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Harold Meyerson: The GOP Revolution Eats Its Own

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2023 //
9

Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect reflects on the Republican debacle of the past few days. Kevin McCarthy wants desperately to be Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. He needs a majority of all members present. But he can’t get a majority because 20 members of the far-right “Freedom Caucus” oppose him. He has conceded to all of their demands for power. Yet after nine ballots, they still oppose him. They want to impeach Biden. They want to impeach cabinet members. They want to humiliate Dr. Anthony Fauci. They are the Chaos Caucus, the party of No. They don’t know how to govern. They are obstructionists.

Harold Meyerson wrote today:

Meyerson on TAP

The Revolution Eats Its Own

Like the Jacobins and Stalinists of yore, today’s Republicans have extirpated their moderates and have no one left to execute besides themselves.

Time was when the conservative credo was “That government is best which governs least.” If that needed quantitative metrics, Grover Norquist came along to say that government should be small enough that “it can be drowned in a bathtub.”

But that was oh, so then. Today’s Republicans repudiate those nostrums as way too statist. What they’re making ridiculously clear (and just plain ridiculous) on the floor of the House this week is that their new credo is “That government is best which cannot even convene.”

The process of revolutions growing more radical by bumping off every previous revolutionary cadre is well established. In revolutionary France, the Girondins supplanted the royalists, the Montagnards supplanted and executed the Girondins, the Jacobins supplanted and executed the Montagnards, and having run out of rival factions, the Jacobins executed each other. In revolutionary Russia, the Leninists overthrew and executed the czarists, the Stalinists overthrew and executed the Leninists. And having run out of Leninists, the Stalinists executed each other.

Today’s Republicans seem to have reached that final phase this week, the supplanting and political execution of each other. Here’s a quote from a speech preceding the eighth ballot for Speaker, in which a Republican described the candidate he was nominating:

“He’s not Paul Ryan! He’s not Mitch McConnell! He’s not John Boehner! He’s different!”

That was not, however, from a speech nominating the Gang of 20’s oppositionist de jour. It was the nominating speech for the hapless Kevin McCarthy, who apparently still clings to the forlorn hope that he can win the Speakership by repudiating every Republican leader and tenet to the left of Matt Gaetz and the Proud Boys.

To be sure, that’s a strategy that didn’t play all that well at the polls last November. Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake made clear that she didn’t want the votes of Republicans who’d supported that squishy John McCain. In that, she succeeded, which was a major reason why she lost. But today’s Republicans are undaunted by anything so ephemeral as electoral results.

Even in comparison with the first two days of McCarthy’s public humiliation, today has been particularly cruel. The news this morning was full of reports that a team from McCarthy’s opposition had spent the night bargaining with McCarthy’s minions and came away with every concession under the sun. McCarthy agreed that a single member of the Republican caucus could call for ousting the Speaker and that would be all that was required to force a vote. McCarthy’s PAC cut a deal with the Club for Growth that it would no longer intervene in open-seat primaries. Hope sprung yet again among the Kevinoids that these concessions would bring perhaps 10 of the 20 malcontents into Kevin’s camp. In fact, however, through today’s seventh and eighth ballots, precisely none of those 20 dissidents, including those in last night’s meetings, came into Kevin’s column. McCarthy’s vote total remained stuck at 201.

There are some reports that the Gang of 20’s negotiators want the agreements in writing. To get his total up to the required 218, however, I suspect McCarthy will have to go beyond that, promising committee chairmanships and seats on the Koch Brothers board of directors to every one of the 20, and that he’ll have to sign this promissory note in his own blood. And a small cut on the finger won’t suffice.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Insane, Republicans

The Strange Congruence Between Election Deniers and School Privatizers

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2023 //
14

Many of the same people who promote The Big Lie about the 2020 election also just happen to be promoters of charter schools and vouchers.

Patrick Byrne is one of them. He is the CEO of Overstock.com.

Indiana blogger Steve Hinnefeld writes about him here.

Patrick Byrne has been back in the news. Remember him? If you’ve followed Indiana politics – especially education politics – for the past decade, you very well may.

Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, has as a prominent election denier trying to cast doubt on the fact that Donald Trump lost in 2020. He was part of an “unhinged” White House meeting Dec. 18, 2020, where he and others reportedly urged Trump to fight harder to overturn the results.

Byrne promoted the idea that 65% of all education spending should be in the classroom. A big, simple solution. George Will loved it. So did the governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, and the legislature so they passed a law mandating it.

Byrne has made big contributions to organizations pushing charters and vouchers.

Byrne spent eight years as board chair of EdChoice, the Indianapolis-based pro-voucher organization started by the libertarian economist Milton Friedman. He stepped down in 2019, the same year he left Overstock.com after his affair with a Russian woman who tried to influence U.S. politics became public.

Election denialism and school privatization: two big, simple ideas that are wrong.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Indiana, Lies, Trump

New York City: Hasidic Schools Reap a Windfall from Special Ed Payments

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2023 //
14

The Hasidic bloc of voters wields unusual political power in New York City and New York state, because the community tends to vote as a bloc. Rare is the elected official willing to challenge their large stream of public funding for their orthodox religious private schools. The New York Times has written previously about the significant flow of public money to their private schools (more than $1 billion over the past four years), and about the abysmal performance of students in those schools on the rare occasion when they take state tests. Many such schools do not teach in English and do not teach secular subjects, in blatant violation of state law.

The New York Times recently wrote in detail about the misuse of public money collected for special education services in Hasidic schools.

Less than a decade ago, New York City drastically changed the way it provided special education to thousands of children with disabilities.

State law requires cities to deliver those services to students in private schools, even if the government has to pay outside companies to do it. But for years, when parents asked, New York City officials resisted and called many of the requests unnecessary.

In 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio changed course. Responding to complaints, especially from Orthodox Jewish organizations, he ordered the city to start fast-tracking approvals.

The policy has made it easier for some children with disabilities to get specialized instruction, therapy and counseling. But in Orthodox Jewish religious schools, particularly in parts of the Hasidic community, the shift has also led to a windfall of government money for services that are sometimes not needed, or even provided, an examination by The New York Times has found.

