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Houston Chronicle Editorial: Three Theocratic Billionaires Threaten U.S. Democracy

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2023 //
2

The Houston Chronicle published a blistering editorial about the power of three billionaires who control Republican politics in Texas and threaten American democracy—not only in Texas. The three are adherents of Christian nationalism and dedicated funders of school vouchers. Their dream is to abolish public schools and enroll every student in a Christian school or home-schooled. They funded State Attorney General KennPaxton’s impeachment defense, and they are now funding Governor Greg Abbott’s campaign for vouchers.

The editorial board wrote:

Since its founding in the early 1880s, the little town of Cisco, 45 miles east of Abilene, has been in the news twice. In 1919, Conrad Hilton paid $40,000 for the Mobley Hotel in downtown Cisco, which eventually gained fame as the first in a worldwide chain of Hilton hotels. Eight years later, two days before Christmas 1927, Santa Claus and three of his helpers robbed the First National Bank of Cisco.

National notoriety will again fall on Cisco if Texas voters — Republican, Democrat and independent — don’t get engaged with their democracy sometime soon. The little town is home to the Wilks brothers, Dan and Farris, oil and fracking billionaires who, by playing Santa Claus to Republican officeholders receptive to far-right extremists, are on a mission to transform Texas into a Christian nationalist state. Their efforts, in conjunction with an even more influential West Texas oil billionaire, Tim Dunn of Midland, was on insidious display during the recent impeachment trial of the most corrupt state attorney general in America.

Ken Paxton skated, not necessarily because he was innocent of the charges that 121 House members, including 60 Republicans, brought against him. He’s back on the job and baying for RINO blood because most Republicans in the Texas Senate are either in thrall to the West Texas triumvirate or they tremble in terror at the prospect of being “primaried” by a Wilks-and-Dunn-anointed challenger. All 19 Republican senators and at least half of the Republican House members have taken money from the West Texas billionaires or their affiliated PACs and organizations.

The biggest recipient by far in this state is none other than Paxton himself. It’s likely that the Wilks and Dunn trio paid for his $4 million impeachment defense, which included the time and effort of very expensive Houston lawyers, Tony Buzbee and Dan Cogdell.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the judge during the impeachment trial, also is beholden to the West Texans. Their Defend Texas Liberty PAC donated $1 million to the lite guv, while loaning him another $2 million. The PAC largesse came shortly before Patrick began presiding over Paxton’s trial, a trial that ended with a fiery Patrick speech denouncing the impeachment process.

In addition to being fossil-fuel billionaires, both Dunn and Farris Wilks are Christian nationalist evangelists — Dunn as a lay preacher for the Midland Bible Church, Wilks as a preacher for a Cisco congregation founded by his father called the Assembly of Yahweh Seventh Day Church. Dan Wilks and his wife oversee the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, a group funded with a portion of the $3.2 billion the brothers made when they sold the majority stake of their Cisco-based oil field trucking company, Frac Tech Services.

From the pulpit to the campaign pockets of politicians, the West Texans are on what they see as a God-imbued mission to transform Texas and beyond. Over the past 20 years, they’ve contributed nearly $100 million to think tanks, nonprofits, fundraising committees, websites and Texas candidates who support their crusade.

In their preaching and practice, climate change is merely God’s will; homosexuality is an evil on par with incest, bestiality and pedophilia; abortion is murder, unlawful with no exceptions; gun owners enjoy a God-given right to carry their weapons in public without permits or training; only Christians have the God-given right to hold leadership positions in government (which, as Texas Monthly reported, left former House Speaker Joe Strauss, who is Jewish, beyond the pale). Also, oil and gas is a gift from God to be used with gratitude. (They don’t mention God’s gift of sunlight and wind.)

Kel Seliger, a longtime GOP state senator from Amarillo, ran afoul of the triumvirate in recent years. Reasonable, affable and conservative, Seliger is no longer in the Legislature. “It’s a Russian-style oligarchy, pure and simple,” he told CNN last year. “Really, really wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money to get policy made the way they want it — and they get it.”

What those “really, really wealthy people” want these days is to destroy Texas public education, a hotbed, as they tell it, of critical race theory and other elements of what one Dunn-and-Wilks-backed group calls “Marxist and sexual indoctrination,” all funded by “far-Left elites for decades.” (That would be the Texas taxpayer.) [Bold-face added by DR, here and below.]

Their strategy, as Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor, told Chron.com, is to recruit a generation of Wilks and Dunn-funded mouthpieces in state and local positions to push the narrative that public schools are harmful to students and their parents. Once public education is weakened beyond repair, they offer private religious schools as “a better way.”

With an insidious, well-funded effort, our home-grown theocrats will make sure that Gov. Greg Abbott has all the financial ammunition he needs in the next few weeks for his last-ditch, special-session effort to persuade lawmakers to use taxpayer money in the form of vouchers for private, often Christian-based schooling. Abbott calls it “school choice.” Rural lawmakers, who’ve fought the plan for years, know it’s school suicide.

The West Texans “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools,” former state Sen. Bob Deuell, a northeast Texas Republican, told CNN. Deuell, a physician, got crossways with the West Texans when he supported a bill that updated the state’s end-of-life procedures. Dan Wilks, falsely claiming that the legislation would “strengthen Texas’s death panels,” backed tea party activist Bob Hall, who defeated Deuell in 2014. Hall was one of Paxton’s most outspoken supporters during the impeachment trial.

Texas is a big state, but the West Texans have Christian nationalist ambitions beyond our borders. They are reliable supporters of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and, of course, former President Donald Trump, who decried Paxton’s “shameful impeachment.” In an expansive, post-impeachment mood these days, Paxton seems to be pondering a larger field of dreams for himself. He told Tucker Carlson last week he may challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn. “His time is done,” Paxton told a radio talk-show host.

If Trump wins the presidential election next year, the disgraced Texas AG would be a prime candidate to head the U.S. Justice Department. (His paramour, the woman he brought from San Antonio to Austin, could be installed in a Georgetown townhouse, only a short Uber ride away from Justice.) He (they) would be right at home in a Trumpian Washington, where, as U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney said to The Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

The party’s presidential nominee in 2012 has said he worries about the survival of America’s democratic experiment.

Whether it survives depends in large part on what happens here in Texas, where the national far right comes for funding and ideas. Decades of one-party rule have contributed to voter apathy and made our state a fertile testing ground for extreme policies. It’s telling, for example, that the AG was reelected last year with the support of about 13 percent of the populace (4 million votes out of a population of nearly 30 million). Paxton and other Dunn and Wilks dependents only have to listen to their West Texan Santa Claus trio, not to the people of Texas.

