For as long as I can remember, I have been a strong supporter of Israel. I was ten years old when the state was created as a refuge for the Jewish people, for those who survived the European genocide and for those who were fleeing persecution in Muslim countries across the Middle East.
In Sunday School every week, we children brought pennies, nickels, and dimes to fill up little blue tin cans marked “For Palestine.”
We celebrated the creation of the state of Israel and its triumph when it was attacked by all the neighboring Arab states. And we celebrated every other attempt to extinguish the only Jewish state in the world, the only safe haven for Jews.
But my unwavering faith in Israel has been shattered by Benjamin Netanyahu and his ruthless response to the horrific events of October 7, 2023.
His brutal campaign of violence in Gaza has not only killed tens of thousands of civilians but has made Gaza an uninhabitable wasteland.
Almost as awful is his refusal to stop the violent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians living on the West Bank. The Israeli Defense Forces have failed to intervene as rabid settlers torch the homes of Palestinians and murder them.
Netanyahu is directly responsible for murder, aggression, and brutality. Instead of seeking peace, he is continuing the inhumane treatment of Palestinians and indulging the extremist settlers who want to seize more and more of the West Bank.
Netanyahu justifies whatever he does or condones because of the Hamas attack on October 7.
But there is a disturbing picture emerging about that day, stongly suggesting that Netanyahu was warned about October 7 and failed to take action. Did he decide not to protect the people who lived near the border with Gaza? If he did, he is an accessory to their deaths.
Like many other people, I was appalled by the savagery of October 7. I was obsessed by the accounts of the attacks on young people dancing until dawn at “the Rave.” They were hunted down and slaughtered like animals. They were killed as they hid, as they attempted to flee. Families in the Kibbutzim near the border were mercilessly murdered, even the children. Some 251 hostages were brutally kidnapped and taken to Gaza.
Immediately after that day’s horrifying events, I subscribed to the English-language version of Ha’aretz to learn what was happening from an Israeli perspective. Ha’aretz is a a liberal, anti-Netanyahu publication. Soon after the October 7 massacre, a disturbing story appeared. The story said that trained observers at a military monitoring post called Nahal Oz, near the Gaza-Israeli border, had repeatedly informed their superiors about what they saw every day on the other side of the fence in Gaza. To them, it appeared that Hamas was preparing for an incursion.
The monitors were identified as Combat Intelligence Collection Unit 414. Unit 414 consisted of 25 unarmed young women, trained to watch the border for signs of trouble.
They saw men conducting military exercises, studying maps and the terrain, practicing attacks near the fence, digging positions. All of it looked ominous to them but Israeli intelligence decided that these activities were not hostile. They were nothing more than training exercises.
Unit 414’s many warnings were ignored. On October 7, Unit 414 was defenseless. At least 15 of the young women were murdered, and seven were taken hostage.
Since that fateful day, we have learned that other nations warned Israel that Hamas was planning an attack.
CNN reported that Netanyahu was warned that Hamas was planning an attack, but did not pinpoint the date it would happen.
Two days after the massacre, The Times of Israel reported that Egyptian intelligence warned Israel that Hamas was planning a major attack. “Mounting questions over Israel’s massive intelligence failure to anticipate and prepare for a surprise Hamas assault were compounded Monday when an Egyptian intelligence official said that Jerusalem had ignored repeated warnings that the Gaza-based terror group was planning “something big” — which included an apparent direct notice from Cairo’s intelligence minister to the prime minister.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was directly warned by the president of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major offensive just days before the militant group attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, according to an Israeli newspaper report.
UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed spoke with Netanyahu 10 days before the attack and said Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza at the time, was planning an operation, the Haaretz daily said.
Bin Zayed said it would lead to bloodshed and could destabilize the region and undermine the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab and Muslim-majority nations, the newspaper reported.
But Netanyahu “reacted with relative calm,” according to Haaretz, which said he assured bin Zayed that Israel was prepared for any scenario and a possible attack was more likely to come from the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu denied the story. He denied all the stories. He knew nothing. Yet the border of Gaza was not reinforced. Netanyahu shifted troops to the West Bank. Did he really know nothing?
Put the pieces together. Netanyahu had multiple warnings about a major attack. He did not bolster the military presence. He did not tell the organizers of “the Rave” to move their dance to a safer location. He did not warn the settlers to evacuate.
He continues to use his narrative about October 7 to bomb and destroy what’s left of Gaza and to allow West Bank settlers to harass and attack Palestinians in their homes and to steal their property..
The Israeli elections will be held on October 27. Netanyahu must be ousted. There should be a thorough public investigation of what he knew and when he knew it. In addition to the deaths that he is directly responsible for, he has made Israel a pariah nation. He should be held accountable for his crimes. Israel has a heavy burden to bear for the crimes he committed in Israel’s name. The good people, the generous people, the open-hearted Israelis must act to restore the Israel that so many of us once revered.
PS: As Americans, we should be able to sympathize with Israel’s dilemma. We have an authoritarian President who ignores the Constitution, norms, and laws to show his power. He has killed countless Iranians in a pointless war. He has murdered scores of men on the high seas, claiming they were carrying drugs but offering no evidence. He shut down USAID, which supplies food and medicine to the neediest in the world; this caused the deaths of many thousands of children in sub-Saharan Africa. He repeatedly tells the world that our elections–the centerpiece of our democracy–are rigged (is that a confession?) He has unleashed ICE to terrorize immigrants, some of whom have papers, and to kill people who committed no crime.
Will we ever reclaim our reputation as a nation of laws? Will Israel?
As the midterm elections get nearer, Trump grows ever more desperate in his attempt to prove that he is hugely popular, that the media are liars, and that elections are fraudulent.
We have never seen anything like this. Other candidates, other presidents have faced midterm elections without falling into a pit of craziness and desperation and fraud.
After a hearing yesterday about Trump’s Friday ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House campus, very early this morning—I was still awake writing yesterday’s letter—U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted the request of the media outlets to stop Trump’s order banning members of their organizations from the White House complex.
Kelly, whom Trump appointed to the bench in 2017, challenged the argument of the White House that it had banned the journalists because they had endangered national security, noting that the stories to which administration lawyers claimed to object were “routine.” In fact, one of the stories the White House claimed endangered national security was based on a press call from the White House itself. According to Oliver Darcy, who writes the media newsletter Status, the anonymous “senior administration official” who provided the quotations on the call was none other than Vice President J.D. Vance.
Kelly ordered the credentials of 78 journalists restored immediately.
This morning, the White House continued to deny reporters from CNN, Politico, and MS NOW access to the White House campus. Their lawyers asked for an emergency hearing because the administration had “already repeatedly violated the Court’s Order,” and soon after the judge ordered the administration to respond, the reporters were once again allowed into the area.
And then tonight, at least CNN and MS NOW were blocked from access to the White House state dinner with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. After Trump posted on social media that CNN and MS NOW (he called it MSDNC) were refusing to cover Xi’s visit “because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to ‘TRUMP,’” the White House told CNN it could send only an audio producer and a cameraman to the event, not a reporter or producer. Senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes said: “They again said that we were specifically denied access and that they were not letting in the CNN editorial presence.”
