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Houston: Voters Rejected a $4.4 Billion Bond Issue to Protest Mike Miles’ Arrogance

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2024 //
4

Houston’s public schools were taken over in 2023 by the state because one (1) high school was persistently getting low scores. One! That school happened to have a disproportionate number of students with disabilities, students who were English learners, students who were impoverished, as compared to other high schools in the district .

The Texas Education Agency engaged in a hostile takeover. Governor Abbott may have wanted to teach the blue district of Houston a lesson, and he did. His hand-picked State Commissioner imposed a new superintendent, Mike Miles, and replaced the elected school board. Houston lost democratic control of its schools.

Miles was a military man and a graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy, whose graduates were steeped in top-down methods and taught to ignore constituents. Miles was superintendent in Dallas, where he had a rocky three-year tenure. He then led a charter chain in Colorado.

Miles proceeded to impose a new lockstep curriculum and to fire administrators and principals who did not please him.

Members of the public complained bitterly about being disregarded, ignored, belittled. Miles plowed ahead.

New test scores came out, and the scores went up. Miles felt triumphant. See, he said, I was right! The Houston schools needed a leader who didn’t listen to the public.

But when Miles and the state’s puppet board put a $4.4 billion bond issue on the ballot last month, parents urged others not to vote for it. In the only place where parents had a say, they organized against the bond issue. It went down to a defeat.

On November 5, Houston voters rejected a proposed $4.4 billion bond that would pay for critical school construction, renovation and infrastructure projects, as well as safety and security improvements, by a wide margin, 58% to 42%. It appears most of those voting against the measure did so not in opposition to the bond itself, but out of deep distrust for Miles and the district’s leaders. For weeks the rallying cry repeated publicly by opponents, including the Texas Federation of Teachers, was simply “no trust, no bond.” 

Miles said it had nothing to do with him. But he was wrong. It was a referendum on his leadership. He lost.

Public education requires community engagement. It requires parent involvement. Committed parents will fight for their schools. They want to know who’s leading their schools, they want to be heard. Miles still doesn’t understand the importance of listening. He thinks that the goal of schooling is higher scores, regardless of how many people are alienated. He doesn’t understand the importance of building community. And without it, he failed.

It’s time to consign the Broad Academy philosophy of leadership to the dust bin of history. Districts don’t need military command and control. They need educators who have a clear vision of what education should be, who care about ALL students, and who understand how to build community.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Houston, Parents, Texas

Jeff Tiedrich: Biden Should Pardon Everyone on Trump’s “Enemies List”

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2024 //
31

Jeff Tiedrich proposes in his blog that President Biden should operate a “pardon factory” to protect everyone who has been threatened by Trump or Kash Patel.

One of the features of democracy is an assumption that parties will contend for power, accept their win or loss graciously, then prepare for next time. There will always be the next election to try again.

The threats by Trump and his toadies to prosecute his critics disrupts the comity on which a democratic system depends.

Trump thinks of his critics as “enemies,” not critics. He has made clear repeatedly that he will use his power as President to prosecute, imprison, and crush his enemies.

He said recently that the members of the January 6 Commission “should be in jail.” Why? Is it normal or acceptable that a mob summoned by the President descends on the U.S. Capitol as they meet to certify the election, smash through the windows and doors, beat up police officers, and rampage through the building? What was criminal? The summoning of the mob? The actions of the mob? Or the investigation of the events of the day?

Biden, writes Tiedrich, should issue pre-emptive pardons to all those whose lives and freedom might be endangered by Trump, Kash Patel, or Pam Bondi.

The next four years will be a trial for our democracy. Will the norms and institutions survive the reign of this bitter, vindictive old man?

Categories Accountability, Bias, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Injustice, Trump

Timothy Snyder: Tulsi Gabbard Would Be a Disaster as Director of National Intelligence

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2024 //
4

Timothy Snyder is the conscience of America. He has written books on tyranny, on democracy, and on the history of Europe. He cares passionately about the survival of democracy.

He wrote recently that it would be an unmitigated disaster to confirm Trump’s nominee Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Choosing her seems to be Trump’s vengeance on the nation’s intelligence agencies, which were not loyal to him.

Snyder writes:

Imagine that the day has come for your brain surgery. You are lying, immobilized and vulnerable, on the operating table. Something is wrong, but you hope that it can be repaired. As the anesthesia sets in, you reflect. To be sure, your brain hasn’t always performed the way you wished it had. You have made some mistakes, and done some stupid things, regrettable things, wrong things. But still, it is the brain that allows for a reconsideration of all that, to adjust, to have some hope and some possibility of doing better next time. Your brain keeps you going, keeps you in touch with the world. Hopefully, yours can be repaired, and you can get back to thinking, being, becoming. You could get better. As darkness descends, you catch a glimpse of a person dressed as a surgeon, approaching your head with a knife and a smile. It’s Tulsi Gabbard. Hope gives way to horror.

