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Olga Lautman: Trump’s War on Dissent

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2025 //
7

Olga Lautman is a fearless defender of democracy. She keeps close tabs on authoritarian regimes and has had many reasons to should the alarm since the return of Trump. Now that Trump controls the executive branch, Congress, and usually the Supreme Court (where he occasionally loses when Barrett and Roberts dissent), he is on a path to tyranny.

She warns that his crackdown on dissent is a decisive step towards full-fledged authoritarianism. Let me add as a personal that not all forms of dissent are legal, even by the most liberal definition. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, you can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater. While I support student protests, there are reasonable limits defined by time, place, and manner. If students prevent others from learning by disrupting their classrooms or closing the library, that’s out of line, in my view. You are free to disagree. That’s your right, as it is mine.

Lautman writes:

Trump’s Crackdown: Silencing Dissent and Censoring the Press

While Trump floods the zone with chaos, I am watching a deeply disturbing pattern emerge. Recently, he has targeted universities under the guise of combating antisemitism, threatening to cut funding, open investigations, and deport foreign students involved in what he deems “illegal protests.” This move to silence student voices is part of a broader strategy—Trump is systematically laying the groundwork to criminalize dissent. Concurrently, he has continued to invoke emergency powers over immigration, granting himself sweeping authority with minimal oversight. 

Adding to this concerning trend, Trump is weaponizing the Federal Communications Commission to suppress media freedom. Under his regime, the FCC has initiated investigations into major news organizations like NPR and PBS, scrutinizing their content and funding. The White House has also barred Associated Press reporters from covering presidential events, citing disagreements over “terminology.” Furthermore, the regime has taken control of the White House press pool, deciding which journalists can cover presidential activities, effectively beginning the process of sidelining independent media voices.

Today, the targets are “antisemitism” and “immigration.” Tomorrow, it could be any form of resistance to the regime. This pattern mirrors tactics employed by autocratic governments, where laws and regulations are manipulated to suppress opposition and control public discourse. It is imperative to recognize and challenge these encroachments on our democratic freedoms before dissent becomes a criminal act, and that is why I felt it was important to bring it to everyone’s attention.

The Playbook of Repression

Trump’s attacks on universities have nothing to do with stopping antisemitism. If they did, there would be a serious, balanced approach to addressing hate across the board. Instead, he’s selectively using it as a pretext to punish colleges, strip funding, launch investigations, and lay the groundwork for broader crackdowns on protests. These moves, along with the threat to deport foreign students who participate in protests, are a classic authoritarian tactic—silencing youth movements before they become a real threat.

In Russia, we have seen this exact strategy play out. Putin started by using the language of “public order” to justify suppressing protests. Then, he expanded it to clamp down on journalists, opposition figures, and universities. Today, any form of public dissent in Russia is met with immediate arrests, long prison sentences, or exile.

Trump is following the same playbook. First, redefine what qualifies as a legal protest. Then, frame all opposition as a national security threat. Finally, implement policies that criminalize resistance. Let’s not forget—during his first term, Trump wanted the military to shoot protesters, but guardrails stopped him. Now, with those guardrails gone and loyalists installed in key positions, he is laying the groundwork to justify an all-out assault on free speech and assembly, using the rhetoric of “law and order” to disguise repression as a “necessary” security measure.

The Danger of Emergency Powers

Trump’s continuing invocation of emergency powers on immigration is another red flag. Emergency powers are not inherently undemocratic, but in the wrong hands, they are a tool for consolidating unchecked authority. In Russia, Putin used emergencies—terrorist attacks, economic crises, and foreign threats—to justify expanding his power. Each crisis became an excuse to centralize control and dismantle any resistance to the regime.

Trump is testing the limits of emergency powers to override legal norms. He has already deployed the military on U.S. soil for immigration enforcement—what stops him from escalating further? With the Insurrection Act looming in the background, he is laying the groundwork to use military force against civilians under the pretense of a “national emergency.”

This is Just the Beginning

We are witnessing the early stages of a full-blown authoritarian shift. The selective targeting of student protesters, the abuse of emergency powers, and the push to redefine “illegal protests” are all interconnected. Today, it’s about silencing students. Tomorrow, it will be about crushing unions, blacklisting journalists, or jailing political opponents.

This is not alarmism—it’s a pattern seen time and again in authoritarian regimes. And it’s why we must sound the alarm now.

What Can We Do?

Expose and Document – Share information, track developments, and call out every attempt to silence dissent. Authoritarians thrive on people looking the other way.

Support Targeted Groups – Defend students, journalists, unions, and activists under attack. Legal funds, advocacy groups, and independent media need resources to fight back.

Pressure Lawmakers – Demand that Congress and state governments put up real resistance. Emergency powers must be challenged, and unconstitutional crackdowns must be met with legal action.

Mobilize and Protest – Peaceful mass protests and civil resistance are essential. Authoritarianism collapses when people refuse to comply.

Prepare for Escalation – The time to organize networks and alternative platforms is now and will be critical to keeping resistance alive.

The question is not whether Trump will attempt to consolidate power—it’s whether Americans will resist before it’s too late.

Categories Academic Freedom, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Students, Trump, Tyranny

Thom Hartmann: Why Are We Crowdfunding Cancer Care and Research, While Billionaires Flourish?

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2025 //
6

Thom Hartmann asks a question that we should all ask? Why is there so much poverty in a land of plenty? Why is there such disparity in access to medical care? Why do working class people vote to elect a billionaire who is surrounded by other billionaires? Why did they think he had their best interests at heart when he has no heart?

Thom begins:

Welcome to America’s sickest reality show — where families turn to crowdfunding for cancer treatments while billionaires hoard obscene wealth. In no other developed nation do sick children depend on charity to survive, but here, it’s just another episode of our rigged system…

Consider the ubiquitous ad for the company that buys life insurance policies. The senior citizen in the ad says something to the effect of, “We learned that we could sell our policy when a friend did so to pay their medical bills.”

Wait a minute: we live in the richest country in the world, with the richest billionaires in the world, and we have people who must sell their life insurance policies — depriving their middle-class kids of an inheritance — because somebody got sick?