This morning, Trump complained on social media that “[t]he Media is trying to cover up how well things are going before the Midterms, just to help Democrats.”
And that’s the gist of Trump’s attacks on media outlets: MAGA is falling apart, and he either lives in a fantasy world or hopes to stem that collapse by issuing propaganda that will convince voters he is actually winning.
The fantasy world thesis has supporting evidence in an image posted on Trump’s social media account this morning, showing Trump and Xi standing together on a red carpet in front of an airplane apparently labeled Air China. There is a military aircraft flying over a circle of stars with the words “Only Trump” superimposed in a German-style blackletter font. Behind Trump, to his right, is a young woman who looks like Trump’s loyal aide Natalie Harp standing with her hand over her heart.
Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice noted that the image was a digitally altered photo in which the image of the chief officer of protocol of the United States, Monica Crowley, had been replaced by an image that appears to be Harp.
Convincing voters he is winning is an even harder sell.
The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration is its signature policy, and last week a federal appeals court stopped the Trump administration from sending migrants to third countries, finding that the short timeline for those renditions stripped deportees of their right to due process. The administration appears to have continued the renditions, arguing that the court had not officially notified a lower court of its decision and thus it was not yet in effect, prompting an appeals court to clarify that the flights must stop.
Today Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to step in to permit those renditions to third countries. He said that disruption of the administration’s “plans…imposes massive costs on the government and invariably requires new rounds of diplomatic engagement with countries who may be all the more skeptical of our removal efforts given the disruption.”
Also today, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for ignoring his previous orders and continuing to hold people in “inhumane and unconstitutional” conditions at Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza, depriving detainees of “sleep, sanitary living conditions, basic personal hygiene needs, sufficient food and water, and adequate medical care.” Although, as Josephine Walker of Axios points out, the administration likely sees the appalling conditions of its prisons as a way to induce migrants to leave, the judge required ICE to provide adequate space and humane conditions for detainees.
Meanwhile, as Ryan J. Foley of the Associated Press reported today, a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that ICE had no strategic plan for spending the unprecedented $45 billion Congress gave it in Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, and has wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on slapdash plans for mass detention.
It spent nearly $3 million for tents at Guantanamo Bay that were never used, $20 million for maintaining warehouses that were never used to house detainees and are now being sold, and excessive rates to lock people up. Foley reports that the Department of Homeland Security told the GAO that it would have a plan for spending its windfall by August 31, 2027, nearly a year from now.
After Trump announced the U.S. would accept meat from other countries in order to lower food prices, on September 22 the Department of Agriculture announced the recall of more than 167,000 pounds (75,750 kg) of raw pork, beef, and goat. The items were produced without federal inspection but carried false marks claiming they had been inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency said the food “should be considered misbranded and unsafe to eat.”
Trump’s insistence that the country suffers from voter fraud isn’t going well, either.
In California, Republican sheriff Chad Bianco and the Riverside County sheriff’s department confiscated more than 650,000 ballots after California voters agreed to redistrict the state to offset the Republican mid-decade redistricting of Texas. The state’s Democratic attorney general immediately ordered him to return the ballots, saying he had no authority to confiscate them and that the seizure was intended to make people distrust elections.
As Uwa Ede-Osifo of the Guardian reported, the California Supreme Court today ordered Blanco to return the ballots, saying that it was Blanco, rather than voters, who was endangering elections: “Allowing law enforcement unfettered access to ballots, or the ability to handle and count them in secret, based on unregulated protocols, itself creates a substantial risk to election integrity,” it said.
On Saturday, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that makes it a felony to seize ballots from a county elections office.
Trump’s own claims of voter fraud also took a hit this week. As Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported today, in July, Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin claimed they had found more than 270,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Mullin stated that there were as many as 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada.
But when officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) met with Nevada election officials in August, they admitted Mullin’s number was inflated. After the meeting, one wrote to say that the department had confirmed just 185 people on the voter rolls were not citizens. They sent Nevada officials a list of those 185 names.
On Tuesday, Nevada told the federal government that the 185 people on the government’s list are all citizens. “Our records do not support DHS’s claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that,” said Francisco Aguilar, Nevada’s Democratic secretary of state. “Instead, DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.”
Trump’s job approval rating continues to drop. Fifty Plus One aggregated new polls today and found that only 34.7% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the presidency, while 62.1% disapprove.
Meridith McGraw, Maggie Severns, and Suzanne Vranica of the Wall Street Journal reported today that an ad airing in major U.S. markets shows Trump promising to “defeat communism, Marxism in America once and for all,” before showing images of Trump at White House events as a choir sings “Love Me.” At the end of the ad, the screen reads: “Paid for by the U.S. government.”
Former campaign finance official Daniel Weiner called the ad “an astonishing misuse of public resources in the campaign context, one of the most blatant I’ve ever seen.” Democratic lawmakers wrote to the White House demanding the ad be taken down, calling it “government propaganda” more fitting for North Korea than the U.S. and “an egregious and illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars.”
According to the Wall Street Journal reporters, the White House says the ad is a “public service announcement,” “reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.”
Trump humiliated himself and our country by his belligerent speech at the United Nations today. He offered a choice to Iran: either make a deal or I will annihilate you. Richardson points out that the animating vision of the UN is a world in which words replace wars, in which diplomacy replaces coercion. Trump doesn’t get it.
Instead, he displayed his idea of “the art of the deal”: do what I say or I will bludgeon you, destroy you, exterminate you.
There is one good thing about his nutty ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. All the other networks refuse to post videos of him
Speaking. That’s a relief for those of us who hate the sound of his whiny voice and know that most of the time he is either boasting or lying. personally, I hope this ban lasts a while longer. By the way, the Justice Departnebt said yesterday that Trump was justified in banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico as a matter of “national security.”
In 1945, still reeling from World War II, representatives from 50 nations reached back to the U.S. Constitution when they wrote the Preamble to the United Nations charter. “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS” were, they wrote, “DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.”
Central to that effort was the principle, stated in Article 2, that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The U.N. General Assembly has been meeting in New York City since September 8, and today began its high-level General Debate, the annual meeting of the heads of state and heads of government that launches the General Assembly session. At the General Debate, all 193 U.N. member states are invited to address the General Assembly.
By tradition, Brazil speaks first because it was the first to volunteer to speak in 1955 when no other country would. Because the United States is the country that hosts the United Nations, it usually speaks second.
In his speech today, President Donald J. Trump, reading haltingly off a teleprompter, said: “I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
Much of the Iranian delegation walked out.
Trump’s immediate switch to a talking point about the midterms suggests that his speech was aimed at U.S. voters more than the U.N. audience, but it should not be overlooked that he stood in front of world leaders and rejected the premise of the U.N.
Touting his own “Board of Peace” and continuing his fiction that he has solved multiple wars, he outlined a fantasy worldview of himself as a powerful dictator, a man of action who rejects the diplomacy at the heart of the U.N.
