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Jennifer Berkshire: What’s Behind the Republican War on Education? Part 2.

By dianeravitch
April 8, 2025 //
8

Jennifer Berkshire has been writing about the politics of education for many years. She has written two books with education historian Jack Schneider, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and The Education Wars. This is the second installment in her excellent series called “Connecting the Dots.” Her Substack blog is called “The Education Wars.”

She writes:

BAs are out, babies are in

The Trump world’s obsession with the declining birthrate doesn’t quite rank with rooting out “DEI,” tariff-ing, or expelling immigrants but it’s up there. In a recent interview, Elon Musk confessed that a fear of the shrinking number of babies keeps him up at night. What does this have to do with education? Everything. Last year, two of the big education ‘thinkers’ at Heritage released a guide to how changes in education policy could increase “the married birthrate”:

Expensive and misguided government interventions in education are, whether intended or not, pushing young people away from getting married and starting families—to the long-term detriment of American society.

What are those government interventions? Things like subsidizing student loans, thereby encouraging young women to go to college. Or requiring teachers, who are mostly women, to have bachelor degrees, thereby encouraging young women to go to college. Of course there is a voucher angle—there always is with these folks. But the key here is that a chorus of influential Trump thinkers like this guy keep telling us that there are too many women on campus, and that policy shifts could get them back into the home where they belong. 

If the administration succeeds in privatizing the government-run Student Loan Program, college will become much more expensive, significantly shrinkign the number of kids who’ll be able to attend. And that seems to be the point, as conservative activist Chris Rufo explained in an interview a few weeks ago.

By spinning off, privatizing and then reforming the student loan programs, I think that you could put the university sector as a whole into a significant recession. And I think that would be a very salutary thing.

So when you hear the rising chorus coming from Trump world that there are too many of the wrong people on the nation’s campuses, recall that an awful lot of these self-styled ‘nationalists’ believe this: “If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers.”

Some people are more equal than others 

I’ve been making the case that both the Department of Education and public education more broadly are especially vulnerable because of the equalizing roles that they play. Of course, education is not our only equalizer. Indeed, all of the institutions and policy mechanisms intended to smooth out the vast chasms between rich and poor are on the chopping block right now. While you were clicking on another bad news story, Trump eviscerated collective bargaining rights for thousands of federal workers. While teachers weren’t affected, a number of red states have been rushing to remedy that, including Utah which just banned collective bargaining for public employees. 

Writer John Ganz describes the unifying thread that connects so much of Trump world as ‘bosses on top,’ the belief that “the authority and power of certain people is the natural order, unquestionable, good.” We got a vivid demonstration of what this looks like in Florida this week as legislators debated whether to roll back (more) child labor protections, allowing kids as young as 14 to work over night. 

Governor Ron DeSantis is busily spinning the bill as about parents rights, but what it’s really about is expanding the power of the boss. The ‘right’ to work overnight while still in school is actually the boss’ right to demand that young employees keep working. Nor is it hard to imagine the long-term consequences of this policy change. Teen workers who labor through the night end up dropping out of school, their futures constrained in every possible way. Here’s how Marilynn Robinson described the rollback of child labor laws in her adopted home state of Iowa: “If these worker-children do not manage to finish high school, they will always be poorer for it in income and status and mobility of every kind.”

Go back one hundred years when the country was in the midst of a fierce debate over child labor, and you’ll hear the same arguments for ‘bosses on top’ that are shaping policy today. At a time when public education was becoming compulsory, conservative industry groups like the National Association of Manufacturers cast their opposition to both child labor laws and universal public education in explicitly bossist terms, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway recount in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market:

“They believed that men were inherently unequal: it was right and just for workers to be paid far less than managers and managers far less than owners. They also believed that in a free society some children would naturally enter the workforce. Child labor laws wer (to their minds) socialistic because they enforced erroneous assumptions of equality—for example, that all children should go to school—rather than accepting that some children should work in factories.”

Back to the states

Did you hear the one about how we’re returning education to the states? Back-to-the-states has become a mantra for the Trump Administration on all kinds of favored policy issues, as the New York Times recently pointed out. Of course, education is already a state ‘thing,’ which means that we can look at the states Trump keeps pointing to as models and see how they’re faring. So how are they faring? Not so well, as the education reform group EdTrust lays out here, reviewing both NAEP scores and the track records of these states in supporting low-income students and students of color.

But there are plenty of warning signs beyond test scores. Ohio seems poised to slash funding for public education, even as the state’s voucher program balloons. (And let’s not even get into the just-enacted Senate Bill 1, which limits class discussions of any ‘controversial’ topic and goes hard at campus unions.) But for a glimpse of the future that awaits us, pay attention to another state in my beloved Heartland, and which Trump has repeatedly showered with praise: Indiana.

Now, Indiana happens to be home to one of my favorite economists, Ball State’s Michael Hicks, who has been warning relentlessly that the state’s decision to essentially stop investing in K-12 and public higher education has been an economic disaster. Hoosiers, he pointed out recently, earn less than the typical Californian or New Yorker did in 2005. As the number of kids going to college in Indiana has plummeted, the state now spends more and more money trying to lure bad employers to the state. Here’s how Hicks describes the economic and education policies that Indiana has embraced:

“If a diabolical Bond villain were to craft a set of policies that ensured long-term economic decline in a developed country, it would come in two parts. First, spend enormous sums of money on business incentives that offer a false narrative of economic vibrancy, then cut education spending.”

As for Indiana’s 25-year-long school choice experiment, Hicks concludes that it has been a failure. Why? Because the expansion of school vouchers and charter schools was used to justify spending less on public schools—precisely the policy course that we’re hurtling towards now. Today, Indiana spend less money per student on both K-12 and public higher education than it did in 2008.

