John Thompson is a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma. He remembers the time before George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” took control of the schools away from educators. Data-driven accountability, he writes, polluted the culture of learning. After more than two decades of failure, educators and students need a better way forward.
When I first walked into John Marshall High School in 1992, I was stunned by the exceptional quality of so many teachers.
It had never occurred to me that such great teaching and learning was being done in high schools. Yes, there were problems, but each year, our school would make incremental improvements.
Then, the Oklahoma City Public Schools system (OKCPS) would bow to pressure and implement disastrous policies that would wipe out those gains — or worse.
I remember when OKCPS was first forced into policies that were later dubbed “corporate school reform.”
The No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law in 2002 by former Republican President George W. Bush, increased the federal government’s influence in holding schools accountable for student performance.
During the first years after the passage, local and state leaders often had some success in minimizing the damage done by school “choice” and high stakes testing. But, as in the rest of the nation, that resistance angered market-driven reformers who then doubled-down on harsher, more punitive policies.
They ordered everyone to “be on the same page,” and even today press educators to “teach to the test.”
I quickly discovered that this one-size-fits-all philosophy was disastrous for schools, teachers and students. And decades later, it still remains so.
It doesn’t take into account the difference between situational and generational poverty. It ignores that some students are seriously emotionally disturbed and/or burdened by multiple traumatic experiences, now known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). And, it fails to factor in that children, who may have reading or math disabilities, have the potential to become student leaders.
The tipping point for me was when school staffing became driven by a primitive statistical model that could not distinguish between low income students and children of situational poverty receiving free and reduced price lunches as opposed to children living in extreme poverty with multiple ACEs.
Because of the additional costs of providing services for the most emotionally disturbed students, teachers in “regular” classrooms were assigned up to 250 students.
School segregation by choice combined with test-driven accountability creates a culture of competition, winners and losers, and simplistic policies that ignore poverty and Adverse Childhood Experiences.
As these quick fixes failed — just like educators and social scientists predicted they would — the “blame game” took off, fueling an exodus of teachers and driving out the joy of teaching and learning. The change in culture particularly affected the poorest children of color.
In order to improve our learning environment and our children’s outcomes, we must first get back to building on our strengths rather than weaknesses.
For instance, if we agree on a culture where we use tests for diagnostic purposes, rather than determining winners and losers, we could go back to the time when our curriculum committees included teachers, assistant principals, and parents.
Those meetings frequently ended in compromises that brought out the best in all sides and made our schools a desired place to learn and work.
Mercedes Schneider is a high school teacher in Louisiana who holds a doctorate in statistics and research methodology. It’s no secret that she is also a devout Christian who takes her faith seriously, so seriously that she doesn’t try to impose it on anyone else. As a veteran teacher, she writes with authority and keen intellect about education.
Project 2025 identifies itself as “The Presidential Transition Project,” further described as “an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country”:
The Heritage Foundation is once again facilitating this work, but as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire conservative movement.
The next conservative President will enter office on January 20, 2025, with a simple choice: greatness or failure. It will be a daunting test, but no more so than every other generation of Americans has faced and passed. The Conservative Promise represents the best effort of the conservative movement in 2023—and the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic.
THE MORE PEOPLE learn about it, the more unpopular and politically toxic Project 2025 has proven to be. This has led the Trump and Vance campaign to attempt to distance itself from the effort. Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller now says he had “zero involvement with Project 2025,” despite appearing in a promotional video. And just today, The Intercept discovered two more conservative groups that have quietly bowed out from the controversial 900-page manifesto — including a national anti-abortion organization.
Miller’s group, America First Legal Foundation, was one of the first organizations to jump ship from the Project 2025 advisory board. Last week, America First Legal asked to be removed from the Project 2025 advisory board webpage. The organization was part of Project 2025 since at least June 2022, when the Heritage Foundation first announced the advisory board’s formation.
