Was the remaking of schools in New Orleans a great success or a hoax? Is I John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, analyzes the conflicting narratives here.

Like Diane Ravitch, who explained that there was “No Miracle in New Orleans,” I was upset by Ian Birrell’s Washington Post article which agreed with Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who “boldly said that the hurricane was ‘the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.’” I felt better after she cited Gary Rubenstein who explained that Birrell was an international reporter who probably didn’t know “that there has been an ongoing battle over education reform in this country where the ‘reformers’ have all kinds of tricks for misrepresenting data to advance their agenda.”

During the 20^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I had been reviewing previous research on the take-over and charter-ization portfolio model of the New Orleans schools. I had been invited to two conferences held by the Tulane Education Research Association (ERA), and to crash at the home of CEO Neerav Kingsland, who arranged for me to visit many schools and interview numerous district leaders.

My memories of the resulting conversations are very similar to the narratives documented in 2012 by Anya Kamenetz, who was then a reporter with National Public Radio.  Kamenetz investigated the evidence for both – that the portfolio process could a “Beacon” for hope in high-challenge schools, or a “Warning” about test-driven, competition-driven school reforms.

She reported on both the large increases in test scores, as well as the effects of segregation by choice, the misuse of test scores, and the inevitable results of a system where 45,000 students were trying to get into 18,500 slots. The damage done by those behaviors was mostly inflicted on the low-performing Recovery School District (RSD).

Then, interviewing the ERA’s Douglas Harris, she found that he had “bad news” for the higher-challenge RSD. He acknowledged that there had been several years of swift improvement, followed by a plateau this past year.” Harris said, “The increasing trend in scores is not all achievement.” He explained, “People were taking these scores as gospel. They had completely bought into the idea that scores equal learning.”

Kamenetz then explained:

Harris isn’t talking about outright cheating — though more than a third of the city’s schools were flagged by the state between 2010 and 2012 for cases of plagiarism, suspicious levels of erasures [of failing grades], and similar indicators.  … He means something subtler: a distortion of the curriculum and teaching practice. “You’re learning how to adjust the curriculum, teach to the test.

Kamenetz then cited a professor at North Carolina State University, who had observed and interviewed teachers at “a ‘KIPP-like’ charter school in New Orleans. She reported that:

There aren’t many projects, discussions, or kids reading literature. They are really teaching what will be tested at the exclusion of all other materials. I had a science teacher tell me that if there was an earthquake in New Orleans, she wouldn’t have the time to cover it if it weren’t on the test. … 

There is extreme effort to control, rather than engage, students in the classroom,” she says.

Sarah Carr exemplified the same type of objective nuance in her book Hope Against Hope, which acknowledged several positive results while documenting the “human cost” of failures.  Carr was sympathetic to the argument that failing schools need to be closed down, but she concluded, “at some point there needs to be some degree of stability.” For instance, only about 10% of Teach for America teachers remained in their school for five years. And she observed:

There were some kids I saw that, even a couple of years out from Katrina, were still getting bounced from school to school to school as they were closed or transitioned out or taken over by different operators. She then concluded that to the extent that NOLA reforms were a success story, “it’s a story of micro-level successes.”  

Around that time, when it seemed like even the fervent believers in evaluating teachers using test-growth models were acknowledging that it had failed, Doug Harris and I had similar exchanges over two points. First, why should we believe that test-score increases, especially in the first years of the unregulated NOLA takeover, represented increased learning?

Second, English Language scores surged for three years, 2007 to 2010, but stagnated until 2014 when growth declined to what it was before Katrina. 

Harris argued that that plateau was evidence that the learning was real because previous gains didn’t disappear.

I was far more impressed by Rutgers’ Bruce Baker’s evidence as to how and why the ERA’s models were “problematic” when trying to account for demographic changes. Baker noted that after Hurricane Karina “citywide school census had plummeted from 65,000 to 25,000,” meaning that. “There’s just way too much that changed as a result of the storm in students’ lives to make confident comparisons.” Baker concluded, “The main drivers of improvement” were “increased school spending and a less impoverished student population post-Katrina.”

Then, and now, I concluded, that the ERA would need to be as transparent as possible in analyzing future outcomes if it sought to back up their viewpoint. Plus, I remained frustrated by their failure to accept the burden of proof as to whether running controls on test score metrics, especially for poor children of color, provided accurate estimates regarding increases in meaningful learning

In 2025, Harris’ and Jamie Carroll’s 20^th anniversary reportincluded the chart we discussed about the decline in output growth since 2024. But their conclusion is:

The New Orleans reforms led to large gains in average student achievement and increased rates of high school graduation, college entry, and college graduation in the first decade after they were implemented. Student outcomes have stabilized since then.

But, recent reports seem to be excessively focused on post-Covid increases in outputs, and it would hard for me to understand a connection between those gains and the test-prep, the teacher-firing, and school closing approach from a dozen years before.

Reading recent studies, I have only found one chart on outcomes from 2014 to the Covid pandemic.  The Louisiana Department of Education, Data Library, Date & Reports, 2016-2024 District Performance Scores in 2015-16 were 84.9 for New Orleans. By 2018-19, they were down to 67.8. 

The historian in me wonders if there would have been a different discussion if the ERA had featured a graph showing big gains from 2007 to 2010, which correlated with so many opportunities to manipulate data and significantly increased funding, followed by stagnate growth for nearly a decade.   

To Harris’ and Carroll’s credit, in 2025, they noted, “There were additional troubling signs of inequity in the first several years of the reforms: schools apparently selected students rather than students choosing schools. The expulsion rates increased 1.5 – 2.7 percentage points (140-250%) in the early years.” 

Harris and Carroll found increased segregation by race and income in high school, but not elementary schools. And they noted a 2019 policy change that “prioritizes admission at most elementary schools for applicants who live within a half-mile of the school. We find that this gives White and high-income students an advantage in securing a seat at high-demand schools.”

They note the decline in pre-K availability prompted by the district’s choices, as well as less of a focus on the arts during the first decade of the reforms, and in 2018, arts educators reported feeling ignored and under-resourced compared to educators in tested subjects. And Harris and Carroll explain the problems that vouchers created. 

As was true previously, Harris and Carroll were careful to warn against the belief that similar reforms would have worked in different times and places.

But, Harris kept praising “growth” measures that account for where students start at the beginning of the year. These accountability measures, however, almost surely contributed to the finding:

Heavy workload is a top reason why teachers leave New Orleans schools; teachers reported working an average of 46 hours per week. This combination of less preparation, lower job security, less autonomy, and higher workloads—to go along with lower salaries (see Conclusion #4)—would increase turnover in any city and any occupation.

Above all, I couldn’t understand why they still supported mass school closures and takeovers, that had supposedly:

Driven essentially all of the post-Katrina improvement. This was especially true in the first decade after Katrina; low-performing schools were replaced by higher-performing ones, which gradually lifted average student achievement.

Harris and Carroll acknowledge that, “it could be that students attending schools that are closed or taken over experience negative effects.” While they noted that “support to students in closed schools helps them end up in better schools the following school year,” even though providing such support to all remains a challenge.