GOP-run states have already begun to petition what’s left of the Department of Education for ‘funding flexibility’—the ability to spend Title 1 dollars, which now go to public schools serving low-income and rural students, on private religious education. We shouldn’t be surprised. This is precisely the vision laid out in Project 2025. (Fun fact: the same Heritage thinker who penned the education section of Project 2025 also co-authored the above referenced guide to getting young married ladies to have more babies.)

And just like in Indiana, school privatization will be used to justify reducing the investment in K-12 public education. So when an economist tells us that school choice “risks being Indiana’s single most damaging economic policy of the 21st century,” we should probably listen.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, DeSantis, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Funding, History, Indiana, Iowa, Lies, Privatization, Republicans, Trump

A European View of Trump

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2025 //
11

Fintan O’Toole is an opinion writer for The Irish Times. My friend Carol Burris shared this brilliant column with me.

He writes:

Sixty years ago, Bob Dylan chanted that “even

the president of the United States/ Sometimes

must have to stand naked”. But now there is

no “sometimes” about it. The president of the

United States is full frontal all the time.

Donald Trump has stripped away all the

niceties that allowed too many people to

remain in denial about his intentions.

The last two months have been a radically

revised version of Hans Christian Andersen’s

fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In the

original, the emperor is duped by two

swindlers into parading naked and everyone

goes along with the illusion until an innocent

child cries out “But he hasn’t got anything on”.

The new twist is that it is Trump himself who

insists on exposing the bare truth of his

objectives.

The real shock of recent weeks is that anyone

is shocked. Most European leaders seem to be

genuinely astounded by Trump’s bullying,

boorishness and blatant aggression. They had

fooled themselves into believing what they

wanted to believe – the emperor has a very

fine new suit. As in Andersen’s parable,

“Nobody would confess that he couldn’t see

anything, for that would prove him either

unfit for his position, or a fool”.

Wishful thinking spun three layers of

imaginary cover. The first was an idea that

comes naturally to professional politicians –

that there is a great gap between campaign

rhetoric and actual governing. With Trump,

there is no such distinction. He is always on

the campaign trail. Everything is one big rally.

What you see on stage – the freewheeling

megalomania, the gleeful malignity – is what

you get in the Oval Office.

The second fig leaf is the literally/seriously

dichotomy. This idea started with a column in

The Atlantic by Salena Zito: “the press takes

him literally, but not seriously; his supporters

take him seriously, but not literally.” It was a

smart thing to say but it has long since

coagulated into cliche. The purpose of cliche

is to save everyone the bother of thinking.

Taking Trump seriously but not literally

became a way of avoiding the hard task of

preparing for his all too literal

destructiveness.

Any excuse for clinging on to the illusion that

Trump’s supporters do not take him literally

vanished on January 6th, 2021, when many of

them heard exactly what he was saying and

attempted to stage a violent coup on his

behalf. Yet much of Europe’s political

establishment continued to reassure itself

that Trump’s imperialist demands were

bluster and braggadocio. He couldn’t really

mean that stuff, could he?

What has to be understood about Trump is

his use of trial runs. He puts things out there,

tests the water, pulls back, goes again. Ideas

appear first as half-serious, still wrapped in a

coating of deniability. But they become

normalised. The unthinkable becomes

thinkable and, when he has the power, the

thinkable becomes doable.

The literally/seriously cliche obscures this

whole process. It sustains the belief that if, for

example, Trump demands that Denmark give

him Greenland and then goes silent on the

subject, he never really meant it in the first

place. But he did mean it and he will come

back to it.

The third layer of illusion is that Trump is a

supreme dealmaker. This is still the comfort

blanket for many of those who want to believe

that he can’t truly be as monstrous as he

seems. It relates, however, not to a real person

but to “Donald Trump”, a fictional mogul

created in a book, The Art of the Deal, that he

did not write, and a show, The Apprentice,

that was as real as reality TV ever is.

The real Trump is a more a breaker than a

maker of deals. In power, he is much more

interested in flouting bargains than in making

them. He despises all existing treaties: the

Paris climate accords, the Iran nuclear

agreement, the arms control agreements with

Russia. A genuine deal is based on mutuality

– a concept that Trump does not recognise.

For him, there are only the “suckers and

losers” being screwed and the superior types

who are doing the screwing.

And when he has made deals, they’ve all

failed. The Abraham Accords normalising

relations between Israel and United Arab

Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan was

his big success story – but it has, to put it

mildly, done nothing to bring peace to the

Middle East.

Trump’s love-hate soap opera with North

Korea’s Kim Jong-un was, in the end, a farce.

His deal with the Taliban simply handed

Afghanistan over to them in return for

nothing. His supposedly grand trade deal

with China produced nothing at all for

the US.

Categories Bigotry, Cheating, Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Lies, Trump

Of Course, Trump Wants a Third Term!

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2025 //
12

Trump has said repeatedly that “many people” have urged him to run for a third term. Who does he talk to other than sycophants?

He made clear in a recent interview that his people are looking for ways to circumvent the 22nd Amendment, which says “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…” Could that be any clearer?

One of Trump’s first executive orders attempts to eliminate birthright citizenship, which is explicitly guaranteed in the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, so it’s obvious that Trump has no respect for the Constitution despite having taken an oath to support and defend it. I would say that his failure to put his hand on the Bible explains his indifference to the Constitution but he is also indifferent to the Bible (unless he is selling it).

Of course, Trump wants a third term! What a great job he has! He can punish, insult, even prosecute his enemies. He can force powerful law firms to cower before him, he can threaten universities unless they abolish courses that he doesn’t like, he has the powers of a king because the U.S. Supreme Court said he has “absolute immunity” for anything he does as President. He could order the military to murder his critics and say it was for “national security.” Absolute immunity!