In 2014, New York made it easier for private school students to receive city-funded special education. More than half of legal requests for aid last school year (as of March 14) came from areas with large Hasidic and Orthodox populations.

Dozens of schools in the Orthodox community have pushed parents to get their children diagnosed with disabilities, records and interviews show. At least two schools have sent out mass emails urging families to apply for aid. A third school provided parents with a sample prescription to give their children’s doctors, saying a diagnosis would bring more resources for the school.

Today, at Hasidic and Orthodox schools, which are called yeshivas, higher percentages of students are classified as needing special education than at other public and private schools in New York City, a Times analysis of government data found.

In the fervently religious Hasidic community, where Yiddish is the dominant language, schools focus on teaching Jewish law and prayer, while often providing little secular education in English. The Times found that at 25 of the city’s approximately 160 Hasidic yeshivas, more than half of the students are classified as needing special education. Records show the classifications are routinely justified by citing the students’ struggles with English.

Across all city schools, one in five students is classified as having a disability. There is little research into whether disabilities occur more frequently in the Hasidic community than in others.

With money more easily available, entrepreneurs with few qualifications have made millions providing services in yeshivas. More than two dozen different companies have opened in the past eight years, records show. Some of them now bill more than $200 an hour per student — five times the government’s standard rate — for what is essentially tutoring.

Some companies have been allowed to collect more than $100,000 a year for providing part-time tutoring services to a single student with mild learning challenges, The Times found.

At least 17 companies have employed people with questionable credentials to provide services, often paying them a fraction of the hourly rate that the firms collect from the city. While some companies provide quality services, others rely on programs that quickly churn out graduates with master’s degrees, some of whom are as young as 18.

“There are a lot of kids in the ultra-Orthodox community who have disabilities. The problem is that the community is not serving the students,” said Elana Sigall, a former top city special education official, who now visits yeshivas as a consultant. “They’re accessing tremendous amounts of city resources, but they’re not actually providing special education.”

One of the firms that opened soon after Mr. de Blasio changed the rules, Yes I Can Services, founded by a husband and wife who had scant education experience, now collects tens of millions of dollars a year.

By law, families who want the government to pay a private company to provide services must make their case against the city in a legal proceeding overseen by an impartial hearing officer. But as requests have increased, officials say they have stopped policing them. Families filed nearly 18,000 requests last year — with more than half coming from neighborhoods with large Hasidic and Orthodox populations — but officials waved through most of them.

In all, more than $350 million a year now goes to private companies that provide services in Hasidic and Orthodox schools, The Times found…

“Cases involving nonpublic schools have ballooned so wildly that they have engulfed and hobbled the entire system,” said John Farago, a longtime hearing officer who has overseen thousands of requests. “It’s affected the access to justice of all, and swamped the cases of children who attend public schools.”

Categories Accountability, Elections, Funding, New York City, Religion, Special Education

Memories of Four Years of Trump

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2022 //
27

A friend sent this list of some of the curiosities of the Trump administration in this article at Huffington Post. Just in case you forgot. I don’t know who compiled it.

I expect that a complete list would contain thousands of items. I, for one, will never forget the COVID briefing when he urged the public to drink bleach and speculated that the virus could be killed by some kind of rays or radiation. Most amusing to watch Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx flinching in the background. I can never forgive him for calling the free press “an enemy of the people,” echoing Stalinist rhetoric. Or his reception of the tortured body of young Otto Warmbier, followed by his exchange of “love letters” with the North Korean dictator responsible for killing Otto.

The worst sin of Trump, to me, was his demand for constant attention. It was impossible to close him out. What crazy thing would he say or do today? I spent four years living in a state of heightened anxiety because of him, worrying about what he would do or say next. COVFEFE.

The good news about Biden. He’s a normal person. He does not tweet several times a day. He doesn’t do or say crazy things. Days go by when I don’t think of him at all. What a relief.

