No matter how many times he is caught lying, no matter how many top-secret documents he squirreled away, no matter how lavishly he praises dictators, no matter how many porn stars he has partied with, no matter how many millions he took from foreign governments during his term, no matter how many criminal counts he faces, no matter how many times he was indicted, the base of the GOP loves him.
Trump owns the Republican Party. It used to be the party of “family values,” but that pretense has been tossed aside. Trump, a thrive-married philanderer, has never talked about family values.
INDIANOLA, Iowa — They lined up for hours, some of them, in the minus-38-degree wind chill to see their candidate. It was the only rally Donald Trump was giving in the state in the TV days before Monday’s caucuses, so for the MAGA faithful, this was the golden ticket.
For the lucky 500 Trump followers admitted to the event space, the Trump campaign played a video reminding voters that Trump had already come in first place in the God primary.
“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump,” the narrator proclaimed.
“God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight. … So God made Trump.” “‘I need somebody with arms strong enough to rassle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.’ … So God gave us Trump.”
And then it came to pass, a few minutes later, that this midwife-turned-prophet took the stage in the ballroom, and he spake thus to his flock:
“We’ve got a crooked country,” run by “stupid people,” “corrupt,” “incompetent,” “the worst.” Trump, in the gospel according to Trump, was the victim of “hoaxes,” “witch hunts,” “lies,” “fake indictments,” “fake trials,” judges who “are animals,” a “rigged election,” “rigged indictments,” and a “rigged Department of Justice where we have radical left, bad people, lunatics.”
The nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., “is a rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole,” he said, with swastikas all over the national monuments.
His opponents, the prophet Trump continued, are “Marxists,” “communists,” “fascists,” “liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps,” “warmongers” and “globalists.” Immigrants are like a “vicious snake,” whose “bite is poisonous,” he told them, and there is an “invasion” at the border by “terrorists,” “jailbirds” and “drug lords.”
“Our country is dying,” he informed them. And, by the way, “You’re very close to World War III.” Have a nice day!
It was, in short, a slightly updated version of the rage, paranoia, victimhood, lies and demonization that propelled Trump’s popularity over the past eight years. Yet there was something else Trump said in his appearance here at Simpson College, south of Des Moines, that, I’m sorry to say, seems reasonably accurate.
“MAGA is taking over,” he told his chilled but enraptured supporters. “On the fake news, they say MAGA represents 44 percent of the Republicans. No, no. MAGA represents 95 percent of the Republican Party.”
His numbers might be off, but the observation is true. Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses Monday night were an overwhelming triumph for Trump, who in early results was more than 30 points ahead of his nearest competitor and getting more votes than the rest of the field combined. The voters had shown that there essentially is no Republican other than a MAGA Republican…
Nikki Haley points out that she polls better against Biden than the others, and it’s true. Were she the nominee, Republicans would likely win the presidency in a landslide. But this Republican electorate wants something different.
They want a guy who talks about being a “dictator” on day one, echoes Hitler in his rhetoric about ethnic minorities, demands absolute immunity from legal liability and threatens “bedlam” if he’s prosecuted.
They want a guy who, after all these years, still derides “Barack Hussein Obama” and “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren, as he did in Indianola on Sunday. They want a guy who threatens, as president, to “direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor because of their illegal, racist … enforcement of the law.”
And they want a man who promises: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmonger … We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that truly hates our country. We will rout the fake news media. And we will evict Crooked Joe Biden from the White House.” The crowd, in their MAGA caps and Trump 47 jerseys, cheered their candidate and broke into spontaneous chants of “Trump!” and “USA!”
Let there be no more excuses made that Republican voters haven’t been given an alternative. They had a choice — and they chose Trump.
Iowa is an atypical state. It is overwhelmingly white and has a large number of evangelicals. Let’s see how other states vote.
Despite his paranoia, despite his character—or because of them— Trump swept 51% of the vote in Iowa.
However. CBS News reported that less than 15% of registered Republicans turned out in the bitter cold to cast a vote.
Thanks to blogger Billy Townsend, I learned about the Florida Center for Government Accountability and its publication, The Florida Trident. This organization shines a bright light on government corruption. I am sending a donation to encourage their great work.
Just when Florida’s forces of gross grift seem to enjoy total impunity, the Florida Center for Government Accountability takes down the Zieglers, beats DeSantis in court, and becomes a new sheriff.
FCGA uncovered the scandalous Ziegler family threesome, which led to Christian Ziegler being forced out as state chair of the GOP and caused some embarrassing moments for his wife Bridget, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and an outspoken critic of gays.
FCGA recently posted about the state’s deceptive marketing to women who search for abortion providers on the Internet. If they choose an “abortion center” funded by the state, they will fall into the clutches of anti-abortion zealots, likely evangelicals, who will try to persuade them not to have an abortion.
An image from a state-funded anti-abortion center website.
When Abby learned she was pregnant, the first thing she did was look online for support. As a college student in a small town in northwest Florida, she thought the Internet was her best hope to find help for her unplanned pregnancy with a boyfriend who had become abusive.
Sifting through Google’s search results, she stumbled on an online-chat providing support for people in need of abortion care. The chat operator stressed the importance of a pregnancy test and referred her to a nearby pregnancy center in Deland called the Grace House.
The center’s website welcomed people like Abby who didn’t have insurance and asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns. She scheduled a visit for the following day – a day she said she’ll never forget.
The horrific visit ended with Abby sobbing as center employees systematically pressured her to continue her pregnancy, prayed over her belly, and promised her free baby care products if she would come back for more “counseling.”
“I deserved legitimate medical care and compassion,” said Abby. “But I know in that room, they didn’t see me or my future. They just saw a positive pregnancy test.”
The staffers at Grace House were not there to help her receive abortion care, but instead to convince her and all others who enter the center for care to complete their pregnancy and be saved by Christianity in the process.
“I was fooled by this facility in a moment of vulnerability and desperation and trusting the wrong people,” Abby said.
The same “wrong people” are funded by the state’s Florida Pregnancy Support Services Program, which provides taxpayers’ money to more than 100 anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs)” around the state. The stated goal of the program is to convince clients to carry their pregnancies to term rather than having abortions.