On a Friday morning in Cisco nearly a century ago, a little girl was among the first to notice that the Santa who stepped out of a stolen Buick and into the lobby of the First National Bank was a fake (and a dangerous one, at that). In Texas these days, maybe we’ve grown jaded. Perhaps it will be young voters of all political persuasions who will take the lead in calling out — and rejecting — the dangerous extremists in our midst. Perhaps taking heart from the brave Republicans who dared impeach an errant AG, they’ll elect representatives of the people, not altar boys and girls on call for Christian nationalists.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Dark Money, Democracy, Freedom, Funding, Home Schooling, Religion, Republicans, Texas, Trump

Peter Greene: Parents Are Happy with Their Public Schools, But the Public Falls for Rightwing Lies

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2023 //
13

Peter Greene wrote in Forbes about the results of the latest Gallup poll about schools. Bottom line: The extremist plot to dismantle public education has bamboozled the public, but not parents. The absurd conspiracy to portray teachers as groomers and pedophiles is undermining public trust in one of our most democratic institutions, the one that teaches us to live with others who are not just like us. As the extremist Chris Rufo said in his infamous speech at Hillsdale College, the road to universal school choice requires sowing distrust of the public schools.

Peter Greene writes:

Parental satisfaction with their local school is at an all-time high, while Americans’ satisfaction with K-12 quality is at a record-tying low, according to newly-released poll results from Gallup.

Starting 1999, the pollsters have asked Americans every August about their views of K-12 quality. There has always been a gap in the results: parents think their own schools are better than the national system as a whole, and non-parents think the national system is even worse. But this year the gap is especially huge.

Of parents of K-12 students, 76% consider themselves completely or somewhat satisfied with their oldest child’s education quality. But when it comes to the U.S. system as a whole, those parents are only 41% completely or somewhat satisfied (14% for completely). Americans as a whole are only 36% satisfied with K-12 education (8% for completely).

Only 9% of K-12 parents are completely dissatisfied with their children’s education. For the system as a whole, both the parents and the full group report 25% completely dissatisfied.

Educators have long suggested that this disparity is the result of negative coverage. That theory makes sense; you know your own child’s school first hand, but beyond that, you only know what you’re told second hand.

Nor have opponents of public education been shy about explaining their intent. In an April, 2022 speech at Hillsdale College entitled Laying Siege to the Institutions, school choice advocate Chris Rufolaid out the strategy succinctly:

To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal school distrust.

This caps forty years of pressing home the message that U.S. public schools are failing. There was a time when supporting public schools was as politically innocuous as babies and apple pie. Now criticism of public education is the political norm, with accusations that teachers are pedophiles and groomers and porn peddlers are not unusual. And groups like Moms For liberty push the narrative that the majority of parents are themselves up in arms about the many failings of their districts.

As the poll shows, that’s not true.

If your child is in school, you see first hand the efforts of the district and the results for your child. But if you have no children at all, or your children’s school days were long ago, all you know about school is what you hear second hand, and that second hand space is dominated by voices declaring that U.S. education is failing.

The poll findings reflect that long repetitive negative messaging, and little else. After all, what would be a better way to gauge the quality of a particular restaurant: talk to people who just ate there, or the people who do PR for a rival eatery?

Categories Corporate Reformers, Curriculum, Dark Money, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake News, Lies, Opinion Polling, Parents, Privatization, Propaganda

Thom Hartmann: How Trump Ate and Swallowed the GOP

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2023 //
51

Thom Hartman explains how Trump managed to devour the Republican Party, leaving nothing but an empty shell, without a platform or a philosophy. The internal collapse of the GOP started half a century ago….

He writes:

The Republican presidential debate wasn’t encouraging: Trump’s hold on the GOP appears stronger than ever. And that’s bad news for America.


In Robert Hubbell’s excellent Today’s Edition Newsletter on Substack, he made the point… that Trump’s relationship to the GOP is like that of one of those parasitic wasps that puts an egg into a caterpillar or spider and when the wasp larvae hatches it eats its host, leaving behind only a husk.


I’d take the metaphor a step farther: there’s a fungus, cordyceps, that infects ants and seizes control of their brains to alter their behavior ooto the fungus’ advantage. Another example is the toxoplasma parasite that’s often spread by cats: when mice are infected with the parasite, they no longer fear the smell of cats (and sometimes even want to play with them!), thus becoming easy prey. Scientists call it “fatal attraction.”


What Trump has done to the GOP is really quite impressive, worthy of either cordyceps or toxoplasma. And, frankly, it’s amazing that they didn’t even see it coming or try to stop him. (More on that in a moment.)


A registered Democrat and donor to the Democratic Party his entire life, Trump appropriated much of Bernie Sanders’ platform in 2016 to ingratiate himself with working class Americans.


He promised universal healthcare “cheaper than Obamacare,” taxes so high on the morbidly rich that “my friends won’t speak to me,” said he would bring America’s factories back home from overseas, and pledged to strengthen and expand Social Security and Medicare.


All, it turns out, were lies, although most in his base believe to this day that he did or nearly did all those things.


Having used Bernie’s policy positions (and a healthy dose of dog-whistle racism, essential for the Republican base) to win office in 2016, he proceeded to step into, take over, and then — like cordyceps or toxoplasma — alter top-to-bottom the behavior of the GOP.


Trump’s no idiot. He saw how the GOP was weakened, first by the Nixon scandals, then by Reagan’s neoliberalism that gutted the middle class, then by Bush and Cheney lying us into two unnecessary and illegal wars. The party was in a state of crisis when the nation elected our country’s first Black president, which gave Trump his opening.


Fifty years earlier, Nixon had injected the first “egg” of racism and white supremacy into the GOP with his “silent majority” and “war on drugs.”
The former was an explicit shout-out to white racists abandoned by the Democrats in 1964/1965 when LBJ pushed through and signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the latter an explicit technique to disrupt the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. Abandoning all subtlety, Nixon called it his “Southern Strategy.”


A decade later, Reagan pulled southern racists even deeper into the GOP by kicking off his 1980 election campaign with a speech about “states’ rights” to an all-white audience at an obscure Mississippi county fair near the site where three Civil Rights workers were brutally slaughtered in June, 1964. While most Americans — and all major American newspapers and TV networks — missed the significance of the event, southerners heard the whistle loud and clear.


Reagan amplified it with his “welfare queen” comments and his sympathy for white people offended by a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to “buy a T-Bone steak,” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.”


With the ground laid by Nixon and Reagan, that singular event of Obama’s presidency gave Trump the lever he needed to inject the larvae of his sociopathy into the moribund GOP.