America First Legal staff were deeply involved in writing and editing the Project 2025 playbook. Its vice president and general counsel, Gene Hamilton, drafted an entire chapter about the Justice Department, which proposes launching a “campaign” to criminalize mailing abortion pills. In a footnote, Hamilton thanked “the staff at America First Legal Foundation,” who he wrote deserved “special mention for their assistance while juggling other responsibilities.” …
America First Legal did not respond to questions about why it asked to be removed from the Project 2025 advisory board despite its prior participation.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan think tank, were among the more than 100 groups listed on the Project 2025 website as part of its advisory board. By Wednesday, Americans United for Life and the Mackinac Center had vanished.
Both organizations were relatively recent additions to the Project 2025 coalition. The Heritage Foundation announced they had joined in February 2024, several months after the massive playbook was released.
Neither organization would elaborate as to why it had joined the Project 2025 board in the first place or why it was exiting it now.
Seems like far-right conservatives have a history of not really wanting the public aware of those conservative plans and schemes.
It should come as no surprise that ALEC is a Project 2025 advisory board member:
Project 2025 is the conservative, American white Evangelical Christian plan for operating government. Below is a “note” from Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 director, Paul Dans:
Let me offer some excerpts. Not many, for it does not take much reading to realize that the Project 2025 overarching goal is to force all of America into a white Evangelical Christian mold.
A smidge from Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts’, foreword:
PROMISE #1: RESTORE THE FAMILY AS THE CENTERPIECE OF AMERICAN LIFE AND PROTECT OUR CHILDREN. The next conservative President must get to work pursuing the true priority of politics-the well-being of the American family. In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatu- ral ones. You see this in the popular left-wing aphorism, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” But in real life, most of the things people “do together” have nothing to do with government. These are the mediating institutions that serve as the building blocks of any healthy society. Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering. The name real people give to the things we do together is community, not government. Our lives are full of interwoven, overlapping communities, and our individual and collective happiness depends upon them. But the most important community in each of our lives-and the life of the nation— is the family. Today, the American family is in crisis. Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children. There is no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by the absence of a father. Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of Ameri- can poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts. So many of the problems government programs are designed to solve-but can’t-are ultimately problems created by the crisis of marriage and the family. The world has never seen a thriving, healthy, free, and prosperous society where most children grow up without their married parents. If current trends continue, we are heading toward social implosion. Furthermore, the next conservative President must understand that using gov- ernment alone to respond to symptoms of the family crisis is a dead end. Federal power must instead be wielded to reverse the crisis and rescue America’s kids from familial breakdown. The Conservative Promise includes dozens of specific policies to accomplish this existential task. Some are obvious and long-standing goals like eliminating marriage penalties in federal welfare programs and the tax code and installing work requirements for food stamps. But we must go further. It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family. Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent. The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi- tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists. Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice-a goal all conservatives and con- servative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds. The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.
Schneider continues:
Free the churches, imprison the librarians.
Roberts was in the news for stating that an “ongoing American Revolution” will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” According to The Hill, that comment caused “blowback” for Roberts and the Heritage Foundation.
None of Jesus’ ministry involved any political agenda, much less the government-driven denigration of “other” or the imposing of His will on any human being.
Trump says he will deport 11 million illegal immigrants. He says his deportation program will be unlike anything the nation has ever seen. He is right.
Actually, the deportations were started in 1930 and reached a peak in 1931, before FDR was elected. Estimates for the numbers of those deported ranged from 300,000-2 million, about half of whom were American citizens. President Herbert Hoover approved the deportation program on the belief that Mexicans were taking jobs from white people. Most of the deportation was implemented by local and state governments.
What would it look like to deport 11 million people?
First, they would have to be rounded up in massive raids. Imagine the terror as federal agents arrived at the homes of immigrants and raided them, carrying away families–men, women and children.
Where to put 11 million people?
Then, the federal government would have to build thousands, tens of thousands of detention camps. Every state would have detention centers. This would be a massive undertaking, because the camps would need to be constructed and supplied with beds, food, personnel, doctors and nurses.
Trump has suggested that the deportees would each have a serial number. Would it be tattooed on their arms?
Inevitably, families would be torn apart, people would die, women would give birth in the camps.
The images sent around the world of detention camps for millions of people would humiliate our country as a cruel, heartless place.