As previously reported in an ongoing Florida Trident investigative series, the centers, including Grace House, are Christian-based organizations and often identify themselves as “ministries” and “missions.” Several legal experts have said the program runs afoul of the U.S. and Florida constitutions, the latter of which expressly forbids the state from aiding religious organizations.
Despite its inherent problems, the program is now bursting at the seams in Florida. Its annual budget has ballooned from $4 million to $25 million a year, an increase written into the controversial six-week abortion ban legislation signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in April.
Kurt Filla is leading the state’s anti-abortion ad campaign.
Included in that funding explosion is a quadrupling of the program’s advertising budget to nearly $1 million a year, according to state records, paid out via the Florida Pregnancy Care Network, the non-profit tasked with administering the program for the state.
Kurt Filla, owner of the Michigan-based company, Filla Life Media, snared the state-funded advertising contract. Filla, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, is an outspoken conspiracy theorist who has backed false QAnon and vaccine tropes on the Internet and has written that the 2020 election was stolen, that God sends him angels and he’s heard the devil talk in his head, and that “global elites” are secretly trying to make people “impotent and immobile.”
Jenifer McKenna, an activist with the Reproductive Health Accountability Fund at Hopewell, said the steep funding hike and hiring of ideologically radical companies like Filla Life are part of a trend in “abortion-hostile” states like Florida to divert tax dollars to CPCs and “ramp up targeted digital marketing to track down pregnant people, talk them out of abortion, and collect their sensitive data.”
“Researchers are calling the post-Roe landscape an ‘abortion infodemic’ with CPCs playing a leading role,” said McKenna, adding that the centers use “extensive digital strategies to intercept pregnant people seeking care, sow confusion, spread disinformation and obstruct access.”
After an initial visit, which at some clinics includes an ultrasound where individual center staffers pray for the fetus, clients are urged to return for “counseling” and parenting classes. In fact, while the state bills the centers as health care providers, a whopping 87.5% of program reimbursements go for counseling and classes, a Trident analysis of state records found. A significant portion of the new $20 million in annual spending will fund a doubling of the amount the state reimburses the centers for counseling from $75 an hour to $150 an hour, state records show.
To put the $150 hourly rate in perspective, the state reimburses registered nurses – who actually have formalized education and training for the critical work they do – only $32.07 per home health care visit, according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. Home health aides, who lack the RN’s credentials, are reimbursed a scant $18.04 per visit by the state.
When told of that increase, Amy Weintraub, who serves as reproductive rights director for the non-profit Progress Florida, called it “atrocious.” She noted that the “counselors” at the centers have no training or education requirements and are often hired based largely on their Christian faith.
“The fact that [state-funded pregnancy centers] are even allowed to use the word ‘counselor’ is such an affront because … they are not trained counselors,” said Weintraub.
That’s something Abby said she found out the hard way.
“Oh, She’s Abortion-Minded”
A random online search for abortion in Fort Lauderdale turns up a website for the Hope Women’s Centers, which received $100,000 in state funding last year. Its website promises “free abortion information” and “consultations on abortion pills, surgical abortion procedures, and emergency contraceptives.”
Yet like all other state-funded pregnancy crisis centers, Hope, which is strongly aligned with the Rio Vista Church, has two goals: to dissuade clients from having an abortion and to try to save their souls. None of that is mentioned in the online material.
It was the same in Abby’s case when she went to Grace House, which recently changed its name to Coastal Choices Women’s Clinic, a moniker that belies the fact that it vehemently opposes choice and isn’t a bona fide health clinic. The Trident left a detailed message for comment with a receptionist at Coastal; a promised return call was not received prior to publication.
“There is no Planned Parenthood in my county, so I thought it was a smaller version of it,” said Abby. “And they said if you were considering abortion to come on in, so I felt that was an invitation.”
Once inside, she was given a form to fill out with questions about her faith, her intimate relationships, even what her college grades looked like. It was the first clue she was inside a Christian ministry instead of a bona fide health clinic.
“That gave me a little bit of a pause,” Abby said. “But it wasn’t until the actual counseling session that I deeply regretted walking in the doors.”
She’d written in the form that she wanted an abortion.
“I watched a group of maybe three staff or volunteers crowd around my paper,” she said. “And I hear them say something to the effect of, ‘Oh, she’s abortion-minded, I’ll take her.’”
In the counseling session that followed, which she attended with her partner, Abby took a pregnancy test that was kept hidden while staff pressed her for 40 minutes about her personal life. She said the staffers told her she was in no position to make the decision about an abortion for herself.
When her partner was out of the room, Abby confided that she was in an abusive relationship. She said the counselor advised her to stay with her partner because the baby would give her purpose and help him step up as a man, and urged him, when Abby was outside the room, to stop her from getting an abortion because the procedure could kill her.
After the test came back positive, Abby was handed her due date and a small replica of a fetus. A staffer asked her what she might name the baby. Distraught, Abby began sobbing.
“There was so much talking over me when I was clearly having a breakdown,” Abby recalled. “[One staffer] starts praying over my stomach, she’s touching my stomach the whole time, and saying that I can start right away taking their parenting classes to earn baby bucks for their boutique to get baby clothes. And all the while I’m just so terrified.”
The experience was a far cry from the online promises, a contrast Weintraub said is common. The most fundamental deception in the advertising is the centers’ posing as health clinics when they don’t actually offer comprehensive reproductive health care services, she said.
“They strip their web sites of anti-abortion lingo so that the intended victims will not realize that the place they are visiting is an anti-abortion center,” said Weintraub. “All kinds of tricky language is used to cloak their true intention.”
Now Filla Life Media, under the leadership of its extremist owner, is set to receive $1 million a year from Florida taxpayers for its marketing prowess.
Tax-Payer Funded Anti-Abortion Marketing Agencies
Filla Life Media is a member of a national network called the Pro-Life Marketing Ethics Council made up of “unified Christ-centered and holistically pro-life” companies dedicated to promoting marketing strategies “grounded in biblical principles and informed by cutting-edge best practices.”