He began with his claim that Obama wasn’t even a US citizen but had been born in Kenya, as clear a reference to race as his assertion earlier this week that the Black prosecutor Fani Willis and the Black judge Tanya Chutkan are both “Riggers.”


But Trump was only able to finally take over the GOP in 2016 because a group of corrupt politicians and rightwing billionaires got there first, setting up the party’s faithful to believe absurd lies and step into alternate realities.


It started with Nixon claiming he had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War when, in fact, he’d reached out to the Vietnamese and scuttled an actual peace treaty that LBJ had negotiated in the summer of 1968.


When President Johnson called Republican Senator Everett Dirksen to tell him about it just days before the election, Dirksen accused Nixon of “treason.”
Reagan then convinced America’s Republican voters that if they’d just cut taxes on the morbidly rich, prosperity would “trickle down” to average middle class people because it would “unleash” the “job creators.”


His cutting the top tax bracket from 74 percent to 27 percent unleashed them, all right: it unleashed them to buy thousands of politicians at both the state and federal level; to flip more radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers hard right; to purchase yachts and mansions around the world, and even to build their own spaceships.


Reagan told Republicans if they stopped enforcing the anti-trust laws that Republicans had fought for in the 1890s and Republican presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Robert Taft had used, prices would drop and America’s small towns would prosper. Instead, the average American family pays $5,000 a year more than citizens of countries that still enforce their anti-monopoly laws and small-town America has been gutted, with literally millions of local retailers and small employers put out of business by Big Box stores.


Reagan sold Republicans (and a few Democrats) on the idea that “free trade” would lower costs for Americans and, to some extent, it did: our stores were quickly filled with cheap, disposable junk. But the price we paid was 50,000+ factories and over 16 million good-paying union jobs moving to Asia and Mexico.


Reagan promised us if we’d just follow Milton Friedman’s advice (when he was secretly being paid off by the real estate lobby) and end rent controls, cut home mortgage subsidies like those through the FHA and VA, and throw our housing markets open to unrestrained speculation and both corporate and foreign ownership, every American could live the American Dream.


Instead, foreign investors and massive hedge funds run by Wall Street billionaires are buying up America’s housing stock and turning it into rental properties, both exploding the price of houses and rents. The clear and measurable result is an epidemic of homelessness and tent cities.
Reagan promised us if we’d just end “oppressive regulations” — designed to keep our food supply safe, our drugs affordable, clean up our air and water, and protect our children from death by firearms — the “magic of the free market” would provide all those things in spades.


Instead, our food supply is filled with chemicals, microplastics, and heavily processed faux foods that have produced two generations of obesity and related metabolic disorders in children along with an explosion of cancer, birth defects, and other once-rare diseases.
Reagan promised us if we’d just stop funding public schools and stop teaching civics and instead direct that money to private for-profit or church-run voucher and charter schools it would grow the levels of literacy, civic engagement, and healthy political dialogue.
Instead, about half of all American adults cannot read a book written at an eighth-grade level, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. Only 39 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government, leaving our nation vulnerable to racist white nationalists and fascists wanting to transform the democratic experiment our Founders began with our American republic.


The next Republican president, George W. Bush, nakedly lied to America about the “threat” presented by Saddam Hussein and Iraq to justify a war that cost our nation dearly in both blood and treasure, just to enrich the failing Halliburton (former CEO: Dick Cheney) and other oil companies in Bush and Cheney’s orbit.


Bush also pushed through a plan to clear-cut forests he called the “Healthy Forests Initiative,” and a plan to deregulate pollution controls he called the “Clear Skies” legislation.


By 2010, Republican voters were primed to believe pretty much anything party politicians told them. That was the year the billionaires really got busy taking control of the party’s base.


They started by funding the Tea Party, theoretically a response to President Obama’s effort to provide affordable healthcare for all Americans. Tri-cornered hats and bizarre signs saying things like “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare” popped up all over America, as the billionaires’ Astroturf movement rented high-end busses to bring gullible retired boomers to staged media events across the nation.


That morphed into the “freedom agenda,” branding everything in sight with the word. From trashing queer people, to calls for more tax cuts for billionaires, intimidation of teachers and librarians, massive Red-state-by-Red-state voter purges, legalizing open carry of assault weapons, criminalizing abortion, and a campaign to end the teaching of Black History, “freedom” has spread across the GOP.


This week we even learned that the billionaire-funded Freedom Caucus in the House intends to try to crash the US economy just in time for the election (knowing Biden will get the blame) by refusing to fund the government for the 2024 fiscal year.


Republicans have taken their “freedom agenda” to such extremes that they’re actively suppressing dissent to promote it. When a group of moms of children who died or barely survived a mass shooting at the Covenant Elementary School wanted to testify before the Tennessee General Assembly, they were escorted out by state police the Republican leader, Rep. Lowell Russell, had called.


In today’s GOP, fully in the thrall of Donald Trump and his authoritarianism, dissent is not allowed. Just ask Justin Amash or Liz Cheney.


Trump has done his work, and the Republican Party is no longer a legitimate political party. Like a cat with a toxoplasma-infected mouse, he’s eaten the party whole.


It has no platform, no moral compass, and no loyalty to the Constitution or America’s historic ideals. Instead, it does whatever the billionaires who own it tell it to do (with the ability to bribe given them by five Republicans on the Supreme Court who legalized political bribery in Citizens United).


This grift, started by Richard Nixon’s treason and lies and exploited over the years by the morbidly rich, has now so completely absorbed the party that it’s hard to see it returning to the conservative-but-willing-to-compromise entity it was during the Eisenhower presidency. Hell, most Republican voters today don’t even remember Eisenhower, much less venerate him.


As the esteemed Republican activist and constitutional scholar J. Michael Luttig told CNN a few weeks ago:

“A political party is a collection and assemblage of individuals who share a set of beliefs and principles and policy views about the United States of America. Today, there is no such shared set of beliefs and values and principles or even policy views as within the Republican party for America.”

Mourning the loss of the party he was once proud to be part of, Luttig added:

“American democracy simply cannot function without two equally healthy and equally strong political parties. So today, in my view, there is no Republican Party to counter the Democratic Party in the country. And for that reason, American democracy is in grave peril.”

A return to some semblance of normalcy in theGOP is essential to restoring a normal, functioning government to our nation, as Luttig points out. Odds are, however, it’s first going to take a widespread destruction of that party — provoked by huge Democratic wins in 2024 — to come about.

And, given the bizarre spectacle we witnessed in the Republican presidential debate, that can’t come soon enough.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Environment, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Freedom, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Jim Hightower: The GOP Plans to Eliminate Federal Programs to Mitigate Climate Change

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2023 //
6

Jim Hightower, an outspoken liberal voice in Texas, posts a warning about the Republicans’ strategy to wipe out environmental regulations if they regain the presidency in 2025. Despite the climate disasters occurring all over the world and in every corner of this nation, the GOP puts greed over survival.