And they don’t deny the harm done by failing to listen to school patrons, and reducing the percentage of Black teachers from 71% to 49% by 2014, as well as the reduction in teachers’ experience, and an increase in turnover.

At least Harris and Carroll conclude:

Local leaders will have to address remaining distrust among key stakeholders and disagreement about the roles of the district and other key actors. State control of New Orleans schools ended in 2018, but the local district did not regain many of the powers that it held pre-Katrina, including school staffing, curriculum, and instruction. … New Orleans created an entirely new type of local school district. Strained relationships and confusion about roles among the district, school leaders, and the community remain. 

My reading of the ERA’s twenty-year evaluation of New Orleans’ market-driven reforms is that I wish they would return to Harris’ previous acknowledgement that those who had imposed them “completely bought into the idea that scores equal learning.”

On the other hand, the 2025 report may be good for public relations, persuading some corporate school reformers and international journalists, but it’s not going to persuade school patrons to have more trust in their reward and punish model.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump could fire the last Democratic member of the supposedly independent bipartisan Federal Trade Commission. When a Democrat is elected President, he or she can fire all the Republican members of supposedly independent commissions. The Supreme Court is paving the way to give Trump unchecked power of all government agencies.

Justin Jouvenal of the Washington Post reported:

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to fire the sole remaining Democrat on the Federal Trade Commission, the latest victory in his aggressive push to exert greater control over the federal bureaucracy.

The justices overturned a lower court injunction that reinstated Rebecca Slaughter to her position with the agency that oversees antitrust and consumer protection issues while litigation over her removal works its way through the courts.
The ruling — while provisional — is significant because the high court also said it will hear arguments on overturning a 90-year-old precedent that allowed Congress to set up independent, nonpartisan agencies insulated from political interference if they do not wield executive power.

In 1935, the justices ruled that President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not fire a board member of the FTC, William Humphrey, simply because he opposed the president’s New Deal policies. Congress had stipulated members could only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” The case is known as Humphrey’s Executor.

The current Supreme Court has all but overturned that precedent in recent rulings. The justices allowed Trump to fire Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission in July and members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board in May. Trump gave no reasons for the officials’ dismissals, despite statutes saying they could only be removed for cause.
“Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President,” the majority wrote in the May decision, “he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents.”

The next big case that tests Trump’s power and the Court’s deference to him is his effort to fire Lisa Cook, a Democrat who is a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Trade Commission. He accuses her of mortgage fraud, with no evidence.

Clayton Wickham of The Texas Monthly described the danger that vouchers pose to rural schools, whose finances were already precarious. In rural areas, these schools are the heart of their communities, as they are in suburbs and used to be in urban districts.

Wickham writes:

The only time I can remember hearing sirens in Marathon (population 271) was for a school send-off. Six weeks into the 2024 academic year, I stood outside our K–12 public school with the student body and my fellow teachers on a dazzling West Texas morning to see our girls volleyball team off to regionals. Sheriff’s deputies, the fire department, and a fleet of pickups and Suburbans all lined up to escort the Lady Mustangs out of town. I was admiring the motorcade when I turned around and realized that my sixth-grade students had fled the school grounds and were sprinting down Avenue E—escaping!—in their Crocs. Panicked, I cried out after them.

“Don’t worry, they’ll come back,” another teacher assured me. They were only circling the block to catch the bus a second time.

Teaching in a small town is unlike teaching anywhere else. In many ways, the local school is the heartbeat of the community. There’s a trust, familiarity, and neighborliness that is hard to find in cities and suburbs. Often the largest employers in rural communities, schools do more than just educate local youth. In Marathon, the school organizes town dinners, hosts intergenerational dances with cumbia and country and western music, and packs the sweltering gymnasium on game night. At a time when school board meetings across the country have devolved into vicious disputes about book bans and “woke ideology,” many rural public schools remain uncontroversial cornerstones of their communities.

“Drive across West Texas or the Panhandle and you’ll see the names of school mascots on the water towers—ours says ‘Spearman Lynx,’ ” Suzanne Bellsnyder, a rural mother and public school advocate, told me. “That alone shows how central the school is to who we are.”

More than a third of Texas students attend rural schools, and despite their communities’ support, many of those schools have been on the brink of financial ruin for years. Not far down the road from Marathon, Alpine Independent School District and Marfa ISD are both running deficits of around $1 million, despite having some of the lowest teacher salaries in the state. Nearby Valentine ISD operates out of an unrenovated 1910 schoolhouse and has recruited six teachers from the Philippines to keep its doors open. The Marathon school is also feeling the pinch. We sometimes teach two classes at once; we rely on online coursework to meet curriculum requirements; two of our fluorescent lights emit a sinister drone the district can’t afford to address; and our track has completely peeled away in places, revealing the layer of concrete underneath.

In 2023, Governor Greg Abbott held public-education funding hostage because a coalition of Texas Democrats and rural Republicans refused to pass his universal voucher program. But this spring the levee finally broke, and lawmakers passed two landmark education bills. One, House Bill 2, offers rural schools a long-awaited lifeline, investing $8.5 billion in public education over the next two years. The second, Senate Bill 2, earmarks billions to fund private school tuition through education savings accounts (ESAs), taxpayer-funded accounts parents can use for private school or homeschooling. Some fear it may mark the beginning of the end for public education in rural Texas.

---

For decades, rural lawmakers opposed vouchers for a pretty obvious reason: Most rural communities in Texas have few private schools, if any. Take the Trans-Pecos, where I live. The region is roughly the size of South Carolina, but if you leave out the El Paso metropolitan area, it had only two accredited private schools in 2022, according to data compiled by ProPublica.

School choice advocates argue that new private school options will emerge to meet demand. “When we insert capitalism into anything, it increases productivity and decreases cost,” said Republican House Representative Joanne Shofner, of Nacogdoches, this fall as the voucher debate raged. “It’s just good all around.” And if rural communities really love their local schools, said Mandy Drogin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank, then rural educators should have nothing to worry about. “Parents want to be able to send their child to the school down the street and have them receive a high-quality, values-aligned education,” Drogin said. “If that’s what the public system is providing, then their children will continue at that school.”

Trying to reconcile the optimism of school choice evangelists with the dire warnings from public-education advocates can be bewildering. Defenders of public education point to evidence that the ESA program will harm student learning, deprive underfunded Texas schools of vital per-student dollars, subsidize tuition for thousands already enrolled in private schools, and likely distribute hundreds of millions to rich and upper-middle-class families. On the other side, school choice advocates—many of whom have ties to deep-pocketed right-wing donors—present ESAs as a win-win, giving parents agency over the state funding allocated to their children’s educations each year without, in Abbott’s words, taking “a penny from public schools.”

