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Thom Hartmann: Trump’s Terrifying New Reich, The Early Months

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2024 //
20

Thom Hartmann writes a description of the first few months of the second Trump administration, based on statements by Trump or his pals. It’s frightening.

He writes:

[Every incident mentioned in this article is based on an actual statement or action by Donald Trump, the people closely surrounding him, or something Trump has praised about his role model Victor Orbàn.]


It was a hell of a year, 2025: the first year of the First Reich (as those formerly called Democrats referred to it) or The New America as the GOP now refers to our nation. One people, one nation, one leader: America, President-for-life Trump tells us, is now “truly great.”


It started with the election of November 2024, when the No Labels candidacy of Larry Hogan and Joe Manchin pulled enough electoral votes away from Biden — who was more than 10 million popular votes ahead of Trump — that none of the three tickets hit the necessary 270 Electoral College votes to win the White House.


It was a scenario similar to 1824 when John Quincy Adams lost the popular vote to Andrew Jackson but, because William Crawford and Henry Clay were also running for president, neither Adams or Jackson hit the threshold with the Electoral College and the vote went to the House of Representatives, which made Adams president in a series of backroom deals known to historians as the “Corrupt Bargain.”


In a similar way, the election of 2024 was thrown into the House of Representatives, per the 12th Amendment, with each state having one single vote. Since 26 states had Republican-controlled congressional delegations and only 23 had Democratic-controlled delegations (Pennsylvania is evenly split), the House voted 26-24 for Donald Trump to become the next president. He didn’t even need to threaten his vice president or invoke a mob.


At his swearing-in, Trump announced that he was going to fulfill his “dictator for a day” promise and pardoned himself, all Republicans who were in Congress in January 2021 and helped organize or support the attack on the Capitol, and all the January 6th seditionists.


He then announced that the 24 Democrats leading their congressional delegations who’d voted against him in the House were “guilty of sedition against the United States.” As he spoke, each was arrested and taken into custody.


The arrests, particularly of Democratic members of the House and a handful of Democratic Senators from Red states, gave the GOP a majority in both houses, even though Democrats had won both in the 2024 election. Jim Jordan was named the new Speaker of the House, and Rick Scott took Mitch McConnell’s job in the Senate.


The next day, January 21st, Trump signed a new version of his Schedule F change to the Civil Service law, firing en masse roughly 50,000 federal employees in the top and upper management positions across the federal government, including the Department of Defense.


A group of billionaire-friendly candidates had been preselected by a billionaire-funded think tank and all were installed within hours. Those that required the “advice and consent of the Senate” were placed in “acting” positions, as Trump had done in 2020.
Within a week, another series of political arrests took place, as Joe and Hunter Biden, Liz Cheney, Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, Brad Raffensperger, Letitia James, and multiple other federal and state judges and prosecutors were arrested for conspiracy and alleged RICO violations.


“America will never again tolerate lawlessness by its elected and appointed officials,” Trump announced in a prime-time message to the country. Republican politicians and the media rushed to his defense, pointing out previous presidents (Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln) who, they said, did “even worse.”


The Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 ruling declaring hate crimes unconstitutional, calling them “thought crimes,” with Justice Sam Alito asserting:

“We will never allow America to become the dystopian nanny state characterized in the writings of Orwell or Lewis and craved by Democrats. Americans are free to have any thoughts or intentions they want: we only punish actual behavior, and that punishment is the same for all.”

Within hours of their announcement, over 200 people — most queer or Black — lay dead across the United States. Trump went on TV to calm the nation, again asserting “There are very fine people on both sides.”

That weekend, hundreds of thousands of Americans poured into the streets to protest. Trump called another press conference and declared a state of emergency, provoked by what he calls “a nationwide insurrection against law and order and our great nation.”

Tens of thousands of Army troops met the crowds in the streets, and in 11 cities and a half-dozen rural areas used live ammunition to kill several dozen protestors.

Joy Reid began her Monday MSNBC show with the song Four Dead In Ohio and was arrested on-air for “inciting further insurrection.” Trump then referred the network, its executives, and several of its hosts to his FCC for investigation, as he promised in 2023.

CNN threw in with Trump, joining Fox and the Big Three national networks in helping explain to America how Trump’s “changes” are actually far less draconian than things previous presidents (particularly Lincoln, “who even suspended habeas corpus!”) have done.

Trump again invoked the PATRIOT Act to continue to hold the hundreds of elected and appointed Democratic officials, “thugs,” and “sedition ringleaders” in secret detention centers without access to lawyers or other due process.

The media pointed out that this is nothing unusual: Bush and Cheney did the same thing hundreds of times, and some of their victims are even still in Gitmo without ever having had a legitimate day in court. Nobody, they said, of any “real stature” objected.

Given the large number of people coming under detention as protests spread across the country, Trump signed an executive order transferring billions out of the military budget for Halliburton and two private prison contractors to build “detention centers” where “bad people” can be “concentrated in one place.” The media refuses to call them concentration camps because of the “prejudicial” connotations associated with the phrase.

Trump then ordered the Pentagon to withdraw all forms of assistance from Ukraine, including military and diplomatic support. “Putin is merely liberating Ukraine from the Nazis that took it over when they stole the election from Yanukovych,” Trump said, echoing Putin. “They never should have turned their back on their Slavic partner, the nation that birthed them.” He ended the speech with his famous 2024 election slogan, “Blood and soil!”

In an executive order titled “No More Shithole Countries,” he outlawed all immigration, and banned all tourist visas, from Muslim and majority-Black countries except for those from a handful of oil-rich Middle Eastern nations that started building a $5 billion Trump Tower in Oman in July, 2023.

Republicans in the House and Senate passed emergency legislation ending all US gun restrictions with a single exception: anybody who’s been arrested or “credibly accused of sedition” and not pardoned can no longer own a weapon of any sort.

Attorney General Jeffrey Clark then declared that anybody who’s ever joined the Democratic Party or voted for a Democrat in any election in the previous decade is now considered “credibly accused of sedition.”

Congress followed that up with billions to hire at least a million new local and state police, as Trump announced he’s integrating the Proud Boys into the federal military, calling them the “Stormfront,” a shoutout to Qanon.