Hightower writes:

When your political opponents push extremist public policies that would be disastrous for America, should you wring your hands in dread… or applaud?

Consider “Project 2025,” put together by former Trump officials and the Koch brothers’ network of billionaire plutocrats. Their strategy is to win the presidency next year by demonizing all environmental protections and promising to halt all national efforts to cope with the obvious crises of climate change. Their proposals include repealing regulations that curb fossil fuel pollution, terminating our nation’s transition to renewable energy, shutting down all environmental protection agencies, encouraging more oil and gas drilling and use, and promoting the deadly delusion that global warming is not a real problem.

Moreover, they intend to implement Project 2025 in the first 180 days of a right-wing Republican’s presidential term – obviously anticipating that Donald Trump will be that president. “We are not tinkering at the edges,” brags a far-out right-wing group that instigated the scheme, “We are writing a battle plan and we are marshalling our forces.” They’ve already drawn up a list of agencies and policies they’ll begin eliminating on Day One, and they’ve readied a list of some 20,000 right-wing henchmen to put on the federal payroll immediately to enforce their plan.

If this sounds ludicrous, it is. But it’s actually happening, for the Republican Party has decided to be ludicrous. As the director of Project 2025 told the New York Times, “[This is] where the conservative movement sits at this time.”

Maybe, but it damn sure won’t sit well with the American people, who’re presently suffering the hellish ravages of our rapidly overheating climate. Indeed, here’s a great chance for Democrats to demonstrate their bipartisan spirit by doing all they can to publicize the Republicans’ let-it-burn global warming policy.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Dark Money, Deregulation, Environment, Koch Brothers, Republicans, Stupid, Trump

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner: The War to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2023 //
12

Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner wrote in their blog Steady about the importance of saving public education from the forces trying to destroy and privatize it. They remind us and the general public that public schools unite us; privatization is inherently divisive. It is ironic that the red states are implementing voucher plans as the evidence about the failure of vouchers and the null effects of charter schools grows stronger. (The boldfacing of passages in their essay was added by me).

It is back to school. Students of all ages flock to campuses and classrooms. Fleeting memories of summer are quickly replaced by tests and textbooks.


Getting into the swing of a new semester has always included an adjustment period, but this is a particularly difficult time for many of our nation’s students and their parents, guardians, teachers, and others entrusted with the education of young minds.


The pandemic wreaked havoc with the emotional, intellectual, and social development of America’s youth. Dismal test scores provide depressing data of yawning learning deficits. Talk to anyone in or around schools and you hear stories of setbacks and struggle — heaps of qualitative data suggesting a staggering scale of generational loss.
As usual, those who were already the most marginalized have paid the heaviest price. The pandemic exacerbated existing disruptions and placed greater strain on finances and time, particularly in large urban districts and small rural ones tasked with educating children from families struggling economically.


We like to tell ourselves that the United States is a great meritocracy, but wealth and levels of family education continue to play outsized roles in dictating a child’s likelihood of academic success long before she learns her ABCs. The simple truth is that kids come to school from widely different circumstances, and these influence their ability to thrive, independent of whatever innate intelligence or drive they may possess. The pandemic made these differences more acute.


The United States does possess a system (or more accurately, a collection of thousands of systems) that, if nurtured and respected, could foster greater equality of opportunity. And it is exactly the institution that is now struggling the most: public education. America’s public schools were once the envy of the world as engines of opportunity and upward mobility. If the nation had the will, they could return to that status once again.


Our public schools certainly weren’t perfect in the past, especially during legal racial segregation, when the lie of “separate but equal” (separate is never equal) helped enshrine white supremacy. The segregated schools of the Jim Crow Deep South were a shameful injustice and a stain on our national identity. They were inconsistent with our founding documents, which spoke eloquently about equality among people. Of course there was (and remains, to some extent) de facto segregation throughout America based on who lives in what neighborhoods. Well-financed suburban schools were often part of the draw of “white flight” from urban districts.


The very ethos of public education should be one of inclusion for America’s diverse population. It should be a place where children of different backgrounds come together to learn both from teachers and from each other. Our schools should be places that allow students to wrestle with what it means to be part of this great country, including understanding America’s uneven and often bloody road to greater equality.


Sadly, in recent years, we have seen a grave regression from these noble goals. Our schools and school districts have become fiercely contested frontlines in an era of stepped-up culture wars. As reactionary political forces target what we teach our children, it is no accident that truth, empathy, and our democratic values have become casualties.

A chief concern is how and what we teach about our history, particularly the Black experience, and race and ethnicity more generally. We have written here before about the shameful whitewashing of racial violence and injustice, including slavery, by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But this effort is not limited to him or that state. There is a national movement to not tell the full — and unfortunately tragic — reality of race in American history and how it continues to shape the nation.


Another serious concern is the othering of LGBTQ+ students and teachers. After years of progress, we see a wave of intolerance spread across America, including in our schools.


Few institutions in American life are as essential to the continuation of our democracy as the public schools. In a time of ascendent autocracy, attacks on our schools — how they are run, what they teach, what books they have in their libraries — are among the most pernicious, pathetic, and painful assaults on the health of our nation.

Several months back, Texas Monthly ran a striking piece of journalism with the headline, “The Campaign to Sabotage Texas’s Public Schools.” It tells a story that extends beyond the raucous school board meetings and book banning campaigns that have gotten the most attention. There is a movement afoot, and not just in Texas, to destroy public schools more generally, to privatize education through vouchers and other means.


In this context, the various culture fights become battles in a larger war over the very future and viability of public education:

Taken individually, any of these incidents may seem like a grassroots skirmish. But they are, more often than not, part of a well-organized and well-funded campaign executed by out-of-town political operatives and funded by billionaires in Texas and elsewhere. “In various parts of Texas right now, there are meetings taking place in small and large communities led by individuals who are literally providing tutorials—here’s what you say, here’s what you do,” said H. D. Chambers, the recently retired superintendent of Alief ISD, in southwest Harris County. “This divisiveness has been created that is basically telling parents they can’t trust public schools. It’s a systematic erosion of the confidence that people have in their schools.

The ideal of quality, integrated public schools for all children in the United States epitomizes the promise of our country’s founding as a place of equality and opportunity for all. It thus makes sense that would-be autocrats and protectors of privilege would seek to undermine our public schools by whatever means necessary. We must see this as what it is: as much a threat to the nation as was the violent storming of our Capitol.