A key strategy of the Florida program is to boost its anti-abortion clinics in Google search results and place ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. State documents show the aim of the campaign is to “generate leads and inquiries” from pregnant people and that it uses “marketing strategies … with the goal of enabling her to carry the pregnancy to term and choose parenting or adoption.”
The new Filla Life marketing campaign is set to be the most aggressive to date, targeting women aged between 18 and 44 years old across Florida. Many of the ads specifically target teens and the uninsured.
The campaign will employ the latest in tracking technology and will leverage behavioral data—like what people are or are not doing in an app, on a website, or how they interact with campaigns—to personalize the message.
FPCN ads that appear at the top of Google searches for “unplanned pregnancy” or “pregnancy test” promise “Compassionate Counseling,” “Judgement-Free Pregnancy Support” and ”Pregnancy Pill Help.” Of 134 Google ads purchased this year by marketing companies on behalf of the state program reviewed by the Trident, only three explicitly warned the centers don’t provide abortions.
While the new ad campaign is super-charged, it’s nothing new. For years, Floridians’ tax dollars have gone to anti-abortion marketing agencies with little to no transparency. Before Filla Life, an Illinois-based company called Caledon, and its subdivision Choose Life Marketing, held the advertising contract.
The digital tactics promoted by Choose Life, alongside other anti-abortion marketing agencies, sparked a congressional investigation in 2022 that cited a number of the company’s tactics, including geofencing strategies, which use sensitive data from abortion seekers to facilitate government surveillance, harassment, intimidation and even violence. The company also featured prominently in a report issued by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which exposed the deceptive tactics of several anti-abortion marketing agencies.
Those marketing strategies also involved so-called “right-brain research” peddled by the Vitae Foundation, an anti-abortion research organization. Vitae uses extensive interviews with previously pregnant people involving repetition and relaxation techniques to “access the emotional mind and uncover deeply seated emotional needs and barriers,” according to its promotional materials.
“By studying the right side of the brain, which controls the emotional, intuitive and creative aspects of the person, Vitae was able to focus on women’s hidden, emotional response to pregnancy, abortion and motherhood,” the foundation explained in a report.
A key finding of the foundation is that “women carry an unwanted pregnancy to term when guilt wins out over shame,” a concept used by pro-life marketing agencies to craft their messaging to “abortion-minded women.”
To continue reading the article, open the link. It’s shameful that the state of Florida spends millions to tell women that they should not get an abortion, no matter how much they want one.
Ron DeSantis likes to boast about “freedom” in Florida, but apparently you are not free unless you agree with him.
Teachers of Black history are not free to teach the truth. Librarians are not free to use their professional judgment about books. Gays and trans kids are not free to live their lives. Drag queens are not free to perform their acts.
Women in Florida are not free to make major decisions about their own lives.
Pro-choice groups in Florida have gathered enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot in November. But the hyper-conservative state Supreme Court must give its approval before the referendum can go forward. There have already been suggestions that the measure may be stricken because it says abortion should be legal until the fetus reaches “viability,” and critics say that the term is vague. Keep watching.
Gregg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, is winning the competition among red-state governors to prove that he is the meanest of all. He wants to secure the border but he won’t work with the Biden administration to do it. Now, as a result of his orders, three migrants drowned. Does he have blood on his hands? I wonder if he laughed when he heard about it.
WASHINGTON — Three migrants — a woman and two children — drowned in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass Friday night after Texas National Guard soldiers blocked Border Patrol agents from reaching them, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar said Saturday.
State officials had seized a 2.5-mile stretch of the border earlier this week, an unprecedented state takeover that the Department of Justice says prevents Border Patrol agents from reaching even migrants in need of emergency assistance.
Cuellar said Border Patrol learned Friday night of a group of six migrants in distress as they were trying to cross the Rio Grande near the area. Border Patrol attempted to contact Texas National Guard and Department of Public Safety officials to alert them by phone, but were unable to reach them. They then alerted soldiers at the entrance of a public park that the state had fenced off and prevented federal authorities from entering.
“The Texas Military Department and the Texas National Guard did not grant access to Border Patrol agents to save the migrants,” Cuellar wrote on social media. “This is a tragedy and the state bears responsibility.”
The Texas Military Division and Department of Public Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday. Neither did Gov. Greg Abbott’s office. The Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection also did not respond to a request for comment.
Cuellar said the Texas National Guard denied Border Patrol entrance, “even in the event of an emergency,” and said they would send state soldiers to investigate. Three bodies were recovered Saturday morning by Mexican authorities, Cuellar said.
Cuellar, who does not represent Eagle Pass, is a Laredo Democrat who has represented a nearby border district for two decades. He is the top Democrat on a House subcommittee overseeing funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Border Patrol.
Open the link to read more.
The Houston Chronicle editorial board thought that Abbott’s behavior was cruel and callous. The editorial board blamed Congress for failing to enact legislation to fix a broken immigration system. No one wants an open border. Abbott was recently interviewed on a rightwing talk show by Dana Loesch, former spokesperson for the NRA, and he boasted that he was doing everything to stop the immigrants except murdering them.
The editorial began:
“The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
– Texas Gov. Greg Abbott
That’s our governor talking, folks. Yessir, he’s one tough son of a gun. Or, at least, he sounds like one. We would suggest, though, that he’s not tough at all. We would suggest that he’s a coward, not to mention an ongoing embarrassment to this state.
Despite his big talk, it is a small man who leaches power and satisfaction from the mistreatment and mockery of the vulnerable. It is a small man who refuses to consider the dangerousness of his tough talk and his callous policies. While clumsily evoking the murder of migrants could incite another El Paso massacre, his rogue, unrelenting policing of the border is endangering lives.
Indeed, on Saturday, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, announcedthat the bodies of three migrants — a woman and two children — were found floating in the Rio Grande near an Eagle Pass park that Texas DPS troopers have seized. Cuellar said Texas authorities wouldn’t grant access to U.S. Border Patrol agents trying to respond to migrants in distress and agreed only to send a soldier to assess the situation.
“This is a tragedy, and the state bears responsibility,” Cuellar said in a statement.