But experience in other states suggests ESAs will constrict public education funding, and the research on their efficacy is disappointing at best. “Catastrophic” is how education researcher Joshua Cowen describes voucher findings from the last decade, citing learning loss comparable to the impacts from COVID-19 and Hurricane Katrina for students leaving public school systems. According to the ESA bill’s fiscal note—a nonpartisan document compiled by the Legislative Budget Board that estimates how much a bill will cost to implement—the Texas Education Agency predicts that private school capacity could increase by 10 percent yearly to accommodate the influx from public schools. But in the first year, most of the students receiving ESAs will likely be children already enrolled in private schools. “There’s not going to be a mass exodus of kids in your community to private schools tomorrow,” Cowen said.

Still, Arturo Alferez, interim superintendent of Marfa ISD, says money is so tight that he worries about the financial impact of losing even one student. His district’s enrollment plummeted by 43 percent, from 341 to 194 students, from 2019 to the 2024—25 school year. More than half of Marfa ISD students are economically disadvantaged, but because property values are rising in Marfa—a fine art hub that draws visitors from around the world—the town gives more than $1 million in local revenue to the state each year under Texas’srecapture, or “Robin Hood,” policy. I reached Alferez by phone about thirty minutes after our scheduled interview time; he’d had to fill in for the district’s bus driver. “Our property values are going up, but we’re losing students,” he said, “and that puts the district more and more in a hole.”

Unlike most small towns of its size, Marfa ISD does have a private school competitor. Wonder School Marfa is a small, mixed-age, unaccredited Montessori-style “microschool” for elementary-age students. The school’s director and sole teacher, Emily Steriti, taught in a Montessori program in Marfa ISD for years before striking out on her own and founding Wonder School Marfa in a church basement. For Ariele Gentiles, a mother of three in Marfa, Wonder School was a godsend. Her middle son has autism and did not respond well to the environment at Marfa ISD.

“We took him into the big school under the overhead fluorescent lights with all the kids, and he just screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed, wouldn’t let us leave,” Gentiles said. “We made it about two weeks of maybe getting to school every other day before I was like, ‘Okay, this is not working.’ ” The small, low-key environment of Wonder School Marfa worked better for her son, she said, and Steriti’s Montessori-based classroom allows him to work above grade level while still learning alongside kids his own age.  “If there was no Wonder School where he could be and could thrive,” Gentiles said, “we probably wouldn’t be in Marfa anymore.”

Wonder School’s tuition is modest, but Gentiles said it’s still a sacrifice for her family, whose income depends on her part-time copyediting and her husband’s work as a fabricator. Depending on Wonder School’s eligibility, Gentiles plans to use either a private school or homeschooling ESA to help cover the $400 monthly tuition. ESA participants can generally receive around $10,000 toward private school tuition, with extra funding available for students with disabilities, while homeschoolers can receive up to $2,000 per year. Though she’s looking forward to the extra funds, Gentiles feels conflicted about ESAs in general. “It’s a very knotty thing to untangle as someone who wants to champion public education and sees the total value in it,” she said.

There is only one private high school option within a hundred miles of Marathon (or Marfa, for that matter). Alpine Christian School, a small K–12 school with a shooting range and a horse arena, offers a classical education “based on a biblical worldview.” Board member Rudi Wallace said school leadership has spoken with families hoping to switch over from the public system using ESAs. He added, however, that “not every student or family would fit” at Alpine Christian. The statement of faith laid out in the school’s handbook professes a belief in “the biblical and biological definition of two genders and of God’s design for marriage between one man and one woman.” When asked if the Alpine Christian would turn away children of gay parents or from different faith backgrounds, Wallace said that admission decisions are made on a “case-by-case basis.” According to the handbook, Alpine Christian looks for “families who share beliefs and goals similar to those identified in the school’s statement of faith and philosophy of education” and may decline admission due to “incompatibilities” in one or more of those areas. 

---

Rural public schools will inevitably lose students to ESAs, but legal scholar and education-policy expert Derek Black says the existential threat to rural schools isn’t private competition. It’s how the state’s new, rapidly expanding entitlement program may constrict public school funding over the next decade. The fiscal note for Senate Bill 2 predicts that Texas will spend around $11 billion on ESAs in the next five years, and that money has to come from somewhere.

Sustainability is also a concern for state representatives. Gary VanDeaver was one of the two Republicans to vote no on vouchers, even when it was clear Senate Bill 2 was a done deal. VanDeaver, whose district, in northeast Texas, is almost entirely rural, is rooting for vouchers to succeed, but he remains concerned about the long-term budgetary impact of funding parallel education systems. “The day will come when we are not going to have the surpluses that we have, that we’ve enjoyed for several sessions in the state,” he said. “When that day comes and we see a downturn or even a leveling off in the economy, how are we going to fund everything that we made promises to fund?”

All Texas public schools have to worry about revenue loss from vouchers, but rural districts are plagued by unique challenges. Because of their typically small property tax bases, they rely more on state funding to keep the lights on. Unlike large urban and suburban districts, small rural districts cannot capitalize on economies of scale to cover fixed costs like salaries and electric bills. “It costs as much to pay a teacher to teach five kids as it does to teach thirty,” Debbie Engle, who recently retired as superintendent of Valentine ISD, told me. “But we don’t get the funding for thirty, so we’re trying to do more with less.”

The job of a rural superintendent is not for the faint of heart. Engle has chased javelinas off her school’s playground and smashed a rattlesnake’s head in with a brick. In small districts, superintendents often double as principals, coaches, teachers, substitutes, or even maintenance staffers. My former boss, Ivonne Durant, had already come out of retirement three times before retiring again this spring, at the age of 78. (“I guess I’m just a glutton for punishment,” she joked.) Before moving to Marathon, Durant faced all kinds of challenges during her decades in Dallas ISD—carjackings, slashed tires, racist incidents in the workplace—but the administrative workload at a small district took her by surprise. “Here, for the first time, I found the true meaning of ‘from the boardroom to the classroom,’ ” Durant told me. “If I was going to bring a big idea to the board, I had to make sure that I could carry it out myself. I don’t care how many times I heard people say, ‘Well, why don’t you delegate more?’ How do you delegate to teachers who already have too much on their plates?”

This May, after six years of stagnation, the passage of House Bill 2 offered rural superintendents some long-awaited breathing room. While it provides far less than the $19.6 billion Raise Your Hand Texas—an education-advocacy nonprofit—estimated schools needed to maintain their 2019 purchasing power, the bill’s $8.5 billion funding package remains the state’s single largest investment in public education in recent history. The bill included a considerable salary boost for experienced teachers in small and midsized districts. But the Texas Senate only raised annual per-student funding, known as the basic allotment—the most flexible revenue stream for public schools—by less than a percent. Instead, the bill requires targeted investments in areas like school safety, special education, and district operating costs, growing the list of underfunded mandates and limiting administrators’ ability to move funds around according to their schools’ needs. “The House passed a good bill, but the Senate desecrated it,” said Engle, referencing the low per-student funding.

“Our legislators love to write bills about education and all the things that they think we should be doing, and they leave out that local elected official,” said Randy Willis, executive director of the Texas Association of Rural Schools. “Texas doesn’t like Washington telling us what to do, but they don’t mind telling school boards how to run their districts—so we’re left trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.”

---

To finish reading the article, open the link or subscribe.

