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I Sound Off on the GOP Campaign to Destroy Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2025 //
11

Before the inauguration of Trump, The New York Review of Books invited me to write about his education agenda. I read three important documents in which his views and goal were spelled out: the education chapter in Project 2025; Agenda 47, Trump’s campaign document; and the website of the America First Policy Institute, the organization led by Linda McMahon, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education. The three documents overlap, of course. Trump intends to privatize education; he despises public schools. He wants to eliminate the Department of Education. He and his supporters are obsessed with “radical gender ideology,” and they blame public schools for the very existence of transgender students. The election of Trump, it was clear, would mean the end of civil rights protections for LGBT students and a determined effort to defund and destroy public schools.

I posted the article yesterday.

The NYRB invited me to participate in an interview.

This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review’s contributors; read past entries here and sign up for our e-mail newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.

In “‘Their Kind of Indoctrination,’” published on the NYR Online shortly before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Diane Ravitch writes about the troubling future of American public education. Referring to the president’s infamous remark from his first campaign—“I love the poorly educated”—Ravitch warns that his second term is likely to lead to “more of them to love.”

A historian of education, Ravitch worked on education policy in both George H. W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s administrations. She has spent her career analyzing the national and state policies that reshape public schools, like laws that implement high-stakes testing or that divert taxpayer money to charter schools. In addition to writing nearly two dozen books—including The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (1983), Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (2013), and, most recently, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools (2020)—Ravitch posts regularly about American education policy on her widely read blog. Her memoirs will be published later this year by Columbia University Press.

I reached out to Ravitch to discuss the current state of American education, the forces threatening it, and her vision for how public schools can better fulfill their democratic promise.

Regina Martinez: How did you start writing about education? Were you influenced by your time in public schools in the South? 

Diane Ravitch: I started writing about education when I was in college. The first paper I ever wrote was for a political science class in my freshman year at Wellesley in 1956. It was about the politics of the Houston public school system in the early 1950s, when I was a student there. Voters elected a new school board every two years, and control went back and forth between a group of far-right extremists, who saw Communists lurking everywhere, and moderates who just wanted to make sure that the schools were running well. At one point, books about Russia were removed from the high school library’s shelves. Under the moderates, we heard assembly speakers who spoke of racial and religious tolerance; under the Minute Women, the female wing of the John Birch Society, we were warned to beware of Communist influence. Also, while I was attending them, the schools were racially segregated.

In “Their Kind of Indoctrination,” you write, “One can only imagine the opprobrium that will be visited upon teachers who are not certified as patriots.” How do you imagine this will impact the teaching profession? What might it mean for teacher recruitment in the future?

The threat of political surveillance is chilling, as it would be in every profession. In many states, especially “red” states, teachers have to be careful about what they teach, what reading they assign, and how they handle topics related to race and gender. Trump recently issued an executive order stating that he would cut off the funding of schools that “indoctrinate” their students by teaching about “radical gender ideology” and racism. His effort to impose thought control is illegal but that hasn’t stopped him from trying. 

This sort of political censorship is happening in K–12 schools but also in higher education. The number of people choosing to prepare to be teachers plummeted in the wake of the Bush-Obama emphasis on standardized testing. The threat of political loyalty screening can only make matters worse.

One of President Trump’s recent executive orders reauthorized federal agents to detain children at schools. What actions if any can schools, families, and students take to resist the incursion of the security state into schools?

The determination of the Trump administration to raid schools is terrifying for children and for their teachers, whose job it is to protect their students. Imagine a child being arrested in his or her classroom. It is indeed frightening. Many districts have urged teachers to get legal advice from the district legal officers. At the very least, educators should demand to see a warrant. If ICE agents are armed, resistance may be futile. Elected leaders will have to develop contingency plans, if they have not done so already.

You worked on education policy under both President George H. W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. What, if anything, was different about your work between a Republican and a Democratic administration? How do you think the Department of Education—and federal education policy more generally—has changed since the early 1990s?

I served as assistant secretary for education research and improvement under President Bush. Then President Clinton appointed me to the national testing board, known as the National Assessment Governing Board. There was a continuity of policy from the first President Bush to Clinton, and then from Clinton to the second President Bush to President Obama.

The first President Bush wanted to reform American education through voluntary measures. He convened a meeting of the nation’s governors in 1989, and they agreed on a set of six goals for the year 2000. He thought that the goals could be reached by exhortation, at no cost. The goals were indeed aspirational (they hoped, for example, that American students would be first in the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000), but no one had a plan for how to reach them, nor was there any new funding. President Clinton got credit for drafting them, so he and Bush shared that commitment. He was willing to spend real money to help states improve their schools, and added two more goals (one about teacher training, another about parent participation). He also believed that the nation should have national standards and tests. None of the goals was reached by the year 2000, except for having 90 percent of students graduate from high school. But that goal was a matter of definition. If it meant that 90 percent should graduate high school in four years, we did not meet that goal. If you counted the students who graduated in five or even six years, we surpassed it.

Since you launched your education blog in 2012, it has become a popular forum for discussions about education and democracy. Looking back, are there any positions you’ve shared on the blog that you would reconsider or approach differently today? Are there positions you took or predictions you made that you’re particularly proud of?

I started blogging two years after publication of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Have Undermined Education. In that book, I renounced views that I had advocated for decades: competition between schools, relying on standardized testing as the measure of students, merit pay, and many other policies connected to accountability and standardization.

What I have learned in the past fifteen years has made me even more alarmed than I was then about the organized efforts to destroy public education. That book has a chapter about “The Billionaire Boys Club.” I focused on the venture philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. These billionaires used their philanthropy strategically to fund privately managed charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing, and a system that evaluates teachers by the test scores of their students and closes schools where students got low scores. I opposed all of these measures, which were endorsed by both the second Bush administration and the Obama administration. I demonstrated in that book and subsequent books that these strategies have been failures and are enormously demoralizing to teachers. They also turned schools into testing factories, crushing creative thinking and the joy of teaching and learning.