That sure isn’t happening in most European countries, Canada, Costa Rica, Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea. 

While every year over a half-million American families are wiped out so badly by medical debt that they must file for bankruptcy and often become homeless, the number of sickness-caused bankruptcies in all those countries combined is zero.

Another ad is for a company that sells “reverse mortgages” that let people strip equity out of their homes to cover living and medical expenses. Tom Sellick is a nice guy and all, but are there really that many seniors who are now destitute and thus must wipe out their largest store of wealth just to retire? And how much worse will this get as Elon Musk guts the Social Security administration?

Then there’s the ad for the Shriner’s hospital for children. One of the kids in the ad says to the camera that she was able to walk “because of people like you!” Here in American we must resort to crowdfunding medical care for children with deformities and birth defects?  What the hell?

Why aren’t we all funding cancer cures and help for disabled for kids with our tax dollars? With, at the very least, the tax dollars of America’s billionaires?

Oh, yeah, that’s right: billionaires in America pretty much don’t pay income taxes any more, and haven’t since Reagan. 

That ad is often followed by one for colostrum, a milk product that is supposed to help the immune system, with the ad’s pitch-lady saying something like, “There are over 90,000 chemicals in our environment that haven’t been tested for toxicity…” 

And, damn, she’s right.

Open the link and finish the article if you want to learn more.

Categories Billionaires, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Funding, Health, Inequality, Poverty, Shame

ALERT! Teachers College Faculty Opposes Trump Attacks on Higher Education and DEI

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2025 //
4

The following statement was drafted and signed by faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University.

The Trump administration is cynically using the pretext of “fighting anti-Semitism” to attack universities and control them. It has withheld $400 million from Columbia University and demanded changes to its curriculum and other policies.

This is outrageous. It is fascistic. It is an attack on academic freedom. Columbia University is a private university, one of the best in the nation. It should rebuff this repellent effort to strip it of its independence and academic freedom.

A Statement by Teachers College, Columbia University Faculty

The Attack on American Education, from our Perspective as Teachers College Faculty

March 19, 2025

We are a group of Teachers College faculty with expertise in the areas of education, health, and psychology. We write in response to the attacks by the federal government on Columbia University, and education. Teachers College is an independent institution, with its own charter, president, board of trustees, and regulations, yet we are also affiliated with Columbia University and are thus deeply affected by the current moment. We emphasize that this statement is not an official response by Teachers College, and represents only the views of its authors.  

As researchers and teachers, we share with our colleagues in higher education a deep concern about the many ways that higher education is under threat at this moment. But as scholars at a graduate school of education, whose work covers the lifespan, from infants to elders, we have a distinct perspective. We see the attack on Columbia as part of a larger offensive by the Trump administration and the Republican party against education at all levels. An attack on academic freedom and the First Amendment is taking place on multiple fronts, all of which impact the basic human activity of learning in all of its forms and meanings. 

Efforts to dismantle Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, erase curricular content that speaks to our nation’s true and difficult past and its ongoing inequities, and intrude into the processes by which educational institutions from local school districts to universities make decisions on what and how to teach: all are connected to a desire to stifle critical thinking and prevent us from actively participating in our democracy. The intention of the Trump administration is clear. By gutting important systems of education, they can shape our thoughts and words, creating a new generation without the skills required to actively participate in our democracy and push back against oppression.

 At Columbia University specifically, the Trump administration has cancelled over $400 million in research and intervention funding and is threatening further action unless the university caves to a series of demands that would radically transform the institution and undermine its fundamental role in a democracy, as our colleagues in the Columbia chapter of the AAUP detail in this letter. Such actions also violate the constitutional law and the substance and process of TItle VI, as detailed by several of our colleagues in the Columbia Law School.

The broad strategies of the administration’s attack on higher education were outlined earlier in Project 2025, but the particular tactics have been shaped by both world and local events since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the Israeli war on Gaza that followed and continues. The accusation that Columbia is unable and unwilling to protect its Jewish students is being used to strip it of funding, especially for research in its medical school, as well as other areas of the institution. Several funded projects in education, health, and psychology at Teachers College have already been cancelled, affecting research and programs ranging from higher education access, graduate training for much-needed school psychologists, social services  for students, and more.

We recognize that Columbia, like many institutions, has much ongoing work to do to ensure campus is a place that can foster and support everyone’s learning, by actively addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of discrimination and hatred. Yet the disproportionate response to anti-war protest on our campus must be acknowledged. We take note of the “Palestine exception,” which blocks discourse by treating Palestine and Palestinians as topics beyond First Amendment and academic freedom protections. Such a pattern has barred necessary speech and difficult dialogues on our campuses, causing division and fear amongst students, staff, and faculty members. To be sure, maintaining space for anti-war protest and other forms of political dissent within a community needs to be done with sensitivity and care, alongside respect for the rights of students to challenge one another and express ideas, including deeply controversial ones.

While this week’s education news has been dominated by Columbia, previous weeks focused on the K-12 landscape. Developments included the appointment of a Secretary of Education with no education expertise, unable even to correctly identify the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) – one of our nation’s largest pieces of federal education and civil rights legislation, which she is charged by Congress to administer. The administration laid off half of the Department of Education’s workforce. The firings have all but shuttered the more than 150 year old National Center for Education Statistics, on which countless areas of education research, including “The Nation’s Report Card” via the National Assessment of Educational Progress and studies that focus on measuring equity, rely. These are the staffpeople who ensure that Congressionally-approved funds for Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (for children living in poverty), the IDEA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act for disabled students, and federal financial aid to higher education make their way to their intended students, families, and communities. Major staff reductions at the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights intentionally impede this division from ensuring equitable treatment of children in our nation’s schools. 

As in higher education, the Trump administration not only seeks to usurp the Congressional power of the purse but does so in the name of false and misleading representations of the state of our educational institutions. Whatever claims to the contrary, American public education is governed chiefly by state constitutions and local school districts. They decide what students learn, how teachers teach, and how student success is measured. When, for example, executive orders seek to disregard that law and tradition, we applaud leaders who, like Maine Governor Janet Mills, respond with “See you in court!”.

