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Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on “60 Minutes”

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2024 //
37

There’s been a lot of grumbling in the media about Kamala not sitting for interviews, so these past few days she has sat for interviews. She was on “The View.” She sat for a long interview with Howard Stern. She did a podcast with Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy,” a very popular show whose audience is women., especially young women. And she did the obligatory interview with “60 Minutes.” So did Tim Walz. I thought she was terrific. Watch and seeehat you think.

Trump was supposed to be interviewed but he canceled at the last minute. He said the show owed him an apology for something Lesley Stahl said four years ago. He claimed she said that Hunter Biden’s laptop came from Russia; CBS denied it. He complained that CBS would fact check him; that was unacceptable. CBS said it always fact checks.

Categories Elections, Harris, Kamala, Media, Vance, J.D.

Creator of Fake Biden Robocall Fined $6 Million

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2024 //
22

This is good news. The misuse of AI threatens the integrity of our elections and our ability to trust anything that is communicated to us other than in person. Justice was served!

The man responsible for a political robocalling hoax aimed at New Hampshire voters has been fined $6 million by the Federal Communications Commission.

Steve Kramer, the New Orleans-based political consultant who has admitted his involvement in the hoax, must pay the fine for violating the federal Truth in Caller ID Act, which makes it illegal to make automated telephone calls with intent to defraud or cause harm. The FCC says that it will hand the matter to the US Justice Department if Kramer doesn’t pay up in 30 days.

The hoax occurred in January, when New Hampshire voters received robocalls in the runup to the state’s primary elections. The calls, which featured a computer-generated voice that mimicked the voice of President Joe Biden, urged voters not to cast ballots in the primary.

Kramer hired New Orleans magician Paul Carpenter to create the recording with help from ElevenLabs, a company that uses artificial intelligence to generate highly realistic simulations of individuals’ voices. Carpenter has said that he didn’t know Kramer’s plans for the AI recording. Kramer has claimed that he did it to demonstrate the dangers posed by computer-generated “deepfakes.”

Lingo Telecom, the Missouri phone company that sent out the robocalls, agreed to pay a $1 million fine last month for its involvement in the hoax.

In addition to the FCC fine, Kramer faces 13 felony counts of attempted voter suppression in the New Hampshire courts, as well as 13 misdemeanor counts of impersonating a candidate.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democracy, Elections, Fake, Technology

Timothy Snyder on Trump’s Hitlerian Month

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2024 //
13

Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale University, expresses his alarm about Trump’s turn toward fascistic rhetoric in this post. Trump knows how to excite his base by repeating conspiracy theories and blaming the Jews if anything he wants goes wrong. Snyder does not invoke the reference to Hitler lightly. He knows European history.

He writes:

Trump just had quite a Hitlerian month.

But before broaching the subject of Trump and Hitler I have to say a with a word about the American taboo on “comparisons.” 

Anyone who refers to Trump’s Hitlerian moments will be condemned for “comparison.”  Somehow that “comparison” rather than Trump’s deeds becomes the problem.  The outrage one feels about the crimes of the 1930s and 1940s is transferred from the person who resembles the criminal to the person who points out the resemblance.  

This cynical position opposing “comparisons” exploits the emotional logic of exceptionalism.  Americans are innocent and good (we would like to believe).  We are not (we take for granted) like the Germans between the world wars.  We would never (we imagine) tolerate the stereotypes German Nazis invoked.  We have learned the lessons of the Holocaust. 

Since we are so innocent and good, since we know everything, it just cannot be true — so runs the emotional logic — that a leading American politician does Hitlerian things.  And since we are so pure and wise, we never have to specify what it was that we have learned from the past.  Indeed, our our goodness is so profound that we must express it by attacking the people who recall history. 

And so, in the name of our capacity to remember great evil, we make it impossible to actually remember great evil.  A taboo on “comparison” becomes a shield for the perpetrator.  Those who invoke the past are the true villains, the real source of the problem, or, as Trump says about journalists, the “enemy of the people.”  Indeed, the more Trump resembles Hitler, the safer the man is from criticism on this point.

I hope that the irony of all of this is clear: the idea that “comparison” is a sin rests on the notion of the inherent and unimpeachable virtue of the American Volk, who by definition do nothing wrong, and whose chosen Leader therefore must be beyond criticism.  In this strange way, outrage about “comparison” reinforces fascist ideas about purity and politics.  We should hate the dissenters.  We should ignore whatever casts doubt on our sense of national virtue.  We should never reflect.