Better still, he doesn’t have to work! He flies home to Mar-a-Lago every weekend to golf. He signs a few executive orders every day. His crew of mean-spirited, hateful people does the heavy lifting; they write the executive orders. They think of new ways to diminish federal programs that help people in need. They are hard at work thinking up ways to reduce the number of people who get Medicare orcSocial Security.

Really, what Trump have to do other than sign executive orders? Not much. His staff knows not to bore him with intelligence briefings.

It’s true that he has to tolerate Little X, Elon’s snot-nosed kid, who put a booger on the Resolute Desk. (Trump was not content to order the cleaning of the historic desk, he sent it out to be completely refinished, all because of a booger.)

Great job! All expenses paid. Full-time security for Trump and all his family, and he “works” fifteen minutes a day signing executive orders that his mean team wrote.

The USA was a great country while it lasted. Will he name it Trumplandia after he has taken Canada and Greenland?

Politico analyzed four ways he could try for a third term:

  1. Repeal or revise the 22nd Amendment. But that seems highly unlikely since it would require 3/4 of the states to ratify any change in the Constitutuon.
  2. Sidestep the Constitution by having JD Vance run for President and Trump as Vice President, with Vance pledging to resign if elected so Trump can be President again.
  3. Ignore the Constitution. Trump could run again, a subservient Republican national Committee would endorse him, and a supplicant Supreme Court would comply.
  4. Defy the Constitution. Refuse to leave office. Call a national emergency and suspend another election.

All the stuff of Fascism. But none of it beyond Trump’s egotism.

Categories Character, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, History, Lies, Trump

A Message to Journalists: Don’t Be Fooled! Follow the Money!

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2025 //
3

Every once in a while, I read an article that is so important and so powerful that I want to give it as much attention as possible. This is such an article. Please read it and share it. Post the link on every social media site. Send it to school board members and journalists.

The article was written by Dr. Maurice Cunningham, a retired Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts. Cunningham has been studying “dark money” in education for years. It was published by “Our Schools” and “Independent Media Institute.”

If you want to understand the attacks on public schools, on teachers, and on teachers’ unions, read this article. If you want to understand how the organized groups that smear public schools got started, read this article. If you read a story about two or three “moms” sitting around their kitchen table and worrying whether the teachers at the local public school are indoctrinating their children, read this article. If those “moms” raised over $1 million in their first year, read this article.

They have fooled many journalists. Don’t let them fool you!

Cunningham warns:

“These groups are the creation of deep-pocketed conservative networks, not “grassroots” advocates.“

By Maurice Cunningham

“If your mother says she loves you, check it out” is a bromide drilled into every journalist. So it is baffling why, if an interest group includes the words “moms” or “parents,” it is just taken at its word, especially when a little digging can reveal that many of these groups are the creations of billionaires out to destroy public education.

As the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, I have been following billionaire-backed education interest groups for more than a decade. Since big money lacks public credibility, it often masquerades as organizations claiming to represent the interests of “parents,” “moms,” “educators,” and “families.” The concocted stories about how these groups were created are often repeated by an incurious press, which misses the opportunity to tell its readers a more interesting story: how billionaires and right-wing activists pour money into upbeat-sounding organizations to further their aim of privateering our public school system.

These astroturf operations have been proliferating resulting in serious negative impacts. Consider the havoc wreaked on some school boards by Moms for Liberty (M4L). M4L even got into presidential politics in 2024, boosting Donald Trump, at the behest of the donors, who co-founder Tina Descovich termed as M4L’s “investors.”

Consider a November 2024 Washington Post story on Linda McMahon’s nomination to be secretary of education. The article contrasted remarks from National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle with an alternative view from Keri Rodrigues, founding president of the National Parents Union (NPU), which the reporter Laura Meckler called “a grassroots group,” thus giving the impression that NEA and NPU are similar organizations.

They are not. NEA is a well-established teachers’ union that credibly claims 3 million members and is governed by a democratic structure. NPU appeared on the scene in 2020, surfing in on millions of dollars from the foundations of American oligarchs, including the Walton family, Mark Zuckerberg, and Charles Koch.

In 2024, Rodrigues, a fixture at education privateering groups, told the Boston Globe that NPU could get its message to “250,000 families to vote against” a ballot question sponsored by the teachers’ union and would “put that network to work.”

There is zero evidence that this extensive network exists or that it did anything on the ballot question. There is also no proof to validate Rodrigues’s claimthat the organization has 1.7 million members nationally.

A 2021 Washington Post article introducing Moms for Liberty chronicled its claimed rapid rise without raising questions about how it grew so fast. The story simply provided the M4L narrative of its creation story, centered around former Florida school board members Descovich and Tiffany Justice. It omitted M4L’s third co-founder Bridget Ziegler, though it did quote her husband, Christian Ziegler, about the group’s political potency.

Bridget Ziegler served briefly on the M4L board and was replaced by GOP campaign consultant Marie Rogerson. Christian Ziegler was then the powerful vice-chair of the Florida Republican Party and a key Trump supporter. (In 2023, the Zieglers became famous for a threesome scandal. She quickly resigned from her executive position with the Leadership Institute, an established training institution for right-wing activists. Christian was removed from his perch as chair of the Florida Republican Party.)

The Post October 2021 story featured a photo of Descovich pulling aside, Superman style, a white jacket to reveal the group’s logo t-shirt while posing next to an American flag. The questions about the group’s ties to the Republican Party and suspicious financing were laughed off by the founders of M4L. The Post followed up a month later by printing an op-ed by Descovich and Justice.

NPU, M4L, and similar groups organize as nonprofit corporations under sections 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Service Code. As nonprofits, their Form 990 tax returns are made public but only in November, following the tax year. The information is skimpy but valuable. Journalists can access the Form 990s by requesting them directly from the nonprofits or from the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, which helps trace donors as well.