This dark fantasy suggests, on a very small scale, the national trauma that lies before us. Gabbard is Donald Trump’s choice to operate American intelligence. In the intelligence system, a kind of national brain, the Director of National Intelligence oversees and coordinates the work of agencies charged with knowing the world, protecting the integrity of digital systems, anticipating and preventing terrorism, and evaluating national security threats. Gabbard is the opposite of qualified for such a role: she is a disinformer and as an apologist for the war crimes of dictatorships.

Gabbard appears on the world stage as a defender of a million violent deaths. 

She is an apologist for two of the great atrocities of the century: the Russian-Syrian suppression of the Syrian opposition to the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship, which has taken about half a million lives, most of them civilians, some of them by chemical weapons; and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has also taken about half a million lives, and has brought the destruction of whole cities, the kidnapping of children, mass torture, and the large-scale execution of civilians.

That is it. That is her profile. Disinformer and apologist. Beyond the United States, in the larger world that US intelligence agencies are tasked to understand, she is associated with her pro-Assad and pro-Putin positions. (In third place, I suppose, would be her propensity to provide the Chinese state media with useful sound bites).

Until 2014, Gabbard said nothing remarkable about foreign affairs. In 2015, just before Putin intervened to save Assad, she began her extraordinary journey of apology for atrocity. In September of that year, Putin sent Russian mercenaries, soldiers, and airmen to Syria to defend Assad. The great advantage Putin could bring to Assad was to multiply the regime’s air strikes, which were turned against hospitals and other civilian targets. Hospitals were and remain a Russian specialty.

a destroyed building in a city

In June 2015, as a congresswoman from Hawai’i, Gabbard visited Syria. During her stay, she was introduced to girls who had been burned from head to toe by a regime air strike. Her reaction to the situation, according to her translator, was to try to persuade the girls that they had been injured not by Syrian forces, but by the resistance. But this was impossible. Only Syria (at the time of her visit) and Russia (beginning weeks later) were flying planes and dropping bombs. 

Either Gabbard was catastrophically uninformed about the most basic elements of the theater of war she was visiting, or she was consciously spreading disinformation. Those are the two possibilities. The first is disqualifying; the second is worse.

And if she was spreading disinformation consciously, she was also doing so with a pathological ruthlessness. Anyone who would lie to the child victims of an air strike to their burned faces would lie to anyone about anything. In January 2017, she visited Syria again, this time to speak to Assad. She began thereafter to deny that his regime had used chemical weapons on its own people. That was a very big lie.

In Washington, in speeches in Congress, Gabbard showed an uncanny ability to turn almost any issue into a justification for defending the Assad regime. In 2016, concern for Christians in Syria was a pretext to defend the Assad regime. In 2017, she presented worries about terrorism as a reason to defend of the Assad regime. In 2018, the anniversary of 9/11 was her prompt for defending the Assad regime. In 2019, she found her way from the genocide of Armenians a century earlier to the need to defend the Assad regime. She even worked hard to segue from the lack of affordable housing in Hawai’i to the need to defend the Assad regime. Gabbard’s support of Assad was so well known that her colleagues, Republican and Democratic alike, were worriedthat she would reveal the identity of a Syrian photographer brought to Congress to testify about Assad’s atrocities.

For Russia, Syria was a testing ground for Ukraine. The atrocities perpetrated by Russians in Syria were repeated in Ukraine. In 2021, the largest donor to Gabbard’s PAC was an apologist for Putin. When the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February of the following year, Gabbard, a  consumer of Russian propaganda, was immediately ready as a channel for the Russian line, including obvious Russian disinformation. Again and again, over and over, her public statements were strikingly similar to Putin’s,

Amidst the farrago of lies that Russia used to justify its full-scale invasion invasion was the completely bogus claim that Ukraine was site of American biolabs that were testing which infections would be most harmful to Slavs (and thus Russians). This lie originates in Russia and was spread by Russian media, along with some Chinese and Syrian echo chambers, and with a set of western helpers — one of whom was Tulsi Gabbard. She also urged, “in the spirit of Aloha,” that Ukraine react to the invasion by surrendering its sovereignty to Russia. She later justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by the notion, common in Moscow, that Russia was the victim of American attempts to overthrow Putin. She was specifically thankedby Russian state media for defending Russian war propaganda.

To be sure, the wars and the regions are complex. Even if Assad falls, as now looks increasingly likely, Syria will be a mess, with unsavory and dangerous people in power. There is, of course, room for disagreement about American foreign policy, including with respect to Assad and Putin and their twinned atrocities. That can all be taken for granted, and provides no excuse whatever for Gabbard’s very unusual behavior. It is strange, to say the least, that Gabbard says nothing about these regimes that they have not first said about themselves, and that she uses her platform to spread their own very specific disinformation.