Democracy, of course, depends on the ability to reflect, and that reflection is impossible without a sense of the past.  The past is our only mirror, which is why fascists want to shatter it.  In fascist Russia, for example, it is a criminal offense to say the wrong things about the Second World War.  The reason why we keep alive the memory of Nazi crimes is not because it could never happen here, but because something similar can always happen anywhere.  That memory has to include the details of history, or else we will not recognize the dangers. 

“Never again” is something that you work for, not something that you inherit.

Before we think about this past month, we also have to consider the past four years.  This entire election unfolds amidst a big lie.  It was Hitler’s advice to tell a lie so big that your followers would never believe that you would deceive them on such a scale.  Trump followed that advice in November 2020.  His claim that we actually won the election in a landslide is a fantasy that opens the way to other fantasies.  It is a conspiratorial claim that opens the way to conspiratorial thinking generally.  It prepares his followers for the idea that other Americans are enemies and that violence might be needed to install the correct leader.

This year we have seen that explicit Nazi ideas are tolerated in the Trump milieu.  The vice-presidential candidate shares a platform with Holocaust deniers, and defends Holocaust denial as free speech.  This is a fallacy people should see through: yes, the First Amendment allows Nazis to speak, but it does not ennoble Nazi speech.  The fact that people say fascist things in a country with freedom of speech is how we know that they are fascists — and that, if they themselves comes to power, they will end freedom of speech and all other freedoms.

Which brings us to North Carolina and to the gubernatorial candidate Trump once called the country’s hottest politician.  No one is denying that Mark Robinson has the right under the First Amendment to call himself a Nazi or to praise Mein Kampf.  The question is what we do about this.  Trump will not intervene here because he believes that Robinson is more likely to win than a substitute candidate would be.  Consider that for a moment: for Trump, the reason not to distance himself a self-avowed Nazi is that he hopes that the self-avowed Nazi will win an election, take office, and hold power. 

This is not surprising.  Trump and Vance are running a fascist campaign.  Its main theme in September was inspired by a lady in Springfield, Ohio, who lost her cat and then found it again.  For J.D. Vance, who knew what happened, this became the basis for the lie that Haitian immigrants were eating domestic animals.  For Donald Trump, that became a reason to promise that Haitians in Springfield would be deported.  He had found people who were both Blacks and immigrants, who could serve as the “them” in his politics of us-and-them.

It is fascist to start a political campaign from the choice of an enemy (this is the definition of politics by the most talented Nazi thinker, Carl Schmitt).  It is fascist to replace reason with emotion, to tell big lies (“create stories,” as Vance says) that appeal to a sense of vulnerability and exploit a feeling of difference.  The fantasy of barbarians in our cities violating basic social norms serves to gird the Trump-Vance story that legal, constitutional government is helpless and that only an angry mob backed by a new regime could get things done. 

It is worth knowing, in this connection, that the first major action of Hitler’s SS was the forced deportation of migrants.  About 17,000 people were deported, which generated the social instability that the Nazi government the used as justification for further oppression.  Trump and Vance plan to deport about a thousand times as many people….

In international politics, the key moment concerns Ukraine and its head of state.  Since February 2022, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, has been rightly understood and admired as a symbol of physical and political courage.  When Russia began its full-scale invasion that month, the American consensus was the Ukraine would crack within days and that Zelens’kyi would (and should) flee.  Instead, he stayed in Kyiv despite the approach of Russian assassins and the Russian army, rallied his people, and oversaw the successful defense of his country.  He has since visited the front every few weeks. 

This is how Trump characterized Zelens’kyi in September, echoing comments that he has made before: “Every time he came to our country, he’d walk away with $100 billion. He’s probably the greatest salesman on Earth.”  Trump seems threatened by Zelens’kyi.  As Trump has made clear numerous times, his first and only impulse is to give Putin what Putin wants.  The idea of taking risks to defend freedom from the Russian dictator is well beyond the pinprick-sized black hole that is Trump’s moral universe. 

And of course the claim itself is false.  The number is too big.  And the money does not go to Zelens’kyi himself, obviously.  That Zelens’kyi does personally profit is a favorite idea of Vance, who repeats Russian propaganda to this effect.  The money does not even, for the most part, go to the Ukrainian government.  Most of the military aid does to American companies who build new weapons for American stockpiles.  We then send old weapons to Ukraine, to which we assign a dollar value.

The essential thing, though, is the antisemitic trope Trump chose to express himself.  It goes like this.  Jews are cowards.  Jews never fight wars.  Jews stay away from the front.  Jews only cause wars that make other people suffer.  And then Jews make vast amounts of money from those wars.  Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, the Ukrainian president, is Jewish.  And thus “the greatest salesman on earth” for Trump.  And the corrupt owner of “yachts” for Vance.  A war profiteer, as in the antisemitic stereotype, not a courageous commander, as in reality. 