1. he incited an insurrection against the government,
2. mismanaged a pandemic that killed a million Americans,
3. separated children from their families, lost those children in the bureaucracy,
4. tear-gassed peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square so he could hold a photo op holding a Bible in front of a church,
5. tried to block all Muslims from entering the country,
6. got impeached,
7. got impeached again,
8. had the worst jobs record of any president in modern history,
9. pressured Ukraine to dig dirt on Joe Biden,
10. fired the FBI director for investigating his ties to Russia,
11. bragged about firing the FBI director on TV,
12. took Vladimir Putin’s word over the US intelligence community,
13. diverted military funding to build his wall,
14. caused the longest government shutdown in US history,
15. called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,”
16. lied nearly 30,000 times,
17. banned transgender people from serving in the military,
18. ejected reporters from the White House briefing room who asked tough questions,
19. vetoed the defense funding bill because it renamed military bases named for Confederate soldiers,
20. refused to release his tax returns,
21. increased the national debt by nearly $8 TRILLION,
22. had three of the highest annual trade deficits in U.S. history,
23. called veterans and soldiers who died in combat losers and suckers,
24. coddled the leader of Saudi Arabia after he ordered the execution and dismembering of a US-based journalist,
25. refused to concede the 2020 election,
26. hired his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House,
27. walked out of an interview with Lesley Stahl,
28. called neo-Nazis “very fine people,”
29. suggested that people should inject bleach into their bodies to fight COVID,
30. abandoned our allies the Kurds to Turkey,
31. pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthiest but balked at helping working Americans,
32. incited anti-lockdown protestors in several states at the height of the pandemic,
33. withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords,
34. withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal,
35. withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific Partnership which was designed to block China’s advances,
36. insulted his own Cabinet members on Twitter,
37. pushed the leader of Montenegro out of the way during a photo op,
38. failed to reiterate US commitment to defending NATO allies,
39. called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries,
40. called the city of Baltimore the “worst in the nation,”
41. claimed that he single handedly brought back the phrase “Merry Christmas” even though it hadn’t gone anywhere,
42. forced his Cabinet members to praise him publicly like some cult leader,
43. believed he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,
44. berated and belittled his hand-picked Attorney General when he recused himself from the Russia probe,
45. suggested the US should buy Greenland,
46. colluded with Mitch McConnell to push through federal judges and two Supreme Court justices after supporting efforts to prevent his predecessor from appointing judges,
47. repeatedly called the media “enemies of the people,”
48. claimed that if we tested fewer people for COVID we’d have fewer cases,
49. violated the emoluments clause,
50. thought that Nambia was a country,
51. told Bob Woodward in private that the coronavirus was a big deal but then downplayed it in public,
52. called his exceedingly faithful vice president a “p—y” for following the Constitution,
53. nearly got us into a war with Iran after threatening them by tweet,
54. nominated a corrupt head of the EPA,
55. nominated a corrupt head of HHS,
56. nominated a corrupt head of the Interior Department,
57. nominated a corrupt head of the USDA,
58. praised dictators and authoritarians around the world while criticizing allies,
59. refused to allow the presidential transition to begin,
60. insulted war hero John McCain – even after his death,
61. spent an obscene amount of time playing golf after criticizing Barack Obama for playing (far less) golf while president,
62. falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote,
63. called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser,”
64. falsely claimed that he turned down being Time’s Man of the Year,
65. considered firing special counsel Robert Mueller on several occasions,
66. mocked wearing face masks to guard against transmitting COVID,
67. locked Congress out of its constitutional duty to confirm Cabinet officials by hiring acting ones,
68. used a racist dog whistle by calling COVID the “China virus,”
69. hired and associated with numerous shady figures that were eventually convicted of federal offenses including his campaign manager and national security adviser,
70. pardoned several of his shady associates,
71. gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two congressmen who amplified his batshit crazy conspiracy theories,
72. got into telephone fight with the leader of Australia(!),
73. had a Secretary of State who called him a moron,
74. forced his press secretary to claim without merit that his was the largest inauguration crowd in history,
75. botched the COVID vaccine rollout,
76. tweeted so much dangerous propaganda that Twitter eventually banned him,
77. charged the Secret Service jacked-up rates at his properties,
78. constantly interrupted Joe Biden in their first presidential debate,
79. claimed that COVID would “magically” disappear,
80. called a U.S. Senator “Pocahontas,”
81. used his Twitter account to blast Nordstrom when it stopped selling Ivanka’s merchandise,
82. opened up millions of pristine federal lands to development and drilling,
83. got into a losing tariff war with China that forced US taxpayers to bail out farmers,
84. claimed that his losing tariff war was a win for the US,
85. ignored or didn’t even take part in daily intelligence briefings,
86. blew off honoring American war dead in France because it was raining,
87. redesigned Air Force One to look like the Trump Shuttle,
88. got played by Kim Jung Un and his “love letters,”
89. threatened to go after social media companies in clear violation of the Constitution,
90. botched the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico,
91. threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans when he finally visited them,
92. pressured the governor and secretary of state of Georgia to “find” him votes,
93. thought that the Virgin islands had a President,
94. drew on a map with a Sharpie to justify his inaccurate tweet that Alabama was threatened by a hurricane,
95. allowed White House staff to use personal email accounts for official businesses after blasting Hillary Clinton for doing the same thing,
96. rolled back regulations that protected the public from mercury and asbestos,
97. pushed regulators to waste time studying snake-oil remedies for COVID,
98. rolled back regulations that stopped coal companies from dumping waste into rivers,
99. held blatant campaign rallies at the White House,
100. tried to take away millions of Americans’ health insurance because the law was named for a Black man,
101. refused to attend his successors’ inauguration,
102. nominated the worst Education Secretary in history,
103. threatened judges who didn’t do what he wanted,
104. attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci,
105. promised that Mexico would pay for the wall (it didn’t),
106. allowed political hacks to overrule government scientists on major reports on climate change and other issues,
107. struggled navigating a ramp after claiming his opponent was feeble,
108. called an African-American Congresswoman “low IQ,”
109. threatened to withhold federal aid from states and cities with Democratic leaders,
110. went ahead with rallies filled with maskless supporters in the middle of a pandemic,
111. claimed that legitimate investigations of his wrongdoing were “witch hunts,”
112. seemed to demonstrate a belief that there were airports during the American Revolution,
113. demanded “total loyalty” from the FBI director,
114. praised a conspiracy theory that Democrats are Satanic pedophiles,
115. completely gutted the Voice of America,
116. placed a political hack in charge of the Postal Service,
117. claimed without evidence that the Obama administration bugged Trump Tower,
118. suggested that the US should allow more people from places like Norway into the country,
119. suggested that COVID wasn’t that bad because he recovered with the help of top government doctors and treatments not available to the public,
120. overturned energy conservation standards that even industry supported,
121. reduced the number of refugees the US accepts,
122. insulted various members of Congress and the media with infantile nicknames,
123. gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address,
124. named as head of federal personnel a 29-year old who’d previously been fired from the White House for allegations of financial improprieties,
125. eliminated the White House office of pandemic response,
126. used soldiers as campaign props,