Someone should drape a hood over the Statue of Liberty, so that she does not see what is happening as she lifts her lamp “beside the golden door.”
On the base of the Statue of Liberty, “The New Collosus,” by Emma Lazarus.
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
No more. Stay home. We are full. No more room. Not at this inn.
Choosing — yet again — to inflict a deteriorating, revenge-obsessed, 78-year-old Capitol lynch mob inciting felon sex abuser and his horde of MAGA freaks on your friends, loved ones, neighbors, fellow citizens, and communities means inflicting — yet again — a deteriorating, revenge-obsessed, 78-year-old Capitol lynch mob inciting felon sex abuser and his horde of MAGA freaks on your friends, loved ones, neighbors, fellow citizens, and communities.
I am surrounded in Lakeland, Florida these days by folks who have made this choice multiple times already, who pretend they’re in downcast denial about the self-evident facts of making that choice yet again, especially post January 6th. They’re pretending to believe that choosing to make a MAGA dictatorship and give it the nuclear codes and Department of Justice does not meanmaking a MAGA dictatorship and giving it the nuclear codes and Department of Justice….
What I most value about elections is that they force clear, unambiguous choices. The MAGA Freak dictatorship choice before us is the clearest and most obviously one-sided choice in the history of American self-government. Everyone knows this. The fact that the vote will be close on something so obvious says more about Americans than it does about the choice we face. MAGA doesn’t even have a fake economic or border argument to make.
I mean, at the most elemental level, I would be proud to call Kamala Harris friend, aunt, wife, mother, boss, co-worker Kiwanis Club president, mayor, minister. I would be disgusted and embarrassed to call the deteriorating 78-year-old MAGA dictator friend, uncle, husband, father, boss, Kiwanis Club president, mayor, minister.
At Governor DeSantis’ insistence, Florida enacted one of the toughest abortion bans in the nation. Abortion is banned in the state at six weeks of pregnancy. Very few, if any, women know they are pregnant at six weeks. Advocates for reproductive rights immediately began mobilizing to fight the abortion ban. They drafted a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would protect a woman’s right to an abortion. Despite DeSantis’ opposition, they gathered signatures, fought legal battles, and got the measure on the November ballot, where it is called Amendment 4.
The Orlando Sentinel reports on the latest state plot to deceive voters:
Florida health officials reiterated Thursday that state law allows abortions at any point in pregnancy to save the life of the mother, responding to concerns that Florida’s new six-week abortion ban is tying doctors’ hands and putting women in danger.
The state’s “provider alert” said abortions can be performed “to save the pregnant woman’s life or avert a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”Failing to provide that “life-saving treatment” could constitute medical malpractice, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration and the Florida Department of Health warned in a notice to providers distributed by email and social media.The notice was released a day after several doctors supporting Amendment 4 — which would enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution — said in news conference that the exceptions in Florida’s abortion ban aren’t real exceptions.
“These so-called exceptions are a mirage,” said Dr. Jerry Goodman, a Sarasota-based OB-GYN, who spoke at the pro-Amendment 4 event on Wednesday. “Patients face overwhelming legal and procedural and logistical hurdles making accessing care nearly impossible, particularly at three ‘o clock in the morning when these emergencies often arise.”Florida’s abortion ban, which went into effect May 1, has exceptions up to 15 weeks for pregnancies resulting from rape, incest, or human trafficking, or if a “fatal fetal abnormality” is detected, the notice added. The memo included a line in bold that “a miscarriage is not an abortion.”
Abortions are permissible for women who experience premature rupture of membranes, as well as ectopic or molar pregnancies, all of which are serious complications, according to the memo.
But several doctors supporting Amendment 4 said at the news conference that the state’s abortion exceptions could be hard to meet. For instance, the law requires women who are raped to provide legal documentation, such as a police report, a barrier that the doctors said can delay care or block access.
The state’s ban has sparked fear and led to confusion over what constitutes a serious health risk under Florida’s “narrow medical exceptions,” according to a report from Physicians for Human Rights released on Tuesday.