As experts on teaching and learning, we know that the most profound moments of learning are usually uncomfortable, as they may lead people to question taken-for-granted assumptions about themselves and the society they inhabit. The goal of good teaching is not to eliminate that discomfort, but to give it a productive use. The barrage of Executive Orders, threats to the Department of Education, and mandates such as the March 13 letter are aimed at restricting discourse and generating fear in teachers and students, especially those most vulnerable: non-US citizens, racially or ethnically minoritized populations, gender and sexually diverse and expansive people, and disabled people. Teaching and learning are much more difficult when one is afraid, and pedagogy can easily turn to rote memorization and repetition in order to avoid controversy.

While the White House accuses elementary and secondary schools as well as higher education of indoctrinating students, against the evidence, what we see is an attack on the capacity for criticism — paving the way for authoritarianism and fascism. The idea that directing criticism at the US or its geopolitical allies is un-American runs counter to much of the history of this nation. As James Baldwin once stated, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” It is extremely hard, if not impossible, for people of any age to do the difficult work of learning, of understanding multiple perspectives on an issue, of offering counterpoints to commonly assumed views, when people are scared of losing their livelihoods and/or their visas, being arrested or deported, or being deemed enemies of the state by the highest office in the land.

As educators and researchers concerned with justice and equity, we cannot stay silent.  What becomes of the University if it succumbs to the demands of a political party or leader and cedes its rights of free speech, free expression, and free inquiry? What becomes of research if its pursuit of truth is shaped by what faculty are not allowed to say, and the topics they cannot investigate? What becomes of our students if they are only permitted to think, speak, and be in ways that follow the political winds? 

We call on university leaders, on our campus and beyond, to use all of the tools at their disposal, including collective efforts across the sector and litigation, to stand for academic freedom, and for First Amendment rights of free speech, inquiry, and debate, and thus to stand for our democracy.

And we pledge, as faculty members in an institution of higher education, to recognize that the challenges facing us are not unique to our institution or to higher education. They are shared challenges that at this moment link us to all those devoted to education and to learning at all stages across the life span. We celebrate the efforts such as the suit filed by the National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union to stop Trump administration efforts to curtail diversity, equity, and inclusion in education. We must find ways to work with one another for our students, our communities, and our still-developing democracy. 

Daniel Friedrich, PhD, Associate Professor of Curriculum, Department of Curriculum and Teaching

Ansley Erickson, PhD, Associate Professor of History and Education Policy, Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis

Melanie Brewster, PhD, Professor of Counseling Psychology, Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology

Ezekiel Dixon-Román, PhD, Professor of Critical Race, Media, and Educational Studies Director, Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study. 

Kay James, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroscience & Education, Department of Biobehavioral Sciences

Additional signatures, added at 6pm daily. 

Anonymous (11)

Jennifer Lena, PhD, Associate Professor of Arts Administration, Department of Arts and Humanities

Brandon Velez, PhD, Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology, Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology

Luis A. Huerta, PhD, Professor of Education and Public Policy; Chair, Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis

James Borland, PhD, Professor of Education, Department of Curriculum and Teaching

Nathan Holbert, PhD, Associate Professor of Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design

Sonali Rajan, EdD, Professor of Health Promotion and Education, Department of Health Studies and Applied Educational Psychology

Carolyn Riehl, PhD, Associate Professor of Sociology and Education Policy 

Beth Rubin, PhD, Professor of Education, Department of Arts & Humanities

Lucy Calkins, PhD, Robinson Professor of Children’s Literature, Department of Curriculum & Teaching

Gita Steiner-Khamsi, PhD, William H. Kilpatrick Professor of Comparative Education, Department of International and Comparative Education

Mark Anthony Gooden, PhD, Christian Johnson Endeavor Professor of Education Leadership, Department of Organization & Leadership

Sandra Schmidt, PhD, Associate Professor of Social Studies Education, Department of Arts & Humanities  

Haeny Yoon, PhD, Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education, Department of Curriculum and Teaching

Judith Scott-Clayton, PhD, Professor of Economics & Education, Department of Education Policy & Social Analysis

Alex Eble, PhD, Associate Professor of Economics & Education, Department of Education Policy & Social Analysis

Prerna Arora, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychology and Education, Department of Health Studies & Applied Educational Psychology

Megan Laverty, PhD, Professor of Philosophy and Education, Department of Arts and Humanities 

Ioana Literat, PhD, Associate Professor of Communication, Media and Learning Technologies Design, Department of Math, Science, and Technology

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D, Professor of English Education, Department of Arts and Humanities

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Higher Education, Lies, Trump

Viktor Kravchuk: A Ceasefire of Shame

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2025 //
9

Donald Trump had a long conversation with Putin. They agreed to terms for a ceasefire. The conversation did not include President Zelensky of Ukraine. The U.S.-Russia ceasefire plan was, of course, favorable to the invader. Trump has never felt that it was necessary to find terms that were acceptable to Ukraine.

Putin agreed to stop targeting energy facilities. Hours after agreeing to this, Russia bombed an energy facility, knocking out the energy in one of Ukraine’s major cities.

Viktor Kravchuk is a Ukrainian. He was born in Dnipro and now lives in Kyiv. He is a graphic designer whose posts are found on Substack.

He writes here about “a ceasefire of shame.”

They talked about Ukraine, but Ukraine wasn’t at the table. They spoke of peace, but the bombs kept falling.

They called it a ceasefire, but it’s nothing more than a gift to a war criminal.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin had their little phone call, their moment of mutual admiration. Trump, a convicted felon. Putin, a wanted war criminal. And together, they came to an agreement: a ceasefire that Ukraine never asked for, that Ukraine was never even consulted on.

As they spoke, Ukraine was under massive missile attack. This is the “result” of their negotiations.

Trump calls it peace. But do you call it peace when entire families are buried under rubble? When stolen Ukrainian children are still trapped in Russia, renamed, brainwashed, erased? When the invader still occupies your home, your city, your country?

That is not peace. That is submission.

Zelensky accuses Russians of 'cowardly silence' over Dnipro attack

Trump says the war “should never have started”, as if it was some tragic accident. As if Ukraine had a choice in whether its cities were bombed, its women raped, its people abducted. 