Indeed, most of what Trump says about Zelens’kyi, Ukraine, and and the war itself makes sense only within the antisemitic stereotype.  Trump never speaks about the Russian invasion itself.  He never recalls Russian war crimes.  He never mentions that Ukrainians are defending themselves or their basic ideas of what is right.  He certainly never admits that Zelens’kyi is the democratically-elected president of a country under vicious attack and who has comported himself with courage.  The war, for Trump, is just a scam — a Jewish scam. 

And that, of course, is why he thinks he can end it right away: he thinks he can just shoulder the Jew aside and deal with his fascist “friend” Putin, who for him is the “genius” in this situation, and who must be allowed to win.  Despite the evidence, Trump says that Russia always wins wars, dismissing both history (regular Russian losses such as the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Polish-Bolshevik War, the Afghan War) and the actual events of the ongoing Russian invasion, in which Ukraine has taken back half the territory it lost and driven the Russian fleet from the Black Sea.  Russia is counting on Trump.  They need him in power to win their war, and they know it. 

It need hardly be said that if Trump throws American power on the Russian side, the “deal” that follows will not end the war.  It will only mean that Russia is able to kill more Ukrainians faster.  Trump will then claim that the deal itself was beautiful and perfect — and try to change the subject from the slaughter he brought about through his antisemitic hubris and admiration of Russian fascism.

And, of course, Snyder explains, Trump has warned Jewish groups that if he loses, it will be the fault of Jews. Anti-Semitism will be Trump’s legacy.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, History, Lies, Trump

Former FBI Agent: What Trump Says About Guns, Crime, and Drugs Is Wrong

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2024 //
9

Retired FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi writes on the MSNBC website about the internal dangers to America. It’s not from immigrants, who are typically more law-abiding than the native-born, but from Neo-Nazi gangs.

He writes:

The federal indictment of 68 defendants accused of being members of (or being associated) with a criminal gang driven by race-based hate followed an investigation that led to the seizure of Nazi paraphernalia, including Adolf Hitler posters, and 97 pounds of fentanyl, federal officials said Wednesday. U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada, who announced the charges, called it one of the “largest takedowns in the history of the Department of Justice against a neo-Nazi, white supremacist, violent extremist organization.”

That announcement landing in the final weeks of a presidential election prompts us to contrast the facts of our crime problem with the fiction that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, would have us believe.

The dismantlement of the group that called itself the Peckerwoods, a San Fernando Valley arm of the notorious Aryan Brotherhood white supremacy organization, came in the form of charges for allegedracketeering, firearms trafficking, drug trafficking and financial fraud. If convicted as charged, some members, who adorn themselves with tattoos of swastikas and other hate symbols, could face life behind bars. The group was so heavily armed and so violent that the FBI deployed its elite Hostage Rescue Team from Quantico, Virginia, to support the arrests. According to the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, the Peckerwoods, a derogatory name historically used against white people, “has as its mission to plan attacks against racial, ethnic, religious minorities.”

Agents seized an arsenal of illegal guns, “bomb-making components” and dozens of kilograms of fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin, according to law enforcement officials.

The details of this multifaceted investigation reveal a significant component of America’s crime problem: hardened, U.S.-born criminals who traffic in the drugs, guns and violence plaguing our country. This contrasts with the fact-free fearmongering fabrications being sold to MAGA believers. It’s not that minorities don’t commit crimes; nor is that migrants never murder or rape. But Trump and Vance want voters to believe our gun, drug and violence problems are being driven by migrants when the opposite is true…

During the vice presidential debate, Vance claimed the vast majority of illegal guns used in crimes here come from Mexican cartels. The truth is quite different; it’s the U.S. that’s arming Mexican cartels. We have detailed data demonstrating the extent to which American weapons are fueling the violence in Mexico, right down to the make and model of the guns found at crime scenes across the border.

Please open the link to read more about crime statistics and Trump-Vance’s hateful and phony war against immigrants.

Categories Cruelty, Data, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Guns, Hoax, Lies, Trump

Massachusetts: Voters Likely to Oppose State Test as Graduation Requirement

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2024 //
20

Massachusetts voters will have a chance to vote on whether the state academic test–MCAS–should continue to be a high school graduation requirement.

The Boston Globe reports:

Roughly 58 percent of Massachusetts voters said they would support eliminating a requirement that students pass the MCAS examination to graduate high school, far outpacing the 37 percent who said they would vote to keep the mandate in place.