February 2025

In the first week of the month, the Supreme Court handed down its 6-3 decision in Loper Bright, gutting every federal protective regulatory agency. Trump immediately fired most of the employees of the EPA and Department of the Interior, promising to sell of all federally owned public lands.

“Our public lands are rich in minerals and fossil fuel, and our parks should be run by smart entrepreneurs,” Trump declared, echoing sentiments attributed to Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt.

Disney and Comcast then both submitted bids to buy and manage Yellowstone.

Congress then declared “the Medicare experiment is over” because “more than half of seniors have voted with their feet” and ended the program, mandating all people over 65 must buy an “Advantage” plan from one of a handful of approved insurance giants. Following on that, Congress rolled out “Social Security Advantage,” a program that will, over the next decade, privatize all Social Security accounts via JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.

Proclaiming “America will no longer use her tax dollars to support Blue state communists,” and keeping a 2023 campaign promise, Trump ordered all military bases closed in any state with a seditionist (Democratic) governor or seditionist-controlled legislature. He gave states 60 days to change the composition of their governments to qualify to keep their military bases; all who didn’t comply are now seeing their facilities (and jobs) moved to Red states.

Congress then passed legislation closely resembling Putin’s laws in Russia and Orbán’s in Hungary declaring homosexuality and transsexuality “deviant behaviors” subject to federal penalties, fulfilling his 2022 promise to pass “Two Genders legislation.”

The “fake news media” is a major crisis, Trump told the nation from a press scrum near his helicopter: the solution, he said, would be straightforward. Congress voted later that day to rewrite the nation’s libel laws, as Orbán did in Hungary and Putin did in Russia, so any journalist or commentator who “sullies the reputation” if any elected official can be subject to both civil and criminal penalties.

Within three weeks of the legislation being signed into law at the end of February, hundreds of writers and TV commentators had been either arrested or bankrupted (depending on the severity of their criticism of Trump) as newsrooms across the nation purged themselves of “anti-American” (anti-Trump) voices.

Now licensed by six Republicans on the Supreme Court and their integration into the military, Proud Boy groups began organized attacks on Black neighborhoods, gay bars, and libraries. Dozens of people died, touching off riots in several cities — particularly Portland and Seattle — that were covered breathlessly by Fox “News.”

Trump pointed to the unrest and announced a second round of billion-dollar contracts for Halliburton to build camps where “bad people,” including those guilty of libel, violating gender conformity laws, or “poisoning the blood of America” through biracial marriages or giving shelter to illegal immigrants, could be “concentrated.”

In a major law and order speech, Trump declared homelessness a federal crime and work camps were set up inside the new concentration camps for homeless people to learn skills so “work can make them free.” Volunteer Proud Boys units were dispatched to help police departments round up those who insisted on living on the streets.

Based on the Comstock Act — which is still law but hasn’t been enforced since the 1950s — the Republicans on the Supreme Court outlawed mifepristone and all hormonal birth control, along with IUDs and condoms. Republicans passed legislation declaring that “life begins at conception,” and US attorneys have started charging women who got abortions in Blue states over the past year with murder. The Attorney General announced that all miscarriages must be reported to local police for investigation.

In the last week of February, Russia launched a “final assault” on Ukraine, with the aid of their new “Freedom Block” allies: China, Iran, and North Korea. Ukraine fell, and Trump hailed “a new era of world peace.”

March 2025

Keeping his campaign promise, Trump dissolved the Department of Education and killed all federal aid to education, higher and primary. The next day, the Supreme Court struck down FDR’s child labor laws; within a week every Red state in the country followed suit with their own state laws allowing anybody older than 12 to work (including in the brothels Trump decriminalized).

Republicans passed the “Free the Job Creators Act,” which ended all taxation of capital gains. Billionaires will never again pay any income taxes at all.

Internationally, the world order was changing rapidly. In a coordinated move, Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons; China encircled and cut off all shipping and fuel to Taiwan; Russia, Belarus, and Hungary collectively invaded Poland; and NATO dithered as Trump threatened to intervene on Russia’s side.

Trump refused to help Israel, and the Iranians who now control the country brought Netanyahu, who had helped fund Hamas for so many years, out of prison and back into office as a puppet Prime Minister. Trump called a press conference and said this is what is prophesied in the Bible and Jews better begin converting to Christianity if they want to survive.

Hours later, Trump issued an executive order declaring America a Christian country; states began to shut down synagogues, mosques, and Buddhist and Hindu temples within the week.

April 2025

Like in Russia and Hungary, Republicans passed laws asserting that voting is a privilege, not a right, and, backstopped by SCOTUS, Red States purged over 30 million people from the voter rolls in the first week. Speaker Jordan proclaimed, “There will never again be a ‘so-called purple’ state.”

The new law requires that a person must be employed to vote; being married to an employed person is not enough. Women, unemployed men, and students protested and hundreds were shot in the streets or sent to the work camps.

With a dramatic flourish and to redirect attention away from domestic protests, Trump declared war on Mexico for “refusing to do anything about their drugs and gangs, which have already declared war on the United States.”

He seized several northern Mexican states after a few short battles and strategic bombing of the presidential palace and Capitol building in Mexico City. Control of those formerly northern Mexican states was given to Greg Abbott, who Trump named “Administrator” of “American Mexico” just like L. Paul Bremmer was in Iraq.

May 2025

An insurgency against American occupation arose in Mexico, drawing us into a hot war with that country. Trump ordered all Americans of more than 3/5ths Mexican ancestry arrested and moved into detention camps or deported. Protests broke out across the country, but were quickly put down by the military.

The wars in Europe and Asia are winding down now, as Trump declared a “New Alliance” between the US, China, Russia, North Korea, Hungary, and Iran. Argentina applied for membership, as did dozens of other rightwing governments from Central and South America to Africa and Asia. Australia has made peace with China, naming a Murdoch heir as the new leader of that English-speaking country.

The Democratic Party is now officially banned as “insurrectionist” and the Supreme Court extended Article 3 of the 14th Amendment (which prevents insurrectionists from holding public office) to include all governmental positions in the country: only Republicans, Libertarians, and No Labels politicians need apply.