One feature of disinformation is that it is factually incorrect: and so the very least (or most?) that can be said about Gabbard is that she is consistently wrong on matters of the greatest moral and political significance. But the other element of disinformation is that it is consciously and maliciously designed to confuse. These memes (biolabs!) are tested and perfected before they are released. Disinformation is the opposite of an innocent mistake: it is concocted to make rational reflection and sensible policy difficult. Disinformation, in other words, is a weapon that one regime tries to spread within another society or — in the dream of a hostile spy chief — within another society’s intelligence service. That is part of what Gabbard offers America’s enemies, and it is bad enough, because it means that systems meant to protect Americans instead put them in danger. It goes without saying that American allies would be unable to cooperate with the United States, and that patriotic intelligence officers would resign in droves. Informers around the world would cease their work. The US government would be cut off from the world. 

As Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard would do enormous harm, unwillingly or willingly. She is not just completely unqualified for this role — she is anti-qualified. She is just the sort of person enemies of the American republic would want in this job. This is not a hypothetical — Gabbard is the specific person that actual enemies of the United States do want in the job. The Russian media refers to Tulsi Gabbard as a “Russian agent” and as “girlfriend,” with good reason.

Gabbard is worse than unfit. Her public record is as a disinformer and apologist for mass murderers. And there is nothing on the other side of the ledger. There are no positive qualifications. (Yes, she wrote a bestselling book. It became a bestseller because she scammed her followers into donating to a PAC which bought the book in bulk.) 

Gabbard is just as qualified to operate on your brain as she is to operate the national intelligence services. Would you let her? She clearly wants to take up the knife. Whose idea, one wonders, was that?

Imagine, because it is true, that the day will soon come when we name the person who will operate the national intelligence services. To be sure, like our own minds, the intelligence services of the United States haven’t always performed well. There have been mistakes, and manipulation, and downright evil. But there has also been learning, and some recent, impressive showings, as in the precise and public prediction of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Intelligence services are a central part of government. Just as a brain might need surgery, American intelligence needs reform. But it does not need to be butchered for the pleasure of enemies.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, International, Trump

Voters Defeated the Dark Money Behind Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2024 //
3

David Armiak of the Center for Media and Democracy reviewed the recent defeat of vouchers in three states: Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska. He points out that vouchers have never won a state referendum. Voters have always said “No” to sending public money to private and religious schools.

Who pays for the state campaigns on behalf of vouchers?

Billionaires.

The two most reliable funders of voucher proposals are billionaires Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch.

The billionaires keep pushing vouchers even though we now know that they are subsidies for families whose children are already enrolled in private schools. And we now know that vouchers don’t help public school students who use them. And we now know that vouchers are a huge drain on state budgets and always cost more than predicted.

DeVos and Koch like to fund failure. Their goal is not to improve education but to destroy public schools.

Armiak writes:

The dark money group Advance Colorado Action (ACA, formerly Unite for Colorado) qualified the ballot measure, but most of the identifiable money spent pushing its passage came from a related advocacy group, Colorado Dawn.

Unite for Colorado was founded in 2019 by Dustin Zvonek, the former vice president for strategy and innovation and state director for Charles Koch’s astroturf operation Americans for Prosperity. As of 2022, Unite for Colorado provided Colorado Dawn with almost half of its revenue ($2.7 million out of $5.9 million).

Both groups have been hit with multiple campaign finance complaints in recent years, including one last month against Colorado Dawn for sending misleading text messages and spending money to influence a ballot measure without registering as an issue committee.

Colorado Dawn reported spending nearly $1.9 million as of October 23 to back Amendment 80, The Colorado Sun reported.

In Kentucky, voters in every county rejected Amendment 2 by a margin of almost two to one (65%).

If it had passed, the state constitution would have been amended to allow public funding to go to private schools.

A record-breaking $14 million was spent by groups in favor and against the amendment, Kentucky Public Radio reported. The Protect Freedom PAC pulled in $5 million from school privatization billionaire Jeff Yassand spent $4 million on ads supporting the measure.

Other groups spending in favor of the amendment included Kentucky Students First ($2.5 million); Empower Kentucky Parents ($1.25 million); Empower Kentucky Parents PAC ($800,000); and the state chapter of Koch’s Americans for Prosperity ($328,000).

Empower Kentucky Parents received $1 million from American Federation for Children, a group organized and funded by the billionaire DeVos family. Betsy DeVos served as secretary of education during Trump’s first term in office and now supports his plans to eliminate the department.