“I do not believe in letting problems fester,” he declared. “They only become harder to solve. So while others have talked, I have acted. While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace. While others have ignored threats, I have confronted them. While others have talked of courage, America has shown it. While others have promised strength, I have used it to make America the most powerful country in the world.”
Rejecting the principles on which the U.N. was founded, Trump instead embraced the idea that powerful countries will have spheres of influence, dominating their neighbors. This is the worldview advanced by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who seeks to have control over the decisions made by the countries around Russia, including Ukraine. In this worldview, as Trump sees it, the United States will control the western hemisphere.
“To the victor belong the spoils,” he told the U.N. in a perverse echo of the world the U.N. founders set out to change. “You’ve all heard that.”
Trump threatened Mexico and boasted of U.S. attacks on Venezuela that removed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power and replaced him with Delcy Rodríguez, who was willing to work with the Trump administration to allow the U.S. access to Venezuelan oil fields.
“Our actions in Venezuela are proof that the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States.”
“My administration is also seeking a fundamental change in the situation in Cuba,” Trump said, “where the communist regime is under great pressure, the biggest pressure they’ve ever been under. It’s an absolutely failed state. It’s failing like never before and it will fall. Marco Rubio is handling a negotiation. He’s deep into negotiations with Cuba. Let’s see what happens.”
The Cuban delegation walked out.
In an echo of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump went full white nationalist, accusing the “U.N.’s top human rights officials” of wanting the U.S. “to open up our borders to gangs and criminals from [the] world’s most dangerous places…. It is deeply ironic that the United Nations has an entire institution, the UNESCO group of people and countries devoted to protecting cultural heritage. Yet with their ceaseless promotion of mass migration, these globalists are actively destroying the greatest cultures and most extraordinary heritage in all of history. There is no human right to illegal immigration, but there is a right to remain a sovereign nation, and we want to remain a sovereign nation and so should you.”
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, the former prime minister of Portugal, asked the nations of the world to hold fast to a different vision.
He warned that “we are witnessing an extraordinary transfer of power away from governments to a handful of private corporations and individuals,” whose “reach now extends across politics, economies, information flows, technological development, and the civic space on which societies depend.”
“At the very moment when humanity faces an unprecedented convergence of threats, our mechanisms for collective action are under growing strain.”
There are two routes open, Guterres said. Either the world will fragment into “transactionalism,” “rising tensions and deepening mistrust,” “fractured markets and weakened institutions,” “shrinking cooperation and zero-sum calculations,” or it will move toward “networked multipolarity,” a “world built on interdependence—and sustained by a dense web of economic, political, social, and technological connections. A world in which multiple centres of influence coexist within a common framework of international law and shared rules.”
Against the backdrop of Russia’s debacle in Ukraine and the U.S. morass in Iran, Guterres noted that the world’s superpowers have learned that “their power isn’t so super. That their power has limits.”
He urged countries to hold fast to the principles of the United Nations: “The primacy of international law. Upholding human dignity. And the pursuit of justice in all its dimensions.”
“It comes down to this,” he said, “Will we act to ensure that power is governed by law or by force? By cooperation or coercion?”
Force must not “be the final arbiter of whose lives, rights, and future matter,” he said.
He called out the war in Iran and conflicts in the Middle East; Israel’s onslaught on the Palestinians in Gaza “with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General”; “violence, displacement and settlement expansion by Israel in the Occupied West Bank”; Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in violation of the U.N. charter; the war on civilians in Sudan, with millions displaced; and escalating violence in Myanmar.
Guterres added that “[n]o discussion of inequality can ignore its most universal form: The inequality between men and women. Everywhere, women and girls continue to face discrimination, violence, exclusion, and abuse. Around the world: Their rights are being rolled back. Their voices silenced. Their bodies turned into battlegrounds. And their freedoms treated as bargaining chips.
“This is an outrage—and a profound waste for humanity. Peace is more durable when women are at the table. Economies are more dynamic when women have equal opportunity. Societies are more resilient when girls can learn, lead, and live free from fear. And institutions are more effective when power is shared equally.”
“Equality is not a dream,” Guterres said. “It is a decision.”
“Excellencies,” he said, “The test before us is whether power will be exercised with the law—or beyond it.”
“In the face of a global catastrophe more than 80 years ago,” Guterres said, “the United Nations was created as an act of defiance. The defiance of people who refuse to surrender the future to fear. The defiance against the self-defeating notion that might makes right. The defiance of countries that know our futures are bound together.
The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts may go bankrupt as soon as tomorrow. The only way to avoid bankruptcy, the board says, is to put Trump’s name back on the building so he will save it.
The board was hand-picked by Trump right after he returned to office.
This is the definition of chutzpah. He destroyed the Kennedy Center by taking personal control of it, naming it for himself, and driving it into the ground, as he has repeatedly done to multiple businesses before he became president. He bankrupted six casinos, as well as Trump Airlines, Trump University, and a long list of Trump–branded items, like Trump wines, Trump steaks, Trump vodka, Trump magazine, and various other failed ventures.
Make no mistake. No other president has packed the board with his cronies, who named him chair of the board. The board immediately put his name on the Center, making it the Trump-Kennedy Center.
As soon as he politicized the Kennedy Center, its reputation was tarnished. Artists and performers canceled, ticket sales plummeted, the National Opera moved out, the National Symphony went into financial crisis.
A federal judge ordered the board to remove Trump’s name. Congress named it; only Congress could change its name. The board reluctantly removed his name but has not removed the tarps covering the Center’s original name.
And now, the board says the Center will be bankrupt unless Trump’s name is restored!
He destroyed it. Only he can save it.
With the billions of dollars he and his family have friends have profited from crypto and other deals in the past year, maybe they will.
But as long as his name is attached to the Center and his board controls it, it will be shunned by the nation’s leading performers. It can’t buy back its tarnished reputation.
Mike Simpson, known on Twitter as “Big Education Ape,” is known for his brilliant memes and editorial cartoons. Typically, they expose the latest fads and lies that defame teachers and public schools. Every once in a while, he publishes a great post, like this one.
I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX
There’s a famous scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault declares he is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on — right before a croupier hands him his winnings. That’s essentially the posture of the billionaire reform industrial complex today, clutching its pearls over a Gallup poll showing public satisfaction with American schools has cratered to 32% — an 11-point nosedive in just two years — while quietly pocketing the profits of the crisis they spent three decades engineering.
Shocked. Absolutely shocked.
The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis
Let’s be precise about the timeline, because precision matters when someone is picking your pocket.
For roughly 30 years, a well-funded constellation of think tanks, philanthropic foundations, hedge fund managers, and tech oligarchs pumped billions of dollars into a single, relentless narrative: public schools are failing. Not “underfunded.” Not “systematically neglected.” Failing — as in, inherently broken, irredeemably incompetent, populated by bad teachers protected by evil unions, and salvageable only by the heroic intervention of the private market.
The messaging was surgical. The money was real. And — surprise! — it worked.