If Abbott fears the criminal penalty for shooting migrants, does he fear any kind of consequences for letting them drown?…
Abbott’s intemperate remarks about guns and shooting people are merely of a piece with his immigration stunts – busing migrants to northern cities, stringing razor wire along the Rio Grande, arresting asylum seekers. The governor is afraid to dig in and look for real solutions to a complex problem — solutions that might mean collaborating with political opponents. When we made a similar criticism of Abbott in a recent editorial, the governor noted on X that we neglected to mention the letter he had hand-delivered to President Biden a year ago in El Paso.
That letter, antagonistic in tone and political in motive, demanded Biden get busy on border wall construction and make pandemic-era immigration policies permanent long after the pandemic ended. It wasn’t about solving anything. It was the same performative politics we’ve come to expect from a self-aggrandizing politician who’s not Texas-tough enough to do what’s right. Or even, at times, what’s human.
Fabiola Santiago is a columnist for the Miami Herald who is expert at skewering Ron DeSantis and his hateful policies. When he tried to take a victory lap during the Republican debates, she called him out. Kids are not better off in Florida, she writes, but racists and homophobes are. It turns out that DeSantis’s war against gays, Black history, and drag queens was not enough to sustain his campaign.
Santiago wrote:
Only in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ version of Fantasyland are kids in Florida “better off” under his watch.
The presidential job-seeker’s assertion, during Wednesday’s Iowa debate with Nikki Haley, that such is the state of childhood in Florida would be laughable — Exhibit No. 1, the man is trying to ruin happy-for-all Disney World — if his anti-science children’s healthcare policiesweren’t dangerous.
Or, his lie might have played out as the self-deprecating joke of a desperate, losing candidate — if DeSantis had kept his homophobia, transphobia, and discomfort with the legacy of racism in American history, where those sordid feelings belong, in the privacy of his home and wooden heart.
But DeSantis made his fears and prejudices against people who aren’t white, straight and ultra Christian-conservative the public’s business in Florida. And what he has unleashed isn’t child-friendly at all.
He used his power to get bills passed through the lily-livered Florida Legislature, signing into law medical practices that go against the advice of respected child healthcare experts like the American Academy of Pediatrics.
This means doctors and psychiatrists in Florida are limited by law on what they can do to address our children’s gender issues, and subject to felony penalties if they deviate from GOP wishes. Doctors also have their hands tied treating mothers facing an unwanted pregnancy discovered after six weeks, which also adversely affects entire families.
And, because the anti-vaxxer governor is a friend of debunked science and quack medical opinions, he has not only campaigned against children (and adults) getting the COVID vaccine, but he’s made it difficult for Florida parents to access boosters.
Under his mandate, schools are no longer safe zones for gay and trans children.
Before DeSantis, the intersection of healthcare, identity and lifestyle was a matter between parents and their doctors. Decisions about approach and care were based on individual cases and made as a family unit.
Now, healthcare and education are in the hands of Republican ideologues — social engineers who constantly feed voters misinformation and outright lies, feeding people’s lowest human instincts to shun the reality and preferences of others.
In schools, children unable to speak to their parents about conflicting identity issues, often were able to confide in a teacher, who in consultation with supervisors, would decide if it warranted parental intervention, or if the disclosure might put the child’s life in danger from family.
No more.
Teachers can be sued, fined, and fired if they allow gender identity discussions, pushing some excellent teachers to leave Florida or the profession, worsening a teacher shortage. This isn’t good for anyone, but least of all for children.
Adults have the power of choice — and many Floridians are exercising it by moving with their trans or gay children out of state, driven by the anti-LGBTQ laws, like former Heat star Dwayne Wade, whose teenage daughter Zaya came out as transgender in 2020.
Parents aren’t going to run the risk of the state taking transgender minors away from their families for receiving gender-affirming care. Nor will they stand for the atmosphere of hate and disrespect DeSantis’ constant harangues and policies have generated.
Unfortunately, not all children have parents with the financial wherewithal to move them to a more sane and accepting state — and remain stuck in DeSantis World suffering his pathology, especially in schools, where they’re no longer free to be themselves.
Nor to read literature that reflects their reality. Nor to play sports in the team where they feel they belong.
No, children are definitely not better off in Florida, where the education system is under-performing, according to national assessments. DeSantis’ solution: Get rid of the tests and dissuade kids from going to college.
With no accountability and ways to measure, he can claim success. With kids skipping higher education, his wealthy donors can access cheaper labor.
The governor’s culture wars and their harmful effect, however, are catching up to him.
In the process of trying to convince Republican voters that he and his “Florida Blueprint” are the alternative to disgraced Donald Trump, DeSantis recast his record — the vengeful attack on Disney World and his ruthless approach to LGBTQ and transgender children — to paint a pretty picture depicting major successes.
Oh, and what a macho man he was to take on Disney!
“We took on Disney and we defeated that and we won that fight and our kids kids are better off now,” DeSantis said.
A big lie that he kept repeating. Disney continues to celebrate Pride Month with “Gay Days,” and in 2023 released its Disney Pride Collection of clothing and accessories….
His neatly-packaged arguments, an attempt to camouflage what’s clearly discrimination, fear of difference and assaults on free speech, are coming undone.
Voters do have the last word — and, apparently, no matter how much the governor travels the nation, or perhaps because they’re getting to know him — polls show voters just don’t pick him.
Even in Florida, where DeSantis thinks he’s king, voters prefer 91-count, criminally-charged Donald Trump.
Turns out the people better off in Florida are possibly a minority: homophobic, racist adults.
You might well wonder, as I did, why Republicans in Congress were conducting hearings about anti-Semitism in our nation’s elite private universities. That is normally the job of the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. Historically and recently, Republicans have not been known as a party that worries overmuch about anti-Semitism or other forms of bigotry.
As a matter of fact, as this article in The Hill shows, the Republicans’ real concern is to stamp out DEI programs (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in higher education. Two of the three elite university presidents who were grilled by Rep. Elise Stefanik resigned, and she crowed about her victory. The conservative media treated Harvard University President Claudine Gay as an unqualified diversity hire. Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania also resigned after the hearing.