In Nebraska, 57% of voters supported a ballot measure (Referendum 435) to repeal a new state law that would have provided parents with $10 million in public funds per year in the form of vouchers for their children to attend private K–12 schools.

The Nebraska Examiner reported that Keep Kids First spent just $111,000 as of November 4 to prevent the repeal of the referendum in the Cornhusker state. The American Federation for Children is also the largest known donor so far to Keep Kids First, giving $561,500 in 2023–24.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Koch Brothers, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Watch as Republicans Grovel Before Elon and Vivek

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2024 //
24

This is a sickening article that appeared in The Irish Times about a meeting on Capitol Hill between Congressional leaders and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Why is it sickening? It shows our elected Congressional leaders preening and groveling in the presence of the world’s richest man and a man who is only very rich.

Our Leaders? Who elected Elon and Vivek?

Why an article from The Irish Times? My good friend and executive director of the Network for Public Education Carol Burris is spending the holidays there and sent it to me.

As you read the article, you can feel the obsequiousness that these elected officials are expressing as they wait for the phony Department of Government Efficiency to tell them what to cut.

“Elon and Vivek talked about having a naughty list and a nice list for members of Congress and senators and how we vote,” reported Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who offered a beaming smile that suggested she knew which list she’d be making. “And how we’re spending American people’s money. I think that would be fantastic.”

One wonders what Ted Kennedy or Henry Clay or Lyndon Johnson, during their Senate years, would have made of two billionaires with zero political experience or authority, breezing into the Capitol and explaining to them they had a chance to make the nice list.

Speaker Johnson promised that Thursday’s meetings will be the first of many visits by Musk and Ramaswamy. “We believe it’s a historic moment for the country and these two gentlemen are going to help us navigate through this exciting day. Elon and Vivek don’t need much of an introduction here in Congress for certain and I think most of the public know what they are capable of and have achieved.

“They are innovators and forward thinkers and that’s what we need right now. We are laying the new ground rules for the new Congress in the new year, and we are going to see a lot of change here in Washington of the way things are run. That is what this whole Doge effort is about.”

Should they cut Social Security? Medicare? Veterans’ Healthcare? Grants for higher education? Title 1? Headstart?

Everything is on their chopping block.

How many civil servants will they seek to terminate?

Musk cut 80% of the staff at Twitter. Will he aim to lay off a huge percentage of the people who keep government running?

Musk tweeted a few days ago that government “should be rule by democracy, not rule by bureaucracy.”

How is it democratic to allow two unelected oligarchs to decide which programs should be eliminated? Why do Elon and Vivek–who will never need Medicare or Social Security–get to decide whether the rest of us can keep the programs that we rely on? If they get their way, there will be more people dying of health conditions that could been treated, more seniors eating cat food for dinner.

The politicians eagerly await their marching orders.

Sickening.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Musk, Elon, Politics, Trump

Trump: He Will Pardon J6 Rioters, Try to End Birthright Citizenship on Day 1

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2024 //
20

Trump was interviewed by “Meet the Press” today.

He talked about his Day 1 goals.

He said he would pardon the January 6 insurrectionists, but the reporting did not clarify whether that would include those who brutalized police officers. If so, Republicans should stop calling themselves the party of law and order.

He said he would try to end “birthright citizenship,” the grant of citizenship to persons born in the U.S. He says he would achieve this goal by executive action but birthright citizenship is written into the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Trump said that no other country in the world has birthright citizenship but NBC said that 30 other nations do.

As usual, Trump ranted about immigrant criminals but NBC pointed out that immigrants are half as likely to commit crimes as native-born citizens.

He also said he would work with Democrats to protect “Dreamers.” These are children who were brought to this country as young children.

Categories Citizenship, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Immigration, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson on the Meaning of December 7 for Us Today

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2024 //
7

This is a beautiful essay on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, and its meaning for us today. Please read it.

On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.

In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.

Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

That night, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America the next day, and four days later, on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.

The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.

Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.

The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany’s Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.

America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were African American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Native Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.

The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.

Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?

Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.

But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.

Donald Trump and his cronies have vowed to replace the nonpartisan civil service with loyalists and to weaponize the Department of Justice and the military against those they perceive as enemies. They have promised to incarcerate and deport millions of immigrants, send federal troops into Democratic cities, silence LGBTQ+ Americans, prosecute journalists and their political opponents, and end abortion across the country. They want to put in place an autocracy in which a powerful leader and his chosen loyalists make the rules under which the rest of us must live.

Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?

When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.

I hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the reactionaries will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.

Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.

Categories Bigotry, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, History

Margaret Sullivan: Trump Will Endanger Freedom of the Press: Stand Up to Him!