People have started to fight back in random places, so Congress codified the earlier ruling by Attorney General Clark that any former member of, or voter for, Democrats may not own a gun or other “weapon of war”: regional “insurrections” continue to break out but the military and their Proud Boy units quickly put them down.

The largest uprising was in Los Angeles: Trump had about 40 square blocks seized, locked down, and surrounded with razor wire. He then put that state, Oregon, and Washington under federal control, citing laws and acts taken by President Lincoln.

And that’s just the first five months. From there, things began to get really bad for Americans…

Categories Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Republicans, Trump

Ethics Lawyers: Why Fani Willis is not Disqualified Under Georgia Law

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2024 //
24

Three prominent ethics lawyers—Norman L. Eisen. Joyce Vance, and Richard Painter— express their shared view of the legal challenge to Fani Willis and her Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade. I have excerpted only the opening paragraphs from the website “Just security.” Please open the link to finish the article. The authors’ bios appear at the end of the excerpt.

They begin:

No one is praising Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s apparent romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, an attorney in private practice who she brought on board as a Special Prosecutor in the criminal investigation and now prosecution of Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants. We have not yet heard that much of Willis’s side of the story. However, based on what is known so far, it represents poor judgment—especially in a case of this magnitude, even if a prosecutor’s private life is generally none of the public’s business. Willis has already said publicly that she is “flawed” and “imperfect” in her public remarks at Bethel AME Church following the allegations. But whether there were personal failings is not the operative legal test for whether Willis or Wade should be disqualified from the case, and accordingly that question is not the focus of this essay. Prosecutors are human, and they can and do make mistakes. The question here is whether Willis’s and Wade’s apparent mistakes have any bearing on the election conspiracy prosecution in a way the law would require their removal from the case.

The motion filed by defendant Michael Roman seeks primarily to do just that – to disqualify Willis and Wade from further participation in this case. Under Georgia law, however, even if all the factual allegations regarding Willis and Wade were true, there would be no basis for disqualifying them from prosecuting Roman or any of the other defendants in the election conspiracy case.

The key point is that regardless of whether the factual circumstances involving Willis and Wade give rise to separate ethical concerns with respect to his hiring, such questions do not affect the propriety of the prosecution against Roman and his co-defendants. Questions about gifts and related matters go to Willis’s and Wade’s obligations to the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, and have no connection to assuring the defendants a fair trial. These allegations are as irrelevant to the trial as allegations in other situations that prosecutors took office supplies for personal use, drove county vehicles for personal errands, or plagiarized portions of their student law review notes. All of those are legitimate issues—for prosecutors’ offices and those with oversight responsibilities to address—but such allegations do not bring criminal prosecutions to a stop or require that cases be transferred to a different office. Defense attorneys cannot use allegations of prosecutorial ethics violations, real or imaginary, that have nothing to do with a trial to delay or force prosecutors off of a case….

The authors:

Norman L. Eisen:

Ambassador Norman Eisen (ret.) (@NormEisen) served in the White House as special counsel and special assistant to the president for ethics and government reform and as ambassador to the Czech Republic under President Barack Obama, as well as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019–20, including for the first impeachment and trial of President Donald Trump.

Joyce Vance

Joyce White Vance (@JoyceWhiteVance) is Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law and former United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017. Member of the Editorial Board of Just Security.

Richard Painter

Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA). is the S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and was the chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Georgia

Politico: Trump Has Undermined the Rule of Law for 50 Years

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2024 //
72

This article in Politico is a must-read. It describes Donald Trump’s strategy of using the courts to undermine the rule of law. He has been doing it for 50 years, with great success. His lawyers come and go but Trump loves the courtroom. Much as some might challenge his intellect, the fact is that he is a brilliant legal tactician. He has figured out how to turn the courtroom into his personal stage, where he defies the law, the prosecutors, even the judge, where he mocks them all, ignores their decisions, appeals and appeals.

How does he do it? Read the article by Michael Kruse. Trump learned at the feet of Roy Cohn, who served not only Senator Joe McCarthy but the Mafia and a rogues gallery of unsavory defendants. From Cohn he learned to fight back aggressively, suing whoever sued you, never compromising or giving in.

The article begins:

NEW YORK — What happened in Room 300 of the New York County Courthouse in lower Manhattan in November had never happened. Not in the preceding almost two and a half centuries of the history of the United States. Donald Trump was on the witness stand. It was not unprecedented in the annals of American jurisprudence just because it was a former president, although that was totally true. It was unprecedented because the power dynamic of the courtroom had been upended — the defendant was not on defense, the most vulnerable person in the room was the most dominant person in the room, and the people nominally in charge could do little about it.

It was unprecedented, too, because over the course of four or so hours Trump savaged the judge, the prosecutor, the attorney general, the case and the trial — savaged the system itself. He called the attorney general “a political hack.” He called the judge “very hostile.” He called the trial “crazy” and the court “a fraud” and the case “a disgrace.” He told the prosecutor he should be “ashamed” of himself. The judge all but pleaded repeatedly with Trump’s attorneys to “control” him. “If you can’t,” the judge said, “I will.” But he didn’t, because he couldn’t, and audible from the city’s streets were the steady sounds of sirens and that felt absolutely apt.

“Are you done?” the prosecutor said.

“Done,” Trump said.

He was nowhere close to done. Trump’s testimony if anything was but a taste. (In fact, he said many of the same things in the same courtroom on Thursday.) This country has never seen and therefore is utterly unprepared for what it’s about to endure in the wrenching weeks and months ahead — active challenges based on post-Civil War constitutional amendments to bar insurrectionists from the ballot; existentially important questions about presidential immunity almost certainly to be decided by a U.S. Supreme Court the citizenry has seldom trusted less; and a candidate running for the White House while facing four separate criminal indictments alleging 91 felonies, among them, of course, charges that he tried to overturn an election he lost and overthrow the democracy he swore to defend. And while many found Trump’s conduct in court in New York shocking, it is in fact for Trump not shocking at all. For Trump, it is less an aberration than an extension, an escalation — a culmination. Trump has never been in precisely this position, and the level of the threat that he faces is inarguably new, but it’s just as true, too, that nobody has been preparing for this as long as he has himself.

