person the president designates, a single share of preferred stock, known as class G, or “gold.” The deal gives the president permanent veto power over nearly a dozen actions the company might want to take, as well as power over its board of directors.

Swanson and Hirsch note that the U.S. government historically takes a stake in companies only when they are in financial trouble or when they play a significant role in the economy. “We have a golden share, which I control, or the president controls,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday. “Now I’m a little concerned whoever the president might be, but that gives you total control.”

This kind of deal echoes those of the authoritarians Trump appears to admire. His ongoing support for Russian president Vladimir Putin was on display at the G7, when he echoed Russian talking points that blamed European countries and the United States for Putin’s war against Ukraine, rather than acknowledging that it was Russia that attacked Ukraine after giving assurances that it would respect Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up the Soviet nuclear weapons stored there.

Also yesterday, Rene Marsh and Ella Nilsen of CNN reported that officials from the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump have been telling staff in the Midwest—which the authors note has a legacy of industrial pollution—to “stop enforcing violations against fossil fuel companies.” At the same time, the Department of Justice has cut its environmental division significantly, leaving “no one to do the work.”

Trump vowed that if he were reelected he would slash the oil and gas regulations he claims are “burdensome.” Now, one EPA enforcement staffer told Marsh and Nilsen, “The companies are scoffing at the cops. EPA enforcement doesn’t have the leverage they once had.”

Also yesterday, outdoor journalist Wes Siler reported in Wes Siler’s Newsletter that while language inserted in the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill requires the sale of up to 3.3 million acres of publicly owned land, an amendment authorizes the sale of 258 million acres more over the next five years. The amendment comes from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and was written by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Steve Daines (R-MT).

It includes Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands in 11 states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. As Siler notes, while the measure does not currently include national monument lands, the Department of Justice under Trump is arguing that the president can revoke national monument protections. If it did so, that would make another 13.5 million acres available for purchase.

Siler notes the process for selling those lands calls for an enormous rush on sales, “all without hearings, debate, or public input opportunities.”

Today, Eliot Brown of the Wall Street Journal reported that Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, is now one of the many wealthy foreign real estate developers “pouring money” into the Trump Organization. Brown noted that the Trump family is aggressively developing its businesses while Trump is in the White House, reaching past real estate into cryptocurrency and other sectors.

The growing power of international oligarchs to use the resources of the government for their own benefit recalls a speech Robert Mueller, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gave in New York City in 2011. In it, he explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. No longer regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated, with multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.

These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”

These criminal enterprises, he noted, were working to corner the market on oil, gas, and precious metals. And to do so, Mueller explained, they “may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”

The FBI’s increasing focus on organized crime and national security is what prompted its interest in the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016.

The willingness of Republicans to enable Trump’s behavior is especially striking today, since June 17 is the anniversary of the 1972 Watergate break-in. On that day, operatives associated with President Richard M. Nixon’s team tried to tap the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate complex. Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard, noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.

The story played out over the next two years with Nixon insisting he was not involved in the affair, but in early August 1974 a tape recorded just days after the break-in revealed Nixon and an aide plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Republican senators who had not wanted to convict their president of the charges of impeachment being considered in the House knew the game was over. A delegation of them went to the White House to tell Nixon they would vote to convict him.

On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.

Chris Geidner of LawDork notes that despite the lawmakers in our own era who are unwilling to stop Trump, “the pushback…is very real.” Geidner notes not just the No Kings Day protests of the weekend, but also a lawsuit by the American Bar Association (ABA) suing Trump for his attacks on law firms and lawyers, calling Trump’s actions “unprecedented and uniquely dangerous to the rule of law.”

Geidner also notes that lower court judges are upholding the Constitution, and he points especially to U.S. District Judge William Young, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan. In a hearing yesterday, Young insisted on holding the government accountable “for both Trump’s actions and the follow-up actions from those Trump has empowered to act.”

Young called cuts to funding for National Institutes of Health research grants “illegal” and “void” and ordered the NIH to restore the funds immediately. “I am hesitant to draw this conclusion—but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it—that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.”

“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Young said during the hearing. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.” He added: “You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The Constitution will not permit that.… Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Character, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Economy, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Trump
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