The measure, known as Question 2, is one of the most consequential on the ballot in Massachusetts, which by some measures boasts the best public school systems in the country. Despite that success, the Massachusetts Teachers Association and its leaders are leading the biggest revolt over testing in two decades, arguing the mandate puts too much focus on subjects tested by MCAS and creates too much anxiety and retesting of students.

The question speaks to the frustrations of many parents, including Felicia Torres, a 39-year-old Haverhill resident and mother of three. Her 9-year-old is smart, loves hockey, and enjoys math, but he “dreads and hates school” because he chafes at being taught “whatever they’re forced to learn,” she said.

“I honestly don’t think that a standardized test depicts how well a child will do,” said Torres, a nurse. “I just don’t think it’s accurate.”

The bid to eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement is riding huge advantages among female voters, with 64 percent saying they plan to vote “yes.” Perhaps most notably, 60 percent of independent voters also say they want to eliminate the mandate.

“That tells me it has an excellent chance of passing,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center.

Typically, he said, those who are undecided about a ballot question ultimately vote against it if they are confused by it or are unsure about its impact, effectively siding with the status quo. In the case of Question 2, only about 4 percent of voters said they were undecided.

The question has split Democratic leaders, with Governor Maura Healey, House Speaker Ron Mariano, and Senate President Karen E. Spilka each opposed to eliminating the requirement while some members of Congress and state lawmakers joined the Massachusetts Teachers Union. But its support isn’t universal among teachers, either.

“You need some sort of tool and measurement stick in terms of how the school is performing,” said Luke, a 37-year-old Wakefield resident and eighth-grade social studies teacher who told pollsters he is voting against the question. He spoke to the Globe on the condition his full name not be used. “If you’re going to still carry out the MCAS, how do you think students are going to take it seriously when you’re saying it doesn’t need to be a requirement?”

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Elections, High School Graduation, Massachusetts, Standardized Testing

Lone Star Left: JD Vance Was Wrong About Guns

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2024 //
7

Michelle H. Davis writes the blog “Lone Star Left” where she tracks events in Texas. She watched the VP debate and was stunned by JD Vance’s assertion that Mexicans send or smuggle guns into Texas. It’s just the reverse, she says.

She writes:

During this week’s VP debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, Vance lied about many things. He spoke really fast, and he lied a lot. Presumably, that’s just who he is. While there have been plenty of fact-checks this week, there’s one topic we must drill down on and know the facts about because this topic has been one of the biggest drivers of mass migration over the years, and his like wasn’t only stupid. It was done with malice. 

That’s right, we’re talking about the Iron River. Here’s what he said: 

Why is the sound out of sync? I have no idea. Here’s the full video; this part is at the 56-minute mark.

Vance’s exact words: “Thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel. So, that number then, the amount of illegal guns in our country, is higher today than it was three and a half years ago.”

Only a moron from Ohio, which is nowhere near a border, who peddles lies would come up with such a tall tale. JD Vance was referring to the Iron River, and it’s essential in the immigration discussion that we all know that it flows from North to South. 

What is the Iron River? 

The term “Iron River” refers to the large-scale trafficking of firearms from the United States to Mexico, where these weapons fuel cartel violence and crime. The term likely emerged from the constant, unrelenting flow of weapons, like a river, moving across the US-Mexico border. This metaphor emphasizes the steady and overwhelming volume of guns moving southward, often from states with looser gun regulations, into the hands of criminal organizations in Mexico.

Between 70% and 90% of firearms recovered from crime scenes in Mexico can be traced back to the US. Most of these guns are purchased in border states with more relaxed gun laws, particularly Texas, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Florida. These five states accounted for 79% of the firearms traced back to the US between 2017 and 2021, with Texas alone responsible for more than 14,000 guns smuggled into Mexico. Trafficking networks exploit loose regulations, using “straw purchasers” to buy firearms legally and then transport them across the border.

This lie from Vance distorts the fact that the trafficking flow is mainly in the opposite direction—guns legally bought in the US are fueling violence in Mexico, not the other way around.

This is nothing new. The Iron River has been fueling mass migration for many years.

Please open the link to finish the story.

Categories Elections, Guns, Texas

Rick Hess: Don’t Worry So Much About Trump 2.0 and Education

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2024 //
15

Rick Hess is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in D.C. that is underwritten in part by the billionaire DeVos family. I have always had very pleasant and rewarding exchanges with Rick, who is a very amiable guy. He often tries to stake out a middle ground on controversial issues, as he does here. He argues that he doesn’t know what Trump will do on education, if re-elected, and neither does anyone else. But he concludes that Trump is unikely to do anything radical in the way of defunding education programs or dismantling the Department. So, don’t believe what he says and disregard Project 2025.