The war didn’t merely “start.” Russia attacked. Putin attacked.

And now Trump wants to reward him with a deal. Not a deal for Ukraine. Not a deal for justice. A deal for Putin, so he can stabilize his economy, sell his gas, stockpile his weapons, and prepare for the next round of war.

Can you believe that?

A ceasefire doesn’t mean Russian troops leave. It doesn’t mean war criminals face trial. It doesn’t mean justice for Bucha, for Mariupol, for every city turned to rubble by Russian bombs.

It means Russia gets time. Time to regroup, time to rearm, time to prepare for another slaughter, another invasion, another genocide.

Because let’s take things clear: this is a war of extermination.

Russia doesn’t just want land. It wants Ukraine erased. Our culture, our people, our history. Russia wants Ukraine to stop existing.

And Trump, whether through cowardice or corruption, probably both, is handing Putin exactly what he wants.

Kyiv mourns as rescuers sift piles of rubble at a children's hospital hit by a Russian missile - The Press Democrat

Trump’s plan is simple: protect Russian oil and gas so Putin can keep funding his war. 

Not a word about returning abducted Ukrainian children.

Not a word about stopping Russian missile strikes on civilians.

Not a word about justice for those tortured in the occupied territories.

Because this was never about peace. It was about business.About “huge economic deals.”

About Trump’s personal interests.

About the wealthy few who stand to profit from Russian gas, from war, from suffering.

The mask is off. There is no diplomacy, no neutrality here. This is Trump openly doing Putin’s bidding, propping up a dictator who has spent the last 25 years waging war, silencing dissent, assassinating opponents, killing anyone who stands in his way.

What Happened on Day 13 of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine - The New York Times

We don’t need a ceasefire. We need Russian troops out of Ukraine.

We need war criminals on trial in The Hague. We need the return of every stolen Ukrainian child.

A ceasefire without withdrawal is surrender. Would you call it peace if an intruder broke into your home, killed your family, stole your belongings, then sat down at your table and told you to move on?

A ceasefire without justice tells every dictator that war crimes work. 

That genocide is just a phase of war, not a crime.

A ceasefire without Ukraine at the table is an insult. As if Ukraine is some distant land, not a country of millions of people fighting for their lives.

No, we will not accept a “peace” that lets Russia keep its stolen land, its mass graves, its war crimes. 

No, we will not pretend that Trump and Putin are negotiating peace when they are simply negotiating how best to carve up a nation that refuses to die.

They are making their choices. To accept occupation, to let war crimes go unpunished.

But we also need to make our choice. 

We have already chosen to fight.

If this were your land, what choice would you make?

🇺🇦

Categories Accountability, Courage, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

Joyce Vance: DOGE Is Gutting the National Weather Service, Which Serves All of Us

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2025 //
16

Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor in Alabama who writes a blog called “Civil Discourse.” In this post, she explains the damage that Elon Musk and his DOGE boys are imposing on NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By making NOAA less effective, they are setting it up to be privatized and available for a fee, not freely available to the public. Their destruction of NOAA will hurt everyone, red and blue states alike.

She writes:

On March 12, there was reporting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was preparing to lay off more than 1,000 workers as part of the Trump administration’s “reductions in force” directive to federal agencies. Cuts like that call into question whether NOAA will continue to provide the early warnings and predictive modeling that help people prepare for weather emergencies in advance. People who live in hurricane and tornado country keep their “NOAA weather radios” handy, and they are especially important for events that occur, as they frequently do, when most of us are asleep.

In theory, it sounds like one more bad thing to worry about. In practice, it’s much worse. We’ve just had a demonstration of precisely how effective NOAA is and what we stand to lose without it. 

Beginning on Friday, violent, long-track tornadoes with damaging winds of up to 80 mph and large hail materialized across the Midwest and South. This was the news Friday night. NOAA’s early warning system, transmitted on social media, radio, television, and by word of mouth, kept it from being much worse.

Saturday was even worse. Here in Birmingham, the alerts started midday.

At 12:27 pm, I got the first alert through the UA campus system, telling me that in light of what was expected, I should seek shelter now instead of waiting for an actual tornado warning. The system sends alerts after the National Weather Service makes the call about what to expect. The National Weather Service (NWS) is a component of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

We’ve grown accustomed to getting this level of detail. NOAA’s information gets pushed out ahead of these events, causing people to plan in advance. Hard helmets were in short supply here yesterday as people prepared for the storms.

We were relatively lucky in Birmingham. But other places were far less fortunate. By Saturday morning, ABC News reported 36 people were dead in the wake of the storms. This was what the devastation looked like in Tylertown, Mississippi. As I’m writing this, the storm is heading east into Georgia.

How much worse would it have been without the accurate forecasting that let our local news people and local emergency systems warn folks in the storms’ paths sufficiently in advance to get to their safe places? As much as I don’t like to think about it, if Trump and DOGE stay on their current path, we are going to be forced to. Mother Nature doesn’t care who you voted for. If there’s a tornado headed your direction, you need access to early warning systems. Gutting NOAA means you won’t have that.

An example of the tornado warnings issued by National Weather Services offices in Alabama throughout the day Saturday, permitting people to find shelter and take cover in advance.

At 8:52 p.m., local television in central Alabama pushed out a message from the National Weather Service: Talladega, take cover now. It was a tornado on the ground near the famous Superspeedway. Alerts meant people were able to stay safe, which is a good thing—this photo of a bus that ended up on the roof of a nearby high school makes it clear that these early warning systems are critically important. What happens if the National Weather Service is no longer there to do that?

Image

Apparently, the Trump administration is not concerned with that. ABC is reporting that NOAA is down about 2,000 employees since January “as a result of the first round of the Trump administration’s cuts.” California Congressman Jared Huffman, who chairs one of the relevant House subcommittees, said, “There is no way to absorb cuts of this magnitude without cutting into these core missions. This is not about efficiency and it’s certainly not about waste, fraud and abuse. This is taking programs that people depend on to save lives and emasculating them.”