From the article:
Republicans say their departures are just the beginning of needed reforms at the schools.
“This is only among the very first steps on a very long road to recovering or returning to higher education its true and original purposes, which is truth-seeking,” said Jay Greene, senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
Conservatives cheered the departures, which came after the two, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sally Kornbluth, faced questions on campus antisemitism before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Neither Elise Stefanik nor Jay Greene has shown interest in anti-Semitism in the past, to my knowledge. Neither issued statements to denounce the young fascists who marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville and chanted “The Jews will not replace us.” If they reacted to the slaughter of Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, I am not aware of it.
An even bigger joke is for anyone at the Heritage Foundation to celebrate “truth-seeking,” when Heritage oversaw planning for the next term of Donald Trump, who has a well-documented record of telling thousands of lies. Heritage Foundation, clean your own house. Before you lecture others about “truth-seeking,” look in the mirror.
“Two down. One to go,” tweeted committee member Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). “Accountability is coming.”
“The long overdue forced resignations of former Presidents Claudine Gay and Liz Magill are just the beginning of the tectonic consequences from their historic morally bankrupt testimony to my questions,” Stefanik added in a statement to The Hill, mentioning an official probe into the schools that the panel has announced.
“The investigation will address all aspects of a fundamentally broken and corrupt higher education system — antisemitism on campus, taxpayer funded aid, foreign aid, DEI, accreditation, academic integrity, and governance,” she said, using an acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion programs…
But their biggest target recently has been DEI programs, making the case that they have been more harmful than helpful to students…
Greene said he is hopeful “additional people are going to have to be removed, both leaders of universities and their underlings, because they’re also significant actors in this. It’s not just at the top, but it’s kind of throughout these institutions.”
He also specifically called for the dismantling of DEI efforts on campus and disciplines such as gender studies, another popular GOP target.
Such efforts have been in motion long before the shake-ups at UPenn and Harvard.
In Texas, a law banning diversity programs at public universities took effect in the new year. And last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) also signed a bill to defund DEI programs at public universities. …
A tracker by the Chronicle of Higher Education last year found 40 bills had been introduced in states across the country to try to restrict DEI programs, diversity statements and mandatory diversity training at schools.
It’s disgusting to see a feigned concern about anti-Semitism used as a stalking horse to dismantle DEI programs and as a pretext for inserting Big government into the policy making process in private higher education.
As long as Republicans control either House of Congress, we can anticipate the rise of a new McCarthyism, purging the curriculum and professors.
Liar, Liar. Pants on Fire. The lies from the powerful, especially Republicans, have risen to stunningly Orwellian 2 + 2 = 5 levels. The lies that protect their wealth and power have been quite successful at gaining wide acceptance. They keep at it because they know most of us reject a grossly inequitable society in which only some people enjoy a stable secure life. Inevitably, the truth seeps through the cracks in their wall of deceptions. Most Americans want fairness and access to decisions that affect our lives. The purveyors of self-protecting fabrications are afraid of the truth. Increasingly, they resort to authoritarianism, outlawing truth-telling, spreading misinformation, and blocking democratic processes.
The well-trod lies are designed to sound like common sense but are demonstrably false. They include:
Providing parents with choices through school vouchers and charter schools improves achievement and equity.
No, they support the privileged, starve and undermine public education, and get the rest of us to fight amongst ourselves for scraps.
The competitive free market will reduce costs and provide choices to consumers to improve education, healthcare, and housing.
No, the free market never reduced the cost of any of these or made these necessities affordable to everyone. Instead, the free market continues to make profits for a few, provides higher quality for those with money to spare, and leaves the rest of us with lower quality or nothing at all.
People are poor because they are lazy or stupid, so social support is a waste of money.
No, our economic and social systems ensure that there are haves and have-nots, haves pass on unearned wealth to their children, that taxes on the rich remain unfair, while trying to convince the rest of us that our struggles are our fault.
Taxing wealth reduces the incentive to innovate and slows economic growth.
No, the United States taxed wealth at far higher rates in the past without stopping us from becoming the world’s largest and most innovative economy. Increasing inequity disincentivizes and slows innovation by keeping too many of us struggling to make ends meet.
These are the lies that the powerful repeat again-and-again, wherever and whenever they can. They assume we are gullible, will fall back, and accept our fate. Our lives do not need to be this way if we organize and if we vote.
The 2024 election is a critical test for voters. Will we accept our inequitable, powerless fate or fight back? Report after report tells us that so many people will, in disgust, stay home that the authoritarian, wealth-protecting, anti-democratic liars will win control of Congress and the presidency. Life’s necessities still cost too damn much, so hearing from Democrats that the inflation, employment, and average wages are getting better falls on deaf ears. Voters–especially the young adults and people of color who Democrats need to win– see that in 2023, our country once again finds money for war but too little to help people. The enduring perception is that no one is on their side.
If Democrats want to win elections, they need to tell the unvarnished truth: The biggest, most enduring lie is that inequity is inevitable. Democrats: Don’t tell people to trust you. Tell them to organize! Tell them:
Do you want to know what Democrats should say? Open the link.
I am a fan girl of Thom Hartmann. I don’t know how he manages to produce deeply thoughtful, deeply researched articles at a fast clip. This is another great one, about the use of threats, intimidation and violence to achieve rightwing goals.
He writes:
How would you react if one day you were sitting at home and the phone rang and when you picked it up you heard a man shout:
“Kill yourself now so we can save ammo!”
Moments later, an email arrives that says:
“I hope the Federal government hangs you and your daughter from the Capitol dome, you treasonous piece of shit! I pray that I will be sitting close enough to hear your necks snap.”
This is what happened to “Shaye” Moss and Ruby Freeman when Trump and Giuliani decided to blame Trump’s loss in Georgia on them, incorrectly claiming they were stuffing ballots for Biden. Just a few hours later, a mob with torches and a bullhorn showed up at Freeman’s house, although she’d already left after being warned by the FBI that she was on the “kill list” of a January 6th defendant they’d just arrested.