In the years since, I have learned that “the Billionaire Boys Club” is far larger than the three families that I mentioned. In my last book, Slaying Goliath, I tried to make a list of all the billionaires and the foundations that support charter schools and vouchers, and it was long indeed. Even now, I continue to come across billionaires and foundations that should be added to the list. What I suspected was that charter schools paved the way for vouchers by treating schooling as a consumer good, not a civic responsibility. What I did not realize was that the voucher movement is even more powerful than the charter movement. Its constituency is not just right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family, but Christian nationalists, white supremacists, extremist organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Legislative Executive Council, affluent parents who want the state to subsidize their private school tuition, and Catholic leaders who have always believed that the state should underwrite Catholic schools.

There has been a lot of discourse recently about declining rates of literacy due to AI, the pandemic, phones, or a host of other causes. How significant do you think this risk is? What might be done to reverse the trend? 

I too am concerned about declining rates of literacy, as well as declining interest in literature. In my field of study, I believe that standardized testing has been a culprit in shortening the attention span of children of all ages. Students are expected to read short snippets, then to answer questions about those limited passages. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the College Board sponsored college entrance examinations in which students were assigned works of literature in advance, then asked to write about what they had read. Teachers and professors read their essays and graded them. Now the exam answers may be read by a machine or by a person hired off Craigslist to read swiftly, giving only a minute or two to each written answer.

In my dreams, I would change expectations and ask high school teachers to assign books that are worth reading, then require students to write three or four pages about why they did or did not like the book.

While I welcome the expansion of the canon to include works by women and by people of color, I would also welcome a revival of interest in the great works that were once considered the classics of Western literature. In too many high schools, the classics have not just been marginalized, they have been ousted. That is as grave an error as ignoring the works of those who are not white men.

Given the increasing momentum behind the privatization of education, how do you envision the next generation advancing public school advocacy? What do you anticipate will be their greatest challenge?

Public schools are one of the most important democratic institutions of our society. In many states, they enroll 90 percent of all students. They have always enabled children and adolescents to learn together with others who come from backgrounds different from their own. There is a major movement today, funded by right-wing billionaires, to destroy public schools and to replace them with religious schools, private schools, and homeschooling. It is called “school choice,” but the schools choose, not the students or families. Private schools are allowed to discriminate on any grounds and are not bound by federal laws that prohibit discrimination and that protect those with disabilities. Racial and religious segregation will increase. More students will attend schools whose purpose is indoctrination, not building a democratic society.

The greatest challenge facing those who believe in the value of public education is that the money behind privatization is enormous, and it is spent strategically to win political allies. To my knowledge, there is no billionaire funder for public education as there are for privatization. In the world of public education advocacy, there are no equivalents to the Koch money, the DeVos money, the Walton money, the Texas evangelical billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, the Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass. I have been president of an organization called the Network for Public Education since 2013, and our annual budget is a pittance compared to the privatizers’ organizations. One pro–school choice organization spent as much on their annual dinner party as our entire annual budget.

The other side of this struggle to save public education is the reality that important Democrats still believe that school choice helps poor Black and Hispanic kids, despite overwhelming evidence that this claim is not true and is in fact part of the hustle. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Cory Booker, Governor Jared Polis, and Senator Michael Bennett are a few of the Democrats who have dampened the interest of their party in fighting for public schools.

What makes me hopeful is that the reality is becoming clearer with every passing day: those who are concerned for the common good must support public schools, not undertake to pay the tuition of every student who chooses not to attend public schools. Privatization benefits some, not all, not even most. Public money should pay for public schools. Private money should pay for private schools.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Equity, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, History, Lies, Obama, Philanthropy, Privatization, Racism, Republicans, School Choice, Segregation, Teachers, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Vouchers

Timothy Snyder: Trump is a “Weak Strongman”

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2025 //
9

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University, who has written many books about European history. His book “On Tyranny” was a bestseller. He writes a blog at Substack called “Thinking About…”

Snyder writes:

Americans have a certain idea of freedom. We are fine just the way we are and the only problem are the barriers in the outside world. In this mental world, Musk’s hollowing out of the government can seem justified. Trump’s betrayal of friends and destruction of alliances can seem convenient. We will be great again by being all alone, with no one to trouble us.

This fantasy leads right to tragedy. It sets the stage for the weak strongman.

Trump is a strongman in the sense that he makes others weak. He is strong in a relative sense; as Musk destroys institutions, what remains is Trump’s presence. But other sorts of power meaning vanish, as Musk takes apart the departments of the American government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. And then the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world.

The strongman is weak because no one beyond the United States has anything to want (or fear) from the self-immolation. And weak because Trump submits to foreign aggression, putting waning American power behind Russia.

The weak strongman undermines the rules, but cannot replace them with anything else. He creates the image of power by his rhetorical imperialism: America will control Greenland, Panama, Mexico, Canada, Gaza, etc. From there, it is hard to say that others are wrong when they invade other countries. The weak strongman is left endorsing other people’s invasions, as with Russia and Ukraine. He lacks the power to resist them. And he lacks the power to coerce them. And, ironically, he lacks the power to carry out wars himself. He lacks the patience, and he lacks the instruments.

Many Americans fear Trump, and so imagine that others must. No one beyond America fears Trump as such. He can generate fear only in his capacity as neighborhood arsonist, as someone who destroys what others have created.

America’s friends are afraid not of him but of what we all have to lose. America’s enemies are not frightened when Trump kicks over the lantern and sets things on fire. Quite the contrary: he is doing exactly what they want.

Trump plays a strongman on television, and he is a talented performer. But the strength consists solely of the submissiveness of his audience. His performance arouses a dream of passivity: Trump will fix it, Trump will get rid of our problems, and then we will be free. And of course that kind of Nosferatu charisma is a kind of strength, but not one that can be brought to bear to solve any problems, and not one that matters in the world at large. Or rather: it matters only negatively. As soon as Trump meets someone with a better dictator act, like Putin, he submits. But he can only enable Putin. He can’t really even imitate him.