Trump and his allies say he is the victim of the weaponization of the justice system, but the reality is exactly the opposite. For literally more than 50 years, according to thousands of pages of court records and hundreds of interviews with lawyers and legal experts, people who have worked for Trump, against Trump or both, and many of the myriad litigants who’ve been caught in the crossfire, Trump has taught himself how to use and abuse the legal system for his own advantage and aims. Many might view the legal system as a place to try to avoid, or as perhaps a necessary evil, or maybe even as a noble arbiter of equality and fairness. Not Trump. He spent most of his adult life molding it into an arena in which he could stake claims and hunt leverage. It has not been for him a place of last resort so much as a place of constant quarrel. Conflict in courts is not for him the cost of doing business — it is how he does business. Throughout his vast record of (mostly civil) lawsuits, whether on offense, defense or frequently a mix of the two, Trump has become a sort of layman’s master in the law and lawfare.

“He doesn’t see the legal system as a means of obtaining justice for all,” Jim Zirin, the author of Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits, told me. He sees it rather as a “tool,” said Ian Bassin, a former White House lawyer in the administration of Barack Obama and the current executive director of Protect Democracy, “in his quest to command attention and ultimately power.” But it’s not merely any tool. It’s his most potent tactic and fundamental to any and all successes he’s had. “There’s probably no single person in America,” said Eric Swalwell, the Democratic member of Congress from California and a former prosecutor and Trump impeachment manager, “who is more, I would say, knowledgeable and experienced in our legal system — as both a plaintiff and as a defendant — than Donald Trump.”

Many have been confounded by the legal system’s inability to constrain Trump, by his ability to escape at least thus far any legal accounting for behavior that even some leaders of his own party excoriated — and why that reckoning might never come. To understand this requires seeing Trump in a new mode — not as a businessman-turned-celebrity-turned-politician, or as a nationalist populist demagogue, or as the epochal leader of a right-wing movement, but rather as a legal combatant. “This is not a political rally — this is a courtroom,” the judge admonished him at one point in November in New York. It was only in the most technical sense correct. Just as he had upended the norms inside the New York courtroom, Trump has altered the very way we view the justice system as a whole. This is not something he began to do once he won elected office. It has been a lifelong project.

Please read the article. You will understand the present moment far better if you do.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Trump

Surprise! Supreme Court Supports Biden in Case About Texas’s Border Razor Wire

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2024 //
71

In a decision that was a happy surprise, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration’s view that federal law controls international borders, not state law.

The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett voting with the three liberal justices.

Governor Greg Abbott ordered that razor wire and buoys be strung across the Rio Grand at locations where migrants were crossing from Mexico to Texas. The U.S. Botder Patrol was blocked by the Texas National Guard, which took control of policing the border. Three migrants, a woman and her two young children, drowned while the Texas National Guard watched and prevented the Border Patrol from rendering assistance.

The Biden administration sued the state of Texas, asserting the primacy of federal law. The federal district court ruled in favor of the federal government. Texas appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative in the nation, which ruled in favor of Texas. Many legal scholars thought that ruling was bizarre.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the federal government and against Texas, meaning that the U.S. Border Patrol will resume their duties. This decision is a knock on the secessionist inclinations of far-right firebrand Greg Abbott and the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

This decision knocked down the claim that state law could override federal law and that a state on the international border could take control.

What’s truly shocking is that four justices were willing to give states the authority to overrule federal law. Shades of 1860!

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Texas

Amplifying Democracy’s Voice: BustEDpencils, a Daily Rally Cry for Public Education!

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2024 //
3

Tim Slekar has been active in the fight against privatization of public education for more than a decade. He has created videos, written articles, posted on blogs, and recently he has run a regular radio show. He’s always fighting for public schools, teachers, and students against the long and ugly arm of corporate reform.

He writes:

Dear Advocates for Democracy and Education,

As BustEDpencils expands to a daily radio show on Civic Media, we’re not just talking about education; we’re championing the cornerstone of a healthy democracy—robust public schools. Our show is a clarion call to defend and rejuvenate public education, the bedrock of informed citizenship and democratic engagement.

By tuning in daily, you’re not just listening; you’re actively participating in safeguarding our public schools. Each episode is a step towards a more informed, democratic society, where public education is celebrated and protected as a vital public good.

And we’re not stopping at the airwaves. We’re planning to bring the heart of our message into your communities with live appearances. These events will be more than just talks; they’ll be rallies for public education, celebrating its critical role in maintaining a thriving democracy.

Join this urgent mission. Tune in, engage, and prepare to welcome us into your community. Together, let’s ensure that public education remains a pillar of our democratic society.

In Solidarity for Public Education and Democracy,

Tim and Johnny

P.S. Every listener, every conversation, every community we visit is crucial in our fight to preserve and enhance public education. This journey is about more than just a radio show; it’s about nurturing the very roots of our democracy.

Timothy D. Slekar PhD
412-735-9720
timslekar@gmail.com
https://civicmedia.us/shows/busted-pencils

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Ethics, Media, Resistance, Students, Teachers and Teaching

Texas: When Billionaires Fund the News….

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2024 //
6

This story by Michael Hardy was published by the Texas Monthly. It goes to the heart of serious problems in today’s journalism: is the Internet destroying the audience for daily newspapers? Can daily newspapers survive? The Baltimore Sun was just purchased by the rightwing Sinclair Network, which already owns a large number of local radio stations. Can newspapers be independent when they are owned by billionaires with a political agenda?

Billionaire Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post but he doesn’t seem to have imposed his political views on the newspaper. Billionaire Rupert Murdoch famously bought The New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News. He has pushed his properties to match his politics.

The Los Angeles Times was purchased by a billionaire doctor, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, in 2018. He has not imposed his politics, but he has ordered drastic layoffs in newsroom personnel, which led to a one-day walkout last Friday by the newsroom guild, the first such work stoppage in the newspaper’s 142-year history. The pending layoffs would be the third round of cuts since June.

This is not a good sign for the health of our democracy.

The death of major newspapers over the past few decades has created “news deserts,” regions where there are no newspapers. It is more important than ever to support local journalism, which provide the sole source of information about local events, school board elections and meetings, elections, and local government.