The future of the United States depends on an educated and empathetic citizenry. It requires us to share a sense of common purpose and recognize our common humanity. It requires an environment that allows every child to thrive and see themselves included in the American story. It requires quality public education. Full stop.

A historic battle to save this institution and the very idea of good public schools has been underway for some time. It is now intensifying. Attention must be paid.

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Gender, History, Hypocrisy, Ignorance, Privatization, Providence, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

NPE Releases Bombshell Report on Latest CREDO Study!

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2023 //
117

The Network for Public Educatuon just released a careful analysis of the latest CREDO study, which claimed that charter schools get better results than public schools.

Not so fast, writes Carol Burris, executive director of NPE. Burris reviewed the data and methodology and found multiple problems with both. The statistical differences between the two sectors, she saw, were the same in 2023 as in CREDO’s first charter study in 2013, which were then described as insignificant.

Even more troubling, CREDO’s work is funded by pro-charter billionaires. How is this different from a study of nicotine safety funded by the tobacco industry? And yet mainstream media accepted the CREDO report without questioning its data, its methodology, or its funders.

Billionaires behind the bias: Unmasking CREDO’s agenda

The Network for Public Education released a response to CREDO’s third national report, revealing the true agenda of a research arm of the conservative Hoover Institution. In its report, CREDO uses cherry-picked charter management chains and flawed methodology that embellishes results and discredits public schools and “mom and pop” charter schools.

NEW YORK, NY — Today, the Network for Public Education released ‘In Fact or Fallacy? An In-Depth Critique of the CREDO 2023 National Report a well-researched response that traces the funders and the bias in CREDO’s data, reporting methods, and conclusions.

CREDO’s report is meant to compare test score growth in math and reading for students in charter versus public schools. But once the curtain is pulled back, the conclusions are dangerously misleading to the public as well as policymakers who depend on accurate research to make informed education-related decisions and policies.

Carol Burris, Executive Director of NPE and the report’s author, says: “CREDO is not a neutral academic institution. They are an education research arm of the pro-charter Hoover Institution, and it’s time they are treated as such. We call on policymakers, the general public, and parents to disregard the results of CREDO studies that take tiny results and blow them up using CREDO-invented “Days of Learning.” Their studies are becoming nothing more than propaganda for the charter industry.”

CREDO’s latest report identifies two nonprofits as underwriters of the latest study – The City Fund and The Walton Family – which gave CREDO nearly $3 million during the years of the study. The City Fund is bankrolled by pro-charter billionaires, including John Arnold, Reed Hastings, and Bill Gates. They have a well-established history of supporting the expansion of charter schools and funding agendas to break up school districts and turn them into a patchwork of “portfolio districts.” The goal of the City Fund is to transform 30-50% of city public schools into charter schools.

CREDO also masks its connections to the conservative think tank the Hoover Institution, but the CREDO report authors’ current biographies and resumes link the organizations. CREDO’s Director and the report’s first author is the Education Program Director for Hoover.

NPE says it is time for state agencies to end their research relationship with CREDO and offer detailed student data to credible and independent research organizations instead.

The NPE report takes an honest look at CREDO’s report with the following key sections:

  • A history of CREDO and its connection to the Hoover Institution.
  • Scholarly critiques of CREDO methodology.
  • Trivial differences exaggerated by the CREDO-created construct, ‘Days of Learning’
  • Bias in the “Virtual Twin” methodology.
  • Serious errors in the identification of schools run by Charter Management Organizations.

According to Diane Ravitch, the President of the Network for Public Education, “CREDO and the billionaires who fund them are trying to discredit public schools to persuade the public that public schools are inferior to privately-managed schools. How is this different from the tobacco industry funding research on cigarette safety?”

“It is clear the CREDO reports are now part of a long-game strategy to undermine, weaken, and defund public education. Why does CREDO consider differences that favor public schools in their first report as “meaningless” and “small” but characterize nearly identical differences favoring charters in its third report to be “remarkable”? Same outcomes. Different characterizations,” Ravitch said.

In light of our findings, The Network for Public Education asks CREDO the following question:

Does CREDO represent the interest of its funders and the pro-school choice Hoover Institution or the interests of the public, who deserve an unbiased look at real outcomes for our nation’s charter and public school students?

“Unless CREDO is held accountable, its reports will continue to move from “in fact” to misleading fallacies. And that does a disservice to the charter and public school sectors alike,” concludes the NPE report. 

The Network for Public Education is a national advocacy group whose mission is to preserve, promote, improve, and strengthen public schools for current and future generations of students.

###

Categories Accountability, Bias, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Data, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Research, Walton Foundation

Peter Greene: “No Labels” on Education Is Warmed-Over NCLB and RTTT

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2023 //
146

The enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2001 (signed into law on January 8, 2002) and the imposition of Race to the Top (a more punitive version of NCLB) created an era of bipartisanship based on testing, punishment, and privatization. The Democratic Party in DC abandoned its historic commitment to public schools.

Those closest to the classroom understand that the Bush-Obama program of 2002- ) was a disaster. After an initial increase in scores, the lines went flat about 2010; there is only so much that test prep can do to lift scores. Many schools were closed, many charters opened (and many swiftly closed), corporate charter chains thrived, teachers left in large numbers, enrollment in teacher education programs plummeted, now vouchers are subsidizing subprime religious schools.

Based on the evidence, the past two decades have been a disaster for American education.

Yet, as Peter Greene explains, a new third party, which calls itself “No Labels,” offers up an education platform that is a rehash of the Bush-Obama agenda. On education “No Labels” repackages the failed ideas of the past 20 years.

Know this about “No Labels”: it is targeting independent voters and will throw the election to Trump, if the election is close, as is likely. It is funded by rightwing billionaires. Caveat emptor.

Greene writes:

No Labels is supposed to be some sort of centrist break from the raging politics of left and right as a champion of “common sense,” and I’m not going to wander down that political rabbit hole (other than to note that saying you’re all about common sense while seriously considering Joe Manchin as a Presidential candidate plays about like a vegan eating a hamburger).

But they’ve got a platform, and it uses four points to address “America’s Youth” and so education, and that’s our beat here at the Institute, so let’s take a look, shall we?

Idea 11: As a matter of decency, dignity, and morality, no child in America should go to bed or go to school hungry.

The basic idea is solid enough– it’s a bad thing for children to go hungry. Some of the rationale is …odd? …off the point? 

Undernourished children “Make smaller gains in math and reading, repeat grades more, and are less likely to graduate from high school, which means they’re more likely to end up in prison.” That’s an interesting chain of causes and effects. Also, they disrupt classrooms more, interfering with other children’s education. 