Trump’s supporters might think that we don’t need friendships because the United States can, if necessary, intimidate its enemies without help.

This has already been proven wrong. Trump can make things worse for Canada and Mexico, in the sense that a sobbing boy taking his ball home makes things worse. But he cannot make them back down. Trump has not intimidated Russia. He has been intimidated by Russia.

The cruelty that makes Trump a strongman at home arose from the destruction of norms of civil behavior and democratic practice. Unlike any other American politician before him, Trump has scorned the law and used hate speech to deter political opponents here. For years he has used his tweets to inspire stochastic violence. This intimidates some Americans. It has, for example, led to a kind of self-purge of the Republican Party, opening the way for Trump, or in fact for Musk, to rule with the help of tamed and therefore predictable cadres. The effect of this is that people who have submitted to Trump see him as a strongman. But what they are experiencing is in fact their own weakness. And their own weakness cannot magically become strength in the wider world. Quite the contrary.

Stochastic violence cannot be applied to foreign leaders. Trump has said that he can stop the war in Ukraine. He wrote a tweet directed at Vladimir Putin; but the capital letters and exclamation points did not change the emotional state of the Russian leader, let alone Russian policy. And no one in Irkutsk is going to threaten or hurt Putin because Donald Trump wrote something on the internet. Something that works in the United States is not relevant abroad. In fact, the tweet was a sign of weakness, since it was not followed by any policy. Putin quite rightly saw it as such.

Trump and his cabinet now repeat Putin’s talking points about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
One could generously interpret Trump’s tweet to Putin threatening sanctions and such as an act of policy. I saw conservatives do that, and I would have been delighted had they been right. But I fear that this was just the characteristic American mistake of imagining that, because Americans react submissively to Trump’s words, others must as well. For words to matter, there has to be policy, or at least the possibility that one might be formulated. And for there to be policy, there have to be institutions staffed with competent people. And Trump’s main action so far, or really Musk’s action so far, has been to fire exactly the people who would be competent to design and implement policy. Many of the people who knew anything about Ukraine and Russia are gone from the federal government.

And now Trump is trying to make concessions to Russia regarding issues directly related to Ukrainian sovereignty on his own, without Ukraine, and indeed without any allies. He is showing weakness on a level unprecedented in modern US history. His position is so weak that it is unlikely to convince anyone. Trump is a sheep in wolf’s clothing. The wolves can tell the difference. Russians will naturally think that they can get still more.

Ukrainians, for that matter, have little incentive to give up their country. Trump can threaten them with cutting US arms, because stopping things is the only power he has. But Ukrainians must now expect that he would do that anyway, given his general subservience to Putin. If the US does stop support for Ukraine, it no longer has influence in how Ukraine conducts the war. I have the feeling that no one in the Trump administration has thought of that.

It is quite clear how American power could be used to bring the war to an end: make Russia weaker, and Ukraine stronger. Putin will end the war when it seems that the future is threatening rather than welcoming. And Ukraine has no choice but to fight so long as Russia invades. This is all incredibly simple. But it looks like Trump is acting precisely as is necessary to prolong the war and make it worse.

Thus far he and Hegseth have simply gone public with their agreement with elements of Russia’s position. Since this is their opening gambit, Russia has every incentive to keep fighting and to see if they can get more. The way things are going, Trump will be responsible for the continuing and escalation of the bloodshed, quite possibly into a European or open global conflict. He won’t get any prizes for creating the conditions for a third world war.

It’s an obvious point, but it has to be made clearly: no one in Moscow thinks that Trump is strong. He is doing exactly what Russia would want: he is repeating Russian talking points, he is acting essentially as a Russian diplomat, and he is destroying the instruments of American power, from institutions through reputation. No American president can shift an international power position without policy instruments. And these depend on functioning institutions and competent civil servants. In theory, the United States could indeed change the power position by decisively helping Ukraine and decisively weakening Russia. But that theory only becomes practice through policy. And it is not hard to see that Musk-Trump cannot make policy.

Even should he wish to, Trump can not credibly threaten Russia and other rivals while Musk disassembles the federal government. Intimidation in foreign affairs depends upon the realistic prospect of a policy, and policy depends, precisely, on a functioning state.

Let us take one policy instrument that Trump mentioned in his tweet about Putin: sanctions. Under Biden, we had too few people in the Department of the Treasury working on sanctions. That is one reason they have not worked as well against Russia as one might have hoped. To make sanctions work, we would need more people on the job, not fewer. And of course we would also need foreign powers to believe that Treasury was not just an American billionaire’s plaything. And that will be hard, because their intelligence agencies read the newspapers.

The United States cannot deal with adversaries without qualified civil servants in the departments of government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. All of these are being gutted and/or run by people who lack anything vaguely resembling competence.

Americans can choose to ignore this, or to interpret it only in our own domestic political terms. But it is obvious to anyone with any distance on the situation that the destruction of the institutions of power means weakness. And it creates a very simple incentive structure. The Russians were hoping that Trump would return to power precisely because they believe that he weakens the United States. Now, as they watch him (or Musk) disassemble the CIA and FBI, and appoint Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, they can only think that time is on their side.

The Russians might or might not, as it pleases them, entertain Trump’s idea of ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. Even if they accept the ceasefire it will be to prepare for the next invasion, in the full confidence that a United States neutered by Musk-Trump will not be able to react, that the Europeans will be distracted, and that the Ukrainians will find it harder to mobilize a second time.

Trump is not only destroying things, he is being used as an instrument to destroy things: in this case, used by Russia to destroy a successful wartime coalition that contained the Russian invasion and prevented a larger war.

What is true for Russia also holds for China. The weak strongman helps Beijing. Time was not really on China’s side, not before Trump. There was no reason to think that China would surpass the United States economically, and therefore politically and militarily. That had been the great fear for decades, but by the time of the Biden administration the trend lines were no longer so clear, or indeed had reversed. But now that Trump (or rather Musk) has set a course for the self-destruction of American state power, Beijing can simply take what it would once have had to struggle to gain, or would have had to resign from taking.