127. fired any advisor who made the mistake of disagreeing with him,
128. demanded the Pentagon throw him a Soviet-style military parade,
129. hired a shit ton of white nationalists,
130. politicized the civil service,
131. did absolutely nothing after Russia hacked the U.S. government,
132. falsely said the Boy Scouts called him to say his bizarre Jamboree speech was the best speech ever given to the Scouts,
133. claimed that Black people would overrun the suburbs if Biden won,
134. insulted reporters of color,
135. insulted women reporters,
136. insulted women reporters of color,
137. suggested he was fine with China’s oppression of the Uighurs,
138. attacked the Supreme Court when it ruled against him,
139. summoned Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to the White House to pressure them to overturn the election,
140. spent countless hours every day watching Fox News,
141. refused to allow his administration to comply with Congressional subpoenas,
142. hired Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer,
143. tried to punish Amazon because the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post wrote negative stories about him,
144. acted as if the Attorney General of the United States was his personal attorney,
145. attempted to get the federal government to defend him in a libel lawsuit from a prominent lady who accused him of sexual assault,
146. held private meetings with Vladimir Putin without staff present,
147. didn’t disclose his private meetings with Vladimir Putin so that the US had to find out via Russian media,
148. stopped holding press briefings for months at a time,
149. “ordered” US companies to leave China even though he has no such power,
150. led a political party that couldn’t even be bothered to draft a policy platform,
151. claimed preposterously that Article II of the Constitution gave him absolute powers,
152. tried to pressure the U.K. to hold the British Open at his golf course,
153. suggested that the government nuke hurricanes,
154. suggested that wind turbines cause cancer,
155. said that he had a special aptitude for science,
156. fired the head of election cyber security after he said that the 2020 election was secure,
157. blurted out classified information to Russian officials,
158. tried to force the G7 to hold their meeting at his failing golf resort in Florida,
159. fired the acting attorney general when she refused to go along with his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban,
160. hired notorious racist Stephen Miller,
161. openly discussed national security issues in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago where everyone could hear them,
162. interfered with plans to relocate the FBI because a new development there might compete with his hotel,
163. abandoned Iraqi refugees who’d helped the U.S. during the war,
164. tried to get Russia back into the G7,
165. held a COVID super spreader event in the Rose Garden,
166. seemed to believe that Frederick Douglass is still alive,
167. lost 60 election fraud cases in court including before judges he had nominated,
168. falsely claimed that factories were reopening when they weren’t,
169. shamelessly exploited terror attacks in Europe to justify his anti-immigrant policies,
170. still hasn’t come up with a healthcare plan,
171. still hasn’t come up with an infrastructure plan despite repeated “Infrastructure Weeks,”
172. forced Secret Service agents to drive him around Walter Reed while contagious with COVID,
173. told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,”
174. fucked up the Census,
175. withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic,
176. did so few of his duties that his press staff were forced to state on his daily schedule “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings,”
177. allowed his staff to repeatedly violate the Hatch Act,
178. seemed not to know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican,
179. stood before sacred CIA wall of heroes and bragged about his election win,
180. constantly claimed he was treated worse than any president which presumably includes four that were assassinated and his predecessor whose legitimacy and birthplace were challenged by a racist reality TV show star named Donald Trump,
181. claimed Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped the Civil War even though he died 16 years before it happened,
182. said that any opinion poll showing him behind was fake,
183. claimed that other countries laughed at us before he became president when several world leaders were literally laughing at him,
184. claimed that the military was out of ammunition before he became President,
185. created a commission to whitewash American history,
186. retweeted anti-Islam videos from one of the most racist people in Britain,
187. claimed ludicrously that the Pulse nightclub shooting wouldn’t have happened if someone there had a gun even though there was an armed security guard there,
188. hired a senior staffer who cited the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre as a reason to ban Muslims,
189. had a press secretary who claimed that Nazi Germany never used chemical weapons even though every sane human being knows they used gas to kill millions of Jews and others,
190. bilked the Secret Service for higher than market rates when they had to stay at Trump properties,
191. apparently sold pardons on his way out of the White House,
192. stripped protective status from 59,000 Haitians,
193. falsely claimed Biden wanted to defund the police,
194. said that the head of the CDC didn’t know what he was talking about,
195. tried to rescind protection from DREAMers,
196. gave himself an A+ for his handling of the pandemic,
197. tried to start a boycott of Goodyear tires due to an Internet hoax,
198. said U.S. rates of COVID would be lower if you didn’t count blue states,
199. deported U.S. veterans who served their country but were undocumented,
200. claimed he did more for African Americans than any president since Lincoln,
201. touted a “super-duper” secret “hydrosonic” missile which may or may not be a new “hypersonic” missile or may not exist at all,
202. retweeted a gif calling Biden a pedophile,
203. forced through security clearances for his family,
204. suggested that police officers should rough up suspects,
205. suggested that Biden was on performance-enhancing drugs,
206. tried to stop transgender students from being able to use school bathrooms in line with their gender,
207. suggested the US not accept COVID patients from a cruise ship because it would make US numbers look higher,
208. nominated a climate change sceptic to chair the committee advising the White House on environmental policy,
209. retweeted a video doctored to look like Biden
210. had played a song called “Fuck tha Police” at a campaign event,
211. hugged a disturbingly large number of U.S. flags,
212. accused Democrats of “treason” for not applauding his State of the Union address,
213. claimed that the FBI failed to capture the Parkland school shooter because they were “spending too much time” on Russia,
214. mocked the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault,
215. obsessed over low-flow toilets,
216. ordered the rerelease of more COVID vaccines when there weren’t any to release,
217. called for the construction of a bizarre garden of heroes with statutes of famous dead Americans as well as at least one Canadian (Alex Trebek),
218. hijacked Washington’s July 4thcelebrations to give a partisan speech,
219. took advice from the MyPillow guy,
220. claimed that migrants seeking a better life in the US were dangerous caravans of drug dealers and rapists,
221. said nothing when Vladimir Putin poisoned a leading opposition figure,
222. never seemed to heed the advice of his wife’s “Be Best” campaign,
223. falsely claimed that mail-in voting is fraudulent,
224. announced a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Syria which not only handed Russia and ISIS a win but also prompted his defense secretary to resign in protest,
225. insulted the leader of Canada,
226. insulted the leader of France,
227. insulted the leader of Britain,
228. insulted the leader of Germany,
229. insulted the leader of Sweden (Sweden!!),
230. falsely claimed credit for getting NATO members to increase their share of dues,
231. blew off two Asia summits even though they were held virtually,
232. continued lying about spending lots of time at Ground Zero with 9/11 responders,
233. said that the Japanese would sit back and watch their “Sony televisions” if the US were ever attacked,
234. left a NATO summit early in a huff,
235. stared directly into an eclipse even though everyone over the age of 5 knows not to do that,
236. called himself a very stable genius despite significant evidence to the contrary,
237. refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and kept his promise.
238. Don’t forget that he took many classified & top secret documents with him when he left the White House, many of which have not been recovered & may have been compromised.
None of the above comes close to whatever is on Hunter Biden’s laptop, of course.
But other than that he wasn’t so bad…