These groups leave clues that no reporter can miss:

  1. Don’t buy the phony origin stories: These organizations all claim to be about moms joining together to improve education. But in no time, they have access to millions of dollars in donations and have the services of elite law firms, pollsters, media consultants, and often, ties to the Republican Party.
  2. Follow the money: It isn’t easy in the first two years of a nonprofit’s existence, but there are signs: easy access to right-wing media, hiring expensive consultants, and big-budget conferences.
  3. Watch how these groups work: The founding leadership usually consists of veteran right-wing operatives or communications professionals with years of experience in privateering organizations.
  4. Get the big picture: Right from the beginning, M4L had obvious ties to Republican and right-wing organizations that often went unreported.
  5. Keep following the money: When nonprofit tax forms finally become public, they’ll reveal how much was donated and can help identify the top contractors and how much they were paid.

Let us expand on these insights to show how these secretive operations can be exposed right from the beginning by using Form 990.

Don’t Buy the Phony Origin Stories

The typical “moms” or “parents” creation story goes something like this: outraged by some aspect of their children’s public school education, two or three “moms” band together to attract other like-minded parents to cure the deficiencies of the system, which are always the fault of the teachers’ unions. In truth, the “moms” are agents of far-right billionaires often tied—like M4L and Parents Defending Education (PDE)—to the secretive Council for National Policy, which seeksto privateer K-12 for profit, expand Christian education, and promote homeschooling.

According to the billionaire-funded online publication the 74, NPU “is the brainchild of two Latina mothers,” Keri Rodrigues and Alma Marquez, who “had disappointing experiences with education, both as parents and students, and with advocacy groups.”

To its credit, the 74 was candid about the funding of NPU: the foundations of billionaires, including Bill Gates, the Walton family, the late Eli Broad, and Michael and Susan Dell, and organizations like the City Fund, which gets its money from Reed Hastings, John Arnold, and Walton family members, inheritors of the Walmart fortune.

Nonetheless, the tenor of the story was of a grassroots moms’ start-up. Other news outlets ignored the 74’s detailing of billionaire funding. An online search through the New York Times website supplemented with a library search through Gale OneFile showed 13 NYT stories or columns that mention the National Parents Union since the group’s public launch on January 1, 2021. Only one column by Michelle Goldberg noted that “The National Parents Union is funded by the pro-privatization Walton Family Foundation.” The Waltons are, however, the only funders Goldberg mentioned.

The New Yorker came closest to the truth in a June 2021 piece: “The Walton foundation set up the National Parents Union in January 2020, with Rodrigues as the founding president.” A review of Form 990s for NPU and the Walton Family Foundation from 2020 through 2023 that I reviewed shows that NPU accepted more than $11 million in contributions. The Walton Family Foundation donated around $3 million of that amount.

The media is failing to cover the single most important fact the public needs to know about “parents” and “moms” groups: who is supplying them with millions of dollars in funding.

As for M4L, although a few media outlets wrote it had three founders, most followed the practice of CNN, which in December 2021 omitted Bridget Ziegler and described “the two women behind Moms for Liberty, a group of conservatives that came together in January,” downplaying the fact that at that time, the state GOP vice-chair’s wife was also one of the co-founders. By January 9, 2021, soon after its incorporation, M4L’s online store was offering magnets, t-shirts, and hats, and a “Madison Meetup” package of right-wing materials.

While mainstream media was valorizing M4L’s origin story, right-wing outlets produced a steady stream of propaganda about the organization. Later in January 2021, Descovich appeared on the Rush Limbaugh Show (guest-hosted by Todd Herman). Media Matters for America found that, by July 2022, M4L “representatives have been regulars on right-wing media, appearing on Fox News at least 16 times and Steve Bannon’s “War Room” at least 14 times.”

Another supposedly grassroots parents’ group that has an origin story grounded in deception is PDE. In lodging a civil rights complaint against the Columbus, Ohio, public schools in May 2021, PDE President Nicole Neily told the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, “We just all work from home… We’re all working moms.”

In fact, Neily is a well-compensated political operativein the Koch network. According to the Koch-connected Speech First’s Form 990 for 2019, which was available after November 2020 and thus before PDE was founded in 2021, Neily was paid $150,000 in 2019.

Follow the Money

Due to the barriers to tracing the funding of such groups, it can be hard to follow the money, especially in the first two years of operation. But in 2021, an article in the New Yorker described how the VELA Education Fund, a partnership of the Walton Family Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute, had given NPU $700,000 in 2020 to “help people with fewer resources,” including promoting homeschooling during COVID-19. This is despite the fact that NPU was not familiar with homeschooling.

Press outlets have also overlooked funding sources of M4L. In 2021, co-founder Descovich told CNN that M4L had raised more than $300,000 through t-shirt sales, small donors, and fundraising events. However, one such event was a gala featuring former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly in June 2021, six months into M4L’s first year. The top tickets went for $20,000. The Celebrity Speakers Bureau pegged Kelly’s speaking fee as between $50,000 and $100,000. The event raised at least $57,000.

In July 2021, Descovich appeared at a Heritage Foundation virtual town hall on “Preserving American History in Schools.” By October 29, 2021, M4L was referring members to the Leadership Institute for training and sending members to the Heritage Foundation for events and other resources. Both these organizations have been part of the right-wing political firmament since the 1970s. A bit of digging showedthat M4L was deeply embedded in far-right politics. But most press accounts ignored that evidence and the public remained largely in the dark.

In April 2021, PDE headed by Neily, brought on Elizabeth Schultz as a “senior fellow,” who had worked under Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos during his first term and was a vocal anti-LGBTQ activist.

Watch How These Groups Work

These groups can be intertwined. PDE, M4L, and another faux-grassroots group, No Left Turn in Education (NLTE), all came on the scene around the same time, with NLTE being founded in 2020. PDE’s website includes a map called “IndoctriNation” with lists of affiliates across the nation. The April 15, 2021, listings (the website appears to have gone live only in March 2021) showed that most of its allies were chapters of M4L and NLTE with few actual members, according to my research in 2021.