Thom Hartmann is very clear about two points in this excellent essay:

1. Political violence is always wrong. No one should be murdered because of their views.
2. Both parties are not equally to blame. Republicans, not Democrats, have stoked the flames of extremism and violence.

He writes:

As a guy who regularly gets death threats because of my media presence, I shouldn’t have to say that killing people — or even threatening them — for their politics is wrong. But here it is, for the record: nobody in America should die for their politics. 

That said, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — the guy who downplayed slavery, demonized Black and brown people, promoted the racist antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, attacked queer people, made degrading comments about women, said gun deaths were fine because that’s the price we must pay for the Second Amendment — the media is afraid to say anything about the state of our politics other than “we need to stop violence-provoking political rhetoric on both sides.” 

As if there were two sides here.

Here’s the hard truth that the bullshit-embracing “both sides” punditry won’t say out loud: calling for Democrats to “tone it down” has become a permission slip for Republicans to keep stoking hate, flirting with violence, and treating fellow Americans as enemies rather than opponents. 

That an alleged leftie shot Kirk is the exception that proves the rule.

If you actually look at the political science and the public record, the escalation didn’t start with Democrats, and it doesn’t continue because Democrats use accurate words to describe what we’re facing. The political research is clear.

As Rachel Bitecofer points out, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said the quiet part our loud when they wrote that the modern GOP had become “ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition” in their 2012 Washington Post essay and book-length work on asymmetric polarization. 

And this isn’t new: the rhetoric that got us here wasn’t even invented on social media. Lee Atwater explained Nixon’s Southern Strategy out loud in 1981, describing how race-baiting messages were laundered into “abstract” appeals that produced the same results without resorting to the N-word.

Ronald Reagan elevated the “welfare queen” trope into a national morality play that exploited poverty and race for partisan gain. The Willie Horton ad and “Revolving Door” spot baked fear-first politics into a Republican presidential campaign’s core strategy.

Pat Buchanan then said the quiet part with a bullhorn in his 1992 convention speech, declaringa “culture war” against Democrats and anyone who didn’t fit his vision of a Christian white America. Newt Gingrich operationalized it with his GOPAC training memo, a how-to guide that told Republican candidates to brand Democrats with words like “corrupt,” “sick,” and “traitors” while reserving terms like “freedom” and “strength” for themselves. 

This wasn’t an internet rumor, it was the Republican party’s official training literature.

When the National Rifle Association mailed a fundraising letter in 1995 calling federal agents “jack-booted thugs,” former President George H. W. Bush resigned from their board in protest, which tells you how far the mainstream right still had to travel to normalize incendiary attacks on law enforcement when it suited their politics.

Fast forward to the past decade and the escalation didn’t slow.

Republicans have long normalized calling Democrats “socialists” or “communists” as a baseline insult rather than an argument. This isn’t a fringe habit, it’s a standard applause line for Republican leaders and conservative media outlets. 

The “Second Amendment” wink-and-nod-endorsing-violence politics isn’t new either; Sharron Angle campaigned on “Second Amendment remedies” in 2010 and Donald Trump suggested in 2016 that the “Second Amendment people” might have to step up to stop Hillary Clinton.

With Trump’s 2016 campaign, the glorification of violence moved from innuendo to stagecraft. He urged rallygoers to “knock the crap out of” protesters, then later told police “please don’t be too nice” to suspects during a Long Island speech.

Armed rightwing extremists swarmed the Michigan Capitol in April 2020, a preview of how “we the people” could be recast as a threat display when public health or election results didn’t go the way Republicans wanted. 

Republican Congressman Paul Gosar posted an anime video that depicted violence against AOC and President Biden, which isn’t normal in an advanced democracy; nonetheless all but two Republicans refused to vote for his censure.

The GOP’s information pipeline supercharged moral panics about identity and belonging; the old birther lie about Barack Obama’s citizenship migrated from fringe to Fox to Trump’s core brand.

Then the “Great Replacement” narrative went from white supremacist fever dream to a standard talking point on the country’s most-watched rightwing channel, and then into the manifestos of mass murderers in El Paso and Buffalo, and into the antisemitic rantings of the Tree of Life shooter who blamed Jews for “bringing invaders” here. 

After Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” law, the “groomer” slur against queer people explodedby more than 400% because political entrepreneurs like Kirk realized how quickly a smear can mobilize fear and clicks in the current media economy.

Republican officials and aligned media also popularized the false frame that gender-affirming care equals “genital mutilation,” a homophobic slur Kirk kept using that’s been rejected on the record by federal judges examining the facts in these cases.

This is the ecosystem that produced a presidential debate moment in which Trump told the racist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” and a January 6th rally where he urged supporters to “fight like hell.” The RNC later tried to rebrand the attack as “legitimate political discourse,” which was an explicit signal to their base that political violence is just fine with the GOP.

The Department of Justice charged more than 1,500 people in connection with the attack on the Capitol, including hundreds for assaulting police officers (three of whom died as a result): Trump then pardoned them all, explaining again by his action (and the failure of any Republicans to condemn it) that political violence is just fine with today’s GOP.

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two election workers falsely smeared by Trump’s lawyer, won a landmark defamation verdict because Republican threats to public servants are real, not rhetorical flourishes.

When critics talk about authoritarian drift, they aren’t making it up for cable hits. Trump created “Schedule F” by executive order in 2020 to strip job protections from large categories of civil servants; President Biden revoked it, but now it’s back, leading to a dangerous politicization of the federal bureaucracy that’s now hunting and purging “lefties” the way slave patrolers once tracked down escapees. 

Alongside that, Trump has publicly urged defunding or punishing the FBI and DOJ when they investigate him, and even floated “terminating” parts of the Constitution, which is rhetoric that would have ended careers a generation ago and now earns a shrug from most of his party’s elected officials.

And, as Jessica Valenti points out: 

“[W]hen a pregnant woman dies of sepsis in a hospital that could have helped her but is legally prevented from doing so, that’s political violence. It’s political violence when a child is shot in their classroom because lawmakers refuse to take action on guns. An abortion provider being assassinated after years of conservatives calling them ‘baby-killers’ is political violence, as is the death of a person who had their medical claim denied by companies more interested in their bottom line than people’s lives.”

And now, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, Republicans are again amping up the violent rhetoric. Laura Loomer just posted, “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.” Trump referenced “radical left political violence” as if that’s the only source of it.

Sean Davis, the CEO of The Federalist, wrote, “When Democrats lose elections they couldn’t steal, they murder the people they were unable to defeat.” Fox Host Jesse Waters said, “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us.” Mother Jones compiled a more comprehensive list of Republican calls for violence against Democrats. 

Trump made jokes about Paul Pelosi’s near-murder, and laughed when a thuggish congressional candidate assaulted a reporter for asking him a question about health care policy; that thug is now governor of Montana. 

And let’s not forget Charlie Kirk’s hero, Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two people and blew most of the arm off a third; Trump invited him to Mar-a-Largo to congratulate him. 

Violence is their brand. 

And in the wake of all this, Trump pulls the Secret Service security detail from Kamala Harris just as she begins her book tour. 

Now put that record next to what Democrats have done.