Categories Elections, Ethics, Lies, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP Divide

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2022 //
19

Heather Cox Richardson shares news about the fissure in the Republican Party between Trump crazies and responsible elected officials.

Today, President Joe Biden signed into law the bipartisan year-end omnibus funding bill passed by the House and the Senate before lawmakers left town.

The $1.7 trillion measure addresses key goals of both parties. It funds the military and domestic programs. It funds public health and science, invests in law enforcement, and funds programs to prevent violence against women. It funds veterans’ services, and it provides assistance to Ukraine in its struggle to protect itself against Russia’s invasion. It updates the Electoral Count Act to prevent a president from trying to overturn a presidential election, as former president Trump did.

Biden said, “This bill is further proof that Republicans and Democrats can come together to deliver for the American people, and I’m looking forward to continued bipartisan progress in the year ahead.”

But on his social media platform, Trump took a stand against the bill that funds the government. “Something is going on with [Senate minority leader] Mitch McConnell [(R-KY)] and all of the terribly and virtually automatic ‘surrenders’ he makes to the Marxist Democrats, like on the $1.7 Trillion ‘Ominous’ Bill,” Trump wrote. “Could have killed it using the Debt Ceiling, or made it MUCH better in the Republican House. Nobody can be this stupid.” Then he went on to blame the deal on McConnell’s wife, Trump’s own Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, using a racist slur.

This exchange reveals the dynamic dominating political leadership at the end of 2022. Biden and the Democrats are trying to show that the government can produce popular results for the American people. They are joined in that effort by Republicans who recognize that, for all their talk about liberty, their constituents want to see the government address their concerns. Together, they have passed the omnibus bill, as well as the CHIPS and Science Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, and gun safety legislation.

This cooperation to pass popular legislation is an important shift in American politics.

But Trump and his cronies remain determined to return to power, apparently either to stop this federal action Trump incorrectly calls “Marxism” or, in the case of extremist Republicans, to use the government not to provide a basic social safety net, regulate business, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights—as it has done since 1933—but instead to enforce right-wing religious values on the country. They reject the small-government economic focus of the Reagan Republicans in favor of using a strong government to enforce religion.

The determination of Trump and his team to dominate the government, and through it the country, has been illustrated powerfully once again today with the release of more transcripts from testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Former White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Griffin recalled how Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, dismissed the idea that the Trump administration should coordinate with the incoming Biden officials over the coronavirus pandemic. “It was the first COVID… meeting that Jared led after [Biden won],” Griffin recalled, “& Dr. Birx… said, “Well, should we be looping the Biden transition into these conversations?” & Jared just said, ‘Absolutely not.’”

Similarly, in an extraordinarily petty exchange, the chief of staff to former first lady Melania Trump, Stefanie Grisham, recalled that Trump wanted to fire the chief White House usher, Tim Harleth, for being in contact with the Biden team about the presidential transition. (Secret Service agents told Trump about the contact, raising more questions about the role of the agents around Trump.) Melania Trump stopped the firing out of concern for the stories Harleth could tell about the Trump family, but he was let go just before Biden’s inauguration, leaving the Biden’s standing before the closed doors of the White House for an awkwardly long time when they entered for the first time.

This determination of far-right Republicans to bend the country to their will presents a problem for the Republican Party. Establishment Republicans came around to backing Trump in 2017 after he promised them lower taxes and less regulation, the goals they had embraced since the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

But Trump managed to stay in power by feeding the reactionaries in the party: those who reject the idea of American equality. Trump’s base is fiercely opposed to immigration and against the rights of LGBTQ Americans, while also in favor of curtailing the rights of women and minorities. Rejecting the equality at the heart of liberal democracy, many of them hope to enforce religious rules on the rest of the country and admire Russian president Vladimir Putin and Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán for replacing democracy with what Orbán has called “Christian democracy,” or “illiberal democracy” that enforces patriarchal heterosexual hierarchies. As Trump encouraged them to, many of them reject as “fraudulent” any elections that do not put their candidates in power.

Now, as Republican establishment leaders recognize that Trump’s star is fading and his legal troubles seem likely to get worse—his tax returns will be released tomorrow, among other things—they seem eager to cut Trump loose to resurrect their anti-tax, anti-regulation policies. But those Americans who reject democracy and want a strong government to enforce their values are fighting for control of the Republican Party.

The far right has turned against Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, whom Trump hand-picked and who helped arrange the false electors in 2020. Trump loyalist Mike Lindell, the pillow magnate, is challenging McDaniel. Of more concern to her is the challenge of Harmeet Dhillon, a prominent election denier who has provided legal counsel for Trump in his struggles against the January 6th committee, calling it “a purely political witch-hunt, total abuse of process & power serving no legitimate legislative purpose.” Orbán supporter and Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson and Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk are backing Dhillon.

Kirk, who is a prodigious fundraiser, has warned the RNC that the party must listen “to the grassroots, our donors, and the biggest organizations and voices in the conservative movement” or it would lose in 2024. “If ignored, we will have the most stunted and muted Republican Party in the history of the conservative movement, the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations.”

The far right is also challenging the bid of House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for House speaker, creating such havoc that today former Republican representative, senator, and secretary of defense William S. Cohen and former congressional staff director and presidential senior fellow emeritus at the Council on Foreign Relations Alton Frye published an op-ed in the New York Times warning that “the Republican caucus is dominated by campaigns and commitments that gravely encumber efforts to define common ground in the political center.” They urged House members to recruit a moderate speaker from outside the chamber and to “fortify those Republicans who seek to move the party beyond the corrosive Trump era.”

They called for a secret ballot, so Republican members won’t have to fear retaliation.

Cohen and Frye suggested that organization of the House by an outsider would allow for “meaningful coalition building,” but the Republicans about to take control of the House have so far indicated only that they intend to investigate the Biden administration before the 2024 election, a throwback to the methods party leaders have used since 1994 to win elections by portraying the Democrats as corrupt.

Representatives James Comer (R-KY) and Jim Jordan (R-OH), who are expected to take over the House Oversight Committee and the House Judiciary Committee, respectively, have already demanded records from the White House. When White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber said the White House would respond to those committees after the Republicans were in charge of them—a position administrations have as taken since the 1980s—Comer and Jordan took to social media today to complain that “at every turn the Biden White House seeks to obstruct congressional oversight and hide information from the American people.” (Jordan, of course, refused to respond to a subpoena from the January 6th committee.)