Media reports seemed content to accept the “moms working from home” creation story despite the obvious early support from well-resourced groups.

NPU held its organizing meeting, which it claims drew representatives from all 50 states, in New Orleans in January 2020. To promote the event, NPU employedMercury Public Affairs, an international public relations firm. To draw press attention, NPU also commissioned polling from Echelon Insights, a Republican pollster that has also worked for the Walton family.

In the same year of its founding, in 2021, PDE published detailed plans, such as “How to Create ‘Woke At’ Pages,” that instruct parents on how to use secrecy to attack “woke activists” in the education system. PDE also began initiating lawsuits against local school boards, represented by the Republican law firm of Consovoy McCarthy.

William Consovoy, who passed in 2023, was in the Federalist Society, the nationwide network of conservative lawyers that helped form Trump’s picks for the U.S. Supreme Court. Consovoy had been a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and represented Donald Trump during a congressional investigation. The firm also represented Trump in 2020 as he tried to intervene before the Supreme Court to stop the vote count in Pennsylvania. When PDE’s 2021 Form 990became available, it showed PDE paid Consovoy McCarthy $800,000 in legal fees.

Get the Big Picture

The clues kept coming, only to be ignored by the press.

In 2022, M4L held its first national summit in Tampa, Florida. In its reporting of the event, NBC portrayedthe group as a political powerhouse, reporting that attendees “browsed booths set up by conservative groups, including Turning Point USA, the Leadership Institute and Heritage Action, and the evangelical Liberty University” without describing these organizations for what they are—the critical infrastructure of Christian nationalism.

Media reports on the event generally ignored who the sponsors of the summit were or the amounts of their donations. The Leadership Institute donated $50,000. The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America provided $10,000 each. And PDE chipped in $10,000. Meanwhile, Descovich was still peddling the story that M4L was getting by on t-shirt sales, even though an aide to Leadership Institute’s Morton Blackwell bragged about how the institute had provided the relevant training to help the group “become a national force.”

When there were questions raised about how M4L could fund such a lavish event with t-shirt sales, M4L denied any connections to deep-pocketed right-wing groups, and most news reporters presented a simple “he said, she said” account and moved on. Reporters generally missed the bigger story that the institutional right was creating and passing off phony “moms” and “parents” operations.

Keep Following the Money

Once Form 990s were filed, the deception became obvious, but that didn’t mean it got covered by big media outlets.

The 2022 Form 990 for NPU showed that Keri Rodrigues was paid $410,000 from NPU and a sister organization. She paid her husband, the chief operating officer of both organizations, $278,529. Yet, in August 2024, CBS Morning News presented Rodrigues as a typical parent worried about back-to-school shopping.

PDE’s Form 990 for 2021 was even more revealing, as exposed by True North Research’s Lisa Graves and Alyssa Bowen for Truthout in 2023. Graves and Bowen showed that PDE is deeply tied with far-right Supreme Court fixer Leonard Leo, even paying $106,938 to his for-profit consulting firm.

PDE, a brand-new operation, raised $3,178,272 in its first year in 2021. It paid Neily, who is also on the board, a total compensation of $195,688 for her 40-hour work week.

According to Speech First’s Form 990 for 2021, Neily put in an additional 20-hour week for Speech First, earning another $86,117 and a total of $281,805 from both Koch- and Leo-funded operations combined. In 2023, PDE pushed Neily’s base salary and other compensation up to $341,400. This is quite an income for a stay-at-home working mom.

The trail from NPU leads back to the Walton family and billionaire allies who have been working to undermine teachers’ unions and siphon public money to charter schools for years.

Scratch the surface of groups like M4L and PDE, and you find the Heritage Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and Leonard Leo—the elite of far-right politics who work to replace public schools with for-profit schools, religious schools, and homeschooling. These details make for a very important story that most journalists have overlooked.

Stop Being Fooled

Reporters should not be fooled by the techniques used by these fake “mom” and “parent” groups on behalf of their extremist overseers. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway show in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, these techniques have been used by “scientific” nonprofits created by the same conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation, to contest climate change.

Many have tracked the origin of these techniques back to the tobacco industry’s fight to protect their profits from the growing body of research linking their products to cancer and other health problems.

In 1994, tobacco giant RJ Reynolds created the industry front group Get Government Off Our Back to advance a “smokers’ rights” campaign to fight against the tsunami of scientific evidence exposing the health risks of tobacco. Reynolds kept its backing a secret while promoting it as a movement of “grassroots” smokers.

Meanwhile, in his farewell address, former President Joseph R. Biden warned about how the wealthy are a big threat to democracy:

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

For years, the same oligarchy that threatens basic rights has been threatening our freedom to have access to a high-quality system of public education. There is no reason they should be aided by credulous reporters from trusted news sources. If we can question our moms on whether they really love us, we can question the authenticity of these moms and parent groups.

Maurice Cunningham PhD, JD, retired in 2021 as an associate professor of political science at the College of Liberal Arts, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and is the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.

Categories Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corruption, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Fake News, For-Profit, Fraud, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Hoax, Parent Groups, Privatization, Propaganda, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, School Choice, Shame, Unions, Vouchers

Trump Wants to Control How Americans Vote

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2025 //
3

Dan Balz of The Washington Post writes about Trump’s executive order seeking control of elections. Trump has complained about election fraud since he won in 2016; he couldn’t believe that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, so he insisted that millions of undocumented immigrants had illegally voted. Although he set up a commission to find election fraud, it found none. When he lost in 2020, he shrieked again about a “stolen” election, but no one ever found any evidence of fraud that would change the outcome, and even his close associates disagreed with him. But after four years of lying about 2020, he recently issued an executive order to change state election laws, which are embedded in the Constitution.