Starve public schools of adequate funding. Declare them “failing.” Ride in on a white charter bus to “rescue” the children.
The chronic underfunding wasn’t fiscal negligence. In many states, it was a feature, not a bug. Squeeze hard enough, the theory went, and disruption would force innovation. What it actually forced was deferred maintenance, teacher shortages, and a generation of kids learning to read in buildings where the roof leaks and the textbooks predate the iPhone.
Now the poll numbers confirm the narrative took hold — and the reformers are citing those same poll numbers as proof they were right all along. The audacity is, genuinely, breathtaking.
The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories
Here’s what the data actually shows — and what it doesn’t show:
Metric: The Headline. What It Actually Means Gallup Public Satisfaction 32% — record low 30 years of “failing schools” messaging worked exactly as intended.
Parent Satisfaction with Their Own School Historically ~2x the national figure People trust what they experience; they fear what they’re told
Math & Reading Scores Declining, especially bottom quartile Tracks directly with funding inequity and screen-time explosion
Top-tier U.S. Student Performance Still globally competitive. The “crisis” is concentrated where disinvestment is concentrated
The gap between how Americans rate schools in general versus their own child’s school is the smoking gun. It has always been the smoking gun. People who actually walk into a public school building — who meet the teachers, see the classrooms, watch their kids come home — consistently rate those schools dramatically higher than the national “failing” narrative suggests.
That gap is the manufactured crisis. It lives entirely in the space between lived experience and media-amplified fear.
$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh
And just when you thought the reform carousel might slow down, along comes the Science of Reading — the latest Next Big Thing™ in a long line of Next Big Things™ that have collectively cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and produced reading scores that went, as the Big Education Ape’s withering analysis puts it, precisely nowhere.
Remember Common Core? $15.8 billion. A decade of standardized testing theater. Reading scores: unmoved.
Now we have the Science of Reading, $1.8 billion deep and climbing, with the same cast of vendors, the same philanthropic networks, and the same conspicuous absence of a money-back guarantee.
To be scrupulously fair: phonics works. Explicit decoding instruction works. The underlying research on structured literacy is legitimate. But here’s the thing about legitimate research — it doesn’t require a $1.8 billion vendor ecosystem, mandatory state legislation in 40+ states, and the systematic deskilling of teachers who are told to stop thinking and start following the script. When real science gets packaged into proprietary curricula, sold to districts under legislative mandate, and deployed without the trained human educators needed to implement it well, you don’t get science. You get very expensive phonics worksheets.
The question nobody in the reform complex wants to answer remains the same one it’s always been: Where is the money-back guarantee?
The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure
Here is the part of the story that deserves its own criminal investigation — or at minimum, a very uncomfortable congressional hearing.
The same Silicon Valley billionaires who spent decades pushing EdTech into classrooms as the revolutionary equalizer — screens for every student! –are the identical billionaires whose social media platforms have:
Collapsed long-form reading among adolescents at a rate researchers describe as one of the steepest drops in PISA history
Engineered algorithmic doom-scrolling that neurologically rewires 15-year-olds away from the sustained attention that math and reading comprehension require
Distracted over a quarter of students internationally during core academic instruction, by their own PISA survey data
They sold the disease and the cure. They pushed the screens that fragmented attention spans, then sold the adaptive software to remediate the fragmented attention spans, then pointed at the test scores and said: See? Public schools are failing.
None of this is inevitable. None of this is permanent. The No Kings Coalition — the sprawling, nonpartisan civic movement that flooded the streets in March — is now flooding the polls, with a Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 aimed squarely at the November 3, 2026 midterms.
The math is straightforward, even if the billionaires prefer we can’t do it:
Elect candidates who will defend public education funding, not divert it into voucher schemes that enrich private operators at public expense
Overturn the Supreme Court rulings — from Citizens United forward — that transformed American democracy into a billionaire auction
Restore the principle that public money follows public children into public schools, not into the portfolios of private equity firms with a “reform” logo.
The manufactured crisis has a manufactured solution: more billionaire intervention, more privatization, more EdTech, more testing, more disruption. The actual solution is considerably less glamorous and considerably more effective — fund schools equitably, pay teachers competitively, put phones away, and stop letting people who profit from public school failure write public school policy.
The Bottom Line
The 32% satisfaction number is not evidence that public schools have failed. It is evidence that a 30-year, billion-dollar propaganda campaign succeeded. The same people who manufactured the crisis are now selling the cure — at $1.8 billion a pop, no refunds, no guarantees, no accountability.
Meanwhile, the teachers who showed up every day through a pandemic, through chronic underfunding, through a staffing crisis, through the algorithmic dismantling of their students’ attention spans — those people are still in the classroom at 7 AM, doing the work that no EdTech platform, no voucher program, and no think tank white paper has ever actually replaced.
The casino is rigged. Captain Renault is shocked. And the November ballot is the one lever the house can’t control.
Vote like a public school depends on it. Because one does.
All links verified active as of September 9, 2026. Primary polling data sourced from Gallup/Walton Family Foundation. PISA data sourced from NCES/OECD 2025 release.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting at my dining table, enjoying a cup of coffee. I lived in Brooklyn Heights, about two blocks from New York Harbor. I heard a loud crash, and my first thought was that there had been a terrible automobile accident on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a highway bordering the harbor. Nothing I could do about it. I kept sipping my coffee.
A few minutes later, my partner Mary called to say that a small plane had crashed into the top of the World Trade Center. “Turn on the TV,” she said. She thought it was not an accident. She thought it was terrorism.
I turned on CNN and saw the smoke billowing from the top floors of the north building of the World Trade Center. I grabbed one of our two dogs–(our rescue girl, Lady, a big white Cocker Spaniel)–and headed for the waterfront, some three or four minutes away.
As I got to the waterfront at Grace Court Alley. a tiny block that leads to the harbor, I looked up and saw the second airplane slice into the second WTC building. This was not a small plane. It was not an accident. It was terrorism. I stood there speechless, alongside a couple of others who were there for the same reason as I. We wanted to see for ourselves. And in an instant, we all knew that hundreds and thousands of people were dying as we silently watched.
I ran back home to see what CNN was saying. I could see what was happening with my own eyes, but needed to know more to put it in perspective. CNN filled out the picture. Two large jets hit the two buildings, minutes apart. We did not know at that moment that another jet was on its way to hit the Pentagon and that a fourth jet would crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, when brave passengers fought the terrorists and sacrificed their lives.
At the WTC, fire fighters were on the scene, racing up the stairs to try to save people. People in both buildings were told to stay in their offices and wait for help. Most did, assuming that the fires would be put out. The elevators were out of service.
Those on the highest floors had no exit. The elevators weren’t available, and the stairs were filled with smoke. After it was over, word came out that one stairway was not blocked but I don’t know if that was true or if there was time to run down more than 100 flights before the building collapsed.
Some people on the high floors jumped to their deaths, not wanting to die of fire or smoke inhalation. Thank God I was too far away to see them jump to their deaths. People in the buildings were calling their families to say goodbye. So many phones were in use that cell service was intermittent.