“Several clinicians described cases of being required by their hospitals to wait until patients become ‘sick enough’ to qualify for care,” the report found.
A physician who performs an illegal abortion could face a third-degree felony charge punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
State officials said they issued the notice in response to “misinformation” about Florida’s abortion laws.
Their guidance comes as voters prepare to take up Amendment 4, which would overturn the state’s six-week ban and protect abortion access up until viability, typically defined as about 24 weeks of pregnancy. If approved by at least 60% of voters in November, it also would guarantee abortion access “when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s health care provider.”
Dr. Chelsea Daniels, a Miami-based provider, also urged voters to support Amendment 4. She said she has seen patients with nonviable pregnancies who have been turned away from care.
“I saw a patient a few weeks ago who came to me with four ultrasounds from four different clinics showing a nonviable pregnancy and she was still carrying this pregnancy when she came to me,” Daniels said.
Opponents argue Amendment 4 is vague and misleads voters by failing to define key terms like “viability” and “healthcare provider.” A group called Physicians Against Amendment 4 denounced the measure at an event earlier this month in Orlando, calling it “overreaching,” “too permissive” and “irresponsible.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis and state officials have been under fire from critics who accuse them of unlawfully using taxpayer resources to try to sway the results of Amendment 4. The agency launched a webpage earlier this month, proclaiming that existing Florida law “protects women” while the initiative enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution “threatens women’s safety.”
It also released a “public service announcement” video that includes information about Florida’s abortion laws and an assurance that “Florida cares about women and families.”
Two lawsuits have been filed challenging the agency’s webpage, and Florida Democrats have pushed for a criminal investigation.
Florida law stipulates that “no employee in the career service” shall “use the authority of his or her position to secure support for, or oppose, any candidate, party, or issue in a partisan election or affect the results thereof.”
State officials, though, say the website is informational and complies with that law.
About the same time, a Florida judge ordered an ob-gyn doctor in Orlando to pay a $10,000 fine for performing 193 abortions after the law passed and was caught up in litigation. The doctor and the clinic where she worked tried to get information from the state about when he law went into effect. Getting no response, the doctor continued to provide abortions. The judge acknowledged that the doctor and the clinic unknowingly violated the law but decided that they broke the law and needed to be punished. The clinic was fined $193,000, a fine of $1,000 for each abortion.
Mark Robinson, currently the Lt. Governor of North Carolina, is running for Governor. He has a long record of making inflammatory, extremist statements. He was endorsed by Trump and is true-MAGA. Recently his personal life has caught up with his extreme rightwing views. North Carolina is a crucial “battleground state” in the Presidential race.
CNN) — Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.
Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a “perv.”
The comments, which Robinson denies making, predate his entry into politics and current stint as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor. They were made under a username that CNN was able to identify as Robinson by matching a litany of biographical details and a shared email address between the two.
Many of Robinson’s comments were gratuitously sexual and lewd in nature. They were made between 2008 and 2012 on “Nude Africa,” a pornographic website that includes a message board. The comments were made under the username minisoldr, a moniker Robinson used frequently online.
Robinson listed his full name on his profile for Nude Africa, as well as an email address he used on numerous websites across the internet for decades.
CNN is reporting only a small portion of Robinson’s comments on the website given their graphic nature.
Many of Robinson’s comments on Nude Africa stand in contrast to his public stances on issues such as abortion and transgender rights.
Publicly, Robinson has fiercely argued that people should use bathrooms only that correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth. He’s also said transgender women should be arrested for using women’s restrooms.
“If you’re a man on Friday night, and all the sudden Saturday, you feel like a woman, and you want to go in the women’s bathroom in the mall, you will be arrested, or whatever we gotta do to you,” Robinson said at a campaign rally in February 2024. “We’re going to protect our women.”
Yet privately under the username minisoldr on Nude Africa, Robinson graphically described his own sexual arousal as an adult from the memory of secretly “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a 14-year-old. Robinson recounted the story as a memory he said he still fantasized about.
“I came to a spot that was a dead end but had two big vent covers over it! It just so happened it overlooked the showers! I sat there for about an hour and watched as several girls came in and showered,” Robinson wrote on Nude Africa.