Balz wrote:

Almost no part of government is immune from President Donald Trump’s thirst for power and control. Last week he signed executive orders aimed at the Smithsonian Institution, the District of Columbia and the administration of elections. No president has sought more change in more institutions more rapidly, through executive orders than Trump.

The order on elections is more than 2,500 words and at times densely written. It may have received less attention than warranted as it was issued amid the controversy over how sensitive military operational details were shared in a Signal chat group that accidentally included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic.

The order is illustrative of how the president is attempting to govern, largely through dictates rather than legislation. It is rooted in Trump’s long-standing, though false, claims that the election system is rife with fraud. Its legal foundations are questionable. But like other executive orders the president has signed, it could produce chaos and change before it is fully litigated.

Trump’s reach for power overrides any ideological consistency, though there is nothing new in that. He is dismantling the Department of Education, arguing that states and local governments should run the nation’s schools (which they already do). Now he is attempting to order state and local election administrators to adopt his rules for running future elections.

The Constitution grants most power over elections to the states. When Democrats were pushing a multifaceted voting rights bill known as H.R. 1 during the administration of President Joe Biden, conservative opponents decried the measure as a federal takeover. So far, there’s been no notable public outcry on the right over the federal takeover that Trump is seeking.

“This is clearly an attempt to federalize election administration to a historic degree, as was H.R. 1,” said Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Certainly liberals and Democrats are going to press the federalism button really hard. And you will get probably some Republican secretaries not pressing it quite as hard, but privately, many of them are going to be pushing back.”

Another election analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid opinion described what he saw as the goal of the order: “It is to reduce turnout by people he thinks won’t vote for him,” the analyst said.

As we can see, billionaire publisher Jeff Bezos has interfered on the opinion pages, but not the news coverage.

Categories Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Lies, Trump

Hillary Clinton “Baffled” by Top-Secret Leak of War Plans

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2025 //
9

Remember how Trump ridiculed Hillary Clinton for using a private email server to conduct State Department business? His crowds chanted “Lock her up!” at his rallies. The FBI reopened an investigation 10 days before the election, based on allegations about her emails, closed the investigation a few days later, and she lost the election. No classified information was found on her private server.

The New York Daily News reports on her reaction to the latest scandal, in which a prominent journalist was accidentally invited to join a top-secret briefing.

Hillary Clinton was baffled by reports of top U.S. officials unwittingly sharing war plans with a reporterduring an unsecure group chat that allegedly took place on the Signal messaging app.

“You have got to be kidding me,” the former Secretary of State wrote next to a wide-eyed emoticon on X.

Clinton’s post included a link to a bombshell Atlantic magazine story about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security director Tulsi Gabbard sharing what appeared to be highly sensitive information about military strikes in Yemen with Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goldberg wrote Monday he withheld information that could’ve put U.S. troops in danger due to the “shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation.”

But he shared portions of the conversation that included Vance claiming “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.”

Goldberg said the plan being discussed “included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.”

Throughout her failed 2016 presidential campaign, Clinton was dogged by criticism for using a private server located in her Chappaqua home to conduct official business white serving in President Obama’s cabinet. She lost to Trump, whose crowds regularly chanted “Lock her up” at his rallies.

An FBI investigation called Clinton’s conduct “extremely careless,” but found that no classified information was shared and no harm appeared to have been done.

Hegseth — a Fox News personality prior to being tapped by President Trump to manage national defense — called Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again” during a brief interview on a Hawaiian airport tarmac.

“Nobody was texting war plans!” he claimed before ending that discussion.

National Security Council Spokesman Brian Hughes confirmed the messages inadvertently shared with The Atlantic “appeared to be an authentic message chain” that’s inclusion of a journalist merited further review.

He also argued the success of the strikes that occurred over the weekend proved the alleged leak was no threat to U.S. troops.

President Trump claimed at a Monday afternoon press conference that he knew nothing about the security breach, adding “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic.”

Categories Accountability, Elections, Failure, Hillary Clinton, History

Heather Cox Richardson: Bloody Sunday and Voting Rights

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2025 //
8

In this post, historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us of the struggle to secure voting rights for Black Americans, as she commemorates the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” For most people, these stories are history. For me, because I am old, they are memories. in my lifetime, Black voters across the South were disenfranchised. People who advocated for civil rights, the right to vote, and racial equality put their lives at risk in the South. The KKK was active. Black churches were bombed. Civil rights leader Medger Evers was murdered while standing in his driveway.

The struggle for equal rights was violent and bloody. Yet today, we are told by our President and his allies that we shouldn’t talk about these parts of the past. It’s not patriotic. It’s “woke.” It’s DEI. It’s divisive. Let’s not talk about race anymore. Let’s all be colorblind. That’s what Dr. King wanted, wasn’t it? Cue the quote about being judged by “the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” No, that’s not what he wanted. He spoke hopefully about a future where no one was disadvantaged by the color of their skin. Where everyone had the same and equal rights. Where racism and prejudice no longer existed.

But that’s not the society we live in today. We live in a society where people of color and women are openly disparaged by the President as “DEI hires.” When race and gender are no longer reasons to belittle and demean people, then we can judge everyone by the content of their character. But that day has not arrived.

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, but the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So in 1963, Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a prominent civil rights organization, joined them.

In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but the measure did not adequately address the problem of voter suppression. In Selma a judge had stopped the voter registration protests by issuing an injunction prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.

To call attention to the crisis in her city, Amelia Boynton, a member of the Dallas County Voters League acting with a group of local activists, traveled to Birmingham to invite Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the city. King had become a household name after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.

King and other prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in January to push the voter registration drive. For seven weeks, Black residents tried to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.

Jackson died eight days later, on February 26.

The leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression. Expecting violence, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voted not to participate, but its chair, John Lewis, asked their permission to go along on his own. They agreed.