Somehow I’m not assuaged.

Hess writes in Education Next:

This summer, musing on the Republican National Convention, I noted that the GOP has been fundamentally remade since 2016—a point deemed self-evident by right-leaning pundits (MAGA and Never-Trump alike) but that seems insufficiently appreciated by a whole lot of other observers.

This has yielded a lot of certainty in education circles as to what would happen under a Trump 2.0, much of which I find pretty dubious. I’ve done interviews with reporters who seem to take it as given that Trump would slash Title I, IDEA, and Pell Grants. One write-up after another has emphatically declared that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook is the blueprint for Trump 2.0. There’s a remarkable confidence that Trump’s administration would embrace budget-cutting, small-government, Mike Pence–Betsy DeVos conservatism, only far more aggressively than the last go-round.

Now, might they be right? Sure. But it’s not the way to bet. I want to take a moment to explain why.

For starters, keep in mind that Trump has never been a conservative in any traditional sense. He’s a showman, reality TV star, and longtime Democrat who stumbled into the presidency. In 2016, as the newbie in a party dominated by Tea Party and Reaganite conservatives, he was obligated to name Mike Pence VP and issue a list of Federalist Society–vetted Supreme Court nominees. Today, Trump is no longer so constrained: he is the Republican Party. Traditional conservatives—from Dick Cheney to Mitt Romney to Paul Ryan—have been purged. Trump’s VP pick is now J.D. Vance, a former Never-Trumper who subsequently bent the knee. Trump has thrown the pro-life wing of the GOP coalition under the bus, torn up a half-century of Republican foreign policy, and dumped those who advised him on judges last time.

The shift is only partly about Trump being unfettered. It’s also about the remaking of the Republican coalition. Republicans have bled socially moderate, fiscally conservative college grads while gaining working-class voters who kind of like New Deal/Great Society-type spending. Pence was a Reaganite, a small-government conservative who wanted to cut programs and reduce spending. Vance is a NatCon, an economic populist who greeted the news that Liz Cheney would be voting for Harris by denouncing the former member of the House Republican leadership as someone who gets “rich when America’s sons and daughters go off to die.” Where Reaganite conservatives talked about the need to reform Social Security and Medicare, Trump has promised he won’t touch them. This is decidedly not the Romney-Ryan Republican Party.

So, while it seems to elude much of the education commentariat, it should be regarded as an open question as to whether Trump 2.0 would actually commit to much budget-cutting or shrinking of the bureaucracy when it comes to education. Indeed, when asked about child care, Trump recently offered a word salad suggesting that his proposed tariffs would help fund a major expansion of federal programs. Last year, he pitched a federally-funded “American Academy,” which would open new vistas for Washington’s role in providing higher education. Trump has obviously promised aggressive action on key cultural hot points—from defunding anti-Semitic colleges to busting the higher-ed accreditation cartel—and such moves, while obviously right-leaning, imply a need for a robust federal presence.

As National Review’s Andy McCarthy observed in his debate postmortem last week, “Because he’s an opportunist with some conservative leanings, rather than a conservative in search of opportunities to advance the cause, Trump often can’t decide whether to deride Harris’s cynical policy shifts or try to get to her left.” Even in Trump’s first term, when he had an experienced team of small-government true believers, there was little cutting and a whole lot of deficit spending. Recall that it was Trump who supported the first big tranche of unconditional pandemic aid for schools, initiated the hugely expensive student loan pause, and spent his first term watching spending climb on programs he’d promised to cut.

Now, some readers may protest: “Yeah, but Trump told Elon Musk we should abolish the Department of Education, and Heritage’s Project 2025 calls for cutting education spending!” Fair points. Trump has made a slew of contradictory promises, and neither the GOP platform nor his track record offer much clarity as to what should be believed. After all, even as Trump was saying he’d like to abolish the Department, he was emphatically denouncing Project 2025 (written by first-term staff who may not be welcome back in a Trump 2.0) and insisting he hasn’t read it.

What’s the bottom line? The truth is that no one really knows how a Trump 2.0 would go. I’ll keep this simple: anyone who claims to know . . . doesn’t. It’s not clear who is advising Trump on education, who (other than his kids) would inhabit his inner circle, how much sway Vance will have, or who would make key calls on staffing. That said, it seems to me that there are three scenarios for a Trump 2.0 when it comes to education. Here they are, from least likely to most likely.