I realize it makes them sound like wimps, but instead of vilifying their opposition Democrats in Congress have been working across the aisle for the average person, passing healthcare legislation, trying to strengthen voting rights, reduce student debt, clean up the environment, rebuild our infrastructure and kick-start chip manufacturing, and hold corporate criminals to account. 

After Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a rightwinger with a list of almost 50 other Democrats he planned to kill, Trump refused to even call Governor Walz, much less lower flags to half-staff. Democrats, who’d lost a genuine hero, universally called for toning down political rhetoric instead of vengeance or retributive violence. 

While the GOP’s brand is “We’re victims!!!,” Democrats are more interested in getting things done for the people. And when they do call out the authoritarianism of this administration, they’re pointing to actual policies like masked secret police, military in the streets, Trump grifting billions in crypto, using the FBI to go after his political opponents, and Republicans on the Supreme Court giving Trump immunity from prosecution for actual crimes.

On top of passing legislation, Democratic leaders have consistently condemned political violence without caveat, from Joe Biden’s 2020 speechspelling out that “rioting is not protesting” to repeated condemnations after attacks on public officials and public servants.

So when commentators ask both parties to “lower the temperature,” we should be honest about what that means in practice.

Too often, it’s a request for Democrats to stop calling out the very real way the modern right has mainstreamed eliminationist rhetoric, moral-panic politics, and procedural hardball. 

It is a call to pretend that saying “you’re child-abusing communists who hate America” versus “you’re undermining democracy and endangering people with lies” are mirror images. 

They are not.

One is a smear that licenses political violence. The other is a description of a documented pattern of behavior with decades of receipts.

None of that means Democrats are perfect. It means Democrats are operating inside the reality-based world where deals must be made, bills must be passed, and violence is condemned when it appears on your own side.

Former Republican George Conway warns that the GOP is on the verge of turning Kirk into Horst Wessel, the Nazi streetfighter who Hitler made into a martyr when he was killed. He posted:

“They may not want to hear it, and it may incense them, but the parallels between what the Nazis did then, and what Trump and MAGA are doing today, are striking, chilling—and as any expert on authoritarianism will tell you, straight out of the same toxic, but dog-eared, playbook.” 

Jim Stewartson suggests Kirk’s killing could be used by Trump the way Hitler used the Reichstag Fire to change German law and give himself unlimited power. 

These are indeed very, very dangerous times. And the political rhetoric coming out of 1500 rightwing hate-radio stations, Republican politicians, and billionaire-funded hard-right-biased-social-media-algorithms is at the center of the crisis. 

If Republicans want the volume to come down, the path is simple.

— Stop labeling mainstream opponents as “communists” and “groomers.” 
— Stop flirting with “Second Amendment remedies.” 
— Stop normalizing threats against election workers. 
— Stop trying to bend the machinery of government to punish critics and shield allies. 

When that happens, Democrats will meet them in the middle, because Democrats already live there when they write bipartisan infrastructure bills, subsidize domestic chip manufacturing, narrow gun loopholes, and harden the legal process for counting electoral votes. 

Until then, asking Democrats to “watch their tone” is not a plan for peace: it’s a plan for unilateral disarmament in a fight the other side first chose.

Our media must call the problem what it is, or we’ll never fix it. The people who lit this fire keep tossing gasoline on it. The only way to put it out is to stop pretending the arsonists and the firefighters are the same.

Trump announced that he will bring back prayer in the schools. This is a prize for his Christian nationalist base, who want the nation to be a theological, Bible-based state.

Trump recently appeared at the Museum of the Bible (who knew?) where he made clear his plans.

This is alarming but also amusing. Trump is probably the least religious man ever elected President. Sunday mornings, he is on the golf course, not in church. He has violated every one of the Ten Commandments.

Politico reported:

President Donald Trump on Monday said that the Department of Education would soon be instituting new guidelines on the right to prayer in public schools.

Speaking from an event at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, Trump said there are “grave threats to religious liberty in American schools.”

“For most of our country’s history, the Bible was found in every classroom in the nation, yet in many schools today students are instead indoctrinated with anti-religious propaganda and some are punished for their religious beliefs. Very, very strongly punished,” Trump said. “It is ridiculous.”

Trump did not detail what the new guidance will include, but during the 2024 campaign he promised to “bring back prayer” to public schools.

In a statement to POLITICO, Savannah Newhouse, press secretary for the Education Department said, “The Department of Education looks forward to supporting President Trump’s vision to promote religious liberty in our schools across the country.” 

While religion is not banned in public schools, the Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that state-sponsored prayer in public schools violates the First Amendment.

It’s important these days to remember that public schools were created by communities, districts, and states to serve all children and to contribute to the betterment of society. As a result of demands by parents, activists, the courts, and legislators, public schools must serve all children, not just those they choose to admit.

Sidney Shapiro, a Professor of Law at Wake Forest University, and Joseph P. Romain, a Professor of Law at the University of Cinncinatti, co-authored a paper on the need for and purpose of public schools.

While the White House’s fight with elite universities such as Columbia and Harvard has recently dominated the headlines, the feud overshadows the broader and more far-reaching assault on K-12 public education by the Trump administration and many states.

The Trump administration has gutted the Department of Education, imperiling efforts to protect students’ civil rights, and proposed billions in public education cuts for fiscal year 2026. Meanwhile, the administration is diverting billions of taxpayer funds into K-12 private schools. These moves build upon similar efforts by conservative states to rein in public education going back decades.

But the consequences of withdrawing from public education could be dire for the U.S. In our 2024 book, “How Government Built America,” we explore the history of public education, from Horace Mann’s “common school movement” in the early 19th century to the GI Bill in the 20th that helped millions of veterans go to college and become homeowners after World War II.

We found that public education has been essential for not only creating an educated workforce but for inculcating the United States’ fundamental values of liberty, equality, fairness and the common good.

In the public good

Opponents of public education often refer to public schools as “government schools,” a pejorative that seems intended to associate public education with “big government” – seemingly at odds with the small government preferenceof many Americans.

But, as we have previously explored, government has always been a significant partner with the private market system in achieving the country’s fundamental political values. Public education has been an important part of that partnership.

Education is what economists call a public good, which means it not only benefits students but the country as well.

Mann, an education reformer often dubbed the father of the American public school system, argued that universal, publicly funded, nonsectarian public schools would help sustain American political institutions, expand the economy and fend off social disorder. Horace Mann was a pioneer of free public schools and Massachusetts’ first secretary of education.

In researching Mann’s common schools and other educational history for our book, two lessons stood out to us.

One is that the U.S. investment in public education over the past 150 years has created a well-educated workforce that has fueled innovation and unparalleled prosperity.

As our book documents, for example, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the states expanded public education to include high school to meet the increasing demand for a more educated citizenry as a result of the Industrial Revolution. And the GI Bill made it possible for returning veterans to earn college degrees or train for vocations, support young families and buy homes, farms or businesses, and it encouraged them to become more engaged citizens, making “U.S. democracy more vibrant in the middle of the twentieth century.”