CNN is not publishing the graphic sexual details of Robinson’s story.
“I went peeping again the next morning,” Robinson wrote. “but after that I went back the ladder was locked! So those two times where [sic] the only times I got to do it! Ahhhhh memories!!!!”
In other comments on Nude Africa, Robinson discussed his affinity for transgender pornography.
“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote. “And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”
In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Robinson repeatedly denied that he made the comments on Nude Africa.
“This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me,” Robinson said. Presented with the litany of evidence connecting him with the minisoldr user name on Nude Africa, Robinson said, “I’m not going to get into the minutia of how somebody manufactured this, these salacious tabloid lies…”
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson speaks on stage on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee. Leon Neal/Getty Images
Now campaigning for governor, he says he supports a so-called “heartbeat” bill that would ban abortion when a heartbeat is detected – approximately six weeks – with exceptions for rape, incest and health of the mother…
In another thread, commenters considered whether to believe the story of a woman who said she was raped by her taxi driver while intoxicated. In response, Robinson wrote, “and the moral of this story….. Don’t f**k a white b*tch!”
Robinson, who would become North Carolina’s first Black governor if elected, also repeatedly maligned civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., attacking him in such intense terms that a user accused him of being a white supremacist.
“Get that f*cking commie bastard off the National Mall!,” Robinson wrote about the dedication of the memorial to King in Washington, DC, by then-President Barack Obama.
“I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” Robinson responded.
CNN’s reporting on Robinson’s comments comes a few weeks after The Assembly, a North Carolina digital publication, reported that Robinson frequented local video pornography shops in the 1990s and 2000s. The story cited six people who interacted and saw him frequent the stores in Greensboro, North Carolina. A spokesperson for Robinson called the story false and a “complete fiction.”
Open the link to see CNN’s extensive documentation.
Alex Shepherd of The New Republic wrote an outstanding article about the linkage between Trump and violence. He threatens it, he encourages it, he revels in his threats. He likes to play the role of the tough guy. I recall a clip from one of his campaigns where he was portrayed at a wrestling match beating up a cartoon figure labeled CNN. I recall him at one of his rallies encouraging the crowd to beat up any infiltrators and he would pay the court costs. I remember the cruel taunts that he directed at others, including Paul Pelosi. He is a bully and he wants to be feared.
Yet when yet another gunman was captured before shooting at him, Trump was quick to blame Harris and Walz, who have repeatedly called for unity.
Shepherd writes:
Three hours before a would-be assassin was spotted hiding in the bushes of his golf course in West Palm Beach, Donald Trump posted, in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on Truth Social, his wildly unprofitable social network. At roughly the same time, his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, was touring the Sunday shows to proudly admit that he and Trump were knowingly spreading racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, in service of an even bigger lie—that immigrants pose an existential threat to the country itself.
It was a banner day for the Trump campaign: a feud with the country’s most popular pop star, a vile lie about a vulnerable population, yet another close call with an attempted assassin. But it also felt oddly familiar, bordering on routine—especially given how the former president and his allies reacted to the golf course scare. There were no fleeting calls for “unity” or hollow promises to turn down the temperature; instead, they were quick to blame their political opponents.
In a speech on Monday, Vance noted that the two attempts on Trump’s life were “pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric or somebody is going to get hurt.” He further argued on X that the captured suspect, Ryan Routh, was inspired by the Harris campaign’s insistence that Trump is a threat to democracy. Trump, meanwhile, said his opponents’ inflammatory rhetoric was endangering him, and that “these are people who want to destroy this country.”
“It is called the enemy from within,” Trump continued. “They are the real threat.” If that wasn’t subtle enough, his campaign then released a lengthy list of people it blamed, without evidence, for inspiring Routh, including Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, as well as Representative Nancy Pelosi, Representative Adam Schiff, and even Walz’s wife, Gwen.
It would be foolish to blame any politician for either assassination attempt; both Routh and Thomas Crooks, the deceased Pennsylvania shooter, were mentally troubled and politically confused. But it’s important to acknowledge a simple and obvious truth: No one in this country has done more to sow division, create chaos, and, yes, encourage violence over the past decade than Trump. It was only a matter of time before that boomeranged on him.