A weak strongman brings only losses without gains. And so the descent begins. Destroying norms and institutions at home only makes Trump (or rather Musk) strong in the sense of making everyone else weak. In our growing weakness, we might be all tempted by the idea that our strong man at least makes us a titan among nations.

But the opposite is true. The world cannot be dismissed by the weak strongman. As a strongman, he destroys the norms, laws, and alliances that held back war. As a weakling, he invites it.

Categories Bigotry, Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Embraces Russia

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2025 //
17

The speed with which Trump embraced the Russian view of its war on Ukraine is head-spinning. Trump said that Ukraine started the war, even though the world saw that Russia invaded Ukraine and that Russia has destroyed Ukrainian hospitals, schools, apartment houses, cultural sites, its power grid, and other non-military targets for three years. Even now, American and Russian delegations are meeting in Saudi Arabia to discuss how the war should end. Neither Ukraine nor Europe was invited.

Meanwhile, Trump lobs insults at Zelensky, calling him “grossly incompetent” and insisting that Ukraine must hold an election before peace can be reached. Zelensky was elected in 2019 with 73% of the vote while Putin had another fraudulent “election” after disposing of any other candidates. Yet today, Trump lashed out at Zelensky and called him “a dictator without elections.” Trump’s insults mirrored Russian propaganda.

After three years of international isolation, Putin has been rehabilitated by Trump and treated as the leader of a major power.

What has become clear is that Trump is hostile to our European allies and is excited to move the United States into an alliance with Putin, with Putin as the senior partner. It’s a shocking turn of events.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote about recent events:

The sixty-first Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for talking about international security policy, took place from February 14 to February 16 this year. Begun in 1963, it was designed to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.

At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.

Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation’s people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.

Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.

After the rise and fall of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Germany banned Nazi propaganda and set limits on hate speech, banning attacks on people based on racial, national, religious, or ethnic background, as these forms of speech are central to fascism and similar ideologies. That hampers the ability of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to recruit before upcoming elections on February 23.

After calling for Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” Vance threw his weight behind AfD. He broke protocol to refuse a meeting with current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead broke a taboo in German politics by meeting with the leader of AfD Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”

Bill Kristol of The Bulwark posted: “It’s heartening that today the leaders of the two major parties in Germany are unequivocally anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. It’s horrifying that today the president and vice-president of the United States of America are not.” German defense minister Boris Pistorius called Vance’s speech “unacceptable,” and on Saturday, Scholz said: “Never again fascism, never again, racism, never again aggressive war…. [T]oday’s democracies in Germany and Europe are founded on the historic awareness and realization that democracies can be destroyed by radical anti-democrats.”

Vance and the Trump administration have the support of billionaire Elon Musk in their attempt to shift the globe toward the rejection of democracy in favor of far-right authoritarianism. David Ingram and Bruna Horvath of NBC News reported today that Musk has “encouraged right-wing political movements, policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash immigration and curtail regulation of business.”

Musk, who cast apparent Nazi salutes before crowds on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, wrote an op-ed in favor of AfD and recently spoke by video at an AfD rally, calling it “the best hope for Germany.” In addition to his support for Germany’s AfD, Ingram and Horvath identified Musk’s support for far-right movements in Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and other countries. Last month, before Trump took office, French president Emmanuel Macron accused Musk of backing a global reactionary movement and of intervening directly in elections, including Germany’s.

Musk’s involvement in international politics appears to have coincided with his purchase of Twitter in 2022. And indeed, social media has been key to the project of undermining democracy. Russian operatives are now pushing the rise of the far-right in Europe through social media as they did in the United States. Russian president Vladimir Putin has long sought to weaken the democratic alliances of the United States and Europe to enable Russia to take at least parts of Ukraine and possibly other neighboring countries without the formidable resistance that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would present.

Russian state television praised Vance’s speech. One headline read: “Humiliated Europe out for the count. Its American master flogged its old vassals.” Russian pundits recognized that Vance’s turn away from Europe meant a victory for Russia.

Vance’s speech came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told other countries’ defense ministers on Wednesday, February 12, that he wanted to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Since 1949, the United States has stood firmly behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that said any attack on one of the signatories to that agreement would be an attack on all. Now, it appears, the U.S. is backing away.

In that speech, Hegseth seemed to move the U.S. toward the ideology of Russian president Vladimir Putin that larger countries can scoop up their smaller neighbors. He echoed Putin’s demands for ending its war against Ukraine, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus conceding to Russia two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He also said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders.

On Wednesday, Trump spoke to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and offered U.S. support for Ukraine in exchange for half the country’s mineral resources, although it was unclear if the deal the U.S. offered meant future support or only payment for past support. The offer did not, apparently, contain guarantees for future support, and Zelensky rejected it.

On Saturday, while the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators have not been invited either. While the talks are being billed as “early-stage,” the United States is sending Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security advisor Michael Waltz, suggesting haste.

After Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. It said the call had focused on “removing unilateral barriers inherited from the previous U.S. administration, aiming to restore mutually beneficial trade, economic, and investment cooperation.” On Friday, Russia’s central bank warned that the economy is faltering, while Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”

But the U.S. is not speaking with one voice. Republican leaders who support Ukraine are trying to smooth over Trump’s apparent coziness with Russia. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) called out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea. Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Carlson, a former Fox News Channel personality, has expressed admiration for Orbán and Putin.

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”

Today on Face the Nation, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said: “There is absolutely no way that Donald Trump will be seen—he will not let himself go down in history as having sold out to Putin. He will not let that happen.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark said: “I guess Republicans think this is how they manipulate Trump into doing the right thing. But Trump’s been selling out to Putin since Helsinki when he publicly sided with Putin over America’s intelligence community. And he hasn’t stopped selling out since. And the [Republican Party] lets him.”