The year 2022 has seen an important split in the Republican Party. The party’s response to voters’ dislike appears to be either to reject democracy altogether or to double down on the old rhetoric that has worked in the past, although you have to wonder if they have gone to that well so many times it’s drying up.

In the meantime, the Democrats have worked with willing Republicans to demonstrate that lawmakers in a democracy really can accomplish big things for the American people, and for the world.

Which vision will win out will be a key political story of 2023.

—

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Funding, Religion, Republicans, Trump

Tune in to Leonie Haimson Show on 12/31! I’m a Guest

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2022 //
0

Send us your thoughts on best/worst events for our schools in 2022 & your hopes for 2023 so @danielalicea & I can share them on @WBAI Sat. at 1 PM EST on #TalkoutofSchool w/special guest @dianeravitch! Instructions here; or DM me. nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2022/12/for-ou… Deadline: Fri at noon.

You can send your thoughts on the best and worst things that happened to schools this past year by writing a tweet @leoniehaimson

Or writing her directly at “leoniehaimson@gmail.com”

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism

Timothy Snyder on the January 6 Report

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2022 //
13

Timothy Snyder, a pre-eminent scholar of fascism, summarized the report of the January 6 Committee:

What did Trump know, and when did he lie about it? How did his Big Lie lead to specific actions to overturn and election and bring down the American system? What did the coup attempt of 2020-2021 look like from within the Trump administration itself?

Thanks to the excellent “Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol,” we now know the answers to these and many other questions. I provide here just the briefest of summaries of the report’s recounting of the events of November 2020-January 2021.

It is very easy, when a long report is released, to underplay its basic findings. There is a temptation to act as if something is not shocking if we have heard part of it before, as though this were a mark of political sophistication. The American tendency to normalize threats to democracy is also present in retrospect.

What is described in palpable and convincing detail in the Final Report is indeed profoundly shocking: a planned and coordinated attempt by the president of the United States and his allies to carry out regime change in the United States of America on the basis of a Big Lie.

Here is my very brief summary of the factual part of the report, in fifteen quick points. I am deliberately understating here; the evidence, in the Final Reportitself, permits much broader conclusions.

1. Trump knew that he was likely to lose the 3 November 2020 election, and planned in advance to declare victory (to tell a Big Lie) if he lost.

2. On 3 November 2020, Trump knew that he was very unlikely to have won the election of that day, and declared victory anyway. In the days following, aware that he had lost, he continued to declare victory.

3. Over and over again in November, December, and January, Trump publicized specific claims of electoral fraud shortly after being informed that they were false.

4. Aware that his advisors, campaign officials, and cabinet knew his claims of fraud to be false, Trump promoted people, such as Rudolph Giuliani, who would lie for him in public.

5. In the full knowledge that he had lost the election and that his claims of fraud were false, Trump made several deliberate efforts to overturn the election results and thus American democracy.

6. In states he had lost, Trump personally pressured state officials to fraudulently and illegally alter the electoral outcome.

7. Informed that the Department of Justice had investigated and found no evidence of fraud, Trump nevertheless sought to use its powers, via Jeffrey Clark, to intimidate state officials to change electoral outcomes.

8. Knowing that he had lost the electoral college vote, Trump oversaw an effort to create fake slates of electors. These entirely bogus documents were then sent to the vice-president (who refused them).

9. Though aware that it was the vice-president’s role only to count the electoral votes, Trump pressured the vice-president not to do so, on the theory that the vice-president could, in effect, choose the president.

10. Even the person who devised the plan regarding the vice-president, John Eastman, knew it to be illegal.

11. Knowing by January 6th that all that remained was the formality of certifying Biden’s victory, Trump encouraged supporters he knew to be armed and angry to halt this procedure and violently overthrow our form of government.

12. Trump’s call to violence was successful because enough of his supporters believed his lies and understood what he wanted them to do: prevent a peaceful transition of power.

13. At a time when the Capitol was under attack, the vice-president was in flight, and the members of the vice-president’s security detail feared for their lives, Trump urged his supporters on to further violence.

14. After the failed coup attempt, a number of Republican legislators sought presidential pardons, thereby acknowledging their fears that they had acted illegally.

15. Even had Trump believed that he had won the 2020 election, which he did not, his coup attempt would remain a coup attempt, and his crimes would remain crimes.

These are some of the simple facts, as we now know them, two years on.

Two years ago, I wrote a long essay about the January 6 insurrection, entitled “American Abyss.” It could be published right after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, because I had written it beforehand, as a study of the Big Lie and its consequences. Thanks to the work of some excellent reporters and editors, I could add details from the horrors of the day before the final text went to press in The New York Times Magazine.

Trump’s coup attempt itself was predictable, and I had been predicting it throughout the autumn of 2020. Indeed, since the publication of On Tyrannyin early 2017, I had been trying to make the case that something like this could happen in the United States, and in late 2020 I spent a lot of time saying that it would happen. I like to think that this helped to prepare some of us for the coup attempt when it did come.

Trump is obviously personally responsible. But the techniques he used are not unique to him, and could be perfected by others. The weaknesses he exploited are structural. Now that a coup attempt has taken place, and we know a great deal about how it happened, it is important for us to ask some of the deeper questions about why it could have happened, not least to make sure that nothing similar takes place in the future. In posts to come, I will be interpreting the report, returning to some of the themes I established these last few years, such as the Big Lie.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Lies, Trump

What Will the GOP Do About Serial Liar George Santos?

By dianeravitch
December 29, 2022 //
48

The short answer is: Nothing. At least in Washington, D.C.

The story in New York is different.

Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether his multiple lies broke any laws. Anne Donnelly, the local prosecutor in Nassau County, where he was elected, is a Republican, and she too has opened an investigation.

The New York Times, which broke the original story, reported last night:

Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether Representative-elect George Santos committed any crimes involving his finances and lies about his background on the campaign trail.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have opened an investigation into Mr. Santos that is focused at least in part on his financial dealings, according to a person familiar with the matter. The investigation was said to be in its early stages.