Criticisms of Trump that rightfully note that he is a threat to the future of American democracy are hardly incitement to violence. They are recognition of the fact that Trump has used and will continue to use any means at his disposal to gain and hold onto power. His own paranoia and deluded ravings about his political enemies, meanwhile, have created a combustible climate—one made more dangerous by the lax gun laws that Trump and his allies have embraced.
These are people who egg on violence against their enemies at every turn. As The New York Times’ Peter Baker put it on Monday, Trump has “long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed.” Let’s not forget that he also directed his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol and allegedly expressed support for hanging his vice president, Mike Pence.
And then, Trump cries victim when he finds himself in the crosshairs. But increasingly, it seems, Americans aren’t buying it. For the last two months, the Trump campaign has whined incessantly about the fact that the country quickly moved on following the first attempt on his life, in mid-July. They’re right about that; his near-death experience was out of the news within a few days, and Trump received no noticeable bump in the polls. The incident is now an afterthought in the election—it’s almost as if it never happened at all. The second assassination plot, meanwhile, barely registered on NFL Sunday.
The country has moved on because it has grown accustomed to the chaos that Trump effortlessly generates. It has moved on because Trump himself moved on almost immediately. The Trump that stood onstage at the Republican National Convention, rambling about his grievances for almost two hours, was not changed by his recent brush with death in the slightest. He was, if anything, even morederanged and vengeful. And since then, he has said that Kamala Harris is a “fascist,” Walz wants to force young children to have gender reassignment surgeries, and that Haitian immigrants who are in the country legally are pet-eating criminals intent on murdering downtrodden Rust Belt whites.
Years before Trump’s political career began, the British photographer Platon found himself shooting Trump in the boardroom where he fired people on The Apprentice, the show where he played an idealized version of himself—wealthy, important, competent. Platon tried to connect with his subject. “Let’s be human together,” he said to Trump. “There’s always an air of tension and controversy about the things you say and do in public. I’m sure it’s intentional on your part but it feels to me like you’re in the middle of an emotional storm. I can’t live with that anxiety all the time. As a fellow human being, I’d like to know how you weather the storm.”
Trump calmly looked back at him and responded: “I am the storm.”
Trump is one of the least self-aware people in American political history—maybe in history, period. But this was an eerily prophetic statement. For eight years, Trump has been the storm. He unleashed dark forces in our society—making America more violent, more menacing, more chaotic—and rode them to the height of power. Now, he’s trying to do it all over again. But that’s the thing about storms, no matter their origin. Sometimes there’s no escaping them.
New York is considered a Democratic state but Trump came to speak at a rally at the Nassau Colisum in suburban Nassau County. Whether he helped his campaign remains to be seen, but he hopes to bolster Republicans trying to retain their seats in the House. Although Trump accused Harris and Walz for campaign rhetoric that unleashed violence against him, his statements about them were far more inflammatory than anything they said about him.
UNIONDALE, NY — A confident Donald Trump took to the stage at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum Wednesday before a sea of red — supporters that met him with cheers, including chants of “USA, USA.”
It was his first presidential campaign rally since an assassination attempt was foiled by the Secret Service at a golf course in West Palm Beach in Florida on Sunday.
Trump had been playing a round of golf at Trump International Golf Club, when a man poked a rifle through the bushes. He was not injured in the attempt.
“We have got to get our media back here,” he told cheering supporters before attacking his team’s Democratic opponents, Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, saying that the lies have to stop and that they would turn America into a dictatorship.
“They’re doing things in politics that have never been done before in the history of our country, and worst of all, with their open borders and bad elections, they have made us into a Third World nation, something which nobody thought was even possible,” he said. “Americans deserve a campaign based on the issues.”
Trump quickly moved into addressing the apparent attempt on his life over the weekend, saying that “God has spared his life,” not once but twice.
The first attempt on Trump’s life was over the summer.
