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ProPublica on The Most Anti-Democratic and Powerful Group You Never Heard Of

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2023 //
13

ProPublica wrote recently about a powerful organization of far-right conservatives that carefully avoids public scrutiny. They are wealthy, powerful, and networked, thanks to the Federalist Society and its mastermind Leonard Leo. Leo is the guy who picked judges for Trump and engineered the selection of Brett Kanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Please read this article about Teneo, an organization with long tentacles and a goal of crushing liberal ideas, ideas that are central to our democracy.

A few tidbits:

ProPublica and Documented have obtained more than 50 hours of internal Teneo videos and hundreds of pages of documents that reveal the organization’s ambitious agenda, influential membership and burgeoning clout. We have also interviewed Teneo members and people familiar with the group’s activities. The videos, documents and interviews provide an unfiltered look at the lens through which the group views the power of the left — and how it plans to combat it.

In response to questions for this story, Leo said in a statement: “Teneo’s young membership proves that the conservative movement is poised to be even more talented, driven, and successful in the future. This is a group that knows how to build winning teams.”

The records show Teneo’s members have included a host of prominent names from the conservative vanguard, including such elected officials as U.S. Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Missouri’s Josh Hawley, a co-founder of the group. Other members have included Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, now the fourth-ranking House Republican, as well as Nebraska’s attorney general and Virginia’s solicitor general. Three senior aides to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, are members. Another is the federal judge who struck down a Biden administration mask mandate. The heads of the Republican Attorneys General Association, Republican State Leadership Committee and Turning Point USA — all key cogs in the world of national conservative politics — have been listed as Teneo members…

Teneo co-founder Evan Baehr, a tech entrepreneur and veteran of conservative activism, said in a 2019 video for new members that Teneo had “many, many, many dozens” of members working in the Trump administration, including in the White House, State Department, Justice Department and Pentagon. “They’re everywhere….”

Soon after Leo took an interest in Teneo, the group’s finances soared. Annual revenue reached$2.3 million in 2020 and nearly $5 million in 2021, according to tax records. In 2021, the bulk of Teneo’s income — more than $3 million — came from one source: DonorsTrust, a clearinghouse for conservative, libertarian and other charitable gifts that masks the original source of the money. In 2020, the Leo-run group that received the Chicago business owner’s $1.6 billion donation gave $41 million to DonorsTrust, which had $1.5 billion in assets as of 2021.

Teneo’s other funders have included marquee conservative donors: hedge fund investor Paul Singer, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the DeVos family, according to Baehr.

As the group’s finances improved, its videos became much more professionally produced, and its website underwent a dramatic upgrade from previous iterations. All of this was part of what Baehr called “Teneo 2.0,” a major leap forward for the group, driven in part by Leo’s guidance and involvement….

Many of the connections happen at Teneo’s annual retreat, which brings together hundreds of members and their spouses, plus allies including politicians like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and DeSantis as well as business leaders and prominent academics. Speakers at past Teneo retreats have included luminaries spanning politics, culture, business and the law: New York Times columnist David Brooks, federal judge Trevor McFadden, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, “Woke, Inc.” author and 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, former Trump cabinet official and 2024 presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, ultrawealthy donors and activists Dick and Betsy DeVos, and Chick-fil-A board chair Dan Cathy.

These are the only posts today. Read them. Think about it. What did you learn? What should we do? None of us is a billionaire. How can we save our democracy?

Organize. Be informed. Vote.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Funding, Gender, Injustice, Lies, Privatization, Race, Religion, Republicans, Trump

ProPublica: Who Is Jeff Yass?

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2023 //
11

Jeff Yass is the richest man in Pennsylvania.

Jeff Yass is a billionaire. The Bloomberg Billionaire Index says he has $33 billion.

Jeff Yass created a Wall Street firm with partners called the Susquehanna International Group.

Jeff Yass is a huge supporter of charter schools. He created the annual Yass Prize, which is administered by the anti-public school organization called “The Center for Education Reform.” CER supports every kind of choice (charters, vouchers, online charters, for-profit charters, homeschooling) while vehemently denouncing public schools. CER is opposed to any regulation or accountability of “choice” schools. CER distributes millions in prizes to charter schools, thanks to the Yass family.

ProPublica says there’s something else you don’t know about Jeff Yass.

He funds Republican candidates and election deniers.

He opposes abortion.

He funds candidates who oppose critical race theory.

His top priority is to defund public schools.

According to ProPublica:

The firm he and his friends founded, Susquehanna International Group, is a sprawling global company that makes billions of dollars. Yass and his team used their numerical expertise to make rapid-fire computer-driven trades in options and other securities, eventually becoming a giant middleman in the markets for stocks and other securities. If you have bought stock or options on an app like Robinhood or E-Trade, there’s a good chance you traded with Susquehanna without knowing it. Today, Yass, 63, is one of the richest and most powerful financiers in the country.

But one crucial aspect of his ascent to stratospheric wealth has transpired out of public view. Using the same prowess that he’s applied to race tracks and options markets, Yass has taken aim at another target: his tax bill.