European leaders reported being blindsided by Trump’s announcement. German leader Scholz on Friday asked Germany’s parliament to declare a state of emergency to support Ukraine, and on Sunday, European leaders met for an impromptu breakfast to discuss European security and Ukraine. Macron invited leaders to Paris on Monday to continue discussions. Representatives of Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark will attend, as will the secretary-general of NATO and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission.

After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”

Proving his point, on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”

Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”

He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Trump

Trump Snubs Europe, Insults Ukraine, Joins Forces with Putin

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2025 //
13

Donald Trump, for reasons of his own, has decided to join in alliance with Vladimir Putin. He has indicated that the U.S. may leave NATO, which has kept the peace in Europe since the end of World War II. There is a chance that NATO might expel the U.S. due to Trump’s partnership with Putin.

Since 1945, this is the most consequential development in U.S. relations with Europe.

Trump has a deferential relationship with Putin. He made certain to install a Putin-friendly person as director of all national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Trump has busied himself installing stooges at every important agency: Kash Patel at the FBI; Pete Hegseth at the Defense Department; Pam Bondi at the Justice Department; John Ratcliffe at the CIA. None of these people will complain or resign if Trump declares that the U.S. is leaving NATO and forging a partnership with Russia.

The New York Times reported today:

President Emmanuel Macron of France called a second emergency meeting of European allies on Wednesday seeking to recalibrate relations with the United States as President Trump upends international politics by rapidly changing American alliances.

Mr. Macron had already assembled a dozen European leaders in Paris on Monday after Mr. Trump and his new team angered and confused America’s traditional allies by suggesting that the United States would rapidly retreat from its security role in Europe and planned to proceed with peace talks with Russia — without Europe or Ukraine at the table.

Mr. Trump’s remarks late on Tuesday, when he sided fully with Russia’s narrative blaming Ukraine for the war, have now fortified the impression that the United States is prepared to abandon its role as a European ally and switch sides to embrace President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

It was a complete reversal of historic alliances that left many in Europe stunned and fearful.

“What’s happening is very bad. It’s a reversal of the state of the world since 1945,” Jean- Yves Le Drian, a former French foreign minister, said on French radio Wednesday morning.

“It’s our security he’s putting at risk,” he said, referring to President Trump. “We must wake up.”

Fear that Mr. Trump is ready to abandon Ukraine and has accepted Russian talking points has been particularly acute in Eastern and Central Europe, where memories are long and bitter of the West’s efforts to appease Hitler in Munich in 1938 and its assent to Stalin’s demands at the Yalta Conference in 1945 for a Europe cleaved in two.

“Even Poland’s betrayal in Yalta lasted longer than Ukraine’s betrayal in Riyadh,” Jaroslaw Walesa, a Polish lawmaker and the son of Poland’s anti-Communist Solidarity trade union leader, Lech Walesa, said Wednesday on social media, referring to the American-Russian talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.

Rasa Jukneviciene, a former Lithuania defense minister who is now a member of the European Parliament, said it was “hard to understand” the sudden shifts in policy by the United States, the once reliable pillar of Europe’s security for decades. She said she was “wondering what historians will write about the events of this time, say, in five decades.”

“It is already clear that the Euro-Atlantic connection will not be the same as it used to be,” she said. “The stage when European security after World War II was basically guaranteed only by the U.S.A. is over….”

Meanwhile Secretary of State Marco Rubio was developing a new relationship with Russia at a bilateral meeting in Saudi Arabia, to which neither Ukraine nor NATO nations were invited.

Mr. Rubio said they hammered out a three-part plan, which would start by re-establishing bilateral relations between Washington and Moscow and end by exploring new partnerships — geopolitical and business — between Russia and the United States, while addressing the parameters of an end of the war with Ukraine in between.

Mr. Rubio said he would consult with Ukraine, the American “partners in Europe and others,” but in the end, “ultimately, the Russian side will be indispensable to this effort.”

Afterward, speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, President Trump blamed Ukraine for starting the war, despite the fact that Russia had invaded.

“You could have made a deal,” he said, denigrating President Zelensky’s popularity and indicating he didn’t deserve a seat at the negotiating table.

“Well, they’ve had a seat for three years. And a long time before that,” Mr. Trump said. “This could have been settled very easily. Just a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without, I think, without the loss of much land, very little land. Without the loss of any lives. And without the loss of cities that are just laying on their sides.”

Mr. Trump’s comments blaming Ukraine for the war stirred outrage in the Czech Republic, whose centrist government has been a stalwart supporter of Ukraine. “I’m afraid we’ve never been this close to Orwell’s ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength’ before,” Interior Minister Vit Rakusan said on social media.

Mr. Le Drian called it a monstrous reversal of world alliances, as well as an “inversion of the truth.”

“The victim becomes the attacker,” he said, adding that the United States seemed to be retreating to a 19th-century view of itself, and telling an aggressive, expansionist Russia to do what it wants in Europe. “It’s the law of the strongest,” he said, adding “tomorrow, it could be Moldavia and after tomorrow, it could be Estonia because Putin won’t stop.”

Categories Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Lies, Trump

Washington Post Kills Ad Calling on Trump to Fire Musk

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2025 //
7

Julie Creswell of The New York Times reported that The Washington Post killed an ad calling on Trump to fire his best buddy Elon Musk. The story was first reported in The Hill. Who could have given such an order?

Creswell writes:

An advertisement that was set to run in some editions of The Washington Post on Tuesday calling for Elon Musk to be fired from his role in government was abruptly canceled, according to one of the advocacy groups that had ordered the ad.

Common Cause said it was told by the newspaper on Friday that the ad was being pulled. The full-page ad, known as a wraparound, would have covered the front and back pages of editions delivered to the White House, the Pentagon and Congress, and was planned in collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund.

A separate, full-page ad with the same themes would have been allowed to run inside the newspaper, but the two groups chose to cancel the internal ad as well. Both ads would have cost the groups $115,000.