But one after the other, the buildings collapsed, pancaked. Almost 3,000 people died, people of many different nationalities, including about 60 Muslims. So did 343 fire fighters, racing up to high floors to try to save those who were trapped. Since 9/11, more than 400 other firefighters died of injuries sustained that day or cancers related to the site.
The first person to die was Father Mychal Judge, a beloved Fire Department chaplain, who was outside the first building to be hit. He was crushed by the body of someone who had jumped. Father Judge was a saintly man.
After the two buildings collapsed, Mary came home from work, and we went to the nearest hospital, hoping to donate blood. The hospital would not accept it. No victims were brought in. None. Blood was not needed.
All transportation came to a halt. Subways stopped. Public buses stopped. The bridges connecting Manhattan to other places were closed to vehicular traffic. The only sound was the intermittent roar of military jets.
Our friend Bernadette attended a meeting that morning on a low floor of the WTC. She tipped the attendant at the garage to leave her car near the entrance, so she could leave quickly. After the attack, she pulled out of the WTC garage, picking up as many people as she could carry, and was the last car to cross the Brooklyn Bridge before it was closed.
We walked past the Brooklyn Bridge and saw scores, hundreds of people crossing it, from Manhattan to Brooklyn. They looked shell-shocked. They were covered in ash, which floated everywhere. Some were barefoot. Some carried sooty briefcases.
We watched the smoke pour out of the tops of the buildings before they collapsed. After they collapsed, there was a thick plume of smoke from the places where the buildings had stood. The wind blew steadily from south to north, away from us.
After a while, the wind shifted to the east, where we were. We could no longer see “the pile,” as the gigantic burning hole was called. What had been a brilliant blue sky turned dark and smoky. We could no longer see anything. Not the sun, not the clear blue sky.
The next morning, there were ashes everywhere in the neighborhood, ashes blown in our direction after the winds turned east. Cars and streets coated with ashes.
In our small backyard we found papers–memos, documents, letters, reports–a day earlier, they had been on someone’s desk. Now they coated our yard, unremarkable except for the tiny burn holes in them.
The pile burned for weeks afterward. We could see the smoke curling up towards the sky. We could smell it–a strange and acrid amalgam of burnt plastic, burnt metal, burnt lives.
We wanted to get out of town, drive far away. But the lines at the gasoline stations were long, and many stations had no gasoline. The city was silent, an eerie silence, not the usual hum.
For months afterwards, I couldn’t fall asleep at night. I imagined the terror of those trapped on the high floors. I felt their terror and panic.
I remembered the wonderful events I had attended at Windows on the World, the spectacular restaurant on top of one of the buildings. No one on those floors–the 106th and 107th–survived.
I will never forget those days, weeks, months. It didn’t happen to me. I was spared. It happened to all of us. Violence begets violence. Hate begets hate.
As W. H. Auden wrote almost a century ago, “We must love one another or die.” He wrote in another version of the same poem, “We must love one another and die.”
Both versions are right. More hate means more violence and death.
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There are 56 days to the midterms.
My apologies for the late delivery. “Life” got in the way.
Monday morning, as if Sunday’s scheduled daylong Adderall overdose posting memes that could only come from a raving lunatic – one of which resulted in Iceland summoning the U.S. ambassador on Monday after Sundowning Gramps shared a doctored map of the American flag covering Iceland as well as Greenland, Canada, Central America, and the Caribbean in which Iceland’s foreign minister, Thorgerdur Gunnarsdottir, said she demanded answers from Ambassador Billy Long over Trump’s “completely inappropriate” post – wasn’t enough, Doddering Dilbert had his sweet little Natalie post a Lie Anti-Social in which he claimed: “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran. Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA!” Interestingly, the shitpost revealed he knows he hasn’t won any part of his war with Iran.
As part of his celebration of Labor Day, Delusional Doddering Dilbert went on Lies Anti-Social to attack a months-old report by the Center for American Progress that found his costly National Guard deployments did not curb crime, going so far as to threaten a lawsuit. He wrote, “The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics.” He went on to name George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, NBCUniversal, the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, and even the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates as fellow perpetraors of the CAP’s “lie,” continuing, “The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything ‘TRUMP.’ These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’ This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now. I am also strongly considering adding some of the contributors to this Fake Organization.”
After posting 24 other equally-demented posts between 0950-1045 Monday, he concluded with his official Labor Day message: “Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA!”
Yes – He. Is. Delusional.
Among the delusional droppings on Lies Anti-Social yesterday was one in which Doddering Cilbert unveiled a mockup of proposed Space Force uniforms, which he acknowledged are based on ones worn by fictional fascists, saying that the gray and black look was “inspired by the discipline of the Starship Trooper uniform,” while being “modernized for the guardians of the space domain.” Starship Troopers, the 1997 science fiction film, was intended to undermine what Dutch director Paul Verhoeven interpreted as fascist themes in the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert A. Heinlein. Verhoeven told the Guardian in 2018, “I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism.” Nazi-inspired iconography is prevalent throughout the film. Even Jonah Goldberg had a reaction: “I liked the movie, which was very different from the book. My concern is whether these guys understand the point Verhoeven intended in Starship Troopers. The thing is I don’t know what would be worse: whether they got it or didn’t.” Menswear writer Derek Guy added: “this is the kind of design costume designers make to tell you who are the bad guys in a space movie.” Another user responded: “If the costume designer on Star Wars had suggested this for the Empire uniforms George Lucas would have told them to dial back the Nazi.”
Canada’s retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. went into effect at midnight last night, affecting hundreds of goods, including steel and aluminum, appliances and electronics and wood, pulp and paper products. There are no reports of any negotiations. Maladministration II levied 50 percent tariffs on $27.6 billion worth of Canadian goods two weeks ago, raising tensions between the neighboring countries.On Monday, Trump threatened Canadian aircraft maker Bombardier, posting on Lies Anti-Social that it must start building in the U.S. to access the American market, otherwise he demanded that Bombardier be barred from doing business in the United States altogether, claiming the company’s products “aren’t good enough.” He seemed to have forgotten (assuming he ever knew) that the company has a U.S. headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, where it employs more than 1,000 people. In the meantime, the Canadian Energy Minister said he’s ready to cut off all Canadian electical suply to the U.S. if Doddering Dilbert keeps pushing his crazy trade war.
Bastet
Republican Senator Jerry Moran has represented Kansas since 2011. Trump’s threat to eliminate over 1,000 jobs in the “Air Capital of the World” sent Moran and his team scrambling. He posted to his official social media account that he’d already reached out to the White House to make sure the president understands how significant Bombardier is to Kansas’ economy. In his X post, Moran noted the company’s local workforce includes more than a thousand of his constituents whose skills help the country’s aerospace and defense capabilities. He also promised he’d not only keep working to make sure Bombardier stays in Kansas, but that its presence continues to expand. In its own statement, Bombardier praised its American workers not only in Kansas, but in more than 20 states including Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Delusional Dilbert’s dumbassed trade war is threatening American jobs, to the point a loyal Republican senator is begging him to call off his attack.