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2024 //
2

Margaret Sullivan is a veteran journalist who served as the last ombudsman for the New York Times. Her blog American Crisis is valuable for its support of a free press and for its criticism of newspapers that sanewash and normalize Trump.

She writes:

Many of Donald Trump’s choices for Cabinet posts and other positions in his new administration have appalled me. To hit some lowlights: RFK Jr. with his dangerous ideas about vaccines and his history of wildly inappropriate behavior; Tulsi Gabbard, whom Russian state TV is referring to as “girlfriend”; Brendan Carr, one of the authors of the authoritarian playbook known as Project 2025; pure loyalist Pam Bondi, as attorney general, replacing the even more inappropriate Matt Gaetz.

But none have shaken me as much quite as much as Kash Patel, whom Trump wants to name the director of the FBI. Before the election, I wrote in the Guardian about the high stakes for press rights. After reviewing what a foe of the press Trump was the first time around, I sounded the alarm, with a particular focus on Patel:

There is nothing to suggest that Trump would soften his approach in a second term. If anything, we can expect even more aggression. Consider what one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, Kash Patel, has said.

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel threatened during a podcast with Steve Bannon. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

If named FBI chief, Patel is sure to help bring Project 2025 into action. Again from the Guardian column: 

Under Project 2025, seizing journalists’ emails and phone records would get easier. The editorial independence of Voice of America would be sharply curtailed; in fact, the global organization might be shut down altogether. Former officials who talk to reporters would be punished. Funding for NPR, PBS and public broadcasting would dry up.

“A pretty grim picture,” was the conclusion of Joshua Benton of Harvard University after analyzing Project 2025 from the perspective of press rights. “The first time around, there was at least a modicum of uncertainty about what a Trump administration would actually do,” Benton wrote in Nieman Lab. “The second time, voters knew better, and they rejected it. The third time? Well, no one can say it’ll come as a surprise.”

Kash Patel at a rally for Donald Trump in Arizona on Oct. 13, 2024. Patel, Trump’s pick for the FBI, has expressed an alarming intent to go after the press / Getty Images

Remember, in his first term, Trump wanted then-FBI director James Comey to bring him a “head on a pike” when government insiders leaked to journalists — often providing information that was important for the American public to know. Patel, no doubt, will be eager to do this. And if raids and imprisonment of journalists follow, it’ll be exactly what the boss has wanted all along.

As many have pointed out, when would-be authoritarians take power, one of the first things they want to do is stamp out independent journalism. We can’t let that happen.

So, how can our most important journalism institutions react? With big doses of courage, a refusal to obey in advance and insistence on standing their ground. I hope that top newsroom leaders — the decision-makers at the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Wall Street Journal, the broadcast networks and others — are clearly communicating to their staffs that they’re not going to knuckle under.

American Crisis is a community-supported project where I explore how journalism can help save democracy. Please consider joining us!

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For inspiration, they ought to read a post by journalist Paul Horvitz (he worked at the late, great International Herald Tribune, among other papers), who wrote to me last week to share his manifesto. Here’s a section, and you can read the rest on his Substack:

In the United States of Donald Trump, American journalism faces a defining test.

Will it be the sleepwalking servant of a propaganda machine? Or will it reclaim its role as public servant, tenacious watchdog, and guardian of democracy?

Because we are not in normal times, these are not rhetorical questions. The coming year may well see the Department of Homeland Security offer journalists stage-managed tours of migrant jails to create a facade of humane treatment. Should the press participate?

The Trump regime will surely sanitize the language it uses to describe these camps, whose legal basis is questionable. Will a compliant press blindly repeat the euphemism “detention centers?” In 1930s Germany, millions of “asocials” were taken into “protective custody” or “preventive custody.” Words matter.

When an angry U.S. President phones the executive editor of The Washington Post or its billionaire owner to complain about “negative” coverage, will the attempt to intimidate be revealed only years later in a book or immediately placed on the front page?

Our alarming situation — we are on a path to American fascism — demands a far more assertive, scrappy, and resolute press. Some news organizations aren’t ready to be aggressive because they don’t accept their broader responsibility in a free society. They have been fact purveyors, always mindful of their own commercial viability. These news companies will continue to be enablers, justifying their behavior by championing strict impartiality, rigorous objectivity, and fast facts.

Horvitz nails it. 

Meanwhile, I’m collecting examples of sanewashing, false equivalence and pussyfooting around the harsh reality of another Trump administration. Here’s a headline that even the satirical social media account New York Times Pitchbot said he couldn’t compete with; it appeared over a prominent Times staff columnist’s offering last week: “Thomas Friedman: Trump’s Path to a Nobel Peace Prize?” 