Mitt Romney, speaking with writer McKay Coppins for his book “Romney: A Reckoning,” told him the story of multiple Republican senators who were so terrified of violence at the hands of Trump’s fascist followers that they set aside their consciences and voted against convicting him of trying to blackmail Zelenskyy and, later, trying to overthrow the government of the United States.
“One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?
“Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.”
I know liberals and regular reporters in the media who are quite happy trash-talking Biden but are frankly terrified of the possibility that Trump or one of his high-profile followers might sic Trump’s fascist fan boys on them. As a result, they self-censor.
Similarly, multiple judges in the past few months have been given the chance to take Trump off the ticket because of his clear violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment by inciting and supporting an insurrection. Each one whiffed, and their legal logic was so thin it’s reasonable to conclude they’re also unwilling to have their families suffer the death threats and harassment that comes with being an “enemy of Trump.”
When the justices on the Colorado Supreme Court finally found the spine to vote him off the ballot, within hours the threats began. Now they’re having to pay for security for themselves and their family members, and go to sleep every night dreading the possibility that a lone wolf Trump supporter — like the one who broke into Paul Pelosi’s home and attacked him with a hammer — may be looking for them, too.
As NBC News reported, Trump’s followers reacted to the Colorado justices with predictable ferocity:
“’This ends when we kill these f–kers,’ a user wrote on a pro-Trump forum that was used by several Jan. 6 rioters.
“’Kill judges. Behead judges. Roundhouse kick a judge into the concrete,’ read a post on a fringe website. ‘Slam dunk a judge’s baby into the trashcan.’”
NBC’s Ryan Reilly added:
“The threats fit into a predictable and familiar pattern, seen time and time again after legal developments against Trump.”
Thus, Jack Smith was unable to find even four Supreme Court justices who were willing to grant cert to hear his challenge to Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from prosecution; terrified, they left the case with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in the hope those judges will draw Trump’s ire — and his followers’ fire — thus diluting their own risk.
This is how fascism takes over a nation from within: with violence and the fear of violence.
I’ve been doing what is now the nation’s largest progressive radio/TV show for 20 years, reaching an estimated audience of 6 million a week. My writings here on HartmannReport.com are frequently reprinted by other progressive media.
The result is that I regularly get threats, although this is not a phenomenon shared by my rightwing colleagues. When I asked a couple of rightwing radio hosts I’ve known for years if they get threats of violence or death, each said, “No.”
There is no movement advocating political violence on either the American left or in the center. It is entirely confined to the American right, and the media needs to admit that and the FBI needs to recalibrate their efforts.
As fascism expert and historian Emilio Gentile noted about how fascist movements start and gain power:
“In the beginning there was violence.”
Violence and the threats of violence are the key to understanding fascists like Trump and the movements they inspire.
As any professional interrogator can tell you, deep down inside, all of us humans are really just scared little kids. The more we’re broken down by the circumstances of life or government policy, the less secure we feel, the harder it is to get by in life, and the more scared we become.
And, for many people, out of that fear comes the willingness — hell, the enthusiasm — to embrace “big daddy” in the form of a tough guy leader who promises to “restore” those who feel the fear back to their previous (or imagined future) positions of power, wealth, and authority.
This becomes particularly easy for fascist leaders when their followers are convinced that the nation’s government has become hopelessly corrupt, a project rightwing fossil fuel billionaires, rightwing media, and Republican politicians have been promoting here in the US for decades.
Ever since the Reagan Revolution, in their zeal to cut their own taxes and stop regulation of the fossil fuel and other polluting industries, they’ve been hammering the message that our government has been seized by “deep state socialists” bent on destroying our country.
Republicans and the billionaires who own them have repeated this conspiracy theory so often for the last few decades that an entire religion, Qanon, as arisen around it.
This belief, that much of what our government does is illegitimate or even malicious, makes it easy for low-information voters to bind themselves to a fascist “reform movement” that promises better times ahead.
As fascist followers act out their violent threats against their leaders’ perceived enemies, they get an inner sense of strength and the feeling that they’ve joined a community: that diminishes their own fear for a short while.
The more an “other” — political enemies; racial, religious, and gender minorities; women — are blamed for the ills of the nation, the more vigilante-style violence against them is justified and the more violent the future becomes.
When the state pushes back against that violence, as America did after January 6th, the calls for increased violence become even louder. Trump is practically shouting “kill them!” with a bullhorn and even our court system is afraid to stop him by throwing him into jail as they would have any other common criminal who encouraged such violence against judges, juries, witnesses, court officials, and their families.
Calling people to violence by denouncing those being scapegoated is central to fascist politics.
Mussolini used to feature Italian “whistleblowers” who, like Joe McCarthy here back in the day, would call out “corrupt” government officials whose only real crime was not supporting him. Hitler had every radio station in Germany play phone calls from local citizens who denounced their neighbors for sympathizing with Jews, socialists, or trade union organizers.
Once publicly targeted in these ways, mobs or lone-wolf assassins would descend on these people’s homes. After a few well-publicized beatings and killings, everybody from media figures to politicians to judges backed away from trying to stop fascists or even hold them accountable.
When he was rising to power in Hungary, for example, Victor Orbàn’s right-hand-man led a torchlight march into a Budapest Roma neighborhood threatening to burn the “gypsies” — who fled in terror — out of their homes. More recently, Orbán started arresting people who “defamed” him on social media.
Soon, nobody in or out of the government is willing to stand up to the fascists; it’s too dangerous and too exhausting. Being the object of regular threats of violence or death is not something anybody would volunteer for unless they saw the stakes as being very, very important.
This is what Trump and the GOP he’s captured are working toward: the silencing of dissent and accountability, replacing them with fear and a guilty complicity. Just take a look at the state of social media today, particularly Xitter and Facebook, which have dialed back on their content moderation and thus loosed the fascists on anybody who dares criticize Trump or the GOP.
“The Fascist state ruled Italy violently, projecting its coercive power deeply and diffusely into society through confinement, imprisonment, low-level physical assaults, economic deprivations, intimidation, discrimination and other quotidian forms of coercion.