Into the gap comes a new form of journalism, the nonprofit newspaper. Most such enterprises are supported by subscribers, advertisers, and foundation gifts. I support the Mississippi Free Press, which does an amazing job of covering news in the state. I also support the Texas Observer, which is a low-budget newspaper whose scrappy staff is known for investigative journalism. (I also subscribe to The Texas Tribune and The Texas Monthly).

In some cases, even the nonprofits depend on billionaires to keep them afloat. As this story shows, relying on billionaires can be hazardous. In some cases, their gifts come with long strings attached.

In a recent issue of The Texas Monthly, Michael Hardy reported what happened to a new nonprofit journal called the Houston Landung.

In its mission statement, the nonprofit Houston Landing describes itself as an “independent, nonpartisan news organization devoted to public service journalism,” one that “offer[s] solutions to pressing problems” and “holds the powerful accountable.” Its stories are free to read, and its website runs no ads or clickbait. Its vision of an independent, well-funded outlet built on rigorous investigative reporting attracted some of the city’s brightest journalism stars after its soft launch two years ago with financial backing from the philanthropic American Journalism Project and Houston billionaires John Arnold and Richard Kinder.

Among its first hires were Houston Chronicle investigations editor Mizanur Rahman, who became the Landing’s editor in chief (and helped write the mission statement), and the Chronicle’s Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Alex Stuckey, who became the Landing’s top investigative journalist. Rahman and Stuckey helped build a newsroom of about thirty editors, reporters, photographers, and web designers that routinely punched above its weight, producing major stories about an epidemic of deaths in Harris County jails and a plague of stopped trains in Houston’s East End. Since the website’s official debut in June, it has regularly scooped the competition—including Texas Monthly—on stories ranging from the state takeover of Houston ISD to predatory lending at the Colony Ridge development north of Houston.

The Landing’s success made it all the more shocking when, on Monday morning, Rahman and Stuckey were summarily fired by CEO Peter Bhatia, a fifty-year newspaper veteran and former Detroit Free Press editor in chief who had been in the job for less than a year. Bhatia is longtime friends with Landing board member Jeff Cohen, a senior advisor at Houston philanthropy organization Arnold Ventures—a major funder of the Landing—and a former Chronicle editor in chief. The six-member board of directors appears to have brought Bhatia in to shake things up at the website. (None of the Landing’s six board members agreed to interview requests for this story; the author of this story worked briefly under Cohen at the Chronicle in 2017 and did sporadic freelance copy writing for the Arnold Ventures website from 2019 to 2020.)

“Over recent months I’ve become concerned about whether or not we were fully engaged in the process of being effective in the digital spaces,” Bhatia told Texas Monthly this week. “We’ve been putting out a newspaper on a website. There’s been some really good journalism and some high-impact stuff, for sure. But after a lot of conversations with Mizanur, I reached the conclusion that we had to make a change if we’re going to be as effective as we can in the digital space.” A document prepared for the November meeting of the Landing’s board and obtained by Texas Monthly showed that the site exceeded its 2023 goal for annual page views (1.5 million) and was within striking distance of its goal for unique visitors (1 million). For comparison, the nonprofit San Antonio Report, founded in 2012, claims 500,000 monthly page views.

Stuckey told Texas Monthly that she was blindsided by her firing. Just two weeks earlier, she had received a glowing performance review and a 3 percent pay raise. In a recording of Monday’s termination meeting provided by Stuckey, Bhatia can be heard saying he has “enormous respect for you as a journalist . . . you are an investigative reporter of the highest level.” But, he explains, there is no place for her in the “comprehensive reset” he believes is necessary at the Landing.

“If you had ever come to me and said, ‘I want you to revamp how you do stories,’ I would have done that in a heartbeat,” Stuckey tells him.

“It’s not my job to do that,” Bhatia replies. “It’s the editor’s job.”

“So I’m getting cut off at the knees because you felt that Mizanur didn’t do that?”

“Well, you can jump to that conclusion.”

At the end of the meeting, human resources director Susie Hermsen offered Stuckey three months of severance pay if she signed a nondisparagement agreement. Stuckey refused. “I believe in transparency,” she can be heard saying in the recording. “This is insanity, and I am absolutely not signing anything.”

The Landing’s newsroom was similarly dumbfounded by the firings. Much of the staff converged upon the organization’s sixth-floor office, in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood, on Monday to show solidarity with Rahman and Stuckey. Later, the staff wrote a collective letter to the Landing’s board of directors warning of “significant damage to employee retention and recruitment” and predicting that “the optics of such a massive restructuring during a moment of forward momentum will hurt our fundraising and financial efforts.”

Bhatia acknowledged that the newsroom was in open revolt against his leadership. “I have no illusion that some people are going to leave over this, and I respect that,” he told Texas Monthly. The Landing’s managing editor, John Tedesco, will temporarily take over for Rahman while Bhatia leads a search for a new editor in chief. Tedesco told me that he disagrees with the decision to fire Rahman and Stuckey and fears that “this turmoil will cause our best and brightest journalists to look for the nearest exit ramp.”

The Landing is one of dozens of local nonprofit newsrooms that have sprung up around the country in the past couple of decades. Often funded by a combination of wealthy donors, foundation grants, NPR-style membership drives, and paid events, these nonprofits have been touted as a supplement or even a replacement for declining local newspapers. But some observers worry that such publications are beholden to the whims of their billionaire patrons. (Texas Monthly is a for-profit magazine whose chairman is Houston billionaire Randa Duncan Williams.)

Where did the staff go wrong? Did they write anything critical of charter schools (billionaire John Arnold has poured many millions into promoting charters)? Or did they praise pensions for public service workers (another of Mr. Arnold’s pet peeves)? Or was it something that stepped on the toes of the other billionaire funder, Mr. Kinder? The publication was launched with $20 million, so it would not have been a financial issue.

This is what Thomas Jefferson said about the importance of a free press:

Jefferson believed that a free press was necessary to keep government in check. He wrote that if he had to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”:

The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Ethics, Freedom of the Press, Funding, Houston, Texas

Beware Deep Fake Videos! Protect Our Democracy!

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2024 //
18

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed (or not) that I never mention artificial intelligence. I think it’s ominous. I don’t like simulations of real people. I don’t like technology that can write even better than most humans. I prefer to deal directly with humans, not fakes.