The other, equally significant lesson is that the democratic and republican principals that propelled Mann’s vision of the common school have colored many Americans’ assumptions about public schooling ever since. Mann’s goal was a “virtuous republican citizenry” – that is, a citizenry educated in “good citizenship, democratic participation and societal well-being.”

Mann believed there was nothing more important than “the proper training of the rising generation,” calling it the country’s “highest earthly duty.”

Attacking public education

Today, Mann’s vision and all that’s been accomplished by public education is under threat.

Trump’s second term has supercharged efforts by conservatives over the past 75 years to control what is taught in the public schools and to replace public education with private schools.

Most notably, Trump has begun dismantling the Department of Education to devolve more policymaking to the state level. The department is responsible for, among other things, distributing federal funds to public schools, protecting students’ civil rights and supporting high-quality educational research. It has also been responsible for managing over a trillion dollars in student loans – a function that the administration is moving to the Small Business Administration, which has no experience in loan management.

The president’s March 2025 executive order has slashed the department’s staff in half, with especially deep cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, which, as noted, protects student from illegal discrimination.

Trump’s efforts to slash education funding has so far hit roadblocks with Congress and the public. The administration is aiming to cut education funding by US$12 billion for fiscal year 2026, which Congress is currently negotiating.

And contradicting its stance on ceding more control to states and local communities, the administration has also been mandating what can’t and must be taught in public schools. For example, it’s threatened funding for school districts that recognize transgender identities or teach about structural racism, white privilege and similar concepts. On the other hand, the White House is pushing the use of “patriotic” education that depicts the founding of the U.S. as “unifying, inspiring and ennobling.”

Promoting private education

As Trump and states have cut funding and resources to public education, they’ve been shifting more money to K-12 private schools.

Most recently, the budget bill passed by Congress in July 2025 gives taxpayers a tax credit for donations to organizations that fund private school scholarships. The credit, which unlike a deduction counts directly against how much tax someone owes, is $1,700 for individuals and double for married couples. The total cost could run into the billions, since it’s unclear how many taxpayers will take advantage.

Meanwhile, 33 states direct public money toward private schools by providing vouchers, tax credits or another form of financial assistance to parents. All together, states allocated $8.2 billion to support private school education in 2024.

Government funding of private schools diverts money away from public education and makes it more difficult for public schools to provide the quality of education that would most benefit students and the public at large. In Arizona, for example, many public schools are closing their doors permanently as a result of the state’s support for charter schools, homeschooling and private school vouchers.

That’s because public schools are funded based on how many students they have. As more students switch to private schools, there’s less money to cover teacher salaries and fixed costs such as building maintenance. Ultimately, that means fewer resources to educate the students who remain in the public school system.

Living up to aspirations

We believe the harm to the country of promoting private schools while rolling back support for public education is about more than dollars and cents.

It would mean abandoning the principle of universal, nonsectarian education for America’s children. And in so doing, Mann’s “virtuous citizenry” will be much harder to build and maintain.

America’s private market system, in which individuals are free to contract with each other with minimal government interference, has been important to building prosperity and opportunity in the U.S., as our book documents. But, as we also establish, relying on private markets to educate America’s youth makes it harder to create equal opportunity for children to learn and be economically successful, leaving the country less prosperous and more divided.

Sidney Shapiro is a Professor of Law at Wake Forest University. He is affiliated with the Center for Progressive Reform.

Joseph P. Tomain is a Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati. He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Private and religious schools, in comparison, choose their students. They choose those who are a “good fit.” They choose their co-religionists. They may reject students for any reason. They may say they have the staff to help students with disabilities or those who don’t speak English or those who struggle with school work. The choice is theirs.

It’s a common complaint that the news media is trying so hard to be neutral that they are failing to warn the public about Trump’s efforts to make himself a fascistic emperor.

Trump has shattered norms and traditions by firing members of independent boards who were appointed to serve for a set term. He has cancelled funding authorized by Congress. He has taken control of Congress’s “power of the purse” by announcing draconian tariffs. He has bullied law firms, universities, tech giants, and the media. He ignores the law and the Constitution because no one will stop him. The Republicans who control Congress are hibernating. And they fear his base.

There is one writer who consistently writes frankly about Trump’s malfeasance: Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker. In her latest article, she points out that federal courts have consistently rebuffed Trump’s lawlessness. The title: “How Many Court Cases Can Trump Lose in a Single Week?”

She describes “the Trump Doctrine” in blunt terms: “I can do anything I want to do.” A king? A dictator? An emperor? What other President has asserted his unlimited power to do whatever he wants? It remains to be seen, she acknowledges, whether the Supreme Court will reverse all these rulings against Trump’s overreach.

She writes:

Is Donald Trump tired yet of all the losing? During the past week alone, federal judges across the country have rejected some of the most important and far-reaching of Trump’s initiatives—from his efforts to reshape the global economy with tariffs and mobilize the military to act as police in American cities to his refusal to spend billions of dollars in congressionally appropriated funds. The President continues to cite nonexistent emergencies to justify his executive overreach and judges continue to call him out on it, issuing stern rebukes in the tradition of Judge Beryl Howell, who, during a case this spring about the firings of civil servants, observed that “an American President is not a king—not even an ‘elected’ one.”

I’m not sure that this week’s epic losing streak has received the attention that it deserves, no doubt in part because America had other things to worry about, such as whether Trump was actually alive, despite all the internet rumors. It speaks to the present moment that the President is not only very much still with us but has already started fund-raising off the social-media frenzy surrounding his supposed death over Labor Day weekend. (“These rumors are just another desperate attack from the failing left who can’t stand that we’re WINNING and bigly!” the e-mail pitch that arrived in my inbox on Thursday morning said.) But what does it say about the state of things that disputing rumors of his death turns out to be a welcome distraction from underlying political realities for Trump?…

The latest string of defeats began last Friday, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs imposing double-digit duties on key trading partners such as Canada, China, and the European Union were illegal. Over the holiday weekend, a federal district judge intervened to stop migrant children from being deported to Guatemala while some of them were already loaded on planes. On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reinstated a Federal Trade Commissioner, saying that Trump did not have the power that he claimed to fire her. Also that day, another federal judge ruled that, in sending hundreds of National Guard personnel to Los Angeles amid protests of Trump’s immigration crackdown, the President had violated a nineteenth-century law prohibiting the use of troops for domestic law-enforcement purposes. On Wednesday, yet another judge, in Boston, rejected billions of dollars in cuts to research funding for Harvard University, part of a broad war on liberal academia that Trump has made an unlikely centerpiece of his second term. And late on Wednesday night, a federal judge in Washington blocked billions of dollars in Trump-ordered cuts to foreign aid, saying that he was usurping Congress’s power of the purse in refusing to spend the money. This, I should add, is an incomplete list. If nothing else, it shows the extraordinary scope and scale of the battles that Trump has chosen to pursue—suggesting not so much a strategic view of the Presidency as an everything-everywhere-all-at-once vision of unchecked Presidential power.

It’s refreshing to read Glasser. She’s not shrill. She’s not ideological. She’s not afraid.