“We asked why they wouldn’t run the wrap when we clearly met the guidelines if they were allowing the internal ad,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, the president and chief executive of Common Cause. “They said they were not at liberty to give us a reason.”

News of The Washington Post canceling the ad was earlier reported by The Hill.

Although it is unclear who made the decision to pull the ad or why, the move comes amid growing concern about the changing mission of the Washington Post newsroom under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. The newspaper’s decision last fall to end its longstanding tradition of presidential endorsements and Mr. Bezos’ front-row seat at Mr. Trump’s inauguration have led some to wonder whether the news organization has been accommodating a Trump administration.

Last month, more than 400 employees sent a letter to Mr. Bezos requesting a meeting to discuss leadership decisions that they said “led readers to question the integrity of this institution.”

Mrs. Kase Solomón said that all the content for the ad — art and text — had been sent to The Post’s advertisement department last Tuesday and that “no alarm bells were rung” by anyone from the newspaper at that time. She said she did not know who inside the organization made the decision to pull the wrap.

The ad featured an image of Mr. Musk laughing over a picture of the White House with text that reads: “Who’s Running This Country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?” The ad called for readers to contact their senators and tell them it’s time for Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Musk…

Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man who controls six companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X, has been given far-reaching power by the president, who has allowed Mr. Musk to dismantle federal agencies and freeze funding for various grants and programs.

Margaret Huang, president and chief executive of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the disappearance of critical programs and grants would have a direct and negative effect mostly on lower-income individuals and people of color.

Categories Billionaires, Censorship, Corruption, Democracy, Ethics, Failure, Media, Musk, Elon, Trump

Sara Stevenson: Fully Fund Texas Public Schools Instead of Handouts for the Wealthiest

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2025 //
5

Sara Stevenson is a retired school librarian and Catholic school English teacher. She is a fearless advocate for public schools. Her article was published in The Austin American-Statesman. At this very time, the Texas Legislature is debating voucher legislation. It has already passed the State Senate. It is now being considered in the House.

She writes:

Many years ago at a school financing conference, I approached an East Texas House member from a rural district. I asked him, “Do y’all even have private schools for vouchers in your district?” He answered, “Hell, no. Private school vouchers are a tax break for families that already send their kids to private schools.” I thanked him for clearing that up.

Now most of those rural House Republicans opposing private school vouchers are gone. Jeffrey Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire investor in TikTok, gave Governor Greg Abbott $10 million to primary them out of office.

Texas has been trying to pass a school voucher or (ESA: Educational Savings Account) bill since 1995, but the bills keep failing session after session. In their earlier forms, these bills called for ESAs (using public tax dollars to pay for private school tuition) as a way to help poor children or those with disabilities trapped in Texas’s “failing public schools.”

Sidenote: If Texas schools are failing, the Republican party is responsible since it has dominated the Legislature for more than two decades and has controlled the governor’s office since 1994.

But over time, the proposed bills kept demanding more, not only in the amount of tuition money offered, but in the expanding pool of students qualified to receive them.

With this year’s version, Senate Bill 2, which passed the Senate, the GOP is saying the quiet part out loud. No longer are the ESAs solely for the families who can’t afford private school tuition or those with disabilities; now a family of four, making as much as $161,000 a year, five times the federal poverty level, can still receive up to $10,000 toward private school tuition or $11,500 for students with disabilities.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick then reassures us that 80% of the vouchers will go to special needs or “low-income” children. Since eligibility is universal, 20% will go to families making more than $161,000 per year.

I remember in 1976 when Ronald Reagan talked about people who abused the welfare system by getting government handouts they didn’t need. He called them “welfare queens.” In those days the GOP praised the working poor for their dignity in refusing a government handout.

Fast forward to 2025. Now families making over $161,000 per year are entitled to your tax dollars to send their children to private schools with little to no accountability. In fact, Sen. José Menendez’s Amendment 36, requiring the state to collect data to determine if the program is even successful, failed.

In earlier iterations, the student had to be enrolled in a failing public school before receiving a voucher. Now children already enrolled in private schools are eligible. Promoters argue this is only fair because private school families pay thousands each year in property taxes to schools their children don’t attend. Well, if they deserve a taxpayer refund, what about all the Texas property taxpayers, including seniors, who have NO children currently attending Texas schools?

No, because contributing to public education is a common good; an educated citizenry benefits all Texans and the Texas economy.

And speaking of children with disabilities, this bill clearly states that these students receiving vouchers must waive any rights for accommodations guaranteed by IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act).

Although SB 2 boosters contend the bill promotes school choice for parents, the bill really means “schools’ choice” for private schools. While public schools must accept every child, private schools, including those receiving vouchers, are free to turn away or expel any child for any reason. For instance, they can continue to prefer legacies and the siblings of current students.

SB 2 earmarks $1 billion for this program in order to give vouchers to just 100,000 students. In contrast, 5.4 million Texas students currently attend public school, 10% of all U.S. school children.

Let’s first pass Senate Bill 1, the budget bill, and include increasing the basic student allotment to fully fund our public schools. Since Texas ranks 44th among the states in per pupil spending, let’s first invest in the school system we already have rather than spend a billion dollars to fund another one.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Hoax, Religion, Separation of church and state, Shame, Texas

Karen Attiah: Call the Attack on DEI What It Is: A Rollback of Racial Integration

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2025 //
25

Karen Attiah is Global Opinions Editor of The Washington Post and a columnist. She says in this column exactly what I have been thinking. The attack on DEI is intended to restore the days when women, Blacks, Latinos, and people with disabilities had little or no chance to rise in their field.

It’s ironic to hear Trump talk about the importance of merit when he has stocked his cabinet mostly with people who lack experience, knowledge, wisdom, or any genuine qualification for the position. His cabinet was not chosen based on merit. In what world would Pete Hegseth–no administrative experience, serial philander with an alcohol problem–be considered qualified to be Secretary of Defense? Or RFK Jr. qualified to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, having spent years fighting vaccines and having zero medical expertise? Or Tulsi Gabbard, Putin apologist, qualified to be Director of National Intelligence?