On March 7, 1965, sixty years ago today, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured John Lewis’s skull and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.

Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.

Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.

On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

The marchers remained determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, but Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them. So President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.

On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”

That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”

The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down “regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.” He called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” and pledged that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”

As recently as 2006, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by a bipartisan vote. By 2008 there was very little difference in voter participation between white Americans and Americans of color. In that year, voters elected the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, and they reelected him in 2012. And then, in 2013, the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get approval from the federal government before changing their voting rules. This requirement was known as “preclearance.”

The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. A 2024 study by the Brennan Center of nearly a billion vote records over 14 years showed that the racial voting gap is growing almost twice as fast in places that used to be covered by the preclearance requirement. Another recent study showed that in Alabama, the gap between white and Black voter turnout in the 2024 election was the highest since at least 2008. If nonwhite voters in Alabama had voted at the same rate as white voters, more than 200,000 additional ballots would have been cast.

Democrats have tried since 2021 to pass a voting rights act but have been stymied by Republicans, who oppose such protections. On March 5, 2025, Representative Terri Sewall (D-AL) reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help restore the terms of the Voting Rights Act, and make preclearance national.

The measure is named after John Lewis, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis went on from his days in the Civil Rights Movement to serve 17 terms as a representative from Georgia. Until he died in 2020, Lewis bore the scars of March 7, 1965: Bloody Sunday.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Inequality, Injustice, Justice, Trump

Senator Elissa Slotkin Responds to Trump Speech

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2025 //
32

The recently elected Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan responded to President Trump.

She was terrific.

It takes about five minutes to watch.

I’m happy to say that I contributed to her campaign. She’s smart, strong, and articulate.

Categories Democracy, Elections, History, Resistance, Trump

How Elon Musk Took Control of the Federal Government

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2025 //
20

The New York Times reported on Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government. Trump has given Musk the power to close down agencies authorized by Congress, like the USAID and the Consumer Financial Control Board. Not a peep from the Republican-dominated Congress, as the world’s richest man flaunts his power to redesign the government and Trump meekly accedes to his every demand.

If you click this link, the story is a gift article.

Who ever dreamed that the election of Trump would lead to Elon Musk terrorizing every agency, a Cabinet whose members are dedicated to the destruction of the agencies they lead (possible exception: Rubio), and a foreign policy aligned with Russia against Europe? A domestic team determined to stamp out civil rights, defend bigotry, take away access to Medicaid, and privatize as much of the government as they can?

The DOGE plan is a coup. The richest man in the world has taken ownership of the federal government, with the consent of an eccentric, ignorant dotard in the Oval Office who was probably elected thanks to rigging and suppressing of votes by Musk and Putin.

Here are excerpts from the article in The New York Times about Elon Musk’s biggest acquisition. The federal government. His motive: he was angry about being regulated by the federal government. This is the government that funded Musk’s empire; he has received some $38 billion in federal subsidies since 2008, when he took charge of a near-bankrupt Tesla company. He loved the subsidies but hated the regulatuon. How could he stop the oversight of his business empire by the feds? Give almost $300 million to Trump and get the promise that Trump would give him free reign to wipe out the bureaucracy and replace it with AI.

From The New York Times:

It started as Elon Musk’s musings at a 2023 dinner party about how he would gut the federal bureaucracy. It evolved into an operation that has given him a singular position of influence over the government.

The plan for his Department of Government Efficiency was mapped out in a series of closely held meetings in Palm Beach, Fla., and through early intelligence-gathering efforts in Washingto

Without ceding control of his companies, the richest man in the world has embedded his engineers and aides inside the government’s critical digital infrastructure, moving with a swiftness that has stunned civil servants.

The story begins:

On the last Friday of September 2023, Elon Musk dropped in about an hour late to a dinner party at the Silicon Valley mansion of the technology investor Chamath Palihapitiya.

Mr. Musk’s visit was meant to be discreet. Still skittish about getting involved publicly in politics, he told the guests he had to be careful about supporting anyone in the Republican nomination fight. And yet here he was — joined by Claire Boucher, the singer known as Grimes and the mother of three of his children — at a $50,000-a-head dinner in honor of the presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was running as an entrepreneur who would shake up the status quo.

As the night wore on, Mr. Musk held forth on the patio on a variety of topics, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation: his visit that week to the U.S.-Mexico border; the war in Ukraine; his frustrations with government regulations hindering his rocket company, SpaceX; and Mr. Ramaswamy’s highest priority, the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy.

Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.

Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?

Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.

What started as musings at a dinner party evolved into a radical takeover of the federal bureaucracy. It was driven with a frenetic focus by Mr. Musk, who channeled his libertarian impulses and resentment of regulatory oversight of his vast business holdings into a singular position of influence.

Without ceding control of his companies, the richest man in the world has embedded his engineers and aides inside the government’s critical digital infrastructure. Already, his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has inserted itself into more than 20 agencies, The New York Times has found.

Mr. Musk’s strategy has been twofold. His team grabbed control of the government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management, commandeering email systems to pressure civil servants to quit so he could cull the work force. And it burrowed into computer systems across the bureaucracy, tracing how money was flowing so the administration could choke it off. So far, Musk staff members have sought accessto at least seven sensitive government databases, including internal systems of the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.

Mr. Musk’s transformation of DOGE from a casual notion into a powerful weapon is something possible only in the Trump era. It involves wild experimentation and an embrace of severe cost-cutting that Mr. Musk previously used to upend Twitter — as well as an appetite for political risk and impulsive decision-making that he shares with President Trump and makes others in the administration deeply uncomfortable.

In reporting how Mr. Musk and his allies executed their plan, The New York Times interviewed more than 60 people, including DOGE workers, friends of Mr. Musk’s, White House aides and administration officials who are dealing with the operation from the inside. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, many described a culture of secrecy that has made them afraid to speak publicly because of potential retaliation.