Cuts that sound like a good idea to Elon Musk and Donald Trump have real impacts on the rest of us. That is only just beginning to dawn on people, who I’m sure you’re hearing, like I am, saying, “But I didn’t vote for this.” Trump 2.0, as I’ve written previously, isn’t a pick-your-own-adventure experience. You go to the carnival, you get all of the rides.

We were fortunate last night. Everyone in our house (chickens included) is okay, we just have a little cleanup to do. But so many people weren’t that lucky. They lost houses and lives. They will need support from FEMA and other federal services. If DOGE continues its romp through essential federal work that we, as taxpayers, fund and rely on, it’s only going to get worse. 

When will Republicans wake up? Will their Senators and members of Congress protest what DOGE is doing? Will they even fight for their own backyards? If they continue to bend the knee on this, then instead of demanding that government work for their constituents, they are permitting it to work for the financial interests of the powerful. 

We know what to do about this. With this piece, and the one Friday night about an Idaho Fair Housing Council that I hope you’ll go back and readif you missed it, we’re putting a face on the people DOGE hurts. It’s not about waste and fraud; it’s about people. People who need their government to work for them. Here’s the phone number for the House switchboard: (202) 224-3121. Here’s that number for the Senate: (202) 224-3121. Make sure your representatives know how you feel.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Categories Disruption, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Musk, Elon, Privatization, Stupid, Trump

Sherrilyn Ifill: Do Not Be Silent!

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2025 //
3

Sherrilyn Ifill is a law professor at Howard University and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She writes a blog called Sherrilyn’s Newsletter, where this post appeared. Open the link to see her footnotes.

“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment. The time is always now.”

-James Baldwin

Illustration by Nick Liu

The past week has shown us in stark terms what it means to fight – to actually fight – to protect against the rise of authoritarians. This week we also saw that somehow, despite years of preparation, some of the leaders of our most powerful institutions seem unprepared for the particular nature of this fight. Others appear just…. unwilling to engage.

Last week the Trump Administration took its most bold actions yet. Through the actions of either Trump himself, Elon Musk or members of Trump’s cabinet, this Administration has:

· Unleashed an unprecedented attack on higher education, the centerpiece of which was a targeted attack on Columbia University. In a letter sent to the University, the Administration[i]demanded that university essentially turn over its decision-making to the Trump Administration, insisting that the University close the Middle Eastern Studies Dept, ban mask-wearing, expel students involved in pro-Palestine protests, and announced the withholding of $400 million in federal dollars until the University accedes to Trump’s demands, unless the University took these actions to address “antisemitism on campus.” The Administration underscored its intentions by entering student dormitories and arresting a Palestinian student who is a legal permanent resident of the U.S. As his 8-month-pregnant wife looked on helplessly, ICE officers arrested Mr. Khalil and then disappeared him, moving him from facility to facility, and offering only vague and unsubstantiated justifications for his arrest. His central “crime” appears to be “advancing positions that are contrary to the foreign policy of this Administration,”[ii]– a concept so staggeringly outrageous it can scarcely be absorbed.

· Fired half the staff of the Department of Education[iii] – as a down-payment on the Administration’s vow to close the agency.

· Indicated its intention to “eliminate Social Security;”[iv]

· Continued firing government workers and removing funding from government agencies including NIH[v] and shuttering offices like the Voice of America.

· Intensified tariffs against Canada and rhetoric suggesting that the sovereign nation of Canada should be annexed to the U.S.;[vi] declared that the European Union was created to “screw the U.S.”; declared that the South African Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome,[vii] continuing the Administration’s Musk-inspired determination to recognize racist white settlers as victims of Black rule.

· Issued Executive Orders targeting law firms who have litigated cases against Trump in the classified documents cases and who provided pro bono counsel to Special Counsel Jack Smith, removing security clearances and blocking government connected work.

· Argued in court that transgender soldiers should be removed from the military.[viii]

· Removed information about Black, Asian American and women military heroes from the Arlington National cemetery website,[ix]disappearing the accomplishments of people of color and women from official recognition.

And that’s just part of it.

But the resistance to Trump’s authoritarian rule has been busy as well:

· Protests across the country have demanded the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian student taken into custody.[x]

· “Tesla Take Down” protests at Tesla dealerships across the country in protest against Elon Musk’s takeover of our government have been so effective in tanking the brand and its stock price,[xi] that President Trump turned the White House into a car lot and personally embodied the used car salesman he was destined to be (if not for his father’s money) in an attempt to gin up Tesla sales.

· Protests nationwide continue to demand an end to government worker firings.

· Voters have shown up at town halls across the country to express anger about proposed plans to cut Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security[xii].

· Lawsuits filed by parents,[xiii] and by a score of states[xiv] have challenged the closing of the Education Department.

· Perkins Coie, the law firm targeted by Trump boldly challenged the Trump administration’s effort to blackball the firm and imperil its business;[xv]

· Federal courts have required Trump to rehire thousands of federal employees fired by DOGE[xvi]

· Federal courts have enjoined Trump’s efforts to freeze spending on governments grants and other funding.[xvii]

· Federal courts enjoined the Administration from removing migrants targeted under Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act – a decision the Trump Administration has defied.[xviii]

But the big stories last week were less about those who have protested and sued, and more about those among the most powerful institutional actors who appear to have lost the plot. Political scientists Steve Levitsky and Ryan Enos offered a blistering and spot-on condemnation of universities that have remained silent in the face of Trump’s authoritarian challenge to the freedom of universities.[xix]Calling out Harvard University specifically (where both scholars teach) for its silence in the face of the hideous attacks on Columbia University, Levitsky and Enos condemned the inaction of universities that have chosen a strategy of “lying low, avoiding public debate (and sometimes cooperating with the administration) in the hope of mitigating the coming assault.”[xx]

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has faced a wave of outrage and demands for resignation after his decision to vote in favor of cloture to avert a government shutdown. To be sure, the Democrats have few options for stopping the Republicans, who are firmly in the majority in the House and Senate from torching our government. But as many of us have been reminded ad nauseum during the years when Democrats controlled the Senate, the filibuster is one of the few procedural rules the party in the minority in the Senate has to counter being overrun by the majority.