There, too, the winnings have been immense: at least $1 billion in tax savings over six recent years, according to ProPublica’s analysis of a trove of IRS data. During that time, Yass paid an average federal income tax rate of just 19%, far below that of comparable Wall Street traders.

Yass has devised trading strategies that reduce his tax burden but push legal boundaries. He has repeatedly drawn IRS audits, yet has continued to test the limits. Susquehanna has often gone to court to fight the government, with one multiyear audit battle ending in a costly defeat. The firm has maintained in court filings that it complied with the law.

Yass’ low rate is particularly notable because Susquehanna, by its own description, specializes in short-term trading. Money made from such rapid trades is typically taxed at rates around 40%.

In recent years, however, Yass’ annual income has, with uncanny consistency, been made up almost entirely of income taxed at the roughly 20% rate reserved for longer-term investments.

Congress long ago tried to stamp out widely used techniques that seek to transform profits taxed at the high rate into profits taxed at the low rate. But Yass and his colleagues have managed to avoid higher taxes anyway.

The tax savings have contributed to an explosion in wealth for Yass, who has increasingly poured that fortune into candidates and causes on the political right. He has spent more than $100 million on election campaigns in recent years. The money has gone to everything from anti-tax advocacy and charter schools to campaigns against so-called critical race theory and for candidates who falsely say the 2020 election was stolen and seek to ban abortion.

Grassroots groups, led by the Working Families Party, held a protest in front of his offices to protest his funding of groups that undermine democracy.

The LittleSis Project, which tracks the connections among rightwing funders and organizations, has more information about Yass. He is the money man behind Pennsylvania’s rightwing political machine. His top priority is school privatization. He wants to dismantle public schools. Read the article.

Yass’s influence over state politics doesn’t stop after elections are over. His money gets distributed throughout the right-wing network in the state and influences legislation and the conservative agenda year round. The right-wing organizations that spend Yass’s money consistently and successfully lobby to cut corporate taxes, bust unions, block climate solutions, ban abortion, target trans youth, and prevent what the right calls “critical race theory” from being taught in schools.

The Pennsylvania Capital Star worries about what Yass is doing to our democracy.

Yass is a threat to democracy in Pennsylvania. Our organizations were in the trenches during the 2020 election organizing on the frontline against MAGA Republicans, white nationalists, and conspiracy-riddled extremists. Yass was funding them. Despite Yass trying to back away from those associations publicly and in the press, this year he quietly continued to fund those same organizations like the Club for Growth – a right-wing front group that backed nearly 50 election deniers across the country.

What a guy. Does Senator Corey Booker know? Does Senator Michael Bennett know? Does Representative Hakeem Jeffries know? Does the Center for American Progress know?

Jeff Yass’s enthusiastic support of charter schools is another reason why charter schools should not get federal funding. Why should the US Department of Education spend $440 million a year to open new charter schools (half of which never open), when Jeff Yass and his partners could easily foot the bill, along with other billionaires like the Waltons, Michael Bloomberg, Charles Koch, and Betsy DeVos?

For billionaires like Yass, that amount is pocket change. Or, as the saying goes, chump change.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Pennsylvania, Republicans

Heather Cox Richardson: Equality Means Equality

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2023 //
28

Heather Cox Richardson writes in her blog “Letters from an American” about the Republican Right’s fascination with the authoritarian leader of Hungary, Viktor Orbán. Orbán is a critic of liberal democracy and a great admirer of Trump. It’s scary.

She writes:

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last weekend, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles said that “for the good of society…transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely—the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.” He worded his statement in such a way that it would inevitably create outrage that he could then angrily refute by insisting that “eradicating transgenderism” was not the same thing as eradicating transgender people. This sort of word game is a well-known right-wing tactic for garnering media attention.

Make no mistake: this attack on transgender people represents a deadly attack on the fundamental principle of American democracy, the idea that all people are created equal.

CPAC and its representatives have become increasingly close to Hungarian president Victor Orbán as he has asserted autocratic power in his own country. Orbán has explicitly rejected the liberal democracy that his country used to enjoy, saying that its emphasis on multiculturalism weakens national cultures while its insistence on human equality undermines traditional society by recognizing that women and LGBTQ people have the same rights as straight white men. The age of liberal democracy is over, he says, and a new age has begun.

In place of equality, Orbán advocates what he calls “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” “Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal,” he said in July 2018; “it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues—say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.”

Orbán has focused on LBGTQ rights as a danger to “Western civilization.” Arguing the need to protect children, his party has made it impossible for transgender people to change their gender identification on legal documents and made it illegal to share with minors any content that can be interpreted as promoting an LBGTQ lifestyle. After Orbán put allies in charge of Hungarian universities, his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. According to his chief of staff: “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women.”

As the opening speaker at CPAC in Texas last August, Orbán called for the establishment of a global right wing to continue to work together to destroy liberal democracy and establish Christian democracy.

The American right wing has heard the call, openly embracing Orbán’s principles. Vox senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp, who is a crackerjack analyst of right-wing political ideology both in the U.S. and abroad, noted in 2021 the rise of right-wing ideologues who saw themselves as the vanguard of a “post-liberal order.”