Trump Drains the Swamp. Trump governs as a Beltway-draining, government-cutting conservative, even after aggressively disavowing Heritage’s Project 2025, promising not to touch entitlements, and failing to downsize the federal education footprint in his first term. He goes after Title I, IDEA, and Pell, and he leans on Congress to dismantle the Department of Education. It’s doubtful he could convince centrist GOP senators like Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski to go along with it, though, meaning Republicans would need a stunningly good election night in the Senate contests to put any of this in play.

Trump Seeks Retribution. Trump devotes his energy to waging his war of “retribution” on his “enemies”—going after the press, Democrats, and any RINOs who’ve earned his ire. His White House spends its time seeking to pull the U.S. out of our international commitments and launching a federally organized deportation effort as part of an aggressive immigration strategy. Amidst the maelstrom, education gets left to the White House’s domestic policy team and whoever winds up staffing the Department of Education—but little happens because of the energy consumed by the tumult and its aftermath.

Trump Puts Trump First. Trump approaches education through the same Trump-first lens as most issues. Because Trump likes things that are popular, he’ll slam colleges, gesture towards school choice, and bark at wokeness but won’t put any meaningful effort into cutting education spending or downsizing the Department. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he emulates Biden-Harris by treating education as a pandering piñata. Rather than tough-minded budget cuts, I think he’s more likely to endorse universalizing free school lunch, tripling federal spending on IDEA (for “our very beautiful children with special needs”), or making college loans interest-free à la Sen. Rubio’s new bill.

Look, I’ll be the first to concede I could well be wrong. Trump’s an impulsive creature and, should he win, it’s a guessing game who’d wind up calling the shots on education in Trump 2.0. But if I had to bet, given what we know today, I strongly suspect the feverish talk of defunding and dismantling federal education will prove little more than a fever dream.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Trump Describes His Plans for Education

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2024 //
12

When Donald Trump appeared recently in Milwaukee, he described his plan for the future of the Department of Education. It’s not quite the same as the scenario in Project 2025, which envisions the total elimination of the U.S. Department of Education. Trump imagines it as a “department” with only two employees: A Cabinet Secretary and a secretary.

The severely shrunken Department would focus solely on the three Rs and would somehow mysteriously have the power and personnel to prevent public schools across the nation from teaching anything connected to “woke.” That is, anything related to race, gender, or social justice. How this fictional Department would impose bans on curriculum when federal law prohibits any federal interference in curriculum is not explained. Actually, it’s nonsense.

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling writes in The New Republic about Trump’s vision for the federal role in education:

Donald Trump has fleshed out his Project 2025–inspired Department of Education plan, and it involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to a group of people with all the time in the world: parents.

“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the Republican presidential nominee told a crowd in Milwaukee Tuesday night. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’

“Not teaching woke is a big factor,” Trump continued. “We’ll have a very small staff. We can occupy that staff right in this room, actually I think this room is too large. And all they’re going to do is they’re going to see that the basics are taken care of. You know, we don’t want someone to get crazy and start teaching a language that we don’t want them to teach.”

Not only do parents already have enough on their plates without trying to run the public school system, it’s likely that Trump has a specific group of parents in mind to direct education policy.

The goals he lays out are startlingly akin to the policy points of the far-right “parents’ rights” group Moms for Liberty, who hosted Trump as the keynote speaker at their annual conference in September. Moms for Liberty has recently ingratiated itself significantly into national politics and was listed as a member of Project 2025’s advisory board.

In the same speech, Trump also drew attention to the amount of real estate occupied in D.C. by Department of Education buildings, plotting that the dissolution of the federal agency would allow “somebody else to move in.”

“They’re run by the state, and run by the parents, because in Washington—you know half of the buildings, such a large number, every building you pass in Washington says Department of Education,” Trump said. “You’re gonna have a lot of vacant space. Now we can have maybe somebody else move in.” 

Trump’s proposal to dismantle the Department of Education wholesale is nearly identical to Project 2025, despite his campaign spending months trying to distance itself from the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto.

Fact check: Trump exaggerated the size and physical space occupied by ED. The U.S. Department of Education is smaller than any other Cabinet department; it has 4,400 employees. It occupies a building at 400 Maryland Avenue, SW, Washington, DC. It rents space at 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW. it does not occupy all or most or many buildings in DC.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Heather Cox Richardson: How Trump Weaponizes His Lies

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2024 //
7

The first election in which I was fully aware of the candidates and their policies was in 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for re-electionnagainst Adlai Stevenson. I was a freshman in college but I could not vote because the minimum voting age then was 21. My first vote was cast for John F. Kennedy against Richard Nixon. I was an active volunteer in that election, working in Kennedy headquarters in New York City. I have been active in every election since then.