“And there are those that say he did it because Trump is going to turn this state around,” he said of his alleged assailant. “He’s going to turn this country around. He’s going to make America great again, and we are going to bring religion back to our country.”
Less than a few minutes into his speech, he claimed the Teamsters gave him their endorsement.
Hours before, the union’s leadership said it would not issue any endorsements, according to a statement on it’s website. In a statement, the union said it was due to strong political divides and few comments from candidates.
“These encounters with death have not broken my will,” he said. “They have really given me a much bigger and stronger mission. They’ve only hardened by resolve to use my time on earth to make America great again for all Americans to put America first and to put America first.”
Questions for readers:
Is it not an inflammatory lie to say that Harris and Walz would turn the U.S. into a “dictatorship”? What does he mean? It is he, not they, who has pledged to fire civil servants by the thousands and replace them with political loyalists. It is he, not they, who promised to prosecute anyone who opposed him and jail them. That is the definition of a dictatorship.
What are Harris and Walz doing “that have never been done before in the history of our country”?
When did Harris or Walz say they favored “open borders” other than never?
What does it mean to say they support “bad elections”? Like elections where every registered voter gets to cast a ballot? It is Republican officials who want to kick people off the voting rolls; that would be a “bad election.”
How can Trump “bring back religion” when he has none?
Trump spewed a Gish gallop, where the lies came out like a fire hose.
The National Coalition for Public Education published valuable information contrasting the actual cost of vouchers to overly optimistic projections by their advocates. In every state that has adopted vouchers, most vouchers are used by students already enrolled in private schools. In states such as Florida and Arizona, vouchers are “universal,” meaning there are no income limitations or other restrictions on their accessibility. In essence, vouchers provide public dollars to subsidize the tuition of students in private and religious schools. They are a welfare program for the affluent.
The NCPE concluded:
When lawmakers consider expanding or creating private school voucher programs, their projections often drastically underestimate the actual costs. They sell a false promise that vouchers will save money, do not budget adequate funds, and then wind up with million dollar shortfalls, necessitating cuts from public education and even tax increases.
Some voucher advocates incorrectly claim that if the amount of the voucher is less than the average expenditure spent to educate a student in public school, the state will save money. Existing voucher programs prove this false.
First, it costs less than the average expenditure to educate some students, and much more to educate others who need additional support and services–like those with disabilities, English language learners, and low-income students. The students who are most expensive to educate, however, tend to remain in public schools because they cannot find a private voucher school willing to accept them. Yet, because of the voucher program, the public schools are left with fewer resources. Furthermore, in a voucher program, the state now pays tuition for private school students who never attended public schools, which is an altogether new cost for taxpayers.
This all adds up to more, not less, spending.
Here are several examples of the skyrocketing costs of voucher programs:
ARIZONA’S VOUCHER IS COSTING 1,346% MORE THAN PROJECTED, CONTRIBUTING TO A $400 MILLION BUDGET DEFICIT.
The fiscal note attached to Arizona’s universal voucher program projected the program would cost the state about $65 million in 2024 and $125 million in 2025. But once students’ applications started to come in, state leaders realized these estimates were woefully inadequate. The Arizona Governor’s Office now estimates that the price tag is more than 1,346% higher at a cost of $940 million per year. This is one of the main causes of a $400 million budget shortfall in the state’s general fund, which funds the state’s public schools, transportation, fire, police, and prisons.
THE FLORIDA VOUCHER IS ALREADY MORE THAN $2 BILLION OVER BUDGET IN YEAR ONE.
The Florida Senate projected that its voucher expansion would cost $646 million. But independent researchers estimated that the program would actually cost almost $4 billion, and actual costs are already approaching that amount—$3.35 billion in the first year. In just one county, Duval, school officials report a $17 million budget shortage due to funds lost to the vouchers.
WEST VIRGINIA’S VOUCHER DRAINS MORE THAN $20 MILLION FROM PUBLIC SCHOOLS PER YEAR.
During the 2024 – 2025 school year, the West Virginia voucher program is expected to funnel $21.6 million away from the state’s public schools–enough to pay the salaries for 301 professional teachers and 63 school service workers. As a result of the voucher and other declines in enrollment, multiple school districts are already warning residents that they need to impose property tax increases in order to continue to pay current teachers’ salaries.