“Moreover, by promoting denunciatory practices, the regime cemented the loyalties of ‘upstanding’ citizens while suppressing opponents, dissenters and social outsiders.”
Trump is telling us right up right now that he intends to rule as a fascist if he’s able to either win or seize power through other means in 2024. Informally, his militia followers will be showing up at polling places next fall to intimidate voters; they see themselves as the shock troops of the new GOP.
Formally, he’s planning on ending your and my protections against state-sponsored police violence, which he openly intends to deploy against anybody who opposes him and his regime:
“I am also going to indemnify our police officers. This is a big thing, and it’s a brand-new thing, and I think it’s so important. I’m going to indemnify, through the federal government, all police officers and law enforcement officials throughout the United States from being destroyed by the radical left for taking strong actions against crime.”
When Trump says “crime,” of course, he’s using the same fascist-speak that Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, and Orbán use that means “minorities” and “political enemies.”
And his followers are listening and acting.
The Anti-Defamation League published a report finding there have been more than 170 murders committed by rightwing (and, I’d add, therefore probably Trump-aligned) extremists over the past five years; only 3 deaths could be attributed to people “on the left.” None of the victims were “criminals.”
So, how does a nation deal with an epidemic of violent rhetoric and actual violent attempts?
Fascists are always a minority when they rise to power in a country. They’re experts at manipulating democratic systems — particularly through things like voter suppression, gerrymandering, voter roll purges, and voter intimidation — to seize power, and then corrupting the existing systems and laws in ways that keep them in power.
At the moment, the fascist movement in the US is very much confined within the GOP and aligned with fringe militia and fundamentalist religious factions.
Merrick Garland should have come down on them hard as soon as he assumed his job as Attorney General; because he dithered for two full years until he was shamed into appointing Jack Smith by the January 6th Committee, Trump’s fascist followers have gained considerable momentum.
By continuing to refuse to investigate or prosecute the people who are still in power and conspired with Trump to overthrow our government, Garland further empowers America’s homegrown fascist movement. This must stop, and news that the FBI has finally acquired some of the content of Congressman Scott Perry’s phone is a positive sign, albeit too little and too late.
But the ultimate victory over fascism in America has to be in the ballot box rather than the courthouse. Americans who believe in democracy and reject strongman oligarchy must turn out next November in overwhelming numbers and so shatter the GOP that the party will be forced to reinvent itself in a way that includes purging itself of its fascist-supporting members.
And we damn well better succeed, because fascists never give you a second chance to defeat them or hold them to account. If we try to stop them and fail, Trump has already told us he’ll have a nice cold cell waiting for you and me in the concentration camps he promises to build to hold “millions.”
There is pretty much nothing more important now than waking up our friends and neighbors to this threat…
Billy Townsend is a Florida blogger who specializes in exposing grifters, especially in education. He calls his blog “Public Enemy #1.” He served on the Polk County school board and has been relentless in pursuing the scams perpetrated by Governor DeSantis and former state Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran, now president of New College, a position for which he is uniquely unqualified. Someone on Twitter noted recently that the university presidents appointed by DeSantis won’t have to worry about plagiarism charges, because few if any of them have ever published a peer-reviewed article or book.
Chris Rufo is the attack dog of the far-right, who literally manufactured and sold a public panic attack over “critical race theory,” a concept debated in law school classes. As a result of his publicity campaign, any teaching about race and racism in American schools became suspect, enabling some states to suppress honest discussion of those subjects. Most recently, Rufo hounded Harvard’s President, Claudine Gay, until she resigned over charges of plagiarism.
In the least surprising revelation ever, Christopher Rufo does not have a Masters of Arts degree from Harvard, as he once claimed in his Manhattan Institute bio. He has, instead, a Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) from Harvard Extension School.
Indeed, this anti-woke grifter is continuing to misstate his educational credentials, even after very very quietly correcting one aspect of his misstatement — as I’ll show you in a moment.
As anyone who remotely follows Rufo knows, this is the kind of credential misstatement he would summon the New York Times to pursue if the person doing the misstating was black or a woman. And the useless NYT would dutifully obey. I’m sure they will find a way to avoid this particular misstatement.
But Rufo’s fellow trustees can and should confront him with this at the next meeting.
Rufo claims undergraduate achievement he did not earn
Harvard instructs graduates of Harvard University Extension School to spell out “Harvard University Extension School” on resumes and bios because its sees a meaningful distinction between “Harvard University Extension School” and Harvard’s traditional graduate schools…
Selectivity of admission is the core difference in these Harvard graduate programs. It’s a lot easier to get into “Harvard University Extension School” than traditional Harvard.
Thus, Rufo’s conflation of degree credentials claims a level of achievement in admission that he did not earn.
It misrepresents the quality of Rufo’s undergraduate performance, suggesting that it was strong enough to earn admission to Harvard’s highly selective graduate schools. It was not.
Rufo’s misleading claim dilutes Harvard’s brand, which is why Harvard cares about how graduates claim this credential, I suspect. I’ve posted Harvard’s direction in how to refer to the extension school below.
The “never admit” grifter admits to something
Is this a big deal? Rufo, a bombastic Bad Ken 99.9 percent of the time, seems to think so. He very very quietly acknowledged that his Manhattan Institute bio misstated his education credential by very very quietly having it altered.
In doing so, Rufo violated the #1 tenet of the modern “conservative” and “anti-woke” grifts — the #1 tenet of Rufoism: always loudly refuse to admit or acknowledge anything damaging to the grift. And yet, here Rufo is admitting….
Billy Townsend goes on to portray Rufo’s bio—before and after—on the Manhattan Institute website, where he is a senior fellow. And he shows that Rufo’s misleading claim to am MA at Harvard persists on the New College website, where DeSantis named him as a trustee as part of the governor’s plan to turn the progressive liberal arts college into the Hillsdale of the South.
Townsend writes:
Ride it while it lasts, Chris
Ironically, considering the time and effort I’ve spent on these two Rufo articles, I’m thoroughly uninterested in him. He’s just another grifter, a little farther down the grift value chain than young Austin Hurst, who I introduced you to earlier today.