Greg Olear lays out the frightening parallels between the rise of Hitler and the rise of Trump, quoting from a book written by a German author. The article is longer that what I posted here. Please open the link to read it all. There is no paywall.

I. The United States: A Survey

In just a few months, a coarse, artless, criminal strongman has taken control of the entire federal government—including, as of yesterday, the nation’s capital (or “Capital,” as he writes it, capitalizing his nouns like a good German).

Trump owns the Supreme Court, the Republican Party, the Speaker of the House. Congress is powerless to stop him. The wealthiest tech-bros in Silicon Valley and most of the legacy media CEOs have lined up behind him. Colleges and universities have capitulated to his demands, as have white-shoe law firms and venerable broadcasting companies. He’s transformed U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement into his own secret state police. He’s using the FBI and the Justice Department to attack his enemies. He’s building concentration camps. He’s enriching himself on a grand scale. And every word that comes out of his puckered little mouth is a lie.

How did this happen? 

While on vacation in Barcelona, I came across the most cogent explanation I’ve yet encountered. It was written, appropriately, by a German—a brilliant journalist named Sebastian Haffner. Here is an excerpt:

At rally after rally all through the summer and fall of 2024, Trump bellowed that he would win—his supporters didn’t even have to vote, because he had Elon’s help—and then heads would roll. Nothing happened. The white-haired attorney general did not think of changing his strategy, insisting instead on the preservation of “norms.” In the presidential election against Joe Biden, Trump had declared that victory was his, in any case. Nothing happened. When he said it again at his next rally, the audience tittered, as if it had been tickled. The House invested considerable time and energy investigating the coup attempt of January 6th, in which his supporters besieged the Capitol and policemen were killed, and concluded that Trump was responsible. Nothing happened. No, something did happen: the insurrectionists were pardoned.

It was strange to observe how the behavior of each side reinforced that of the other: the savage impudence that gradually made it possible for the unpleasant orange apostle of hate to assume the proportions of a demon; the bafflement of his tamers, who always realized just too late exactly what it was he was up to—namely, when he capped it with something even more outrageous and monstrous; then, also, the hypnotic trance into which his public fell, succumbing with less and less resistance to the glamour of depravity and the ecstasy of evil. 

Besides, he promised everything to everybody, which naturally brought him a vast, loose army of followers and voters from among the ignorant, the disappointed, and the dispossessed.

Spot on, right?

Here’s the twist: Haffner wrote that in 1939—before the Nazis invaded Poland. He was reflecting on how the “unpleasant little apostle of hate”—I swapped “orange” for “little”—had come to power: how Hitler had bamboozled the German people into voting away their freedom, and how the German people had failed to meet the moment.

Obviously I modified the first paragraph to serve my rhetorical purposes, but the spirit of the original is unchanged: a loud, hateful psychopath keeps pushing and pushing and pushing, no one in a position of authority stops him, and the unthinkable comes true. This is what Haffner actually wrote:

Summoned as a witness before the highest German court, Hitler bellowed at the judges that he would one day come to power by strictly constitutional means and then heads would roll. Nothing happened. The white-haired president of the supreme court did not think of ordering the witness to be taken into custody for contempt. In the presidential elections against Hindenburg, Hitler declared that victory was his, in any case. His opponent was eighty-five, he was forty-three; he could wait. Nothing happened. When he said it again at his next meeting, the audience tittered, as if it had been tickled. One night, six storm troopers fell on a “dissident” in his bed and literally trampled him to death, for which they were sentenced to death. Hitler sent them a telegram of praise and acknowledgment. Nothing happened. No, something did happen: the murderers were pardoned.

The parallels are as obvious as they are disturbing.

---

Haffner—the pen name of Raimund Pretzel—was born in Berlin in 1907, the son of a Prussian government official. As a boy, he thrilled to the exploits of the Kaiser’s army during the Great War, like most of his contemporaries. He was not particularly “political.” He did not care for the Communists; if anything, he was more “right” than “left.” But he loathed Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He realized early on, in the years after the First World War, that political zealotry in Berlin was the province of “the more stupid, coarse, and unpleasant among my schoolfellows”—and all of those young, dumb bullies bought what the creepy watercolorist from Linz was selling. Haffner himself was “Aryan,” but he had a lot of Jewish friends, including his then-girlfriend, and he was morally outraged at the disgusting anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party.

As the situation grew more dire, Haffner fled Berlin, first to Paris, then to London, where, in 1939, he began a memoir—an account of how the Nazis had come to power. Unlike other works of this kind, his book is not an examination of what Hitler did, but rather how the German people, especially the ones who should have known better, reacted and responded to what Hitler did. He makes the case that his experience, as an individual German citizen living through the rise of the Third Reich, reflected the experience of hundreds of thousands of German citizens—the majority of whom, after all, had notvoted for the Nazis. The book is a chronicle of the political zeitgeist. It tracks the evolution of the emotions, the feelings, the vibes of the German nation, and explicates how and why Adolf Hitler, of all people, this nebbishy little weirdo, became not only chancellor but führer.

Published in German as Germany: A Survey, in English, the memoir is called Defying Hitler—a poor title, as it isn’t representative of the contents (there is not much defying of Hitler going on); plus, functionally, having HITLER emblazoned on the cover of a book makes it awkward to read at the airport.

Haffner abandoned the project in 1939, after the war started, “presumably because its theme is the question of how it was possible for the Nazis to come to power,” as his son and (wonderful) translator, Oliver Pretzel, explains in the introduction. “Instead he started another one, whose subject was the more urgent question of how to deal with Nazi Germany.”

The manuscript sat unread in a filing cabinet for decades. It was only published in 2001, two years after Haffner’s death, becoming a best-seller in Germany. While his original plan for A Survey was to chronicle his experiences through his emigration to England in 1938, he doesn’t get nearly that far. The action breaks off in 1933. I would have loved for it to continue—it feels like if Andor hadn’t come back for the second season—but he gives us more than enough insight to make his point.

Nineteen thirty-three was the crucial year in which Hitler and the Nazis established their power. It’s helpful, in the U.S. of 2025, to focus just on the events of that year. Here is a quick timeline:

January 30, 1933
The moribund president, Hindenburg—a “traitor,” Haffner rightly calls him—appoints Hitler as chancellor. Nazis are now in charge of Germany.

February 27, 1933
The Reichstag Fire—a “false flag” act of terrorism blamed on the rival Communists and used as a pretext for Hitler to crack down on his political opponents.

March 5, 1933
In the last free elections, the Nazis garner 43.9 percent of the popular vote—but exploit the parliamentary system and the feckless leaders of the German Nationalist People’s Party to remain in control.

March 22, 1933
The first concentration camp is established at Dachau, where dissidents and political opponents of the Nazis are sent after their arrests.

March 23, 1933
The Enabling Act grants Hitler dictatorial powers.

April 1, 1933
The Nazis impose a national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. This kicks off an incremental process of barring German Jews from the civil service, the legal profession, the armed forces, the arts, agriculture, journalism, and so on.

April 26, 1933
The Gestapo—a truncation of Geheime Staatspolizei; literally the secret state police—is established.