Also in the Times, this euphemistic headline: “Trump’s Choices for Health Agencies Suggest a Shake-up Is Coming.” The sub-headline mentioned “ideas that are outside the medical mainstream.” Y’think? Author and scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat expressed her objection: “Shake-up is hardly appropriate for the engineering of mass sickness by withholding vaccines and reducing insurance coverage so few can get medical help.” Language needs to be much stronger and more direct, especially in headlines and news alerts since that’s as far as many people ever get.

At the same time, I’ve noticed a lot of strong, important reporting in the Times, which remains essential. Here’s a gift link to one such story.

Thanks so much to all subscribers to American Crisis. I truly appreciate your interest and support. The paywall remains down so all may read these posts in full and may participate in the comments. The discussion has been robust and I’m grateful for the thoughtful contributions.

One last item: Greg Sargent of The New Republic invited me on his podcast last week to talk about Trump and the press. We covered everything from why The Times got rid of its public editor role (and why I predict it’s never coming back) to whether the mass cancellations at the Washington Post may motivate decision-makers to recommit to their mission. We also talked about the risk that news organizations may self-censor, given Trump’s threats of retribution against the press — and what to do about it. 

Here’s the podcast recording and a transcript, if (like me) you prefer to read than listen. 

Categories Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of the Press, Trump

Timothy Snyder: America Cannot Survive Trump’s Horrible Appointments

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2024 //
28

Timothy Snyder is an expert on European history and on tyranny (the title of one of his books is On Tyranny). He writes here about the creeping authoritarianism of the coming Trump regime.

Snyder writes:

We should be wary of shock, which excuses inaction. Who could have known? What could I have done? If there is a plan, shock is part of the plan. We have to get through the surprise and the shock to see the design and the risk. We don’t have much time. Nor is outrage the point.

Of course we are outraged. But our own reactions can distract is from the larger pattern.
The newspapers address the surprise and the shock by investigating each proposed appointment individually. And we need this. With detail comes leverage and power. But clarity must also come, and quickly. Each appointment is part of a larger picture. Taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.

In historical context we can see this. There is a history of the modern democratic state. There is also a history of engineered regime change and deliberate state destruction. In both histories, five key zones are health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. These people, with power over these areas of life, can make America impossible to sustain.

The foundation of the modern democratic state is a healthy, long-lived population. We lived longer in the twentieth century because of hygiene and vaccinations, pioneered by scientists and physicians and then institutionalized by governments. We treat one another better when we know we have longer lives to lose. Health is not only the central human good; it enables the peaceful interactions we associate with the rule of law and democracy. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the proposed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, would undo all of this. On his watch, were his ideas implemented, millions of us would die. Knowing that our lives will be shorter, we become nasty and brutish.

A modern democratic state depends upon the rule of law. Before anything else is possible, we have to endorse the principle that we are all governed by law, and that our institutions are grounded in law. This enables a functional government of a specific sort, in which leaders can be regularly replaced by elections. It allows us to live as free individuals, within a set of rules that we can alter together. The rule of law depends on people who believe in the spirit of law. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first proposed attorney general, is the opposite of such a person. It is not just that he flouts law himself, spectacularly and disgustingly. It is that he embodies lawlessness, and can be counted upon to abuse law to pursue Trump’s political opponents. The end of the rule of law is an essential component of a regime change. He has been replaced by Pam Bondi, who will evade the sex-crime allegations that seem to have brought Gaetz down. But Bondi is someone who dropped an investigation against Trump when he made an illegal donation to one of her foundations. She also led “lock her up” chants against Hillary Clinton, who had committed no crime. And she participated in a central injustice of contemporary American history, Donald Trump’s Big Lie that he won the election of 2020. She can be expected to lead prosecutions based upon alternative reality.

In a class by himself is Kash Patel, whom Trump would like to see as director of the FBI. This, of course, requires Trump to fire Christopher Wray, whom he himself appointed, and who has three years left to serve. Firing Wray for no reason would be unprecedented and would itself have been an outrage in a more sane time. Giving Patel authority over the national police force is nothing less than a promise of authoritarian rule.

Patel is a narcissitic zealot with zero qualification for such a post, as even hard-right Trump insiders such as Bill Barr have said (“over my dead body” were his words when Trump proposed Patel for a lesser position of authority in 2020). Patel got Trump’s attention for his efforts to denounce the entirely correct proposition that Trump was supported by Russia in 2016. Patel was then one of the most active and outspoken participants in Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-2021. Patel has since become a pitchman for a clothing line as well as pills that, he claims, will detox your body from the harmful effects of vaccinations. Patel said both that he would shut down the FBI and that he would use it to prosecute journalists and people who deny the untrue conspiracy theories in which he believes, and to prosecute people who say true things, such as that Russia supports Donald Trump when he runs for office. Russian trolls have been, understandably, very excited in their support of Patel.