Beauchamp explained that these ideologues reject American democracy. They argue that “religious liberty, limited government, ‘the inviolability of private institutions (e.g., corporations),’ academic freedom, constitutional originalism, free markets, and free speech”—all central tenets of democracy—have created “liberal totalitarianism” that has destroyed “all institutions that were originally responsible for fostering human virtue: family, ennobling friendship, community, university, polity, church.”

They see the government institutions that defend these democratic tenets as part of a totalitarian system designed to destroy national virtue. If this were truly the case (it is not), it would be an act of heroism to try to destroy those systems altogether. Right-wing attacks on the FBI, the Department of Justice, and even the government itself over the arrest of January 6th rioters who they insist were peaceful tourists shore up the idea that the FBI and DOJ are part of a government determined to crush Trump supporters. That ideology invites those who believe it to continue to attack our government.

Knowles’s statement last week that transgenderism must be eradicated from public life was not simply an attack on transgender individuals, although it was certainly that. Tapping into the anti-LGBTQ sentiment that Orbán and those like him have used to win voters, the statement was a crucial salvo in the attempt to destroy American democracy and replace it with Christian nationalism.

But there is a very simple answer to the radical right’s attack on LGBTQ people that also answers their rejection of democracy. It is an answer that history has proved again and again.

Once you give up the principle of equality, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that people are unequal, and that some people are better than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, you have stamped your approval on the idea of rulers and subjects. At that point, all you can do is to hope that no one in power decides that you belong in the lesser group.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men and excluding black Americans were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”

Either people—men, in his day—were equal, or they were not. Lincoln went on: “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it…where will it stop?”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Gender, Inequality, International, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Dana Milbank: Is Kevin McCarthy Dumb or Is He Pretending?

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2023 //
29

Dana Milbank, a fabulous columnist at The Washington Post, reviews Kevin McCarthy’s long record of claiming that he didn’t know, he didn’t see it, he didn’t hear it, he has no opinion.

After McCarthy gave 40,000 hours of security video from January 6, 2021, to Tucker Carlson, he was surprised to hear that Tucker Carlson took clips to “prove” that nothing much happened that day. He was confused. I’m confused too as I thought that Carlson had long advanced the claim that the insurrection and violence that we saw that day was actually a “false flag” operation, manipulated by the FBI, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter. All along, Carlson has pandered to his viewers by insisting that Trump supporters had nothing to do with the turmoil and desecration of the nation’s Capitol.

Just another day at the Capitol is the new line at FOX. If you thought otherwise, your eyes deceived you. The insurrectionists were actually peaceful protestors, now victims and patriots.

This new line was too much for many of the Republicans who were there that day and ran for their lives.

Milbank wrote:

Not since the Know-Nothing Party disappeared in the 1850s has a public figure boasted about his ignorance with as much gusto as Kevin McCarthy does.

It doesn’t seem to matter what you ask the speaker of the House. He hasn’t read it, seen it or heard about it.

The explosive documents from the Dominion case showing Fox News hosts privately said Donald Trump’s election lies were hokum but promoted the lies on air anyway?

“I didn’t read all that. I didn’t see all that,” McCarthy told The Post.

The way Fox News’s Tucker Carlson (predictably) manipulated the Jan. 6, 2021, security footage McCarthy (foolishly) gave the propagandist, giving the false appearance that the bloody insurrection was “mostly peaceful”?

“I didn’t see what was aired,” McCarthy asserted.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, in an implicit rebuke of McCarthy, blasting the Carlson propaganda while holding up a statement from the Capitol Police chief denouncing Fox News’s “outrageous,” “false” and “offensive” portrayal of the insurrection?

You guessed it. McCarthy “didn’t see” McConnell do that.

The benighted McCarthy has been amassing this impressive body of obtuseness for some time. If ignorance is bliss, the California Republican has been in nirvana for years now.

How about Trump’s speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, provoking the sacking of the Capitol?

“I didn’t watch it,” McCarthy said.

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) calling the insurrectionists’ rampage a “normal tourist visit”?

“I don’t know what Congressman Clyde said,” quoth McCarthy, and “I didn’t see it.”

When his own designated negotiator reached a bipartisan agreement to form a commission to probe the Jan. 6 attack (a commission McCarthy ultimately killed)?

“I haven’t read through it.”

Trump, in a recorded phone call, demanding Georgia’s secretary of state “find” enough votes to overturn the election results?

“I have to hear it first.”

Trump telling four congresswomen of color (three of them U.S.-born) to “go back” where they came from, prompting chants of “send her back” among his rallygoers?

“I didn’t get to see the rally.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) harassing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) with shouts and slander just off the House floor?

“I didn’t see that. I don’t know what happened.”

Trump’s ludicrous allegation that former GOP congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may have murdered a staffer?

“I don’t quite know about the subject itself. I don’t know this subject well.”

Trump’s scandalous claim that Democrats inflated the death toll from a hurricane in Puerto Rico to “make me look as bad as possible”?

“I haven’t read it yet,” McCarthy pleaded.

At best, McCarthy’s willful cluelessness is just a dodge. But this week, McCarthy’s see-no-evil approach was just plain evil.