Mr. Musk’s stealth approach stunned both Democrats and civil servants. Failing to imagine an incursion from inside the bureaucracy, they were caught essentially defenseless.

The Times has learned new details about how the operation came together after the election, mapped out in a series of closely held meetings in Palm Beach, Fla., and through early intelligence-gathering efforts in Washington.

Seasoned conservative operatives like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought helped educate Mr. Musk about the workings of the bureaucracy. Soon, he stumbled on an opening. It was a little-known unit with reach across the government: the U.S. Digital Service, which President Barack Obama created in 2014 after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov.

Mr. Musk and his advisers — including Steve Davis, a cost cutter who worked with him at X and other companies — did not want to create a commission, as past budget hawks had done. They wanted direct, insider access to government systems. They realized they could use the digital office, whose staff had been focused on helping agencies fix technology problems, to quickly penetrate the federal government — and then decipher how to break it apart.

Since this is a gift article, please open the link and read the rest of it.

Never before in American history has there been subversion of the U.S. government that was so well planned and executed.

What will be left? How many agencies will Musk close down? How many highly skilled and knowledgeable civil servants will be fired? Which agencies will be irredeemably crippled by the loss of their best leaders?

This story should lead the news every day.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Musk, Elon, Republicans, Trump

Our Allies Speak Up in Support of Ukraine

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2025 //
23

Trump’s MAGA base was happy with his beatdown of Zelensky, and Russia too was thrilled. His Cabinet members each dutifully thanked him for offending Zelensky and “putting America First.” ((I doubt they realized that the “America First” crowd in the 1930s was opposed to helping Europe fight Hitler.)

With the exception of the Fascist leader of Hungary, who consolidated power by undermining the press and the judiciary and demonizing LGBT people, our allies cheered on Zelensky.

One hopes that Europe will unify to protect their border from Putin. Maybe the U.S. will be ejected from NATO.

The New York Times reported:

European leaders quickly pledged their continued support for Ukraine on Friday after President Trump’s blistering criticism of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in a meeting at the White House.

Leaders lined up behind Ukraine and praised its embattled president, the statements coming one after the other: from France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Norway, Finland, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Belgium, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Ireland. Canadian, Australian and New Zealand leaders added their voices to the Europeans’.

Even as Western leaders generally shied away from explicitly criticizing Mr. Trump, who had told Mr. Zelensky he was “not in a good position” and angrily threatened to pull American support for Ukraine unless he agreed to a cease-fire deal with Russia, many in Europe addressed their statements of encouragement directly to Mr. Zelensky.

“Your dignity honors the bravery of the Ukrainian people,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said on social media, referring to Mr. Zelensky. “Be strong, be brave, be fearless. You are never alone, dear President.”

President Emmanuel Macron of France, who had put on a display of friendship with Mr. Trump during a chummy visit to the White House on Monday, said the United States and Europe had been justified in aiding Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.

In a statement, Mr. Macron urged America to remain on the side of the Ukrainians, who he said were “fighting for their dignity, their independence, their children, and the security of Europe.”

Friedrich Merz, who is on track to become Germany’s next chancellor after the country’s election this week, said in a statement addressed to “Dear Volodymyr” that his country would stand behind Ukraine “in good and in testing times.”

“We must never confuse aggressor and victim in this terrible war,” Mr. Merz added, apparently referring to Mr. Trump, who has called Mr. Zelensky a dictator and blamed him for the invasion. The departing German leader, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said that Ukraine could rely on Germany and the rest of Europe.

Daniel Fried, a career diplomat under American presidents of both parties who had just returned from a trip to Brussels, said the Oval Office clash had jolted Europe’s capitals, generated a wave of sympathy for Mr. Zelensky and upended a peace process that appeared to be gaining traction.

“The Europeans are horrified and dismayed,” Mr. Fried said, adding that Europeans see the United States shifting to a great-power strategy in which large countries carve up the world. “They’re watching the America they know and respect change in a matter of a couple of weeks.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, a center-left leader who carefully avoided any major disagreements with Mr. Trump during a visit to the White House on Thursday, spoke with Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky on Friday, according to the prime minister’s office. Mr. Starmer “retains his unwavering support for Ukraine and is playing his part to find a path forward to a lasting peace,” the office said in a statement.

Mr. Starmer is scheduled to host in London an international meeting on Ukraine on Sunday with Mr. Zelensky and other leaders from across Europe.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, a right-wing nationalist who has long been at odds with much of Europe, appeared to side with Mr. Trump, saying on social media, “Strong men make peace, weak men make war.” He did not mention Ukraine or Mr. Zelensky in his post.

Mr. Trump’s upbraiding of Mr. Zelensky also predictably won praise in Russia. Dmitri Medvedev, a former Russian president who is deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said on Telegram that Mr. Trump had told “the truth.”

The Canadian foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, joined the European leaders in offering words of support for Ukraine, telling reporters that Ukrainians were “fighting for their own freedoms, but also fighting for ours.”

Ms. Joly, whose country’s relationship with Mr. Trump has been deeply strained by the American president’s threats to annex Canada and plans to impose tariffs, stressed the importance of maintaining Western unity over the war in Ukraine. She said that the Russians were watching.

On Saturday morning in Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese echoed the messages of support from Europe. Mr. Albanese said his country was proud to help Ukraine defend itself against “the brutality of Russian aggression.”

Mr. Zelensky responded to each European leader on social media, writing, “Thank you for your support.”

But he offered his most ample statement of gratitude to Mr. Trump, who had said in the Oval Office earlier on Friday that Mr. Zelensky was not “acting at all thankful” for American aid.

“Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank you for this visit,” wrote Mr. Zelensky, also thanking Mr. Trump, and adding, “Ukraine needs just and lasting peace, and we are working exactly for that.”

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, History, Republicans, Shame, Trump, Vance, J.D.
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