Attiah writes:

Across the United States, in government agencies and private corporations, leaders are scrambling to eliminate DEI programs. President Donald Trump is not only destroying any trace of diversity work within the government: He has ordered a review of federal contracts to identify any companies, nonprofits and foundations that do business with the government and keep their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he has warned that they could be the target of investigations.

Let’s call this what it really is: resegregation.
I don’t mean resegregation in the sense of separate water fountains. I mean it in the sense that a Black woman would never even be considered for a federal job or a management position at a big company — the way it was in, say, the 1960s. It is not “inclusion” the Republicans want to get rid of, it’s integration.

If you think I’m exaggerating, just look at a post made by Darren Beattie, who was just named an acting undersecretary of state: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” he wrote on X — not 10 years ago but in October.

Trump’s GOP is also threatening private companies that are trying to level the playing fields for Black people, women and other groups. After Costco’s shareholders voted to keep its diversity programs in place, 19 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to Costco asking it to explain why it was maintaining a policy of “unlawful discrimination.”

A number of other corporations have begun their cowardly capitulations. In a memo, Kiera Fernandez, chief equity officer for Target, said the company would be ending its diversity, equity and inclusion goals “in step with the evolving external landscape.” Amazon, Meta and Walmart have also announced rollbacks.

For anyone wondering why “inclusion” is still needed: Since the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in 2023, first-year Black enrollment at top universities has dropped by 17 percent. That’s the sharpest drop of any major racial group. (For comparison, White enrollment has fallen by 5 percent.)

Or look at the business world: Black people represent 13.7 percent of the population but Black-owned businesses generally get less than 2 percent of venture capital funding. Despite a smattering of promises from venture capital companies to do better after the murder of George Floyd, funding to Black companies dropped from $4.9 billion in 2021 to $705 million in 2023 — an astonishing 86 percent drop. Sounds like a segregated market to me.

These facts, taken together, point to the removal of Black people from academic, corporate and government spaces: resegregation.
People are vowing to push back with their wallets — to shop at Costco and boycott Target, for example. But I believe the fight starts with language. Journalists have a role and an obligation to be precise in naming what we are facing.

Frankly, I wish the media would stop using “DEI” and “diversity hiring” altogether. Any official, including the president, who chooses to blame everything from plane crashes to wildfires on non-White, non-male people should be asked whether they believe that desegregation is to blame. Whether they believe resegregation is the answer. We need to bring back the language that describes what is actually happening.

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do.”
Black people have spent nearly 70 years “proving” ourselves. And in a flash, with a new administration, the gains of those decades are being washed away.

While Attiah focuses on the expansion of opportunity for Black people, the biggest beneficiaries of DEI policies–that is, efforts to diversify student bodies, the workforce, and corporate leadership–have been white women.

Thanks to DEI, white women now serve on corporate boards, as corporate leaders, and in positions that would have been closed to them in the past.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Economy, Ethics, Gender, Race, Trump

A Tribute to Two Black Pioneers in Brooklyn

By dianeravitch
February 16, 2025 //
2

It’s Black History Month. Ignore the fact that this annual tribute to the achievements and culture of African-Americans has been stripped of recognition by the federal government since the inauguration of the worst President in our history. Trump thinks that the nation was greatest when it was ruled by straight white men, and everyone else was submissive. I don’t work for him, so here is a tribute to two pioneering Black women. It was posted by CBS News, which is also not covered by Trump’s racist war on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

NEW YORK –  A peaceful playground in Williamsburg bears the name of Sarah J. S. Tompkins Garnet. Two miles away in DUMBO is a park named after Susan Smith McKinney Steward. These are not the only places that bear their names — a school in Fort Greene and another in Prospect Heights are also named after them. 

Dr. McKinney Steward specialized in childhood disease, co-founded a hospital and, later in life, ventured out West with her second husband, Theophilus Gould Steward, a U.S. Army Buffalo Soldier of the first all-Black Army regiment. 

Her great-granddaughter is the late actress Ellen Holly, America’s first Black soap opera star who died in 2023. 

“Its very special when someone recognizes your work,” Holly said in a 2004 interview recognizing her contribution to the history of TV.

Both sisters were also involved in the Women’s Suffrage movement and helped create the Equal Suffrage League, which worked to abolish race and gender discrimination in the late 1880s.

“Once abolition was achieved, a lot of those allies kind of went away. And you had women standing there asking, ‘well, what about us? ‘So women like Sarah and Susan took it upon themselves to take up the mantle for Women’s Suffrage,” Robbins explains.

Among the idyllic hills of Brooklyn’s historic Green-wood Cemetery are two graves, steps away from each other — the resting places of both sisters who desired to educate and heal their community. 

Categories Character, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Gender, Race

Trump Is Destroying Our Country, Putin Benefits

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2025 //
8

I am posting a large excerpt from Olga Lautman’s Tyranny Tracker. Christine Langhoff shares this link with us. I urge you to subscribe. I have given up trying to keep track of Trump’s destructive orders, but Olga Lautman has not. She is a patriot. Trump is not. He is Putin’s puppet. Hillary warned us.

Olga Lautman posted yesterday:

📆 Trump Tyranny Tracker: Feb 14

Welcome to today’s Trump Tyranny Tracker, where I’m breaking down the key news from the day alongside ongoing developments as Trump and his regime move swiftly to consolidate power, undermine democracy, and dismantle civil rights and freedoms.

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone!!

🔥 In Corruption News

Musk’s Treasury Appointee Retains CEO Role, Raising Conflict Concerns

What Happened: Elon Musk ally Tom Krause, newly appointed to oversee U.S. government payments, is still CEO of Cloud Software Group, a private tech company. Treasury’s ethics office approved the arrangement, which is a massive conflict of interest. 