After Carlson aired his phony portrayal of the insurrection, several Republicans finally spoke up about Fox News’s lies: “Inexcusable and bull—-” (Sen. Thom Tillis, N.C.), “whitewashing” (Sen. Lindsey Graham, S.C.), “dangerous and disgusting” (Sen. Mitt Romney, Utah).

Then there was McCarthy, questioned by reporters just outside the speaker’s office, which the supposedly “peaceful” insurrectionists had ransacked that terrible day.

“Do you regret giving him this footage so he could whitewash the events of that day?” asked CNN’s Manu Raju.

“No,” McCarthy replied, adding some gibberish about “transparency” (which is the very opposite of Carlson’s fabrication).

“Do you agree with his portrayal of what happened that day?” Raju pressed.

“Look,” McCarthy said. “Each person can come up with their own conclusion.”

Talk about dangerous and disgusting. Given a choice between fact and fiction, between law and anarchy, between democracy and thuggery, the speaker of the House proclaimed his agnosticism. In doing so, he threw the power of the speakership behind the insurrectionists and against the constitutional order he swore to uphold. McCarthy’s leadership team even endorsed Carlson’s fakery, promoting a link to the segment from the House GOP conference’s official Twitter account with four alarm emojis and a “MUST WATCH” recommendation.

Of course, were McCarthy to turn against Fox News, the speaker, weakened by the promises he made to secure the speakership, would be swiftly replaced by the likes of GOP caucus chair Elise Stefanik of New York (who claimed Carlson’s propaganda “demolished” the “Democrats’ dishonest narrative” about Jan. 6), or Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.), who went on Carlson’s show to congratulate him on his deception.

So McCarthy sells out democracy to preserve his title. He gave the security footage to Carlson in the first place because he promised that to the far-right Republicans denying him the speakership during his 15-ballot quinceañera in January.

Even Fox Corp.’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, has expressed some regret over the network’s role in perpetrating Trump’s “big lie,” saying it should have been “stronger in denouncing it.” The internal documents exposed in the Dominion lawsuit show beyond any doubt that Fox News hosts knew the truth about the 2020 election and yet encouraged viewers night after night to believe Trump’s lies.

Those hosts continue to deceive and manipulate viewers nightly. The same day Carlson aired his Jan. 6 fabrication, Trump said on Sean Hannity’s radio show that he would have been willing to let Vladimir Putin “take over” parts of Ukraine. But when Hannity played excerpts of the interview on Fox News, the network edited out Trump’s proposed surrender.

The latest Fox News lies have proven too much for the Senate GOP leader. Though McConnell has enabled Trump at crucial moments, he said at a news conference this week that it was “a mistake” for Fox News to portray the insurrection “in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here in the Capitol thinks.”

Yet McCarthy continues to put himself before his country. In just two months on the job, McCarthy “already … has done more than any party leader in Congress to enable the spread of Donald Trump’s Big Lie,” the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, charged on the Senate floor this week. The speaker, he said, “has made our democracy weaker.”

And McCarthy isn’t finished with his depredations. Greene, given a position of influence and respectability by the speaker, is launching a probe, complete with a field trip to a D.C. jail, into the “inhumane treatment” allegedly suffered by the accused insurrectionists awaiting trial. McCarthy has also given the green light to a new probe designed to challenge the conclusions of the Jan. 6 committee.

The man who will lead that panel, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), declared this week that Americans “didn’t see the other side” of the insurrection. “I think the truth is going to be somewhere between the violent videos and the supposedly peaceful actions there,” he said.

No. The only truth is that Jan. 6 was a violent attack on the seat of American democracy. There was nothing peaceful about an armed insurrection attempting to overturn an election — even if some people there that day weren’t themselves violent.

But that truth — and this democracy — are threatened by a dangerously weak speaker of the House, who has concluded that the only way to preserve his own power is to support Fox News in its sabotage of this country.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, District of Columbia, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Hoax, Lies, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump

Texas: What Governor Abbott Does Not Understand About Rural Schools

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2023 //
7

Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have been pushing voucher legislation hard this year. Texas is one of the few red states that has not adopted voucher legislation for religious and private school tuition. The big stumbling block in the past has been a sturdy coalition of urban Democrats and rural Republicans.

Writing for ReformAustin, Jovanka Palacios explains here what Governor Abbott does not understand about rural schools.

Gov. Greg Abbott believes that touring rural areas where Republican members of the Texas House or Senate are against vouchers is enough to get them and their constituents on board with the “school choice” idea. But he seems to be overlooking one small detail: “rural public schools are the lifeblood of their communities.”

Keith Bryant, Superintendent of Schools in Lubbock-Cooper ISD, illustrates the effect of a voucher program in rural public schools best:

“They are unifiers, gathering places, and information providers. Many times they are the largest employers in their communities, and, often, school events are the largest draw of visitors to their towns. Disruptions to funding for rural schools are disruptions to the fabric of life in rural communities.”

In a state where the money follows the child, students dropping out of public schools would inevitably affect – an already scarce – budget. Those who oppose a “school choice” program argue that the Legislature should focus on increasing public school education funding, instead of diverting those dollars into a system that holds no accountability.

School funding isn’t that complex, Bryant told RA News, who explains school funding as a pie that everyone in public schools in Texas is sharing.