Artifial intelligence may be deployed as a deceptive weapon in the upcoming elections.

2024 is a crucial year in our politics. On the ballot in the primaries and in the general election will be candidates who are offering theocracy, dictatorship, or democracy. They will use AI to woo and confuse voters.

New Hampshire blogger and former state senator Jeanne Dietsch has posted a warning about deep fake videos. The video she posts is titled “This Is Not Morgan Freeman.” The face is Morgan Freeman, the voice is Morgan Freeman. But it is not Morgan Freeman.

She also offers a warning about the three factions that are competing in New Hampshire.

She writes:

Elected officials no longer act as individuals. They vote as teams. In NH we have three types of teams:

  • “LIBERTY” CANDIDATES who do not believe in majority rule or public services. They want to privatize education, public lands and government services. They believe the only behaviors that should be illegal are theft and bodily harm. People may make fentanyl, pollute the water supply, sell body parts, or do anything else on their private property. That includes corporations that want to buy up state forests to lumber or entire swaths of housing to rent.
  • FASCIST & THEOCRATIC CANDIDATES also want to replace democracy with minority rule. Unlike liberty candidates, they want stricter laws set by a dictator or by religious leaders. Their goal is to control society, as in Putin’s Russia or a Christian version of Iran.
  • PRO-DEMOCRACY CANDIDATES may disagree on how large government should be and many other issues. However, they will stand up against those who support lawlessness or dictatorship. They will ensure we regularly hold fair elections. They believe in the rule of law.

Political parties no longer define the teams in this state. Undeclared voters outnumber either party by a third. In 2020, the “liberty” team temporarily took over the NH House Republican Caucus. Even though they were a minority of the 400 House members, they controlled the agenda. Pro-democracy legislators in both parties were powerless.

The story in DC is similar. The functions of the American republic are being held hostage by a small minority.

Will we fall for the deep fakes? Will we be deceived by AI? Or will we protect our democracy?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read

“Democracy“: A Yale Historian Speaks Out About the Changes in the Republican Party

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2024 //
81

A new commenter on the blog ssserted recently that real scholars don’t express their views about current events. Our reader “Democracy” here excerpts a recent article by a genuine scholar, David Blight of Yale University. Professor Blight is an eminent scholar of African American history, who recently edited a volume of Frederick Douglass’s writings for the Library of America. The following excerpt cited was published in the New York Review of Books.

Incidentally, the Washington Post reported that Trump responded to Nikki Haley’s concern about his age by saying that he took a mental test of 35-40 questions where he was shown a picture of a giraffe, a tiger, whale, and he correctly identified the whale. It sounds like a test for little children or non-English speakers.

Democracy wrote to the blog:

David Blight, historian from Yale, recently called Trump woefully “ignorant” about history, and, in essence a liar.

But Trump IS the current Republican Party, and here’s Blight on that:

“Changing demographics and 15 million new voters drawn into the electorate by Obama in 2008 have scared Republicans—now largely the white people’s party—into fearing for their existence. With voter ID laws, reduced polling places and days, voter roll purges, restrictions on mail-in voting, an evisceration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a constant rant about ‘voter fraud’ without evidence, Republicans have soiled our electoral system with undemocratic skullduggery…The Republican Party has become a new kind of Confederacy.”

“This new Confederacy is regional and rural. It knows what it hates: the two coasts, diverse cities, marriage equality, certain kinds of feminism, political correctness, university ‘elites,’ and ‘liberals’ generally. It is racial and undemocratic. It twists American history to its own ends, substituting ‘patriotism’ for scholarship and science. It has weaponized ‘truth’ and rendered it oddly irrelevant. It has brought us almost to a new 1860, an election in which Americans voted for fundamentally different visions of a proslavery or an antislavery future.”

Republicans: The New Confederacy

You can see all of this in Trump’s words and actions, and it’s parroted in turn by his minions, and his supporters, and by his lawyers.

Trump has proved himself to be a serial liar, racist, misogynist, and seditious traitor to the Constitution and the republic. The Republican Party is his enabler.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, History, Ignorance, Racism, Republicans, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Why Rightwingers Oppose Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2024 //
23

Thom Hartmann continues to amaze me, with his steady production of powerful articles. This one is especially important for the readers of this blog, whose primary purpose is to strengthen and protect our public schools.

Thom Hartmann writes:

In 1776, British economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a book that laid out the principles that modern economies have operated under for centuries (with the exception of the Reagan Revolution years of 1981-2021). In addition to arguing for a strong domestic manufacturing base and high taxes on the wealthy, Smith pointed out that one of the things that most directly constitutes the wealth of a nation is its educated workforce and well-informed populace (as a result of that education).

From Thomas Jefferson creating the first tuition-free American college (the University of Virginia), to Horace Mann’s advocacy of public schools in the late 19th century, right up until 1954, this was an uncontroversial position. It’s why every developed country on Earth has a vibrant public school system and — with the exception of the US since Reagan ended free college in California — most developed countries offer free or near-free college to their citizens.

But in 1954, the US Supreme Court upset the education apple cart by declaring in their Brown v Board case that “separate but equal” schools, segregated by race, were anything but “equal.” That decision fueled two movements that live on to this day.

The first was the rightwing anti-communist movement spearheaded by the John Birch Society, which was heavily funded back then by Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch. They put up billboards across the country demanding that Americans rise up and “Impeach Earl Warren,” who was then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for requiring “communist” racial integration of our schools.

The second was the private, all-white “academy” movement that has morphed over the years into charter schools and the “school choice” movement of today. It received a major boost when the white supremacist co-founder of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, published a widely-read and influential article in 1955explicitly calling for what he called “education vouchers” to fund all-white private schools to “solve the national crisis” the Court had created.

In 1958 when the Virginia Supreme Court went along with the US Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision and ordered that state’s schools desegregated, the governor shut downevery public school in the state. Prince Edward County’s schools were still closed in 1964, when they were finally ordered to open by the courts.

Hundreds of “segregation academies” opened across the South; in Mississippi, for example, 41,000 white students left public schools to attend these academies in just the one year of 1969. Parents had to pay the tuition themselves, but they were willing to do so to avoid their children having to interact with Black, Hispanic, or Asian kids.