A pattern is emerging: the federal government is to be used only as an instrument of revenge, which means that the law will be subverted as such. Laws that were passed to improve the lives of citizens, meanwhile, will simply not be implemented.

The United States of America exists not only because laws are passed, but because we can expect that these laws will be implemented by civil servants. We might find bureaucracy annoying; its absence, though, is deadly. We cannot take the pollution out of the air ourselves, or build the highways ourselves, or write our Social Security checks ourselves. Without a civil service, the law becomes mere paper, and all that works is the personal connection to the government, which the oligarchs will have, and which the rest of us will not. This is the engineered helplessness promised by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are to head a black hole named after a cryptocurrency. There are already oversight instruments in government. DOGE is something entirely different: an agency of destruction, run by people who believe that government should exist for the wealthy or not at all.

The understandable jokes are that DOGE just adds unelected bureaucrats when it is supposed to replace them, and that DOGE is itself a model of inefficiency, since it has two incompetent directors. But the humor distracts from the basic truth: DOGE is there to make the government fail, and then to divide the profitable bits among regime-proximate oligarchs.

DOGE = Den of Oligarchs Gets Everything.

In a modern democratic state, the armed forces are meant to preserve a healthy, long-lived people from external threats. This principal has been much abused in American practice. But never before Donald Trump have we had a president who has presented the purpose of the armed forces as the oppression of Americans. Trump says that Russia and China are less of a threat than “internal enemies.” In American tradition, members of the armed forces swear an oath to the Constitution. Trump has indicated that he would prefer “Hitler’s generals,” which means a personal oath to himself. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s proposed secretary of defense, defends war criminals and displays tattoos associated with white nationalism and Christian nationalism. He is a fundraiser and television personality, with a complicated sexual past and zero experience running an organization. Like Trump, he has no coherent account of how foreign powers might threaten America; if anything, he praises them for sharing his misogyny. His own obsessions with gender lead him to believe that American high officers should be politically purged — a proposition that America’s actual enemies would of course welcome. Hegseth makes perfect sense as the person who would direct American armed forces against American citizens.

In a world of hostile powers, an intelligence service is indispensable. Intelligence can be abused, and certainly has been abused. Yet it is necessary to consider military threats: consider the Biden administration’s correct call the Russia was about to invade Ukraine. It is also necessary to counter the attempts by foreign intelligence agencies, which are constant, to harm American society. This often involves disinformation. Tulsi Gabbard, insofar as she is known at all, is known as a spreader of Syrian and Russian disinformation. She visited Syria, where her remarks could only be understood as an endorsement of the atrocities of Assad. She suggested to burn victims that they had not suffered because of Assad and his ally Russia, which was in fact the case. Gabbard has no relevant experience. Were she to become director of national intelligence, as Trump proposes, we would lose the trust of our allies, and lose contact with much of what is happening in the world — just for starters. We would be vulnerable to all of those who wish to cause us harm. Unsurprisingly, Gabbard is regarded in Russia as “girlfriend,” “superwoman” and a “Putin’s agent.”

In the Soviet theory of regime change, one crucial aspect was control of the power ministries: those associated with defense, the police, and intelligence. Patel, Gabbard, and Hegseth are such shocking suggestions as custodians of American power and law that it is easy to overlook Kristi Noem as Trump’s proposed director of Homeland Security. Noem is regarded positively in Trump’s circles because of a publicity stunt in which she, as governor of South Dakota, effectively privatized her states’s National Guard by accepting a big private donation to send a few of its members to the border with Mexico. The border is, of course, a serious matter, Noem’s combination of spectacle, privatization, and incompetence is more than concerning.

Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States. How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective, Trump’s proposed appointments — Kennedy, Jr.; Bondi; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard; Noem — are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done. These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.

I do not defend the status quo. I have no doubt whatsoever that the Department of Defense and the Food and Drug Administration require reform. But such a reform, of these or other agencies, would have to be guided by people with knowledge and experience, who cared about their country, and who had a vision of improvement. That is simply not what is happening here. We are confronted instead with a group of people who, were they to hold the positions they have been assigned, could bring an end to the United States of America.

It is a mistake to think of these people as flawed. It is not they will do a bad job in their assigned posts. It is that they will do a good job using those assigned posts to destroy our country.

However and by whomever this was organized, the intention of these appointments is clear: to create American horror. Elected officials should see this for what it is. Senators, regardless of party, should understand that the United States Senate will not outlast the United States, insist on voting, and vote accordingly. The Supreme Court of the United States will likely be called upon. Although it is a faint hope, one must venture it anyway: that its justices will understand that the Constitution was not in fact written as the cover story for state destruction. The Supreme Court will also not outlast the United States.