Despite the heading, there’s not a moral argument in sight. And we still have to insert “even though Washington must reduce spending” we wave at some sort of significant expansion of funding or tax credits so children are fed. So nothing systemic about child hunger or poverty, I guess.

Idea 12: Every child in America should have the right to a high-quality education. No child should be forced to go to a failing school.

There is not a molecule of air between these “centrists” and the usual crowd of school privatizers. 

Rich kids get great schools and poor kids get terrible ones, so the solution is NOT to fix  or supplement funding, but to push down the pedal on charters and vouchers. Because, hey– America spends “more on education per school-aged child than any country in the world, with worse results.” Let’s also throw in some bogus testing results, and the usual claims about charter school waiting lists.

Because “we like competition too,” their common sense solution is to add 10,000 charter schools in the next ten years, to offer a “lifeline” to some students “trapped in failing traditional public schools.” I’m not going to take the time to argue any of this (just go looking through the posts on this blog). Let’s just note that there’s nothing here that Betsy DeVos or Jeb Bush would object to, other than they’d rather see more vouchers. This is standard rightwing fare.

Idea 13: America should make a national commitment that our students will be number one in reading and math globally within a decade.

You know-number one in the international rankings based on Big Standardized Test results, a position and ranking that the United States has never held ever. And yet somehow, leading nations like Estonia have failed to kick our butt. These guys invoke China’s test results, when even a rudimentary check would let you know that China doesn’t test all of its students. 

If America wants to maintain our lead in the technologies of tomorrow, we’d better spend less time on waging culture wars in our schools and more time focusing on promoting, rewarding, and reaching for excellence.

Remember that, so far, we have maintained that lead without improving our test score ranking.

But if excellence in education is the goal, maybe rethink voucher-based subsidies for schools that mostly are religious and teach creationism and reading only “proper” stuff and just generally waging those same culture wars. Or starting up 10,000 charter schools that don’t necessarily do anything better than a public (and who may soon also have the chance to operate in a narrow, myopic, discriminatory religious framework).

Idea 14: Financial literacy is essential for all Americans striving to get ahead

Oh, lordy. Remember all those poor kids in Idea 11? Well, No Labels has an explanation.

Almost six in 10 Americans say they are living paycheck to paycheck. Inflation is arguably the biggest driver of this insecurity, but far too many Americans also lack the knowledge and tools to become financially independent and get ahead.

Inflation and bad accounting. You know what helps people become financially independent? Money.

So let’s have financial literacy classes so people can get better credit scores.

Also, in Idea 22, they want civics education so people will be proud of America. Idea 24– “No American should face discrimination at school or at work because of their political view,” and I’m going to send them right back to their support for vouchers and charters that are working hard to be free to do exactly that.

Look, I feel the frustration over education’s status as a political orphan, an important sector that neither party stands up for. But if you’re looking for someone who understands some of the nuances of education and wants to stand up for the institution of public education, No Labels are not the party, either.

This sounds mostly like right-tilted Chamber of Commerce-style reformsterism from a decade ago. Even in a world in which both parties have lurched to the right, this is not a centrist approach to education. It’s the same privatizing reformster baloney we’ve been hearing since the Reagan administration drew a target on public education’s back. If you’re looking for the vegan candidate, this burger is not for you.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Hoax, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Trump

Greg Olear: Leonard Leo, the Man Who Stacked the Supreme Court

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2023 //
31

Greg Olear is a novelist and journalist who writes a blog called PREVAIL. The following post appeared there. I post only part of it. If you want to see his complete list of Leonard Leo’s claque, open the link and continue reading. This is part one of a two-part report.

Greg Olear writes:

He’s one of the most powerful individuals in the country. His spiderweb of connections is extensive. But most Americans, including many working in Washington, have never heard of him.

Occupying the center of an intricate web of political, legal, religious, and business connections, Leonard Leo is the quintessential Man in the Middle, a veritable dark-money spider. Like a spider, he is patient, painstaking, relentless, and much more powerful that he appears. And like a spider, he prefers to stay hidden.

I first wrote about him in February 2021, in a piece called “Leo the Cancer.” Leo, who I described as “a dandier George Constanza, or if The Penguin worked at Jones Day,” has, I explained,

made himself one of the most powerful figures in the United States. He’s put five—count ‘em, five!—justices on the Supreme Court: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Sam Alito, and John Roberts. A sixth, Clarence Thomas, is one of his closest friends. And, perhaps most impressively, he quietly led the 2016 crusade to deny Merrick Garland a hearing, when Barack Obama nominated the highly-regarded jurist to replace the late Antonin Scalia (another of Leo’s pals). In the lower courts, he’s been even busier. He’s installed so many judges on so many courts, it makes you wonder if he really is the instrument of God’s will he believes himself to be. I mean, there are only three branches of government. One of those three—arguably the most important one—is Leonard Leo’s domain.

When I began researching that piece, I didn’t know much about the guy beyond his silly, comic-book-villain name. I was surprised to discover that he was, like me, a middle-class product of Catholic upbringing and Italian descent who graduated from a public high school in New Jersey—not at all the well-heeled, oenophilic Master of the Universe he has become. He’s also much younger than I expected; born in 1965, he’s solidly Gen X—only seven years older than Yours Truly.

Yet Leonard Leo, somehow, is the individual most responsible for stripping away federal abortion rights. (The anniversary of the odious Dobbs decision was this past weekend.) As his admiring chum Ed Wheelan presciently wrote in 2016, “No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.”

As Politico reported—and as I outlined on these pages three months ago—Leo has been rewarded handsomely for his troubles. “I personally don’t believe that Leonard is motivated by greed,” Steven Calabresi, who founded the Federalist Society with Leo and still runs the organization, told Politico. “I think Leonard is motivated by ideology and ideas. I do think he likes to live a high-rolling lifestyle, but I don’t think he’s in the business because of the money.”

To be fair, Leo does spread that money around. He endows more organizations than I can succinctly list here. Friends like Ginni Thomas get a taste. He brings his SCOTUS cronies on lavish fishing trips with his billionaire backers. And yet Payoff Lenny—as I call him—has amassed a fortune for himself, and spends that fortune lavishly: on tailored suits, palatial vacation homes in Maine, and bottles of wine that cost more that what most Americans pay for a month’s rent.

Jesus liked wine, yes, and Jesus hung out with fishermen, sure, but I’m not sure the Son of God would approve of Leo’s stockpile of dirty loot—although his fellow Knights of Malta don’t seem to mind. Money washes away a lot of sins, as anyone familiar with the history of the Catholic Churchwell knows.

And so the rich and powerful Leonard Leo presides spider-like over Washington, moving chess pieces across the great board, raising unfathomably vast sums of money, and cultivating his extensive network, which I have attempted to map out here.