Nate Monroe of the Jacksonville, Florida, Times Union poses a challenging question: who is the worst college president in the state? Ben Sasse or Richard Corcoran? Sasse, the former Senator from Nebraska, was hand-picked by Governor DeSantis to be President of the state university system, the University of Florida. He hired several of his former staff in D.C. and paid them lavish salaries to stay in D.C. and work remotely. He retired after one year, with a $1 million annual salary until 2028. Corcoran, former Speaker of the House in Florida, former state education commissioner, rightwing ideologue, was selected by DeSantis to lead the conversion of tiny (700 students) New College from a bastion of progressivism to become a libertarian/Christian Hillsdale of the South.
He writes:
Richard Corcoran wasn’t about to let that runza monger hog the spotlight. No sir, if there’s going to be a disgraced university president in the news, by god it’s going to be Richard Michael Corcoran of New College of Florida, the once-respected liberal arts school turned raggedy right-wing academy for Clarence Thomas scholars.
Ben Sasse, the University of Florida’s former president, was caught with his hand in the cookie jar, making him Florida’s main character for the first half of the week. Not to be outdone, Corcoran’s latest sin is having his underlings toss a truckload of books into the garbage, according to a report Thursday from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s Steven Walker, combining the oafish meanness of Matilda’s parents with the imagery of dystopian fiction. In a response befitting this disinformation age, Corcoran’s flaks called the account “false” — a bold statement in light of the video and photo evidence available — before then, with no hint of irony, confirming the account: “The images seen online of a dumpster of library materials is related to the standard weeding process.”
Some hapless Corcoran toady pointed to a state law to explain why the books couldn’t be donated or made available to students, as they had in the past, but that law merely confirms the clear fact that New College could have done exactly that. This was no accident: The books bound for the landfill included titles from the college’s former Gender and Diversity Center — a collection of words that, in the Free State of Florida, generally invite state censorship. Heaven forbid college kids read “Nine and Counting: The Women of the Senate,” a book a curious New College student would have to dumpster dive to find now.
Corcoran is that most fitting a Floridian for the DeSantis era: a committed, strident ideologue, except in his own affairs. During his tenure in the state House, for example, he was known as a rude and miserly fiscal hawk, possessed with the belief college administrators were overpaid and spending lavishly. He seemed to believe that until he began trawling for a sinecure from his political superior, Gov. Ron DeSantis, in the world of public education. That first took the form of an appointment as Florida’s Education Commissioner, a mostly undistinguished term save for a bid-rigging scandal centered on the management of a small Florida school district.
As commissioner, he got the public attention he so often seems to crave, but his true apparent goal was becoming one of those overpaid college administrators himself. He gunned for a chance to run Florida State University — a crusade during which he flew a bit close to the sun — but ultimately landed a job running New College of Florida. He was installed by a remade board of trustees, a group of fanatics selected by DeSantis with the intention of making an example out of the small liberal-arts school.
Corcoran, an opponent of public education (save for his ability to make a buck off it), quickly set about turning New College into the Hillsdale of the South, a conservative higher-education bulwark. Vital to this work was securing for himself a plum compensation package worth about $1.1 million, a staggering sum that is among the highest in Florida despite New College being the state’s smallest public college.
Corcoran and Sasse’s hirings at their respective schools seemed to usher in a sea change in how higher education is run in Florida: experienced administrators were out, politicians were in. DeSantis carefully chose the appointees who run Florida’s college system, centralizing power over this diversified set of schools and allowing him to exert his will on issues like tenure and diversity programs. Every high-level vacancy in a Florida college prompts a fevered and terrified concern: which low-life politician is DeSantis going to stick them with next?
But Sasse and Corcoran have generated so much heat — Sasse in particular has come under criticism this week from no less than U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz and Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis — it’s tempting to hope this experience has even soured DeSantis on this particular project. The problem with useful idiots is that they happen to be … well, you know.
Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA Today Network. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU. Email him at nmonroe@gannett.com.