Back in 1911, Canada and the United States had a free trade deal on the table until House Speaker Champ Clark boasted that he hoped to see the American flag flying over every square foot of British North America. Canadian voters heard that, threw out the government that negotiated the deal, and killed reciprocity for decades, which is the lesson Dilbert apparently never learned about telling your neighbor you plan to swallow them whole.
Sunday, the Alternative fur Deutschland Party (AfD) won 43.8% of the vote, falling three seats short of the majority necessary to form a government by itself. AfD, a party whose regional branch in Saxony-Anhalt is considered a right-wing extremist group by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, finished well ahead of the other parties in the regional election. It would need partners from other parties to form a governing coalition. That would normally be difficult, as Germany’s mainstream parties have refused to work with AfD as part of a so-called “firewall” to prevent the party from gaining power. But AfD may reach out to the far-left BSW party. The two parties are on opposing sides of the political spectrum, but AfD and BSW both share anti-immigration and Russia-friendly sentiments. Ulrich Siegmund, AfD’s candidate in the race for governor, responded to Elon Musk’s X post in which the Afrikaner Nazi wrote “Gut gemacht,” which translates to “good job” in English, posting: “Thank you, @elonmusk, for your support and for your clear and highly important perspective on the political developments of our time – including here in Germany.”
Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who is the son of a Mafia “button man,” and later worked as Trump’s personal lawyer, publicly criticized current Mayor Zohran Mamdani for planning to attend a 9/11 commemoration ceremony at Ground Zero on Friday. In an interview with Newsmax on Sunday, Giuliani – whose decision to locate the city’s emergency responce HQ in the World Trade Center so he could use the bedroom in the facility for his “nooners” – said: “Frankly, whatever he’d like to say, he doesn’t agree that Sept. 11 was an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States of America. Having lost friends there, and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that he’s coming.” Mamdani has said nothing like that. Most New Yorkers would appreciate it if Giuliani dropped off the face of the earth.
Back in 2023, Ron DeSantis’ short-lived presidential campaign employed Nate Hochman, who was fired that year after posting a video that included the Sonnenrad, a symbol used by neo- Nazis and white supremacists. Before joining the DeSantis campaign, Hochmann worked at the National Review and the Claremont Institute. He eventually lost a journalism fellowship after publicly praising white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Now, the New York Times is reporting Hochman has been hired as deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning office. According to Hochman’s email signature, he’s also serving as Rubio’s chief speechwriter. The policy planning office is a big deal, as it directly advises the Secretary of State on broad strategic priorities. The State Department both confirmed and defended hiring Hochmann, calling him a trusted staffer who has helped advocate for Maladministration II’s foreign policy agenda. It’s amazing how people with a documented history of racist and extreme rhetoric keep getting hired and/or promoted into influential roles in Maladministration II.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz is reporting In the days leading up to Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 – in which, let us remember, 1,200 people were killed – United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan warned Netanyahu that Hamas’ leader in Gaza was planning the deadly attack. According to Haaretz, Netanyahu failed to inform Israeli security agencies of the impending attack. Netanyahu’s office called the report an “absolute lie” and denied speaking to the UAE. Of course he would – what’s 1,200 of his own dead? It was the perfect excuse to start his long-planned genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli opposition leaders demanded Netanyahu’s removal from office. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a candidate in the upcoming vote, said Netanyahu “bears personal and direct responsibility” for the deaths on Oct. 7 and “cannot continue to serve in his position for even one more minute.”
Maladministration II administration must hand over the names of the people who devised the structure of the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund that was of the bogus settlement of President Trump lawsuit against the IRS, a federal magistrate judge in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in a case challenging the slush fund.
Brian Jose Morales Garcia was born in Denver, Colorado. Thispast spring he was installing air conditioners in Texas. On April 3, his boss got pulled over near Fredericksburg over the car’s window tint. Brian was in the passenger seat. Troopers called in local police to translate, because he speaks Spanish. Then they called ICE. Brian’s birth certificate was sitting at his house. His family drove it over, but agents wouldn’t even look at it. Agents told him he’d go to prison if he kept insisting he was American. He signed their papers rather than disappear for months. On April 7 – four days after the traffic stop – they deported him to Mexico. Then Brian hired lawyers who got him a hearing on Judge Robert Pitman’s calendar. Days before that, the government agreed he could walk back in if he presented his birth certificate and a photo ID at the border. The same birth certificate the government refused to look at in April. On August 30, he walked back across the border into Texas. Nobody had to look at his citizenship until a federal judge was about to make them explain. His damages case is ongoing.
Republicans suffered yet another blow in their legal war against mail-in voting, this time in Delaware. A Delaware court has once again upheld the state’s 16-year-old permanent absentee voting law, dealing a fresh defeat to Republican state Sen. Gerald Hocker in his years-long crusade against the program. Hocker, who is running for re-election, as well as fellow Senate candidate Steven Washington, argued Delaware’s Permanent-Absentee Statute unconstitutionally lets voters receive absentee ballots indefinitely, without reaffirming their eligibility each election, violating the state constitution’s specific list of qualifying reasons for absentee voting. Vice Chancellor David disagreed, ruling the law does no such thing. The court found the law only allows a narrower slice of voters, those with qualifying illnesses, disabilities, military service, or caregiving duties, to skip reapplying every cycle, while still requiring them to notify the state the moment their situation changes. If a voter’s reason for needing absentee status stops applying, the state must cancel it immediately. “’Permanent’ is therefore a misnomer,” the court wrote, explaining the label doesn’t mean what plaintiffs claimed.
Missouri’s redistricting war has spiraled into chaos, and observers say the state’s own emergency filing to the U.S. Supreme Court hints that county officials could defy the courts to keep the Republican map alive. In a reply brief to the justices, Attorney General Catherine Hanaway argued that the Missouri Supreme Court “derailed an imminent federal congressional election” when it threw out the GOP’s “Missouri First” map for November. Buried in that same filing is a line that political reporter Mark Maxwell warned should worry anyone who cares about orderly elections. Now, her brief concedes, “local election officials in counties are now left to make individual decisions” on whether to follow the order or stick with the map used in the primary while they wait on a federal court. Maxwell warned that the filing signals officials could defy the state Supreme Court and keep the Republican map anyway, “which would be absolute chaos. The state court explicitly forbade this.” People Not Politicians attorney Chuck Hatfield has called the state’s position “open defiance of the court.” Meanwhile, candidates don’t know which district they are running in, and lawsuits are piling up.
The Talarico campaign in Texas just rolled out one of its most eye-catching endorsements yet .