In a separate inquiry, the Nassau County, N.Y., district attorney’s office said it was looking into the “numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos” during his successful 2022 campaign to represent parts of Long Island and Queens.

It was unclear how far the Nassau County inquiry had progressed, but the district attorney, Anne Donnelly, said in a statement that Mr. Santos’s fabrications “are nothing short of stunning.”

Why are the Republicans in Congress silent?

Charlie Sykes, who used to be a conservative Republican, writes in The Bulwark that Kevin McCarthy needs Santos’ vote. End of story. His colleagues are saying “He’s learned his lesson,” although he remains defiant. Santos says “Everyone embellishes his resume.” But the proper word is not “embellish,” it’s “lie.” The Congressman-elect lied about his education, lied about his employment, lied about his religion, lied about his family. What part of his resume is true? No one knows.

Probably none of it except his name.

Sykes writes:

Of course, a political party with any sort of intact immune system would move quickly to send this sociopath back to ScamLand, whence he came.

But this is the GOP circa 2022, and so it faces a painful dilemma. With a narrow majority in the House, Republicans (and especially Kevin McCarthy) need his vote, of course.

But that’s not the real problem here, is it?

After years of ignoring, enabling, and rationalizing Big Lies and small ones, it will now be exceedingly difficult for the GOP to find their misplaced conscience that might morph into outrage and something like a moral standard. As Nick Catoggio writes:

Anyone willing to set aside their qualms about Trump for the sake of holding executive power logically should be willing to set aside their qualms about Santos for the sake of holding legislative power

So, not surprisingly, GOP leaders are either silent, or in a forgiving mood.

To deepen the puzzle of Santos, read this article in The Daily Beast about one of his big donors.

Categories Accountability, Character, Elections, Ethics, Fake, Hoax, Lies, New York, Republicans

Cassidy Hutchinson Has a Moral Core

By dianeravitch
December 27, 2022 //
93

It gets tiresome to read about the cheats, liars, grifters, and dishonorable people who rise to wealth and power. Thus it is a relief to read about a young woman who had neither wealth nor power, but something far more powerful: a moral core. A sure sense of right and wrong. Principles. Others could boldly lie or feign ignorance when testifying under oath. She couldn’t do it. She wanted to be able to look herself in the mirror every day without grimacing.

Ruth Marcus, the deputy editor of The Washington Post, wrote about her, a woman with more wealth and power than those she served because she has a clear conscience.

After I read the column below, I read the transcript of Cassidy’s interview with the January 6 Committee. She goes through the details of how she changed from a loyal partisan of Trump world to a renegade, more concerned with telling the truth than pleasing her handlers. She was without a job for a year, and she relied on a Trump world lawyer. He advised her to say as little as possible in answer to the Committee’s questions and to answer whenever possible, “I don’t recall.” He and others in Trump’s entourage promised to get her a good job, to take care of her, as long as she protects the team. They flattered her and told her that she’s doing a good job, she’s a member of the family, and they will always have her back. So much of it sounds like something out of The Sopranos. She wants to please them, but she also wants to tell the truth. At one point, as she is doing her best to please them, she admits that she is “disgusted” with herself.

A cynic might wonder why she had so many qualms about lying for a president who lied repeatedly every day. But then you remind yourself that she’s a young kid, not long out of college, working in a dream job. Of course she wanted to please her superiors in Trump world. Of course she was afraid that they would destroy her if she defected. But somewhere inside her was a moral core that required her to tell the truth.

Marcus wrote:

Cassidy Hutchinson knew better than to put herself in debt to what she called “Trump world.” As she would later testify, “Once you are looped in, especially financially with them, there is no turning back.”

But Hutchinson, who witnessed the final days of the Trump White House from her all-access perch as an aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, had been subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 select committee. The deadline for turning over documents was looming, and Hutchinson was, she said, “starting to freak out.” One lawyer she consulted said he could assist — then demanded a $150,000 retainer.

So, the young aide, out of work since Donald Trump had left office a full year earlier, initially decided to turn to Trump world for help. Which is how she came to receive a phone call from Stefan Passantino, previously a lawyer in the Trump White House counsel’s office.

“We have you taken care of,” he told Hutchinson. When she asked who would be paying the bills, Passantino demurred — this despite legal ethics rules that let attorneys accept payment from third parties but only with the “informed consent” of their client.

“If you want to know at the end, we’ll let you know, but we’re not telling people where funding is coming from right now,” Hutchinson, in her deposition, recalled him saying. “Like, you’re never going to get a bill for this, so if that’s what you’re worried about.”

If Hutchinson’s live testimony before the select committee was riveting, her deposition testimony, taken several months later and released Thursday, is a page-turner: The Godfather meets John Grisham meets “All the President’s Men.” Before, we could only imagine how frightening the situation must have been for the 20-something Trump staffer. Now, we can read of her frantic search for help, and her terror as she contemplated telling the truth.

It is a tale, at least in Hutchinson’s telling, of Trump allies dangling financial support in exchange for unyielding loyalty. “We’re gonna get you a really good job in Trump world. You don’t need to apply other places,” Passantino assured Hutchinson. “We’re gonna get you taken care of. We’re going to keep you in the family.” The goal, as he set it out, was clear: “We just want to focus on protecting the President.”

It’s a story of meek compliance enforced by fear of consequences — and menacing admonitions to remain on board. “They will ruin my life, Mom, if I do anything they don’t want me to do,” Hutchinson told her mother when she offered congratulations about finally securing a lawyer.

The night before her second interview with the committee, an aide to Meadows called Hutchinson about her former boss: “Mark wants me to let you know that he knows you’re loyal and he knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss. You know, he knows that we’re all on the same team and we’re all a family.”

Most vividly, it is a chilling account of questionable legal ethics practiced by Passantino who, in a plot twist worthy of a Hollywood scriptwriter, was the Trump White House’s chief ethics officer. Passantino is depicted repeatedly advising Hutchinson to fall back on an asserted failure to remember anything. “The less you remember, the better.”