But they’re essentially the same person — lazy bros trolling for rich guy money by owning the libs. Rufo’s need to overstate both undergrad and grad school credentials is a pretty good example of that.
Rufos, like Zieglers, always come and go. This one will too.
Townsend then quotes a Harvard document explaining how graduates of the Harvard Extension School should refer to their degrees, advice that Rufo ignored until he was caught.
I urge you to open the link to read the material I did not reproduce here. It’s fascinating.
Billy Townsend, by the way, is a graduate of Amherst College, whose admission standards are as rigorous as those of Harvard.
Ryan Walters of Oklahoma may be the worst state superintendent in the nation. Read John Thompson’s latest report on Walters’s plans for the Tulsa public schools and see if you agree.
Thompson writes:
The Tulsa World reported that the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) “is zeroing in on 6,200 students in grades four to eight who must improve on state tests to help the district avoid a state takeover.” Given the threats State Superintendent Ryan Walters has thrown at the district, I understand why the TPS is undertaking a probably doomed-to-fail intervention. By appeasing Walters (who now supports the Tulsa plan), they might save the school system from Walter’s most destructive attacks. But that shouldn’t be the issue.
The question we should be asking is: Will their rushed effort to increase test scores help the 18% of the district’s students who are targeted or will it do them more harm? This experiment will inevitably teach students a lot of things – including destructive lessons rooted in worksheet-driven malpractice. The question should be: Would the supposed gains justify the likely damage that will be done to those students? If history is the guide, it seems inevitable that the tragedies of No Child Left Behind and ESSA will be repeated, especially for the most-disadvantaged students. For instance: What are the chances that the $360,000 spent on state test-aligned test preparation materials will result in a drill-and-kill mindset which is antithetical to the meaningful learning students need?
One of many examples of research on why programs like Walters’ demands have failed is National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2011 study, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. It found:
Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries. When evaluated using relevant low-stakes tests, which are less likely to be inflated by the incentives themselves, the overall effects on achievement tend to be small and are effectively zero for a number.
I was attending a rally of teachers when Walters announced his latest assaults on Tulsa schools, and the district’s response was outlined. On one hand, the conversations with Tulsa and Oklahoma City teachers were stimulating. I was impressed by their emphasis on trusting and loving relationships, and supporting students who face so many obstacles. I was inspired by the embraces of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), and how overworked and stressed out teachers remained devoted to their kids. I was told about successful efforts in some schools to restore holistic and meaningful learning, as well as other schools where test prep was still dominant.
Moreover, I was consistently told about the exhaustion and anxiety the educators face, and how Walters’ attacks will force schools to ramp up test prep. These conversations brought me back to the first decade of the 21st century when low-performing schools were the primary focus of drill-and-kill, and where recess, field trips, arts, and music were taken away.
Then, I was brought back to the second decade when almost every student and educator was targeted for reward-and-punish accountability. Just as the Race-to-the Top (RttT) was doubly devastating because NCLB had already broken the resistance to test-driven accountability, today’s mandates are likely to be doubly dangerous because they follow Walters’ and the Moms for Liberty’s campaigns for Prager’s false, rightwing curriculum, attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), LGBTQ and trans students, and public education’s principles.
By the way, who are the students TPS needs to immediately move up at least one achievement level from “below basic” on state tests? The World reports they are 92% are economically disadvantaged, 20% require special education services, 43% are multilingual learners. They will be the ones who will likely suffer the stress, the drill-and-kill instructional malpractice, and lower graduation rates that typically result from Walters-styled mandates. This raises the question: Wouldn’t they benefit more from properly funded social and emotional supports, equitable spending on holistic instruction, diversity, and inclusiveness?
Instead of asking those questions, as the Voice reports, Walters said he will be proposing a rule which says “sexual activity in public targeted towards kids” is inappropriate. He said “the rule is a direct result of a district hiring an administrator who dresses as a drag queen during non-work hours.” Walters said he would respond to out-of-state groups that oppose prayer in school by introducing “a rule that protects prayer in schools.”
Moreover, the TPS will be required to make “midyear changes in principal assignments and reassigning central office staff to support the Tulsa schools needing Most Rigorous Intervention, or MRI, based on federal education standards.” It will also need to restructure “the district’s leadership team, and aligning leadership priorities and strategic planning to the state’s demands.”
Even if Walters’ priorities and plans made sense, how could the TPS effectively implement them is such a rushed manner? While I’m not optimistic that the TPS will dare to heed research on why the federal School Improvement Grants largely failed, I hope it will not ignore (like many reformers have) the reasons why the billions of dollars invested in turnaround and transformation schools didn’t improve student outcomes.
I must emphasize a key difference, however, between the hurried transformations that backfired so badly over the last two decades, and those that Walters is coercing Tulsa into adopting. I spent hundreds of hours trying to explain to researchers and funders who hurriedly devised the previous turnaround attempts. Even though they were extremely smart, they didn’t know what they didn’t know about public schools. These venture philanthropists and their staff sought to “blow up” the status quo so that innovators could reinvent schools.
Walters is even more aggressive in trying to blow up public education, and he’s shown no interest in improving schools. He might be able to intimidate Tulsa into “knocking down the barn” but, even if he was interested in the welfare of students, there’s no way he would be interested in rebuilding public schools.
The continuation of Israel’s war in Gaza is madness. Initially, Israel’s invasion was a righteous response to the heinous atrocities of October 7. Israel has the right of self-defense.
But Netanyahu’s determination to eliminate every trace of Hamas is an insane goal. He will never succeed because the violence he is inflicting on Gaza is creating new recruits for Hamas.
He should declare success and end the war. There is nothing to be gained other than more hatred, more death, and more destruction by continuing to drop bombs on helpless people.
One day, he orders a million or so Gazans to move to the south of Gaza to avoid the bombing; then he bombs the south. No place is safe. Unless his goal is to kill all life in Gaza, his battle plan is madness.
The bombing is not only destroying civilians, it is destroying historic mosques, churches, museums, and precious cultural archives. Attacking such sites is contrary to international law and serves no purpose.
End the war. Stop the killing. Bring home the hostages. Talk peace.
Diane Ravitch's blog 