Why It Matters: A sitting CEO running federal payment operations raises ethical and security concerns over potential financial manipulation, insider deals, and corporate favoritism. With Treasury’s $5.45 trillion in annual transactions, watchdogs warn of unprecedented conflicts as Musk’s allies tighten their grip on government finances.

Source: WIRED

Trump DOJ Guts Public Corruption Investigations

What Happened: Trump has dismantled federal efforts to fight public corruption, pausing investigations into corporate bribery, weakening the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and considering eliminating the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section. Trump also fired inspectors general across multiple agencies. The move follows the DOJ’s controversial dismissal of charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams, sparking mass resignations among prosecutors.

Why It Matters: The Justice Department is shielding Trump’s allies while curbing corruption investigations, signaling an unprecedented shift in enforcement priorities. The DOJ’s politicization raises concerns about legal accountability under Trump’s regime.

Source: CNN

Kash Patel’s Undisclosed LLCs Raise FBI Nomination Concerns

What Happened: Trump’s FBI director nominee, Kash Patel, failed to disclose multiple LLCs tied to a $1.8 million Virginia land deal in his Senate financial disclosures. His filings contradict each other on the land’s value, and he delayed submitting records until after his Senate hearing, avoiding scrutiny.

Why It Matters: Patel’s lack of transparency and hidden financial dealings—including ties to Kremlin-linked payments—raise serious ethical concerns for a potential FBI director. His pattern of secrecy and conflicts of interest fuels fears about his ability to lead an impartial agency.

Source: Mother Jones

🛡️ In Power Consolidation News

Mass Layoffs Spark Chaos as Trump Purges Federal Workforce

What Happened: Trump and Elon ordered mass layoffs of probationary federal employees, impacting thousands. Over 1,000 VA workers, including cancer and opioid researchers, were fired. The CDC lost 1,300 employees, cutting 10% of its workforce, while the Education Department, USDA, and DOE also saw deep cuts. Many were terminated without warning, including some who had already accepted buyouts.

Why It Matters: This politically driven purge weakens veterans’ services, public health, and environmental protections, prioritizing loyalty over competence. The purge will cripple government operations and vital social services.

Source: Associated Press

IRS Prepares for Mass Layoffs Amid Tax Season

What Happened: The IRS is set to fire thousands of workers, including many probationary employees, just as tax season reaches its peak. The move follows Trump and Elon Musk’s federal purge, aimed at gutting the government. The IRS had 100,000 employees, including 16,000 probationary workers, many of whom are now at risk.

Why It Matters: The cuts threaten tax processing, refunds, and enforcement, gutting Biden-era efforts to audit corporations and wealthy taxpayers. 

Source: Reuters

Elon Musk’s DOGE Arrives at Pentagon, Eyes Massive Cuts

What Happened: Elon Musk’s operatives arrived at the Pentagon as part of Trump’s push to gut government agencies and veterans’ services. This follows similar moves across Treasury, DOJ, DHS, and intelligence agencies, where Musk’s operatives have gained access to financial, security, and intelligence data.

Why It Matters: Musk’s Pentagon access raises major conflict of interest concerns, as SpaceX and Starlink hold billions in defense contracts. Unvetted DOGE operatives could gain access to classified military programs, including cyber defense, nuclear strategy, and global operations. The Trump regime’s prioritization of loyalty over security vetting risks espionage, military compromise, and insider financial manipulation.

Source: Reuters

Mass Firings Loom Over CDC and NIH as Trump Reshapes Public Health Agencies

What Happened: Senior officials at the CDC and NIH are bracing for mass layoffs, with up to 700 public health workers targeted, including members of the CDC’s elite “disease detectives” corps—the first responders to global infectious disease outbreaks. Some high-ranking officials could be forced to resign as the regime continues its efforts to gut agencies.

Why It Matters: Slashing frontline pandemic and disease response teams cripples America’s ability to contain deadly outbreaks. Experts warn this will devastate public health preparedness, drain critical expertise, and politicize key agencies—as the U.S. faces a bird flu outbreak, a resurging measles crisis, and the worst flu season in decades.

Source: The New York Times

DHS Cuts 405 Employees, FEMA Hit Hardest

What Happened: DHS laid off 405 employees, including 200+ at FEMA, 130 at CISA, and others at USCIS and Science & Technology. 12 Coast Guard DEI staff were reassigned to border security.

Why It Matters: This purge weakens disaster response, cybersecurity, and national preparedness.

Source: ABC News

Trump Purges Leadership at National Archives

What Happened: Trump purges senior leadership at the National Archives and Records Administration. Deputy Archivist William Bosanko resigned Friday, following the firing of Archivist Colleen Shogan last week. At least five other senior officials are expected to leave, as the White House moves to replace them with Trump loyalists.

Why It Matters: This purge comes after NARA’s role in referring Trump’s classified documents case to the DOJ, signaling an attempt to reshape the agency’s leadership for political control. The loss of experienced, nonpartisan officials threatens historical preservation and government transparency.

Source: CNN

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Trump

Trump Kisses Putin’s Ring and Betrays Ukraine

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2025 //
18

Phillips P. Obrien is a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrew’s in the UK. The title of this article on his blog at Substack is “This is Not Appeasement, It’s Worse.”

He begins:

In the last few days, the US has made concession after concession to Russia before any formal negotiations have even started. Trump has said that Putin should be allowed back into the G7, Defense Secretary Hegseth has said Ukraine should be kept out of NATO and the US forces will not provide any security guarantees for Ukraine. The US has also made it clear that Russia will be allowed to keep most/all of the Ukrainian lands it has seized, while at the same time making no new promises of aid to Ukraine.

In other words—Trump is helping Putin—at exactly the time Putin needs it most. If you have not noticed (will write more about this in the weekend update), the Russian army is really struggling right now. Its advances are slowing and its losses are extremely high. In fact, what Trump seems to be doing is offering a hand of friendship and support to Putin, when the Russian dictator and war criminal most needs it.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Failure, International, Trump
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