But frustratingly, although Democrats were unwilling to abolish the filibuster in 2022 to advance their agenda, last week they were unwilling to use the filibuster to defy the Republican power grab. Heads the Republicans win. Tails the Democrats lose.

It was hard to understand the point of Democrats affixing their signature to a continuing resolution to fund a government that is being cut to the bone every day by Elon Musk – an unelected billionaire with no official government position – who has been permitted to usurp the appropriation power of Congress. When Trump and Musk lawlessly gut agencies and fire government workers, and Speaker Mike Johnson and his caucus cede the power of Congress to the President, we are in a constitutional crisis.

Trump and Musk’s anti-constitutional usurpation of congressional power with the complicity of the Republicans in Congress is an emergency. It demands an emergency response. Minority Leader Schumer and 7 other Democratic Senators (and I suspect more who were covered by the Leader’s unpopular action) were unprepared to meet the moment in a way that would have upped the stakes. Sometimes when the game is fixed, you have to overturn the tables.

I will concede a serious point Schumer later offered that got lost in the Comms disaster of his Wednesday night statement that suggested there would be a shutdown, and then his Thursday morning announcement that he would vote to avert one. If the government shutdown happened, there would be little chance of obtaining judicial orders enjoining decisions by Trump/Musk to eliminate programs, because legally during a government closure, the President enjoys unfettered power to determine which functions of government are “essential” – standard to which the courts would likely defer. By contrast, with the government open, challenges to DOGE firings and closures continue to do fairly well in the courts and have slowed down the force of Musk’s chainsaw.

In any case, Schumer’s decision and perhaps moreso the clumsy comms that accompanied it have resulted in boiling outrage within the base of the party, including calls for him to step down from leadership.

Of course, none of this compares to the perfidy of the Republican Party. We must never forget the unconscionable and dastardly conduct of Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republicans in the House and Senate – men and women who have abdicated their allegiance to this country and to democracy itself. Their cowardice and complicity in the destruction of this country must never be forgotten or whitewashed. Their betrayal is singular and historic. 

But there’s another group that is failing to meet this moment. America’s corporate leadership has been nearly silent during one of the most volatile economic periods in years. Last week the stock market took a nosedive – entering “correction” status as a result of Trump’s manic and unhinged tariff announcements. [xxi] Trump’s erratic tariffs – up one day, down the next, up again two weeks later – are lunacy. Every rational business leader knows that.[xxii] The predictable market response to Trump’s irrationality threatens the retirement plans of older Americans hoping to retire and the American economy. America’s leadership in the world has been compromised by Trump’s saber-rattling, and his insistence on imperialist moves towards Canada, the Panama Canal and Greenland, is destabilizing the integrity of perception of American stability. Combined with the massive government lawyers, Trump’s policies are bad for America and bad for business.

As Trump literally tanks the American economy and the trust of the international business community, where are the voices of America’s business leaders? Are they all hoping that Trump will do a commercial on the White House lawn hawking their products too? Are the leaders of the Business Roundtable (200 CEOs of the nation’s leading corporations) agnostic about the President’s stubborn insistence on policies that are wrecking the U.S. economy and our standing in the world?

These same business leaders enabled the lie that Trump is a “successful businessperson” – knowing full well that Trump does not seem to know what he’s talking about when he wades into economics, knowing of his six bankruptcies, knowing of his refusal to pay contractors, his false representations, and knowing that no responsible Fortune 500 CEO would ever have gone into business with Trump before he was elected President, or even after. Being wealthy is not the same as being a successful businessperson and they all know it. 

In an interview on CNBC, even host Maria Bartiromo – a Trump sycophant – felt compelled to remind Trump that successful business leaders need predictability to make coherent decisions about investments, infrastructure, expansion, and product development for markets. She noted that the up-and-down tariff mania undermines predictability. Trump responded, “well they say that. It sounds good to say.” Really? Is that it? Or is it a fundamental tenet of business that even a first year MBA student would know? At other times last week he has repeated with “we’re gonna have so much money from the tariffs” with a desperate insistence that suggested mental instability.

American corporations have either tried to placate Trump by paying tribute,[xxiii] or have “crawled into a protective shell” like the university officials called out by Levitsky and Enos. In either case, it is utterly irresponsible. Their voices and influence – presented collectively and forcefully – are critical to protecting the economic interests of this country, and our democracy. Their failure to act is a betrayal of their responsibility as citizens.

Media owners have shamed themselves – whitewashing their teams,[xxiv] surrendering the independence and diversity of their editorial pages,[xxv] and taking a knee before Trump’s demands rather than standing firm in the face of the challenge to our democracy.[xxvi]

In the week ahead, there will be many additional opportunities for leaders from our most powerful democratic institutions to meet this moment. Already it appears that the Trump Administration has defied a federal court order to turn around planes taking Venezuelan migrants accused of being to El Salvador.[xxvii] The Administration announced that the first 250 migrants arrived in El Salvador.[xxviii] What does that mean? Two hundred-fifty Venezuelan nationals have been disappeared into the one of the world’s most notoriously abusive prisons in El Salvador, without judicially approved trials or due process. 

What will judges do as Trump appears to defy judicial orders? This week will test the readiness of our judiciary to defend the rule of law.

Meanwhile ordinary people have been showing tremendous leadership, protesting, launching and participating in boycotts, conducting teach-ins, calling their elected representatives every week, sometimes several times a week, visiting district offices, participating in “die-ins,” writing letters and petitions, and building support for opposition candidates in special elections. A “mass march” has been announced by the organization Hands/Off for April 5th, although information is still spotty [please drop info in the comments]. Black churches have launched a 40-day Lenten boycott of Target for its obsequious abandonment of its DEI commitments.[xxix]

Every day we are called upon to meet the moment. As we see our neighbors seized by plainclothes agents without judicial warrants, and see our workplaces “obey in advance” – removing from websites, official policies and even mission statements expressing their commitment to equality and to inclusion, and as we see law firms crouch before this Administration’s threats, and media outlets silence voices that write the truth about this Administration, we have to decide how we will respond.

All over America ordinary people are looking into their toolboxes of non-violent actions and determining which ones they will use. It’s been beautiful to see.