“Every public school in Texas is sharing this pie. If someone takes a slice out of the pie to fund vouchers for private schools or homeschooling, there is less pie remaining for Texas public schools.”

Open up the link at the Network for Public Education blog, where you will see the article as well as a link to the original.

Consider subscribing to the Network for Public Education blog, which is able to cover many more stories about education across the nation than I do. The blog is curated by the wonderful Peter Greene, who has an eye for great stories.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Democrats, Education Industry, Elections, Rural Schools, Texas, Vouchers

Thom Hartmann: The New McCarthyism

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2023 //
41

Columnist Thom Hartmann warns of the dangerous overreach by Congressman Jim Jordan, enabled by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Jordan and other House radicals intend to spend the next two years investigating government employees, in hopes of discrediting the Biden administration and critics of Traitor Trump.

He writes:

This column could get me thrown in jail.

And the fact that I’m even thinking that way is the entire point of Jim Jordan’s new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee which Jordan chairs.

This is the same Congressman Jordan who voted to overthrow democracy and make Trump America’s first dictator on January 7th, 2001, who finally admitted he talked with Trump several times during the insurrection, and then defied the January 6th Committee’s request to tell them and America what Trump was doing on that fateful day.

He and his fellow fascist seditionists want Americans to be afraid of them, particularly Americans who may be in a position to identify their crimes and hold them to account.

Frankly, I’d be pretty low on their list. Just like the notorious Republican Senator Joe McCarthy back in the 1950s, Jordan and his buddies appear focused on using their power to intimidate those who have actual legal power. Like the FBI, IRS, regulators, and elected officials.

But it would be foolhardy to think they won’t go after members of the press. Or whatever they’re calling people like me these days: “fake news,” “lamestream media,” or the Lügenpresse in the original German.

The Committee will have the power to pry-bar their way into ongoing investigations, terrorizing agencies and government employees looking into Republican participation in the attempted coup of January 6th and the weeks around it.

They’ve even acquired, in yesterday’s vote, the power to access and use top-secret information normally reserved to the highly-vetted members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Sources and methods. How the FBI knows which seditionist Members of Congress were involved in giving tours or conspiring with Proud Boys. Secrets Putin or the Saudi’s would pay billions for, as they apparently already have with Jared Kushner and Donald Trump.

As congressman Ruben Gallego said yesterday, it’s “as if we gave the mafia the right to investigate the Southern District of New York attorney’s office.”

Congressman Adam Schiff calls it The Coverup Committee. He’s right, but it’s worse than just that.

They’ve proclaimed their desire to intimidate the FBI, the Capitol Police, America’s spy agencies, and any politician who might show the temerity to suggest traitors should be held accountable for their treason.

We’ve seen this movie before, complete with the bombast, threats, lies, and bullying. And it tells us a lot about what we can expect over the next two years.

On February 9, 1950, an obscure first-term Senator who’d lied about his military service to get elected, Joe McCarthy, gave the first speech of a 5-city tour before a Republican women’s group in Wheeling, West Virginia. Apparently wanting to stir up some buzz, he pulled a random piece of paper from his pocket, waved it theatrically, and claimed it was a list of “205 known communists” who worked at the State Department.

Americans were worried about communists then, with some justification. The “communist miracle” was widely acknowledged under Stalin as just another form of brutal anti-democratic tyranny. Stalin had starved four million Ukrainians to death in what was known as the Holdomor, while he was imprisoning his own citizens in brutal gulags. The Soviet Union had exploded their first nuclear weapon just six months earlier, and that June North Korea, with help from the USSR, would invade South Korea.

By the end of McCarthy’s tour that month, reaching Salt Lake City, he’d reduced his claim to 57 communists in the State Department; in other cities he’d claimed the number was 81. It’s entirely possible he simply couldn’t keep track of his own lies.

In any case, no such list existed. Right up to the day he drank himself to death, May 9, 1957, McCarthy never was able to name a single communist in the State Department. But his demagogic claim got him on the front pages of newspapers across America.

McCarthy and his right-hand man Roy Cohn (later Donald Trump’s mentor) terrorized people working in the US government.

Being dragged before his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was a career-ender: over 2000 government employees lost their jobs because of his baseless accusations and innuendo.

In 1950, The Progressive magazine called McCarthy:

“[A]n ambitious faker living by his wits and guts, a ruthless egotist bent on personal power regardless of the consequence to his country, a shrewd and slippery operator with the gambler’s gift for knowing when and how to bluff.”

Even average Americans trembled before McCarthy, who was stepping into the anti-communist game late.

Three years earlier the “Hollywood Ten” (Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo)— none of them particularly rich or famous — had all been sent to prison for a year for refusing to acknowledge subpoenas and submit to public interrogation by McCarthy’s peers on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Their crime? Most were writers and one, Ring Lardner Jr., had written an op-ed very much like this one in which he noted:

“One of the first acts of the Republicans who took control of Congress in 1946 (for the first time in 20 years) was to convert a temporary committee [HUAC], which had been investigating fascist sympathizers during the war, into a permanent [committee] concentrating on the … left…”

Off he went to prison.