Note: Leo has so many connections that it became unwieldy to confine them to a single dispatch. In today’s installment, I will cover the judges, non-profiteers, lawyers, media members, and titled Europeans. Part Two will focus on the billionaire donors, the politicians, and the religious contacts.

Judges

Antonin Scalia (1936-2016), Clarence Thomas (b. 1948), John Roberts (b. 1955), Sam Alito (b. 1950)
Supreme Court justices

Leonard Leo worshiped at the altar of Scalia, has been close with Thomas for decades and regards him as a sort of godfather, and worked maniacally to secure the confirmations of Roberts and Alito. Thomas and Alito, in particular, he remains tight with, as recent reporting by ProPublica has made clear.

Regarding Alito, the author of the dreadful Dobbs decision: in his 2018 Daily Beast piece on Leo, Jay Michelson points out that “few people had heard of [Alito] before Leo first promoted him.” Alas, we’ve all heard of that sneeringly arrogant dickhead now.

To learn more about Leonard Leo’s circle, open the link and keep reading.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom, Gender, History, Injustice, Justice, Republicans

Tom Ultican: Chartered to Indoctrinate

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2023 //
15

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas likes to say that he supports vouchers because he wants “education, not indoctrination.” This is hilarious because most vouchers are used for religious schools, whose purpose is indoctrination. They certainly do not teach students to think critically, as that might refute their mission.

Tom Ultican read the recent report by the Network for Public Education about the growth of faith-infused charter schools. The report is called “A Sharp Right Turn.” If you want your child to learn critical thinking, these schools would be the wrong choice. Critical thinking means that you are encouraged to question what you are taught.

Ultican writes:

Carol Burris and team at Network for Public Education (NPE) just published, “A Sharp Turn Right” (STR). NPE President Diane Ravitch noted there are several problems associated with charter schools’ profiteering, high closure rates, no accountability…

“This new report, A Sharp Turn Right, exposes yet one more problem — the creation of a new breed of charter schools that are imbued with the ideas of right-wing Christian nationalism. These charter schools have become weapons of the Right as they seek to destroy democratically governed public schools while turning back the clock of education and social progress by a century.” (STR Pages 3 and 4)

STR focuses on two types of charter schools. One characterizes themselves as “classical academies” and the other touts “back to basics,”without noting they also employ the same “classical” curriculum. Both provide right-wing clues on their web-sites, alerting parents of alignment with Christian nationalism. Marketing is often red, white and blue, with pictures of the American founding fathers, and discussions on patriotism and virtue. Some schools include direct references to religion like Advantage Academy’s claim of educating students in a “faith-friendly environment…”

Using keyword searches, NPE identified 273 active charter schools fitting this description and noted they surely missed more. Nearly 30% of them were for-profit; about double the rate for the charter sector in general. Almost 50% of them have opened since Donald Trump was inaugurated president in 2017… (STR Page 7)

It identifies the largest charter school systems indoctrinating students with Christian nationalist ideology and discloses where they are operating. Discussing, in some depth, Hillsdale College with its Barney charter schools and the large number of new charter affiliates, the report asserts:

“What they all have in common is teaching Hillsdale’s prescriptive 1776 curriculum, which disparages the New Deal and affirmative action while downplaying the effects of slavery. Climate change is not mentioned in the science curriculum; sixth-grade studies include a single reference to global warming.” (STR Page 15)

The reality is today’s taxpayers are forced to pay for schools teaching a form of Christianity associated with white superiority; politically indoctrinating students with specific rightist orthodoxy. What happened to the principal of separation of church and state? This charter schools for indoctrination movement must be stopped before American democracy is sundered.

Ultican reviews the long-held belief in separation of church and state, and the Supreme Court’s decisions that balanced the Constitution’s protection of freedom of religion and its prohibition of any establishment of religion.

This balancing act was disrupted by Reagan’s appointment of Justice Antonin Scalia, who saw no reason to separate church and state. The appointment of Justice Clarence Thomas gave Scalia an ally. Scalia and Thomas believed that all religious activity is religious speech and therefore protected. We saw the most recent example of this reasoning in the Court’s decision holding that discrimination against gay people was acceptable if their very existence offended the religious beliefs of the service provider, since in this case she feared she might be expected to give he assent to their wedding. The Court called its license to discriminate a vindication of free speech rights.

Ultican concludes:

Time to wake up and smell the coffee; the modern Supreme Court is corrupt and needs reformation. Instead of deciding issues based on law and precedence, they create theories designed to support a political philosophy rather than showing fidelity to the constitution. This reflects a complete degradation of jurisprudence. The poorly formed decisions regularly undermine the rights and protections the founders bestowed on citizens; all while some Justices appear to be ethically compromised.

For the first time in American history, billions of taxpayer dollars are flowing to private religious schools. The STR report shines a light on charter schools with religious agendas. Even more disturbing, these new taxpayer funded privatized schools are literally indoctrination centers, teaching a depraved political ideology.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state

Heather Cox Richardson: The Supreme Court Is Putting Our Democracy at Risk

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2023 //
87

This is one of the best letters that Heather Cox Richardson has written since I started reading her posts. It puts the current Supreme Court’s radical decisions into historical perspective. This Court, hand-picked by Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, is engaged in a shameless effort to move the clock back to the world as it existed before the New Deal. This Court threatens our democracy and our rights.

She writes:

Today the Supreme Court followed up on yesterday’s decision gutting affirmative action with three decisions that will continue to push the United States back to the era before the New Deal.

In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis the court said that the First Amendment protects website designer Lorie Smith from having to use words she doesn’t believe in support of gay marriage. To get there, the court focused on the marriage website designer’s contention that while she is willing to work with LGBTQ customers, she doesn’t want to use her own words on a personalized website to celebrate gay marriages. Because of that unwillingness, she said, she wants to post on her website that she will not make websites for same-sex weddings. She says she is afraid that in doing so, she will run afoul of Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws, which prevent public businesses from discriminating against certain groups of people.

This whole scenario of being is prospective, by the way: her online business did not exist and no one had complained about it. Smith claims she wants to start the business because “God is calling her ‘to explain His true story about marriage.’” She alleges that in 2016, a gay man approached her to make a website for his upcoming wedding, but yesterday, Melissa Gira Grant of The New Republic reported that, while the man allegedly behind the email does exist, he is an established designer himself (so why would he hire someone who was not?), is not gay, and married his wife 15 years ago. He says he never wrote to Smith, and the stamp on court filings shows she received it the day after she filed the suit.