As you can see—and as any American paying attention to the news these days can attest—it does not take that long for a stubborn and dedicated strongman, however ridiculous he may appear, to acquire fearsome authoritarian powers.

Defying Hitler is jawdroppingly good: as a piece of writing, as a personal memoir, as a social history, as a political analysis. And it is eerily, uncomfortably, shockingly current. I lost track of how many times I gasped out loud as I was reading, noting the unpleasant similarities between Germany in 1933 and the U.S. right now. Insofar as Trump has modeled himself on Hitler, and MAGA on the Nazi Party, the book is instructive—terrifying, to be sure, but not unhopeful.

Because of the ticking-time-bomb urgency, I’m going to quote from the book at length in this two-part piece, and hope that Mr. Pretzel does not object. With that said, I urge everyone to buy Defying Hitler and read it. Haffner’s memoir is beautifully written, short, fascinating, and not as depressing as the subject matter suggests. His disappointment and disgust with his countrymen feels very familiar. Defying Hitler is the single most important work I’ve come across, in terms of understanding the here and now.

There are, to reiterate, an alarming number of parallels between Germany in 1933 and the United States today. But there are also subtle differences, which, I believe, and which I hope, augur a better future here now than there then. The key difference, of course, as I’ve said many times on various broadcasts, is that the Germans of 1933 did not have the benefit of knowing what happened in Germany in 1933. They were caught blindsided. We have no such excuse.

Especially given this historical hindsight, it is both shameful and depressing that Donald Trump was elected a second time. But the historical precedent for such national stupidity still exists, as Haffner shows.

Mike DeGuire, veteran educator in Denver, fears that billionaires are paying the bills for a phony reform group that’s trying to buy the Denver school board. The billionaires find Denver an enticing target because its leading public officials are DFER Democrats: Michael Bennett is a Colorado Senator and a big supporter of charter schools when he was Denver’s Superintendent of Schools; Governor Jared Polis opened charter schools and is a charter cheerleader; Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a former TFA and state legislator, loves charters and evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores (he sponsored legislation to make teacher evaluation-by-value-added-scores state law).

Please note that the Dark Money groups use names intended to fool the public into thinking they represent parents and families. They don’t.

DeGuire wrote in Colorado Newsline:

School board elections in Denver have become increasingly expensive, and the outcomes often hinge on the amount of money spent by competing groups. According to Chalkbeat, “In Denver Public Schools politics, pro-charter organizations like Denver Families Action are on one side and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association union is on the other.”

In the 2023 Denver Public Schools school board race, Denver Families Action spent nearly $1 million through its independent expenditure committee Better Leaders Stronger Schools, outspending “the Denver teachers’ union 5 to 1.” That election nearly tied the record for all-time spending in a DPS school board race at $2.2 million. For the first time, Denver Families Action also paid for TV ads with dark money that featured Denver Mayor Mike Johnstonsupporting their endorsed candidates.

The money paid off, and all three won.

The Denver Classrooms Teachers Association is rooted in a local, democratic labor process since its funding comes from nearly 4,000 educators. 

Denver Families Action, however, is the “political arm” of Denver Families for Public Schools, an organization whose name might suggest local representation yet it is funded by billionaire donors from outside Denver.

The near-historic spending by Denver Families Action in 2023 has its roots in a national strategy spearheaded by billionaires Reed Hastings and John Arnold. In 2018, a leaked presentation described how their new organization, City Fund, planned to invest $200 million to “increase charter school representation up to 50% in over 40 cities.” Denver has been one of their prime targets. 

City Fund’s investment highlighted the DPS “portfolio model” which closes or replaces neighborhood schools that fail to meet standardized test-score benchmarks and then reopens them as charter schools. Since implementing the portfolio model in 2007, DPS closed or replaced dozens of neighborhood schools. Today, DPS has more than 50 charters. The model also weakens union influence“by reducing the number of schools whose teachers belong to the union, diminishing the union’s membership — and thus its power and its money.”  

City Fund’s strategy has met with some resistance. In 2021, school board members from six cities criticized City Fund and their locally funded “activist groups” writing they “present themselves as local grassroots organizations when nothing could be further from the truth.” They warned that the billionaire-driven privatization erodes local control, divides school districts, and undermines democratic ideals.

Denver’s experience reflects similar concerns. In Denver, financial backing from wealthy advocates of charter schools ensured that pro-charter school board members dominated the board for over a decade. But in 2019, three teacher union-backed candidates unexpectedly won. This raised alarm among charter school advocates who worried the new board might dismantle past reforms, and ongoing enrollment declines also raised concerns.

In response to these events, City Fund helped launch Denver Families for Public Schools with backing from four Denver charter networks: DSST, STRIVE Prep, Rocky Mountain Prep, and University Prep. DFPS’s executive director, Ray Rivera, acknowledged their goal was to elevate the “voices of families who attend these charter schools in Denver and making sure they’re part of the public policy that gets made.” 

DFPS received nearly $4 million from City Fund’s political arm, Campaign for Great Public Schools, and in 2024, they merged with another activist group, RootED, which had received over $34 millionfrom City Fund for charter expansion and grants to community organizations. Their combined resources now total about $8 million, allowing DFPS to hire staff, fund charter schools and community groups, pay canvassers up to $36 an hour, and organize advocacy campaigns to elect pro-charter candidates.

DFPS is led by Pat Donovan, the former managing partner with RootEd, who also chairs the board of Rocky Mountain Prep, a charter network with twelve DPS schools. In addition, Donovan serves on the boards of the Colorado League of Charter Schoolsand KIPP Colorado. City Fund CEO Marlon Marshall also serves on the board of Rocky Mountain Prep. These overlapping roles highlight how interconnected the interests of City Fund and Denver Families for Public Schools are, and how DFPS is integral in the school privatizationmovement in Denver.

DCTA’s funding is transparent and tied directly to local educators. By contrast, DFPS’s money originates from a national network of wealthy donors whose priorities do not necessarily align with the entire Denver community. This imbalance means one side can dominate the narrative, drowning out authentic community voices. 

When voters receive glossy mailers or see a targeted ad, they may believe they are hearing from grassroots “families” or “students.” However, the spending often comes from the billionaires who fund Denver Families for Public Schools. This is where democracy is at risk. Without transparency, voters cannot fully assess the motives behind the messaging.

Denver’s school board should prioritize issues like equitable funding, strengthening neighborhood schools, and supporting educators. If the dark money spending levels are repeated, or surpassed, in the 2025 races, local priorities risk being overshadowed by billionaire-backed agendas.

The question for Denver voters this fall is straightforward: Will they allow outside money to dictate the future of their public schools, or will they insist on authentic local voices leading the way?

MIKE DEGUIRE

Mike DeGuire, Ph.D., is the vice chair of Advocates for Public Education Policy. He has been a teacher, district level reading coordinator, executive coach, and a principal in the Denver metro area for most of his education career. He also worked as a leadership consultant for several national education organizations, and as an educator effectiveness specialist with the Colorado Department of Education. His writing is also featured on a4pep.org.