And now, today, Jim Jordan and his colleagues have that same power of subpoena that was so bluntly wielded by McCarthy and his Republican collaborators when I was a kid.

We’ve been hearing about changes that the Republicans are making here and there in Congress since they’ve seized power, but now the full picture is coming into focus. I worried and warned about this two years ago in my book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

For example, back in April of 2009 the FBI/DHS issued a report titled: “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” It had been prepared during the presidency of George W. Bush, but Obama was now president when it was released and the reaction from the right was immediate.

John Boehner said the report was “offensive and unacceptable” and was particularly outraged that it used the word “terrorist” to, in Boehner’s words, “describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation.”

That mild response caused Obama to essentially pull the report.

But imagine if such a report were issued today by the FBI. Jordan’s new committee could call before it — as McCarthy did in the 1950s — the actual government employees who’d done the research and written it.

Their careers would be destroyed, their homes and families under constant death threat, their lives turned upside down.

It would be a long time before any other federal employee would dare expose terrorism on the American right.

This is how fascists behave. It’s how they’ve behaved throughout history. It’s how they get what they want.

Unless you confront them with overwhelming resistance, you can’t negotiate with them; they keep taking more and more right up to the point of using violence.

I hope I’m wrong, but everything I’m seeing tells me this is exactly the direction Republicans in the House are moving.

We’ve entered the new McCarthy era, and Kevin is doing everything he can to empower Jordan as the new Joe.

Only this time the goal isn’t just feeding the ego of an alcoholic narcissist: it’s to end democracy in the United States.

Categories Biden, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Fake, Fascism, History

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The Fascist Roots of Trump’s CPAC Speech: Victim and Avenger

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2023 //
40

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a historian of fascism and Italian Studies at New York University. The following appeared on her blog. Lucid.

“In 2016, I declared, I am your voice. Today, I add, I am your warrior, I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Anyone who wants to understand how Fascist models of leadership can find expression in our own time need only read this passage from former president Donald Trump’s speech at the recent Conservative Political Action Committee meeting held in Maryland.

Trump’s CPAC speech brings forth a century of rhetoric and agendas that have been used to destroy democracy, conjuring threats that are meant to build support for authoritarian action and leadership, starting with the idea of the head of state as a vengeful victim.

“What did Italy need? An avenger!… It was necessary to cauterize the virulent wounds…and eliminate evils which threatened to become chronic,” Fascist leader Benito Mussolini wrote in his autobiography, striking a similar note to Trump as he explained why he had declared dictatorship in 1925.

Ever since Il Duce came to power a century ago, strongman leaders have proclaimed their unique ability to lead their people to greatness, including by righting the wrongs internal and external enemies supposedly perpetrate against the nation. In the process, the strongman absorbs the blows delivered by those enemies, putting his well-being at risk as he battles to save the nation and protect all that is cherished and dear.

The focus on victimhood sets up any repressive action by the state as self-defense. It justifies the literal weaponization of government, with violence used against enemies “for the good of the nation.” The “public safety laws” that jailed leftists and transformed Italy into a police state in the 1920s upheld this fiction.

And Nazi policies did not just make good on Adolf Hitler’s vows to punish elites who had “stabbed Germany in the back” by accepting the draconian terms of the Versailles Treaty (which held Germany responsible for all moral and material damages incurred during World War One). They also targeted groups that Hitler identified as threats to Germany’s survival in the future. These included Jews (“black parasites of the nation”); Bolsheviks (the “scum of humanity”); and war profiteers and international capitalists— the forerunners of the “globalists” Trump regularly denounces, including in this CPAC speech.

When such leaders feel their power is threatened, or are staging a comeback after having been voted out of office, they focus on gaining control of public institutions to exact revenge. This is one meaning of Trump’s declaration that “we’re going to finish what we started.” If he returns to the White House, he will punish all who did not collaborate with his attempt to overthrow the government.

Trump’s well-honed victimhood persona is the star of the CPAC speech, and he invokes a dizzying array of enemies who want to “kill America” and do him in as well. “A sick and sinister opposition, the radical left, communists, the bureaucrats, the fake news media, the big special interests,” as well as “Antifa thugs,” and “corrupt intelligence agencies.”

Fascist leaders pose as pure souls who risk everything to defend the nation. Trump followed suit at CPAC by presenting himself as an innocent and honest man who had never tangled with the law before “corrupt Democratic prosecutors” funded by “the George Soros money machine” sought to stop his “an epic struggle to rescue our country.”

“I had a beautiful life before I did this…”I didn’t know the word subpoena, I didn’t know the word grand jury. I didn’t know that they want to lynch you for doing nothing wrong.” Luckily for his followers, Trump is tenacious. “We’re going to complete the mission, we’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory. we’re going to make America great again.”

But why stop at America? The true Fascist avenger fixes the world. “I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled. It will be settled quickly. I will get the problem solved. I will get it solved in rapid order—it will take me no longer than one day. I know what to say to each of them. I got along well with all of them. I got along well with Putin.”

In fact, as Trump remarks, had he been in office now, as fearsome and powerful as a mountain, “Russia would have never pulled the trigger. This is the most dangerous time in the history of our country and Joe Biden is leading us into oblivion…Biden is a criminal and nothing ever seems to happen to him.”