Despite this history, by a 6–3 vote, the court said that Smith was being hurt by the state law and thus had standing to sue. It decided that requiring the designer to use her own words to support gay marriage violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

Taken together with yesterday’s decision ruling that universities cannot consider race as a category in student admissions, the Supreme Court has highlighted a central contradiction in its interpretation of government power: if the Fourteenth Amendment limits the federal government to making sure that there is no discrimination in the United States on the basis of race—the so-called “colorblind” Constitution—as the right-wing justices argued yesterday, it is up to the states to make sure that state laws don’t discriminate against minorities. But that requires either protecting voting rights or accepting minority rule.

This problem has been with us since before the Civil War, when lawmakers in the southern states defended their enslavement of their Black (and Indigenous) neighbors by arguing that true democracy was up to the voters and that those voters had chosen to support enslavement. After the Civil War, most lawmakers didn’t worry too much about states reimposing discriminatory laws because they included Black men as voters first in 1867 with the Military Reconstruction Act and then in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and they believed such political power would enable Black men to shape the laws under which they lived.

But in 1875 the Supreme Court ruled in Minor v. Happersett that it was legal to cut citizens out of the vote so long as the criteria were not about race. States excluded women, who brought the case, and southern states promptly excluded Black men through literacy clauses, poll taxes, and so on. Northern states mirrored southern laws with their own, designed to keep immigrants from exercising a voice in state governments. At the same time, southern states protected white men from the effects of these exclusionary laws with so-called grandfather clauses, which said a man could vote so long as his grandfather had been eligible.

It turned out that limiting the Fourteenth Amendment to questions of race and letting states choose their voters cemented the power of a minority. The abandonment of federal protection for voting enabled white southerners to abandon democracy and set up a one-party state that kept Black and Brown Americans as well as white women subservient to white men. As in all one-party states, there was little oversight of corruption and no guarantee that laws would be enforced, leaving minorities and women at the mercy of a legal system that often looked the other way when white criminals committed rape and murder.

Many Americans tut-tutted about lynching and the cordons around Black life, but industrialists insisted on keeping the federal government small because they wanted to make sure it could not regulate their businesses or tax them. They liked keeping power at the state level; state governments were far easier to dominate. Southerners understood that overlap: when a group of southern lawmakers in 1890 wrote a defense of the South’s refusal to let Black men vote, they “respectfully dedicated” the book to “the business men of the North.”

In the 1930s the Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt undermined this coalition by using the federal government to regulate business and provide a social safety net. In the 1940s and 1950s, as racial and gender atrocities began to highlight in popular media just how discriminatory state laws really were, the Supreme Court went further, recognizing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s declaration that states could not deprive any person of the equal protection of the laws meant that the federal government must protect the rights of minorities when states would not. Those rules created modern America.

This is what the radical right seeks to overturn. Yesterday the Supreme Court said that the Fourteenth Amendment could not address racial disparities, but today, like lawmakers in the 1870s, it signaled that it would not protect voting in the states either. It rejected a petition for a review of Mississippi’s strict provision for taking the vote away from felons. That law illustrates just how fully we’re reliving our history: it dates from the 1890 Mississippi constitution that cemented power in white hands. Black Mississippians are currently 2.7 times more likely than white Mississippians to lose the right to vote under the law.

The court went even further today than allowing states to choose their voters. It said that even if state voters do call for minority protections, as Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws do, states cannot protect minorities in the face of someone’s religious beliefs. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that for “the first time in its history,” the court has granted “a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

It is worth noting that segregation was defended as a deeply held religious belief.

Today, using a case concerning school loans, the Supreme Court also took aim at the power of the federal government to regulate business. In Biden v. Nebraska the court declared by a vote of 6 to 3 that President Biden’s loan forgiveness program, which offered to forgive up to $20,000 of federally held student debt, was unconstitutional. The right-wing majority of the court argued that Congress had not intended to give that much power to the executive branch, although the forgiveness plan was based on law that gave the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs…as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a…national emergency…to ensure” that “recipients of student financial assistance…are not placed in a worse position financially in relation to that financial assistance because of [the national emergency]”.

The right-wing majority based its decision on the so-called major questions doctrine, invented to claw back regulatory power from the federal government. By saying that Congress cannot delegate significant decisions to federal agencies, which are in the executive branch, the court takes on itself the power to decide what a “significant” decision is. The court established this new doctrine in the West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agencycase, stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate certain kinds of air pollution.

“Let’s not beat around the bush,” constitutional analyst Ian Millhiser wrote today in Vox, today’s decision in Biden v. Nebraska “is complete and utter nonsense. It rewrites a federal law which explicitly authorizes the loan forgiveness program, and it relies on a fake legal doctrine known as ‘major questions’ which has no basis in any law or any provision of the Constitution.”

Today’s Supreme Court, packed as it has been by right-wing money behind the Federalist Society and that society’s leader, Leonard Leo, is taking upon itself power over the federal government and the state governments to recreate the world that existed before the New Deal.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called out the lurch toward turning the government over to the wealthy, supported as it is by religious footsoldiers like Lorie Smith: “Today, the court substituted itself for Congress,” Cardona told reporters. “It’s outrageous to me that Republicans in Congress and state offices fought so hard against a program that would have helped millions of their own constituents. They had no problem handing trillion-dollar tax cuts to big corporations and the super wealthy.”

Cardona made his point personal: “And many had no problems accepting millions of dollars in forgiven pandemic loans, like Senator Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma had more than $1.4 million in pandemic loans forgiven. He represents 489,000 eligible borrowers that were turned down today. Representative Brett Guthrie from Kentucky had more than $4.4 million forgiven. He represents more than 90,000 eligible borrowers who were turned down today. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia had more than $180,000 forgiven. She represents more than 91,800 eligible borrowers who were turned down today.”

In the majority opinion of Biden v. Nebraska, Chief Justice John Roberts lamented that those who dislike the court’s decisions have accused the court of “going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” He defended the court’s decision and urged those who disagreed with it not to disparage the court because “such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country.” But what is at stake is not simply these individual decisions, whether or not you agree with them; at stake is the way our democracy operates.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute didn’t offer much hope for Roberts’s plea. “It is not just the rulings the Roberts Court is making,” he tweeted. “They created out of [w]hole cloth a bogus, major questions doctrine. They made a mockery of standing. They rewrite laws to fit their radical ideological preferences. They have unilaterally blown up the legitimacy of the Court.”

In a shot across the bow of this radical court, in her dissent to Biden v. Nebraska, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “the Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”

—

Categories Accountability, Biden, Bigotry, Billionaires, Cardona, Miguel, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Gender, Higher Education, History, Inequity, Injustice, Justice, Race, Racism, Religion, Shame, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt
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