But we must not absolve the leaders of our most powerful institutions – those who have the money and power, and influence to insulate themselves from the worst consequences of this Administration’s excesses – from their obligation to act and to meet the moment.

To those who are business leaders, captains of industry, university leaders, and media owners, decide who you will be at this moment. If we fully lose democracy in this country, it will be because the most privileged among us refused to accept the responsibility to speak out, to say “no more,” and to lead. History will not kindly remember those who left it to Americans with considerably less power and protection, to do the hard work of saving this country. Your tax cuts will not be large enough to cover your shame. And we will remember.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Lies, Musk, Elon, Racism, Resistance, Trump

Talking Points Memo: Trump Bullies Columbia University

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2025 //
1

David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo writes about the Trump administration’s bullying of Columbia University. Under the guise of fighting “anti-Semitism,” Trump has singled out Columbia for extreme punishment. Not only has he frozen $400 million in federal funds for research, he is now threatening Columbia unless it removes certain international studies from its curriculum. Trump has no authority to do this. Columbia is sure to sue and should prevail. This is Trump’s basic authoritarianism showing and portent of worse to come. He wants the nation to bow to his whims and bigotry, and only the courts have stood in his way.

Kurtz writes:

If you still harbored any doubt that President Trump’s ongoing attack on Columbia University – a private institution – is drawn straight from the authoritarian playbook, then the latest development should be clarifying.

The Trump administration – specifically the Department of Education, HHS, and GSA – sent a letter yesterday to Columbia attempting to extortan array of concessions in how the university is run before it may consider restoring some $400 million in frozen federal funding.

Imposing an arbitrary March 20 deadline, the Trump administration demanded that Columbia complete a laundry list of internal restructurings, policy changes, and submissions to federal authority. Among the most alarming demands: put the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department in what it calls “academic receivership” for at least five years.

If Columbia complies by the deadline, then and only then will the Trump administration “open a conversation about immediate and long-term structural reforms” at the university. If it’s not clear, it sure should be: Even if Columbia submits to this extortion letter, it doesn’t get federal funding restored. It merely sets itself up for a later round of bullying, exorbitant demands, and more extortion.

The extortion letter came the same day DHS agents executed search warrants at the residences of two Columbia students. “According to the sources, it was part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on individuals it has described as espousing the views of Hamas and threatening the safety of Jewish students,” ABC News reported.

This all transpired as Columbia graduate and pro-Palestinian protest leader Mahmoud Khalil remained in federal detention as the Trump administration attempts to deport him even though he’s a legal permanent resident. His lawyers amended their filings as they obtained new information about his detainment. In an interview with NPR, a top DHS official could not articulate what wrongdoing Khalil was being accused of.

Meanwhile, The Atlantic reported that the Trump administration had targeted at least one other person at the same time as Khalil:

It turns out Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified a second individual to be deported, and included that person alongside Khalil in a March 7 letter to the Department of Homeland Security. Both were identified in the letter as legal permanent residents, The Atlantic has learned. …

The officials did not disclose the name of the second green-card holder, and did not know whether the person is a current or former Columbia student, or had been singled out for some other reason. The person has not been arrested yet, the U.S. official said.

The Trump administration’s bullying of a private university is being done under the guise of rooting out antisemitism. But the real authoritarian move here is to bring higher education under the thumb of the president. Columbia’s not the only example, but it’s the most extreme.

“So far, America’s leading universities have remained virtually silent in the face of this authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education,” the Harvard student newspaper editorialized.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Higher Education, Trump

Why Does Trump Want to Destroy America’s Biomedical Research Institutions?

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2025 //
30

Jeff Nesbit, who worked at both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, wrote this article for The Contrarian. The question is one that I keep asking about many federal government programs that are being eliminated by Trump and Musk, like USAID.

Why? It makes no sense.

The fact that Trump chose Robert F.Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services should have been an alarm bell; Kennedy is not only unqualified, he is stridently hostile to science.

The only beneficiary of this insane and reckless slashing of our most successful programs would be our international enemies, Russia and China. They want us to fail. Trump and Musk are making their dreams come true.

Nesbit wrote:

A siren call is cascading wildly through the corridors of every major academic center in America right now with a huge question firmly at its epicenter: Why are Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and President Donald Trump’s White House team hellbent on destroying the National Institutes of Health, the world’s gold standard of biomedical research?

There isn’t an easy answer to the question, unfortunately.

What is true and known is that Kennedy’s HHS team has halted communications activities about NIH grants; throttled necessary peer-reviewed grant-review meetings; ordered the federal agency staff to review dozens of keywords in thousands of existing grants and issue termination letters based on what it finds; threatened to fire hundreds of expert reviewers and core staff at the agency; placed a cap on indirect costs that underpin basic scientific and medical research; and put woefully unprepared, lower-level career staff in charge of key functions at the agency.

The actions have ground NIH to a halt and sent shockwaves through academia and the biomedical research institutions that have created nearly all our life-saving breakthroughs in the past quarter century. Higher education leaders have halted Ph. D. programs in response. Major research labs are being shuttered or told to stop most of their research.

An American biomedical research enterprise that has been the envy of the world’s science and medical community for decades has been surprised and shocked by the careless destruction of core staff functions and almost mindless efforts to purge NIH of hundreds or thousands of grants for reasons that seem ideological at best and irrational and dangerous at worst.

The question, again, is why? Why are Kennedy, Musk and Trump determined to eviscerate the most successful biomedical research system the world has ever known—a scientific enterprise that produces life-saving medicines and leads to breakthroughs (via basic scientific and medical research) that the private sector would never support?

There was a time, once, that NIH was supported by majorities of Republican and Democratic politicians. NIH’s budget, which supports the entire biomedical research field, has grown year after year with large, non-controversial, bipartisan majorities in Congress.

Until now. Trump and Musk have clearly determined that NIH and the National Science Foundation (NIH’s companion in the world of basic scientific research funding) need to be eviscerated and then reoriented away from life-saving scientific and medical research toward some destination not yet revealed. And while this effort has been racing forward, there has been almost no pushback from politicians—at least not yet.