With this incitement to violence against a sitting president, Trump’s CPAC speech reaches its peak. Trump offers Americans no policy ideas, but rather a classic Fascist cocktail of negative emotions, satisfying promises of revenge, and a sense of heroism and power.

Like Mussolini and Hitler before him, Trump knows that the strongman must be everything to his people. His devoted followers must be so bonded to him that no other leader is possible in their minds. Only he can save them. “I am your warrior, I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

References:

Benito Mussolini, My Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), 205. Adolf Hitler, speech in Salzburg, August 1920, in Neil Gregor, “Hitler,” in Mental Maps in the Era of Two World Wars, eds. Steven Casey and Jonathan Wright (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 189; Hitler, “Rathenau und Sancho Pansa,” Völkischer Beobachter, March 13, 1921.

Categories Elections, Fascism, Trump

Florida: Bill Would Require Bloggers to Register with the State

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2023 //
32

Legislators in Florida have introduced a bill that would require bloggers who write about Ron DeSantis or his cabinet or legislators to register with the state. This is rich because gun buyers don’t have to register at all.

Apparently, the bill covers only paid bloggers, and Republicans consider them to be no different from lobbyists.

A Republican state senator in Florida has introduced a bill that, if passed, would require bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis, his Cabinet or state legislators to register with the state.

Sen. Jason Brodeur’s bill, titled “Information Dissemination,” would also require bloggers to disclose who’s paying them for their posts about certain elected officials and how much.

“If a blogger posts to a blog about an elected state officer and receives, or will receive, compensation for that post, the blogger must register” with the appropriate office within five days of the post, the legislation says.

I’m in the clear because no one pays me to blog. I do hope there is a court case testing this among many other pieces of legislation intended to cement DeSantis’ control over everything in Florida.

More worrisome is the legislation that challenges the New York Times v. Sullivan case, which would allow DeSantis to sue his critics for defamation. Justice Thomas and Justice Gorsuch want to overturn that precedent too.

The New York Times published an editorial this morning critical of Florida’s effort to restrict free speech and press freedom.

It said:

A homeowner gets angry at a county commission over a zoning dispute and writes a Facebook post accusing a local buildings official of being in the pocket of developers.

A right-wing broadcaster criticizing border policies accuses the secretary of homeland security of being a traitor.

A parent upset about the removal of a gay-themed book from library shelves goes to a school board meeting and calls the board chair a bigot and a homophobe.

All three are examples of Americans engaging in clamorous but perfectly legal speech about public figures that is broadly protected by the Constitution. The Supreme Court, in a case that dates back nearly 60 years, ruled that even if that speech might be damaging or include errors, it should generally be protected against claims of libel and slander. All three would lose that protection — and be subject to ruinous defamation lawsuits — under a bill that is moving through the Florida House and is based on longstanding goals of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Even a tweet or a comment in Facebook would trigger a lawsuit.

In a direct attack on a key aspect of free expression, it says that whenever someone is accused of discriminating against others on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation, that accusation is automatically considered enough to sue for defamation. Any person accused of bigotry based on sexual orientation or gender identity could file a defamation lawsuit and be virtually guaranteed of winning by saying the discrimination was based on personal religious or scientific beliefs. The penalty for calling someone a bigot would be a minimum of $35,000.

Bloggers could no longer call DeSantis names like DeSatan or DeFascist. What a fragile ego he has. How will he survive Trump’s insults?

Categories DeSantis, Elections, Florida, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press

New York Times: Fact-Checking Trump’s Lies

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2023 //
17

Trump spoke on Saturday night to an audience of wildly enthusiastic supporters. His 100-minute speech was chock-full of exaggerations and lies, and his audience loved it.

Before he spoke, he said that he would run even if he is indicted.

Linda Qiu of the New York Times did a fact-check, but it is not complete. For example, Biden withdrew from Afghanistan to fulfill a deal (the Doha Agreement) that the Trump administration made with the Taliban to withdraw American troops by May 1, 2021. Biden pushed the withdrawal back to August 30, 2021. It was a bipartisan disaster.

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump revived familiar falsehoods and returned to old themes in a speech Saturday night at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Here’s a fact check of some of his claims.

WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID

“Killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.”

False. Murders declined in New York by about 11 percent from 488 homicides in 2021 to 433 homicides last year. It was the lowest level since 2019, according to the city’s Police Department. Murders continued to decrease this year to 30 in January(compared with 31 in January 2022) and to 26 in February (compared with 36 in February 2022).

Those numbers also pale in comparison to the height of crime in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, when Mr. Trump was a mainstay of the city and when it regularly recorded more than 1,500 murders annually. Homicides peaked in 1990 at 2,245.

WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID

“We lost $85 billion worth of the greatest military equipment in the world.”

This is exaggerated. Mr. Trump was referring to, and overstating, the value of military equipment seized by the Taliban after the United States withdrew the last of its troops from Afghanistan last August.