Except Hutchinson did remember — and quite a lot. Such as the incident in the presidential limousine, as related to Hutchinson by deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato, in which an enraged Trump allegedly lunged at his lead Secret Service agent when he refused to take the president to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

When Hutchinson mentioned this episode to Passantino shortly before her first interview with the committee, “he’s like, ‘No, no, no, no, no. We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to talk about that.’” The committee, he said, “have no way of knowing that. … But just because he told you doesn’t mean that you need to share it with them.”

Deposition prep with Passantino seemed confined less to reviewing the facts than to instructing the witness in the art of declining to disclose them. “He was like, ‘Well, if you had just overheard conversations that happened, you don’t need to testify to that,’” Hutchinson said.

“Stefan never told me to lie,” she told the committee. “He specifically told me, ‘I don’t want you to perjure yourself, but “I don’t recall” isn’t perjury. They don’t know what you can and can’t recall.’” Hutchinson pressed him on this matter. “I said, ‘But, if I do recall something but not every little detail, Stefan, can I still say I don’t recall?’ And he had said, ‘Yes.’”

A week later, appearing before the panel, Hutchinson found herself peppered with questions about the Trump limousine incident. She kept saying she hadn’t heard anything like that — and Passantino sat silently by as his client offered testimony he knew to be false.

“I just lied,” a rattled Hutchinson told Passantino during a break. “And he said, ‘They don’t know what you know, Cassidy. They don’t know that you can recall some of these things. So you saying “I don’t recall” is an entirely acceptable response to this.’”

No, no, no. Lawyers advise their clients not to volunteer information — that’s appropriate. They instruct them to give limited answers, confined to the precise scope of the question — that’s appropriate, too.

But lawyers — at least lawyers who want to keep their law license — do not provide the kind of counsel that Hutchinson describes. There is no “overheard” or “I don’t recall” loophole if, in fact, you did hear something and you do remember it. Ominously for Passantino, the deposition transcript reveals that Hutchinson provided the same information to the Justice Department.

Passantino, who has taken a leave of absence from his law firm to “deal with the distraction of this matter,” said in a statement that he represented Hutchinson “honorably, ethically, and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me” and believed she “was being truthful and cooperative with the Committee throughout the several interview sessions in which I represented her.”

In the end, Hutchinson decided she could not accept such advice and still look at herself in the mirror. So, she dumped Passantino and decided to spill what she knew to congressional investigators.

“To be blunt, I was kind of disgusted with myself,” Hutchinson said. “I became somebody I never thought that I would become.”

To read her deposition is to wonder: What do the others in the Trump crowd see when they look in the mirror?

Categories Character, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Fraud, Justice, Scandals, Trump

Politico: Partisan Battles Over School Boards Continue Unabated

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2022 //
15

Politico reports that there was no sweep for partisans of the culture war issues. We can expect to see more attacks on teachers, students, and school boards in the next election, based on hyped-up falsehoods about race and gender. Support from rightwing conservative foundations—the usual suspects—will keep alive the battles and the fake organizations leading them. (Expect a special report soon from the Network for Public Education on these front groups attacking school boards, written by an authority on Dark Money).

Juan Perez Jr. of Politico writes:

THE DIVIDED CLASSROOM — In case you missed it amid the advertising noise and campaign spending avalanche of November’s midterms, 2022 proved to be an incredibly busy — and contentious — year for education elections.

Fifteen states and the District of Columbia held state school board or education superintendent races this year. Roughly 1,800 local board seats across some 560 districts in 26 states were also up for grabs on Nov. 8, according to the nonpartisan nonprofit Ballotpedia.

Who came out on top? Nobody. Neither Democrats nor Republicans managed a clean sweep.

This means the state of education in the United States remains divided sharply along partisan lines — and the education wars are likely to continue unabated in 2023 and beyond.

The bitter differences between the two sides and lack of consensus between the poles of both parties — over everything from teaching about slavery and gender identity to childhood vaccinations – offer little incentive for either side to back down.

“We are stopping Critical Race Theory from being taught, stopping access to obscene pornography in our schools, and ending the tenure of radicalism and indoctrination of our kids because the left is waging a civil war in our classrooms,” newly-elected Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters recently wrote in the Daily Caller.

Candidates who supported having race and sex-related curricula or Covid-19 safety requirements in schools won about 40 percent of the roughly 1,800 local board elections tallied by Ballotpedia this year, and tended to win in counties President Joe Biden carried in the 2020 election. Candidates with opposing views won about 30 percent of their elections, often doing so in counties held by former President Donald Trump.

Nearly one-third of incumbent school board members also lost to their challengers on Nov. 8.

“People didn’t feel listened to. Parents felt they lost agency and power over their kids’ education,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers labor union, recently told Nightly. “My concern is that we can’t have two countries. This is one United States of America, and we have an obligation to help kids — regardless of whether they’re in South Carolina, Tennessee, New York or California — to learn how to critically think.”

As they turn toward 2023, Democrats take solace in battleground state victories for governor, successful education-related ballot measures and local school board races where moderate incumbents defeated far-right challengers in Louisville, Ky., the suburbs of Austin, Texas, and other places.

Sure, conservatives lost plenty of races. But they won more than enough to show their brand of culture-based education politics thrives in areas controlled by the party faithful. Trump seems to have this on his mind, too. The former president promised schools would lose their federal funding if they don’t get rid of critical race theory, and what he described as “radical civics and gender insanity,” when he announced his reelection bid.

No state school boards with elections this year flipped partisan control, according to the National Association of State Boards of Education. But majority parties did expand their influence on boards in Colorado, Kansas and Utah while conservative incumbents often lost primary challenges.

Candidates endorsed by two upstart GOP-aligned political committees also won roughly half of their midterm elections.

Candidates backed by Moms for Liberty, a group formed by a former Florida school board member to fight school Covid-19 mask requirements and controversial library books, won about half of their 2022 elections, according to the organization. The 1776 Project PAC, a group opposed to the critical race theory academic framework that examines how race and racism have become ingrained in American institutions, saw a similar win-loss ratio.

Open the link to read more.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, History, Privatization, Racism, Religion
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