The turning point for the Republican Party was 1964, when President Johnson and a Democratic Congress passed and signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Shortly thereafter, one Southern Democratic politician after another changed party affiliation to the GOP so they could continue to argue against “forced integration” of public schools.

The Republican war on public schools burst into the open with the Reagan Revolution, when Education Secretary Bill Bennett oversaw a 30 percent cut in federal aid to public schools following Reagan’s promise to abolish the Department altogether. Every Republican running for president since has made a similar promise or claimed the need to end the Education Department.

Bill Bennett wasn’t shy about explaining why it was necessary to gut public schools, after the Supreme Court had ordered they must be racially integrated. Bennett wanted to privatize public education — as did Trump’s former Education Secretary, billionaire Betsy DeVos — and is probably most famous for his statement that gives us a clue as to why this idea of ending public education is so persistent in the GOP:

“If you wanted to reduce crime,” Bennett said on the radio, “you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

LISTEN NOW · 0:17

Could it be that it’s all about keeping white children away from Bennett’s Black babies? Is simple racism what’s animating the GOP’s antipathy toward public education?

One clue is that the idea of ending public education in America goes back even farther than Bennett or Reagan to a single moment and a single court decision. 

When I was born, in 1951, Republicans loved public schools. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower led the charge to build gleaming new public schools all across the United States: I attended one, as did perhaps a majority of my generation.

But then came the Supreme Court, with their Brown v Board decision.

In 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools desegregated. The “Little Rock Nine” — nine Black children trying to desegregate Little Rock Central High School — became nationally famous when Governor Orval Faubus prevented them from entering the school that fall, provoking Eisenhower to call up federal troops to escort the children to class.

Faubus called a referendum — an election — and the good citizens of Little Rock voted 19,470 to 7,561 to shut down their entire school system rather than comply with Eisenhower’s order. That, in turn, led back to the Supreme Court, which, in the fall of 1958, ruled unanimously in Cooper v Aaron that the Brown v Board desegregation order was, in fact, now the law of the land for public education.

In response, whites-only private schools and “academies” began springing up across the nation, many run by all-white churches. (Jerry Falwell tried, in 1966, to open an all-white school; in 1980 he became Reagan’s main advisor on merging the white supremacist faction of evangelical Christians — also triggered by Brown v Board — into the GOP.)

Thus, in 1958 the governor of Virginia closed all the public schools in racially mixed Warren County, Norfolk, and Charlottesville; Prince Edward County’s public schools remained closed for a full five years.

While that’s the foundational history of what has become the GOP’s war on public education, for most of the past 40 years Republicans have merely claimed vague libertarian principles when they try to explain what they ironically call “school choice.”

It wasn’t until Donald Trump gave them permission — and showed them how politically potent it could be — to unleash their inner racists that the GOP went public with overt white supremacy as a core value for the party.

While Critical Race Theory (CRT) was a little-known 1993 analysis of structural racism pioneered by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell taught only in law school, rightwing influencer Christopher Rufo popularized the term with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox “News” show.

From there, it echoed around the GOP for a few months before catching fire across rightwing hate radio, podcasts, and Fox. Pretty soon white supremacist militia members were showing up at school board meetings threatening members that “we know where you live.”

Republicans anxious to stoke the fears of their white racist base began inveighing against teaching CRT in public schools — even though such a thing had never happened — and passing laws so loosely worded as to bar any meaningful teaching or classroom discussion of America’s racial history.

All-white private schools funded with taxpayer dollars have become the darlings of Republicans. In most cases these schools don’t need to flout the law by declaring their segregated status: Black, Asian, and Hispanic parents most often simply aren’t interested in enrolling their children in schools that proudly proclaim they will not allow a drop of “CRT,” true American history, or real science education in their classrooms.

The issue of privatizing public schools came up in Arizona in 2018 with a statewide ballot initiative that would extend free school vouchers to every student in the state: it was defeated by voters by a 2:1 ratio. Writing for The Arizona Republic, columnist Laurie Roberts was unambiguous in her description of the state’s voters’ horror at the ballot initiative:

“Actually, they didn’t just reject it. They stoned the thing, then they tossed it into the street and ran over it. Then they backed up and ran over it again.”

Republicans in the heavily gerrymandered state, though, didn’t much care about the will of the voters. Appealing exclusively to their white racist “Christian” base, they pushed what was essentially that same proposal through the GOP-controlled state legislature and it was signed into law last year by Republican then-Governor Doug Doocey.

In giving every student in the state the ability to opt out of public education with a taxpayer-funded voucher, Doocey established a new benchmark in the war against racially integrated public schools that was matched this year by Florida, Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah.

Legislation to gut public schools and replace them with vouchers for private schools have failed in six states so far (Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota), but Republicans are not letting go. This year voucher bills were introduced in at least 24 states.

The fact that most of the nation’s public school teachers are union members has given Republicans another good reason, in their minds, to do everything possible to destroy public schools. As Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimedlast year, in the minds of Republicans the American Federation of Teachers’ President Randi Weingarten is “the most dangerous person in the world.”

Republicans also love the fact that voucher programs mostly subsidize upper-income families, while educationally ghettoizing the children of low-income parents. Vouchers almost never cover all the costs of attending a private school, so they primarily serve as a government handout to the mostly upper-middle-class white families who already wanted to send their kids to today’s version of the segregation academies.

Once the public schools are largely dead, Republicans will begin lobbying to “reduce spending” by cutting the amount allocated for the vouchers, locking the emerging two-tier status of publicly funded education into place.

For the moment, though, private schools are a booming industry as a result of the GOP’s embrace of Friedman’s vouchers. In Florida, for example, they have virtually no rules or standards for the over-one-billion-dollars the state shovels into its private schools: while public schools must disclose their graduation rates, how they spend their money, and let anybody examine their curriculum, private academies have no such rules in many Republican-controlled states, even though they’re receiving public monies.

Many private schools across the country operate with untrained and uncertified “teachers,” have no clear standards for graduation, and refuse to teach “controversial” subjects like evolution, climate science, and the racial history of America.