One reason for this is that scientists are historically apolitical and, to be blunt, quite bad at the political game that dominates Washington, D.C. Scientists aren’t nearly as adept as others at advocating for themselves or their priorities to politicians who make funding decisions…

Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust scientists or academia—and clearly don’t hear or recognize the immense value that the biomedical research enterprise brings to American progress.

NSF funding built and then supported the internet and led to nearly every modern computer and basic scientific advancement we recognize in the hard sciences. NIH medical and scientific research led directly to the creation of nearly all the life-saving drugs developed in the past quarter century that Americans rely on today.

The economic impact to states with large bioscience research centers would be enormous. Tennessee, for instance, would be devastated by the NIH cuts. Vanderbilt University Medical Center is one of the top research hospitals in America. It received nearly half a billion dollars in 2024 for medical research, the second most in the country. Its budget would be cut by more than 10 percent. Nearly 50,000 jobs and 4,000 businesses in Tennessee are dependent on the biosciences research enterprise in the state and would be severely impacted by the NIH cuts.

Other states, such as Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, would be similarly devastated by the cuts. Washington University in St. Louis received $717 million from NIH last year and would lose an estimated $108 million. The University of Michigan received $708 million and stands to see a cut of $119 million. Two Pennsylvania universities – the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh – received nearly $1.3 billion and could lose $244 million. All of those add up to massive job losses and devastating impacts to each state’s economies.

But Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust the scientific and medical research enterprise. They don’t hear the entreaties by scientists who merely want to do great work that benefits the greater good. And they don’t listen to those calls of bewilderment from scientific and medical research leaders that are falling on deaf ears. This could be happening because scientists are particularly bad at politics.

But it also could be that Trump, Musk and Kennedy are willing to destroy the most successful biomedical research enterprise the world has ever known simply because it is a direct way to harm elite academic institutions that they believe harbor leaders and academics who are ideologically opposed to their aims and politics.

And that is a dangerous story that every American needs to hear and fully take to heart right now—before the Trump administration capriciously destroys a hundred years of scientific and medical progress in a matter of weeks or months.

Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services (which includes NIH) in the Biden administration, and the director of legislative and public affairs at NSF during the Bush and Obama administrations.

After I put this article in the queue, I came across this article about John’s Hopkins University:

More than 2,000 positions related to global health are being cut from the Johns Hopkins University after the Baltimore institution saw $800 million in federal grants disappear, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday.

Hopkins’ medical school; the Bloomberg School of Public Health, including its Center for Communication Programs; and JHPIEGO, the university’s health initiative that focuses on global public health, will be affected by the cuts. USAID was the main funder for both JHPIEGO and CCP.

“This is a difficult day for our entire community. The termination of more than $800 million in USAID funding is now forcing us to wind down critical work here in Baltimore and internationally,” Hopkins’ spokesperson said in a statement.

The Trump administration, through advisor Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, is slashing federal spending across agencies in an effort to end wasteful spending. Such cuts have an outsized effect on Hopkins, which comes in first of all universities in federally funded research. By extension, those cuts affect Baltimore and Maryland, where Hopkins is the city and state’s largest largest private employer. Hopkins says it accounts for more than $15 billion in economic output in the state.

The funding cuts for research institutions are hurting universities in multiple states.

Who determines that basic research in science and medicine are unimportant?

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, Insane, Musk, Elon, Science, Trump, Tyranny

Corruption Unlimited, Sponsored by the Trump Administration

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2025 //
4

David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo describes the evisceration of all guardrails that protect us from looting by public officials and private billionaires.

Trump’s flunkies have eliminated the Inspectors General in every Department; they are the nonpartisan watchdogs who scrutinize contracts and official actions to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. They were all summarily fired, without even the 30-day notice to Congress required by law and without cause.

Kurtz writes about the purge at the Justice Department, which will never again investigate Trump or any of his allies.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has eviscerated the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, NBC News reports, in another sign that rampant unrestrained public corruption will be a defining feature of the Trump era.

We didn’t get here overnight. A social, political, and legal transformation over the past decade has removed many of the most important guardrails to contain public corruption. The 2016 Supreme Court decision in McDonnell v. United States was the most overt early sign that democracy’s endemic but manageable corruption was going to be allowed to run free.

The implications of that and similar subsequent decisions are hard to isolate from the wholesale corruption that Donald Trump brought to the table beginning that same year. But the rank corruption of his first term pales next to the structural changes he’s already wrought less than two months into his second term.

The Trump White House’s takeover of the Justice Department writ large is the greatest boon to public corruption, but there have been a series of particularly egregious actions – like Trump’s executive order crapping all over the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – that have cleared the way for more wrongdoing and less accountability for wrongdoers.

Bondi’s decision to strip the Public Integrity Section bare leaves Main Justice’s experienced career prosecutors on the sidelines in public corruption cases, shifts the onus to bring (and not to bring) such cases to more politically malleable U.S. attorneys, and weakens the mechanism for ensuring nationwide consistency across investigations and cases.

Unrestrained public corruption creates its own perverse political culture. It feeds into cynicism and nihilism about government that in turn is exploited by figures like Trump to justify further weakening and undermining the rule of law. It’s a death spiral and we’re now firmly in the grips of it.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Justice, Trump, Tyranny

Jan Resseger: Will the Trump Gang Succeed in Demonizing the Words “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”?

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2025 //
12

Jan Resseger reflects on the Trump administration’s determination to eliminate not only to eliminate programs based on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” but the words themselves. Those three words must be expunged from our vocabularity. We must not recognize that there is diversity of people, even within the same religion or race. We must not strive for equity, which means that everyone has an equal chance to thrive. When they don’t thrive, we ask why. But we mustn’t care anymore.

Inclusion is the third “dirty” word that must be extirpated, inclusion means “all.” Remember when you recited the Pledge of Allegiance in school? I do. We said, “with liberty and justice for all.” I suppose it will be changed now to “with liberty and justice for some.”

Read Jan’s post. As always, it is thoughtful, incisive and well researched.

Have faith. This madness and meanness will come to an end.

Categories Censorship, Equity, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Gender, Language, Lies, Stupid, Trump
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