And citizens, regardless of how they voted, need now to check their attitudes. This is no longer a post-electoral moment. It is a pre-catastrophic moment. Trump voters are caught in the notion that Trump must be doing the right thing if Harris voters are upset. But Harris voters are upset now because they love their country. And Harris voters will have to get past the idea that Trump voters should reap what they have sown. Yes, some of them did vote to burn it all down. But if it all burns down, we burn too. It is not easy to speak right now; but if some Republicans wish to, please listen

Both inside and outside Congress, there will have to be simple defiance, joined with a rhetoric of a better America. And, at moments at least, there will also have to be alliances among Americans who, though they differ on other matters, would like to see their country endure.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Health, Trump

North Carolina: Vouchers Are Funding Indoctrination in Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2024 //
6

Justin Parmentier, an NBCT-certified high school teacher in North Carolina, has been scrutinizing the nonpublic schools that receive voucher money from the state. he found that nearly 90% are religious schools where discrimination and indoctrination are commonplace.

Parmenter remembers when now-disgraced Lt. Governor Mark Robinson opened a search for public schools that indoctrinate and came up with nothing.

Public funds in NC support religious schools that openly and egregiously indoctrinate students. Not a peep from the culture warriors. It wasn’t indoctrination they objected to; it was public schools.

Parmenter wrote the following in March 2024, before Robinson was disgraced by the CNN report on his history of posting on pornography websites. To call Robinson a hypocrite would be an understatement:

With billions of dollars now on tap for North Carolina’s private schools, and 88.2% of those dollars going to religious schools, scrutiny is rising over exactly what our taxes are supporting.

Private schools are legally able to discriminate against children, and many of North Carolina’s Christian schools deny admissions to students based on religious beliefs, sexual orientation, or learning disabilities.

For example, Fayetteville Christian School, which pocketed nearly $2 million in voucher dollars this school year, expressly bans students who practice specific religions like Islam and Buddhism, and they also bar LGBTQ+ students–whom they brand “perverted”–from attending.

North Raleigh Christian Academy won’t accept children with IQs below 90 and will not serve students who require IEPs (a document which outlines how a school will provide support to children with disabilities).

If this public funding of widespread discriminatory school practices rubs you the wrong way, I have bad news for you.

It gets worse.

That harmful indoctrination Mark Robinson was howling about a couple years ago in his disingenuous attempt to generate political momentum?  Turns out it’s real.  It just isn’t happening in the traditional public schools Robinson was targeting.

The Daniel Christian Academy is a private school in Concord, NC.  This school has received public dollars through school vouchers every year since Republicans launched the controversial Opportunity Scholarship voucher program in 2014-15 for a grand total of $585,776.

Daniel Academy’s mission is to “raise the next generation of leaders who will transform the heart of our nation” by equipping students “to enter the Seven Mountains of Influence.”

The Seven Mountains of Influence (also referred to as the Seven Mountains of Dominion or the Seven Mountains Mandate) refers to seven areas of society:  religion, family, education, government, media, arts & entertainment, and business.  Dominionists who follow this doctrine believe that they are mandated by God to control all seven of society’s “mountains,” and that doing so will trigger the end times.

The Seven Mountains philosophy has been around since the 70s, but it came to prominence about ten years ago with the publication of Lance Wallnau’s book Invading Babylon:  The Seven Mountains Mandate.  Wallnau touts himself as a consultant who “inspires visions of tomorrow with the clarity of today—connecting ideas to action,” and his book teaches that dominionists must “understand [their] role in society” and “release God’s will in [their] sphere of influence.”

Wallnau does caution his followers that messaging about taking control over all seven areas of society on behalf of God might freak out non dominionists, saying in 2011 that “If you’re talking to a secular audience, you don’t talk about having dominion over them. This … language of takeover, it doesn’t actually help…”

So why should North Carolinians care that their tax dollars are subsidizing this sort of indoctrination of children through private school vouchers?

I posed that question to Frederick Clarkson, a research analyst who has studied the confluence of politics and religion for more than three decades and lately has been focusing on the violent underbelly of Christian nationalists who want to achieve Christian dominion of the United States at all costs.  Here’s what Clarkson said:

North Carolina taxpayers should be concerned that they are helping to underwrite an academy for training children to become  warriors against not only the rights of others, but against democracy and its institutions.  The idea of the Seven Mountain Mandate is for Christians of the right sort to take dominion — which is to say power and influence — over the most important sectors of society. It is theocratic in orientation and its vision is forever. 

This is not something that is about liberals and conservatives . Most Christians including most evangelicals, Catholics, and mainline Protestants are deemed not just insufficiently Christian, but may be viewed as infested with demons, and standing in the way of the advancement of the Kingdom of God on Earth. And they will need to be dealt with.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, North Carolina, Religion, Separation of church and state
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