Which brings us to organized religion, the other recipient of big bucks because of the school voucher movement. Schools affiliated with churches are now raking in billions every month across the US, and Republicans — who continue to push for unconstitutional things like mandatory public school prayer — pander daily to fundamentalists who don’t want their kids exposed to science or history.

Six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized this practice of shoveling taxpayer funds to churches and religious schools in their notorious Carson v Makin decision last year. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in her dissent:

[In just five short years this Court has] “shift[ed] from a rule that permits States to decline to fund religious organizations to one that requires States in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars.” This decison “continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.”

Which is exactly what the GOP wants. As SenDem recently wrote for Daily Kos:

“Laura Ingraham claimed that ‘a lot of people are saying it’s time to defund government education or at least defund it by giving vouchers to parents.’ Fox’s Greg Gutfeld similarly declared that private school vouchers are needed because public schools are ‘a destructive system’ and described teachers as ‘KKK with summers off.’

“Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has called public schools ‘a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.’ Donald Trump declared, ‘public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs.’ And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called them taxpayer-funded indoctrination centers that need to end, which is a bit ironic since she is the poster child for the necessity of funding public education.”

Sweden has been flirting with libertarianism for a few decades and was the first developed country to offer American-style school vouchers to all kids so they could attend private, for-profit public schools. Just a month ago, their government proclaimed the experiment a disaster and is trying to figure out how to shut down the private schools and re-establish a public education system.

Public schools were the great social and economic leveler for the last century of American history; Republicans want to end that and instead advantage wealthy children over their lower-income peers, particularly those whose skin is darker than Trump’s spray tan.

Public schools (and free college) made it possible for America to produce an explosion of invention and innovation throughout the mid-20th century; now other countries are surpassing us, as the dumbing-down of our kids has become institutionalized in Red state after Red state.

And public schools gave many students their first experience of interacting with people who look different from them and grew up under different circumstances, awakening many young people to the discrimination and unfairness inherent in how America has historically treated minorities.

All of which explains why Republicans so badly want to put an end to public education in America.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Resistance, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools

Dana Milbank in Iowa: Trump Owns the Republican Party

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2024 //
30

No matter how many times he is caught lying, no matter how many top-secret documents he squirreled away, no matter how lavishly he praises dictators, no matter how many porn stars he has partied with, no matter how many millions he took from foreign governments during his term, no matter how many criminal counts he faces, no matter how many times he was indicted, the base of the GOP loves him.

Trump owns the Republican Party. It used to be the party of “family values,” but that pretense has been tossed aside. Trump, a thrive-married philanderer, has never talked about family values.

Dana Milbank went to Iowa to see for himself, and he saw the devotion of the MAGA crowd.

INDIANOLA, Iowa — They lined up for hours, some of them, in the minus-38-degree wind chill to see their candidate. It was the only rally Donald Trump was giving in the state in the TV days before Monday’s caucuses, so for the MAGA faithful, this was the golden ticket.


For the lucky 500 Trump followers admitted to the event space, the Trump campaign played a video reminding voters that Trump had already come in first place in the God primary.


“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump,” the narrator proclaimed.


“God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight. … So God made Trump.”
“‘I need somebody with arms strong enough to rassle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.’ … So God gave us Trump.”


And then it came to pass, a few minutes later, that this midwife-turned-prophet took the stage in the ballroom, and he spake thus to his flock:


“We’ve got a crooked country,” run by “stupid people,” “corrupt,” “incompetent,” “the worst.”
Trump, in the gospel according to Trump, was the victim of “hoaxes,” “witch hunts,” “lies,” “fake indictments,” “fake trials,” judges who “are animals,” a “rigged election,” “rigged indictments,” and a “rigged Department of Justice where we have radical left, bad people, lunatics.”


The nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., “is a rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole,” he said, with swastikas all over the national monuments.

His opponents, the prophet Trump continued, are “Marxists,” “communists,” “fascists,” “liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps,” “warmongers” and “globalists.”
Immigrants are like a “vicious snake,” whose “bite is poisonous,” he told them, and there is an “invasion” at the border by “terrorists,” “jailbirds” and “drug lords.”


“Our country is dying,” he informed them. And, by the way, “You’re very close to World War III.”
Have a nice day!


It was, in short, a slightly updated version of the rage, paranoia, victimhood, lies and demonization that propelled Trump’s popularity over the past eight years. Yet there was something else Trump said in his appearance here at Simpson College, south of Des Moines, that, I’m sorry to say, seems reasonably accurate.


“MAGA is taking over,” he told his chilled but enraptured supporters. “On the fake news, they say MAGA represents 44 percent of the Republicans. No, no. MAGA represents 95 percent of the Republican Party.”


His numbers might be off, but the observation is true. Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses Monday night were an overwhelming triumph for Trump, who in early results was more than 30 points ahead of his nearest competitor and getting more votes than the rest of the field combined. The voters had shown that there essentially is no Republican other than a MAGA Republican…

Nikki Haley points out that she polls better against Biden than the others, and it’s true. Were she the nominee, Republicans would likely win the presidency in a landslide. But this Republican electorate wants something different.


They want a guy who talks about being a “dictator” on day one, echoes Hitler in his rhetoric about ethnic minorities, demands absolute immunity from legal liability and threatens “bedlam” if he’s prosecuted.


They want a guy who, after all these years, still derides “Barack Hussein Obama” and “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren, as he did in Indianola on Sunday. They want a guy who threatens, as president, to “direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor because of their illegal, racist … enforcement of the law.”

And they want a man who promises: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmonger … We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that truly hates our country. We will rout the fake news media. And we will evict Crooked Joe Biden from the White House.” The crowd, in their MAGA caps and Trump 47 jerseys, cheered their candidate and broke into spontaneous chants of “Trump!” and “USA!”

Let there be no more excuses made that Republican voters haven’t been given an alternative. They had a choice — and they chose Trump.

Iowa is an atypical state. It is overwhelmingly white and has a large number of evangelicals. Let’s see how other states vote.

Despite his paranoia, despite his character—or because of them— Trump swept 51% of the vote in Iowa.

However. CBS News reported that less than 15% of registered Republicans turned out in the bitter cold to cast a vote.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Insane, Iowa, Racism, Republicans, Trump
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