The huge development, which comes as Talarico’s Democratic campaign seeks to be the first to win Texas in over 30 years, was revealed in a brief political ad on Tuesday. The ad said: “This is Ken Paxton, and this is Ken Paxton firing an honest Texas Ranger. David Maxwell spent five decades in law enforcement and was inducted into the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame. The best of the best. Let’s just say he knows a bad guy when he sees one. So when he saw his boss, Ken Paxton, trading favors with a convicted felon, he had to speak up. He reported Ken Paxton to the FBI and Ken Paxton fired him for it. Ranger Maxwell testified in Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial. Ken Paxton was impeached by his own party. But Ranger Maxwell isn’t done speaking up against bad guys.” Ranger Maxwell concludes the commercial:”My name is David Maxwell. Ken Paxton ended my five-decade career because I blew the whistle on his corruption. I am supporting James Talarico for the U.S. Senate … He’s one of the good guys.”
Don’t worry, there will be far more presidential looney toonies to come this week.
Remember, you are not the crazy ones, and we were made for these times. Regardless of what you may feel right now, act as if you believe that and redouble your efforts.
“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it.” – Abraham Lincoln
Heather Cox Richardson sums up the sickening feeling that many of us have about the Trump-Musk alliance and their efforts to torpedo the November midterm elections. Musk has corrupted our politics with the vast amounts of money he spends to elect far-right politicians. Most of his wealth comes from government contracts, and he wants to maintain his friends in office. You have to wonder how a man who celebrated the killing of US AID, leading to the deaths of at least 700,000 people, can sleep at night. Did he enter the U.S. legally?
She writes:
On Sunday, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in a legislative election in the small state of Saxony-Anhalt, formerly part of Soviet-dominated East Germany. The AfD is anti-immigrant and pro-Russia and has won the support of both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire Elon Musk.
When Musk posted “Well done!” in German to the co-founder of AfD, Alice Weidel, another AfD leader responded with thanks, posting: “If we take on responsibility here, I would very much welcome the opportunity for strong and constructive cooperation. Germany would then once again be a place worth investing in. Best regards from Saxony-Anhalt!”
Jon Henley of the Guardian noted that right-wing leaders across Europe celebrated the outcome, including ousted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who called the election results “a huge night for Germany and Europe,” adding: “Buckle up. This is just the beginning.”
Musk was the largest donor to any political committee in the 2024 U.S. elections, putting around $290 million into the 2024 election to help elect President Donald J. Trump and Republicans. On August 28, Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Musk was planning to meet with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) as he considered investing at least $100 million to elect Republicans in the midterm elections.
Since that meeting, Musk has plowed money into the Texas Senate race to support Texas attorney general Ken Paxton against Democratic nominee James Talarico. According to Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times, Musk’s investments—many through political action committees—target Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio, as well as House races in at least California, Wisconsin, and Washington.
Musk’s open attempt to buy elections for the Republicans should be bigger news, not only because of the political power his money has given to one man, but also because of what his behavior says about the MAGA administration’s ideology and its goals.
After supporting Trump in 2024, Musk appeared to become the head of the Department of Government Efficiency—the administration was coy about who actually held that title—where he worked to slash government spending. On February 3, he posted on his social media: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone [sic] to some great parties. Did that instead.” Musk called USAID—the United States Agency for International Development—“a criminal organization” and “a viper’s nest of radical left-marxists who hate America.”
In July 2026, Ari Daniel, David Augustine, Kazeem Olawale Nasiru, and Lameck Nyagudi of NPR reported on a study by Boston University infectious disease modeler Brooke Nichols that estimated more than 700,000 people had died from the sudden stop in USAID funding, including more than half a million children in developing countries.
And yet, for all his talk about slashing government expenditures, Musk’s DOGE did not appear to save much. Emilio Perez Ibarguen of Politico reported in August, when DOGE officially ended, that a report by the Government Accountability Office found that the savings it claimed were in large part exaggerated or couldn’t be corroborated.
Meanwhile, government contracts continued to flow to Musk’s businesses. As Desmond Butler, Trisha Thadani, Emmanuel Martinez, Aaron Gregg, Luis Melgar, Jonathan O’Connell, and Dan Keating reported in the Washington Post in February 2025, Musk himself has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer dollars in history, taking in at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the course of more than 20 years. Once he was in power in Trump 2.0, government investigations into those businesses ended.
The very public nature of Musk’s antics has helped to wake the public up to the fact that our current system is skewed toward billionaires. In July, economist Paul Krugman noted a growing backlash against those billionaires. A poll by UMass Amherst found that 58% of Americans think billionaires are a threat to democracy, and 45% of them say the U.S. is an oligarchy, “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” As Krugman noted, only 28% of those polled disagreed.
Krugman pointed out that wealth has been concentrating at the top of the U.S. economy for decades, so the growing wave against that concentration of wealth appears to be driven by those like Musk and Trump himself, who has flaunted his use of taxpayer money for his own interests while dismissing the pain of regular Americans.
This flow of taxpayer dollars to favored businesses rather than to programs that serve the needs of the people seems to be a feature rather than a bug in the Trump administration and reflects its rejection of democracy in favor of the right-wing axis of authoritarianism.
Last night, Tarini Parti, Josh Dawsey, Michelle Hackman, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal published a deep investigation into the machinations of Corey Lewandowski when his colleague Kristi Noem was secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. They report that Lewandowski, who was Trump’s campaign manager for part of 2016, appeared to offer aid to foreign countries navigating U.S. bureaucracy in the department for a fee, selling government services for his own gain.
The journalists also report that Lewandowski may have been involved in awarding government contracts improperly, an accusation covered in a November 14, 2025, article by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security an additional $75 billion to spend during Trump’s term on deportations, detention facilities, and technology, providing deep pockets for corruption.
While the administration appears to have sidelined Noem and Lewandowski since Noem resigned under pressure in March, the journalists say Lewandowski “has told people close to him he expects the president would pardon him in the event of a criminal case.”
Lewandowski responded on social media that the story was “just another example of the kind of anonymous-source, politically driven reporting that Americans have seen time and again. We’ve lived through the Russia collusion hoax the fake Birthday card and countless other sensational allegations that ultimately failed to withstand scrutiny. I’m tremendously proud of my work as a volunteer in advancing this administration’s agenda and remain confident that the facts and not anonymous accusations will ultimately speak for themselves.”
But, of course, every official investigation into the 2016 election, including the one conducted by the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee and unanimously adopted, agreed that Russia did work to get Trump elected in 2016. And while Trump claims he did not create the birthday card to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein apparently bearing Trump’s signature on a drawing of a nude girl that was produced by the Epstein estate, the story was convincing enough that it helped to push Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act and the first case he brought against the Wall Street Journal for publishing the story was dismissed. A second case is pending.
There is, in fact, increasing pushback against the world Musk and Trump are trying to put into place instead of liberal democracy. In the U.S., the growing opposition to data centers, which seems to represent anger at the very wealthy tech bros who want to call the shots, is perhaps a sign of the direction the wind in the U.S. is blowing.
Whether that popular pressure can withstand the extraordinary amounts of money Musk and other right-wing billionaires are pouring into the midterms is unclear. Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that Musk is funding an advertising campaign encouraging people in swing states to check their voting registration status at a different website than the one run by the Election Assistance Commission, which is an independent agency of the U.S. government.