I mention this background to point out that over a period of nearly 70 years I have never seen a candidate of either party lie as persistently, casually, and audaciously as does Donald Trump. His lying is not normal. In my lifetime, Presidential candidates strived to appear honest (even if they weren’t, they wanted to appear to be honest), thoughtful, and dignified. They did not insult or belittle their opponent. They did not curse when giving campaign speeches. Trump’s behavior is not normal. He demeans the office of the Presidency.

Heather Cox Richardson contends here that Trump’s incessant lying is not simply a sign of poor character or the defense mechanism of a spoiled man-child. As she shows, the lying has a political purpose.

She writes:

This morning began with a CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale, titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts. 

Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims, especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants.

Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian. 

Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”

They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.

Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. 

But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true. 

Before the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives working for Putin set out to tear the U.S. apart and thus undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) they see as stopping the resurrection of Imperial Russia. They called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States… encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts,… [and] support[ing] isolationist tendencies in American politics.” 

But they were not the only ones operating in this disinformation sphere. In 2014, then–Breitbart chief executive Steve Bannon explained to a right-wing Catholic group meeting at the Vatican that he believed traditional western civilization was fighting a war for survival. To win, current western-style civilizations must be completely reconfigured to put a few wealthy white Christian male leaders in charge to direct and protect subordinates. 

In that year, Bannon set out to dismantle the administrative state that was leveling the playing field among Americans and push Christian nationalism. With the help of funding from Republican megadonors Robert and Rebecca Mercer, he launched Cambridge Analytica, a company designed to develop profiles of individuals that would enable advertisers to group them for targeted advertising. Before the 2016 election, the company captured information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission or knowledge, enabling it to flood the platform with targeted disinformation. 

Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.

Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted. 

Challenging that lie, as Harris and Obama did, challenged all those that came afterward, including the lie that Trump had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to the October 2 filing by special counsel Jack Smith, we know that Trump was in almost daily communication with Bannon as he pushed that lie. 

Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

The MAGA movement is now based in the Big Lie. Its leaders refuse to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, two days ago actually said Trump won, and as media figures more frequently ask the question of MAGA lawmakers, they continue to dodge it, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton did today on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as House speaker Mike Johnson did on ABC News’s “This Week.”

Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone. 

Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.   

Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk. 

They continue to be aided by foreign operatives, as well. This morning, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Kelly (D-AZ) warned, on the basis of information he has heard from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, that Russia, Iran, and China are generating about 20% to 30% of the political content and comments on social media.

But the largest purveyors of disinformation are homegrown.

Perhaps, though, the very real, immediate damage MAGA’s disinformation about Hurricane Helene is causing might finally be a step too far. In what is at least a muted rebuke to Trump, Republican governors across the damaged area have stepped up to praise President Joe Biden and the federal response to the disaster. 

Categories Democracy, Elections, Lies, Trump

New York Times: Trump’s Rambling Speeches Reflect His Advanced Age and/or Cognitive Decline

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2024 //
10

The New York Times was recently the target of a protest by a group protesting its “sanewashing” of Trump, that is, publishing stories that made his incoherent speeches sound normal when they were not. Critics have complained that the Times published many stories about Biden’s age and his gaffes and misstatements, but overlooked Trump’s gaffes and persistent lying.

With this story by Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman, with the assistance of two journalists who excerpted relevant videos, the Times may have mollified the critics. The story contains excellent video clips that show Trump making incoherent statements. Unfortunately, I was unable to copy them. Each of them shows Trump saying what is quoted in the article.

The story begins:

Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on his side. Except that there was no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one “went crazy,” as Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.

Anyone can misremember, of course. But the debate had been just a week earlier and a fairly memorable moment. And it was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.

He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.

With Mr. Biden out, Mr. Trump, at 78, is now the oldest major party nominee for president in history and would be the oldest president ever if he wins and finishes another term at 82. A review of Mr. Trump’s rallies, interviews, statements and social media posts finds signs of change since he first took the political stage in 2015. He has always been discursive and has often been untethered to truth, but with the passage of time his speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past.

According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.

Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition. (A study by Stat, a health care news outlet, produced similar findings.)

Mr. Trump frequently reaches to the past for his frame of reference, often to the 1980s and 1990s, when he was in his tabloid-fueled heyday. He cites fictional characters from that era like Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lip” (he meant “Silence of the Lambs”), asks “where’s Johnny Carson, bring back Johnny” (who died in 2005) and ruminates on how attractive Cary Grant was (“the most handsome man”). He asks supporters whether they remember the landing in New York of Charles Lindbergh, who actually landed in Paris and long before Mr. Trump was born.