According to quarterly Pentagon reports to Congress, the United States had provided $88.6 billion for security in Afghanistan from October 2001 to July 2021, and disbursed about $75 billion. That figure includes the amount spent on training, antidrug trafficking efforts and infrastructure, as well as $18 billion for equipment. Most of the $75 billion actually went toward “sustainment,” a category that includes salaries, communications and gas for vehicles.

CNN and other news outlets have reported that the United States left behind about $7 billion of military equipment.

WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID

“They want windmills all over the place that ruin our fields, kill our birds and are very unreliable and are the most expensive energy ever developed”

This is exaggerated. Mr. Trump has long been an ardent critic of wind turbines, but his complaints are overstated.

By one estimate, as many as 328,000 birds die each year flying into wind farms, but other things — inanimate and living — pose a far greater threat. Cats kill as many as four billion birds annually in the United States, fossil fuel power plants are responsible for 14.5 million and collisions with buildings as many as 988 million birds.

Wind power and other forms of renewable energy are becoming increasingly more affordable.

The Energy Information Administration estimated that onshore wind would cost about $30 per megawatt-hour by 2027, cheaper than the $52 for coal, $61 for nuclear, $41 for biomass and $47 for hydroelectric. It will remain more expensive than natural gas, solar and geothermal generation.

OTHER CLAIMS

Mr. Trump also repeated a number of other claims The New York Times had previously fact-checked:

  • Mr. Trump inaccurately claimed to have “shut down” unauthorized border crossings. (The number declined during the pandemic, but began to increase again in the final months of his presidency.)
  • He falsely claimed that “no other president had ever gotten anything from China, not even 10 cents.” (In the decade before Mr. Trump took office, the United States collected $8 billion to $14 billion per year from duties on Chinese imports.)
  • He misleadingly characterized members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as “delinquent” on payments. (All member nations pay their bills.)
  • He falsely said that “no one ever heard of” the Nord Stream 2 pipeline before he raised it as an issue and halted its construction. (His predecessors all opposed the project.)
  • He misleadingly claimed that the Obama administration had only supplied Ukraine with “blankets.” (It committed more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine.)
  • He falsely claimed to have “completed” building a wall along the southern border. (It has not been finished.)
  • He claimed to have presided over the “best economy in history.” (Average growth, even before the coronavirus pandemic decimated the economy, was lower under Mr. Trump than under former Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.)

Linda Qiu is a fact-check reporter, based in Washington. She came to The Times in 2017 from the fact-checking service PolitiFact. @ylindaqiu

Categories Accountability, Elections, Lies, Trump

Trump Is Back with the Same Old Inflammatory Rhetoric and Lies

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2023 //
6

Trump spoke to an adoring crowd tonight at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and he brought his fans to their feet with the usual fiery language, fear-mongering, and lies.

David Smith wrote in The Guardian:

Feeding off the energy of a crowd that wore “Make America great again” (Maga) caps, and watched by Brazil’s far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, Trump returned to the authoritarian language that characterised his political rise seven years ago.

“In 2016, I declared: I am your voice,” he said, speaking for just over 100 minutes from a bright blue and red stage in a cavernous ballroom at the closing speech of the CPAC event in Maryland. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution,” he said.

Trump left office in disgrace after two impeachments and a failed attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election, culminating in a deadly riot at the US Capitol. He faces an array of criminal investigations yet announced another run for president last November at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida….

Perhaps stung by critics who say Trump has lost the swagger of his first campaign, Trump seemed determined to tap into supporters’ nostalgia and make the case that, together, they could rekindle the old magic. “For seven years you and I have been engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from the people who hate it and want to absolutely destroy it,” he said.

“We are going to finish what we started. We started something that was a miracle. We’re going to complete the mission, we’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory. We’re going to make America great again….”

“With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the war mongers… We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists. We will throw off the political class that hates our country … We will beat the Democrats. We will rout the fake news media. We will expose and appropriately deal with the Rinos [Republicans in name only]. We will evict Joe Biden from the White House. And we will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all,” he said.

Trump then sent a warning to the party that he has shaped in his own image in an effort to crush dissent. “We had a Republican party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots and fools but we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove and Jeb Bush.”

In a zigzagging speech, Trump avoided references to DeSantis but repeatedly turned his fire on Biden. “This is the most dangerous time in our country’s history, and Joe Biden is leading us into oblivion,” he said.

Trump insisted that Russian’s Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine because of the US’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. “And you’re going to have world war three, by the way. We’re going to have world war three if something doesn’t happen fast. I am the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent world war three.”

He made the unlikely boast: “Before I arrive in the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine ended… I know what to say.”

Trump threw red meat to the base: additional border wall construction and a massive increase in border patrols to stop the flow of illegal drugs, one day voting with paper ballots, a crackdown on trans rights and gender affirmation surgeries. He repeated his false claim that he won the 2020 election “by a lot” when in fact Biden beat him by 7m votes.

But before a cult-like crowd, Saturday’s event was a warning against Democratic complacency, an indicator that Trump is down but not out and that, just as in 2016, history could take a perilous turn. “We have no choice,” he said in a startling contrast to Biden’s pleas for unity, warning “this is the final battle.”

He concluded: “If we don’t do this, our country will be lost forever.”

Categories Corruption, Elections, Extremism, Lies, Trump
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