Instead, Musk’s campaign urges people to go to “votesafe . org,” which collects their full name, home address, date of birth, email address, cell phone number, IP address and location (which identifies city and zip code), every link clicked, every page looked at, and voter registration status, among other information.
Legum reports that the privacy policy of the website “allows [Musk’s super PAC] America PAC to ‘share’ or ‘sell’ personal information ‘with our business partners,’” including “whether you are registered to vote” and “how you submit your vote… where permitted by law.” America PAC can also sell “inferences” it makes about a user, including “psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and aptitude.”
A new documentary about Musk by filmmaker Alex Gibney argues, as Steven Zeitchik of the Hollywood Reporter put it, that Musk is “a dangerous huckster [who] is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data.” The documentary, called Musk, notes that, under Musk, DOGE had access to federal IT systems and, as Zeitchik recalls, a whistleblower warned that members of DOGE accessed and shared sensitive data from the Social Security Administration.
Zeitchik reports on the onscreen comments of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the godfather of AI,” who said: “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says onscreen. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”
In Europe, in the wake of the rise of the AfD, German defense minister Boris Pistorius said today that Germany will send missiles to Ukraine to help it fight off a winter incursion from Russia.
He came to the United States in 2024 to reunite with his parents, who had fled Haiti three years earlier fearing for their lives. Living in Springfield, Ohio, he had temporary protected status and a pending asylum case. Bel took quickly to life in the United States. He was a member of the Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. He played soccer. He graduated from high school with honors and recently started as a freshman at Wright State University, just a half-hour drive from his home.
Not too long after Pierre Damas Bel arrived in the United States, Ohio’s junior senator, JD Vance — then running to be vice president of the United States — accused the Haitian community in Springfield of stealing and eating the pets of their neighbors. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” he said on X. These “reports” were false but, as Vance would explain later, they were useful: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
After Vance created his story, Donald Trump amplified the charge to a prime-time audience of 67 million people during his debate with Kamala Harris. “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats.”
The conservative media apparatus then went to work. Fox News broadcast the smear far and wide. Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, a professional provocateur and propagandist known for his gleeful race baiting, offered a “$5,000 cash bounty” to anyone who had evidence that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield. He later posted a video purporting to show just that. It was a lie; the people in the video were eating chicken.
Building on the frenzy, Trump spun a new tale. “Twenty thousand illegal Haitian immigrants have descended on a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life,” he said at a rally in Tucson, Ariz. “Residents are reporting that the migrants are walking off with the town’s geese. They’re taking the geese. You know where the geese are, in the park. And even walking off with their pets.”
Trump had long disparaged Haiti as a country that is “filthy, dirty” and “disgusting.” He has said that Haitians “probably have AIDS” and that Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” If elected president again, he promised, he would start his mass deportations in Springfield.
In July, the Trump administration revoked the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of Haitians, including Pierre Damas Bel. Bel was ordered, like many others, to a local ICE office to receive an ankle monitor, which is one way the agency tracks immigrants it seeks to remove from the country.
Ankle monitors are heavy and uncomfortable. They constrict movement and wearing one can be painful. They’re also easy to see — a visible stigma and a mark that, in the eyes of the government, you are a suspect person.
Bel felt that stigma. Hobbled by the monitor, he could not play soccer as he used to. His peers mocked him. When his R.O.T.C. instructor handed students their uniforms, he did not receive one. His father, Pierre Ronal Bel, believes it was because of the device. On Instagram, Bel shared a picture of the ankle monitor. “I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” he wrote. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”
On Monday morning, Pierre Damas Bel called his father. “I’m not feeling OK,” he said. His father told him to come home so they could talk.
That afternoon, Vice President Vance was in Michigan to campaign for Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate running for Senate. During his speech, Vance accused Abdul El-Sayed, Rogers’s Democratic opponent, of dividing the country. “If you look at his politics, it is all about saying, ‘This group of people is good, this ethnicity is bad, and I’m going to fight to give from the bad group of people to the good group of people.’ I think that’s a despicable way to think about your fellow Americans.”
Vance is right: This is a despicable way to think about your fellow Americans. But then the vice president has a narrow view of what it means to be an American. For him, it is defined by blood, soil and heritage. It does not apply, for example, to the Haitians of Springfield. They can be smeared and libeled and hounded and hunted. They can be treated as less than human. They can live under a miasma of hate brought on by him, his boss and their enablers.
Sometime before 8:45 a.m., but after the call to his father, Pierre parked his car on the shoulder of the Interstate in Springfield. Hours later, police officers arrived at Pierre Ronal Bel’s home to tell him that his son “threw himself under a truck.” He was pronounced dead at the scene.
In Florida, a couple were arrested and charged for keeping their four grandchildren confined in a truck for six years and allowing them to be sexually abused during their long confinement.
The good news (sarcasm) is that they homeschooled the children by enrolling them in Khan Academy online classes.
Did the couple know they were eligible for $32,000 in voucher payments to pay for all their educational expenses from the state of Florida? Maybe they did and were collecting. Why pay for the Khan Academy classes when the state will pick up the bill?
A grandmother and her fiancé are accused of trapping four children for six years inside a semi truck’s cab, where the children endured sexual abuse, malnutrition and neglect, prosecutors in Florida said on Tuesday.
Starting in 2019, the victims, two girls and two boys who now range in age from 11 to 15, slept on a top bunk without all fitting on the mattress, the authorities said in an arrest warrant. They urinated in a plastic cup and defecated in a grocery bag, the warrant said.
One child scarred her hand permanently when hot noodles burned her, and she was not taken to the hospital, the warrant said. One girl contracted a sexually transmitted infection, the warrant said.
“This is just straight evil, and a scourge on our society,” Mark Glass, the commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said during a news conference held on Tuesday.
The ordeal began when Ms. Epps and her fiancé, Tamra Marshon Stewart, 37, of Jacksonville, Fla., traveled with the children from Atlanta to Miami, James Uthmeier, the state’s attorney general, said during the news conference. Ms. Epps was a licensed semi truck driver, Mr. Williams said.
The couple served as primary caregivers for the children, and they all lived inside the truck’s cab.
The cab included two seats for a driver and a passenger, a bunk bed, a refrigerator, a microwave and a space for storage all packed into tight quarters, the authorities said in the arrest warrant.
“This was a prison, a rolling prison,” Mr. Uthmeier said.
One of the girls, who is now 12, said Mr. Stewart had touched her inappropriately every day for two years, the authorities said. She said her grandmother knew what was happening to her, and in one instance pretended to be asleep, according to the arrest warrant.
Mr. Stewart furnished the other girl, now 11, with candy and money after sexual encounters in an effort to keep her quiet, according to the arrest warrant. The victim “said it didn’t work,” the warrant said.
A 15-year-old boy confronted Mr. Stewart, calling him a pedophile and a child molester, according to the arrest warrant from the state’s attorney general office. Mr. Stewart punched the victims after the dispute, according to an arrest warrant filed by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
The children did not attend school while with Ms. Epps and Mr. Stewart and instead used Khan Academy, a website with educational videos that is not accredited, the authorities said.