He seems confused about modern technology, suggesting that “most people don’t have any idea what the hell a phone app is” in a country where 96 percent of people own a smartphone. If sometimes he seems stuck in the 1990s, there are moments when he pines for the 1890s, holding out that decade as the halcyon period of American history and William McKinley as his model president because of his support for tariffs.

And he heads off into rhetorical cul-de-sacs. “So we built a thing called the Panama Canal,” he told the conservative host Tucker Carlson last year. “We lost 35,000 people to the mosquito, you know, malaria. We lost 35,000 people building — we lost 35,000 people because of the mosquito. Vicious. They had to build under nets. It was one of the true great wonders of the world. As he said, ‘One of the nine wonders of the world.’ No, no, it was one of the seven. It just happened a little while ago. You know, he says, ‘Nine wonders of the world.’ You could make nine wonders. He would’ve been better off if he stuck with the nine and just said, ‘Yeah, I think it’s nine….’”

Mr. Trump dismisses any concerns and insists that he has passed cognitive tests. “I go for two hours without teleprompters, and if I say one word slightly out, they say, ‘He’s cognitively impaired,’” he complained at a recent rally. He calls his meandering style “the weave” and asserts that it is an intentional and “brilliant” communication strategy….

How much his rambling discourse — what some experts call tangentiality — can be attributed to age is the subject of some debate. Mr. Trump has always had a distinctive speaking style that entertained and captivated supporters even as critics called him detached from reality. Indeed, questions have been raised about Mr. Trump’s mental fitness for years.

John F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, was so convinced that Mr. Trump was psychologically unbalanced that he bought a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” written by 27 mental health professionals, to try to understand his boss better. As it was, Mr. Kelly came to refer to Mr. Trump’s White House as “Crazytown….”

He does not stick to a single train of thought for long. During one 10-minute stretch in Mosinee, Wis., last month, for instance, he ping-ponged from topic to topic: Ms. Harris’s record; the virtues of the merit system; Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement; supposed corruption at the F.D.A., the C.D.C. and the W.H.O.; the Covid-19 pandemic; immigration; back to the W.H.O.; China; Mr. Biden’s age; Ms. Harris again; Mr. Biden again; chronic health problems and childhood diseases; back to Mr. Kennedy; the “Biden crime family”; the president’s State of the Union address; Franklin D. Roosevelt; the 25th Amendment; the “parasitic political class”; Election Day; back to immigration; Senator Tammy Baldwin; back to immigration; energy production; back to immigration; and Ms. Baldwin again.

Some of what he says is inexplicable except to those who listen to him regularly and understand the shorthand. And he throws out assertions without any apparent regard for whether they are true or not. Lately, he has claimed that crowds Ms. Harris has drawn were not real but the creation of artificial intelligence, never mind the reporters and cameras on hand to record them.

He mispronounces names and places with some regularity — “Charlottestown” instead of “Charlottesville,” “Minnianapolis” instead of “Minneapolis,” the website “Snoops”instead of “Snopes,” “Leon” Musk instead of “Elon.”

In Rome, Ga., he went on an extended riff about Mr. Biden in swim trunks on a beach. “Look, at 81 — do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant, he was good. I don’t know what happened to movie stars today. We used to have Cary Grant and Clark Gable and all these people. Today we have — I won’t say names because I don’t need enemies. I don’t need enemies. I got enough enemies. But Cary Grant was like, Michael Jackson once told me, ‘The most handsome man, Trump, in the world.’ Who? ‘Cary Grant.’ Well, we don’t have that anymore. But Cary Grant at 81 or 82 — going on 100, this guy, he’s 81 going on 100 — Cary Grant wouldn’t look too good in a bathing suit either, and he was pretty good-looking, right?…”

He considers himself the master of nearly every subject. He said Venezuelan gangs were armed “with MK-47s,” evidently meaning AK-47s, and then added, “I know that gun very well” because “I’ve become an expert on guns.” He claims to have been named “man of the year” in Michigan, although no such prize exists.

He is easily distracted. He halted in the middle of another extended monologue when he noticed a buzzing insect. “Oh, there’s a fly,” he said. “Oh. I wonder where the fly came from. See? Two years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here. You’re changing rapidly. But we can’t take it any longer.”

But like some people approaching the end of their eighth decade, he is not open to correction. “Trump is never wrong,” he said recently in Wisconsin. “I am never, ever wrong.”

Categories Elections, Extremism, Trump
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