I had a conversation with Tim Slekar on his program, “Busted Pencils,” about the Rightwing attack on teaching history honestly and accurately.
We had fun, and you might enjoy listening:
#BustEDPencils Pod.
It’s not an attack on history. It’s an attack on #democracy.
Guest: Diane Ravitch.
Listen here: https://civicmedia.us/podcast/teaching-history-in-hostile-times
ProPublica wrote recently about a powerful organization of far-right conservatives that carefully avoids public scrutiny. They are wealthy, powerful, and networked, thanks to the Federalist Society and its mastermind Leonard Leo. Leo is the guy who picked judges for Trump and engineered the selection of Brett Kanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Please read this article about Teneo, an organization with long tentacles and a goal of crushing liberal ideas, ideas that are central to our democracy.
A few tidbits:
ProPublica and Documented have obtained more than 50 hours of internal Teneo videos and hundreds of pages of documents that reveal the organization’s ambitious agenda, influential membership and burgeoning clout. We have also interviewed Teneo members and people familiar with the group’s activities. The videos, documents and interviews provide an unfiltered look at the lens through which the group views the power of the left — and how it plans to combat it.
In response to questions for this story, Leo said in a statement: “Teneo’s young membership proves that the conservative movement is poised to be even more talented, driven, and successful in the future. This is a group that knows how to build winning teams.”
The records show Teneo’s members have included a host of prominent names from the conservative vanguard, including such elected officials as U.S. Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Missouri’s Josh Hawley, a co-founder of the group. Other members have included Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, now the fourth-ranking House Republican, as well as Nebraska’s attorney general and Virginia’s solicitor general. Three senior aides to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, are members. Another is the federal judge who struck down a Biden administration mask mandate. The heads of the Republican Attorneys General Association, Republican State Leadership Committee and Turning Point USA — all key cogs in the world of national conservative politics — have been listed as Teneo members…
Teneo co-founder Evan Baehr, a tech entrepreneur and veteran of conservative activism, said in a 2019 video for new members that Teneo had “many, many, many dozens” of members working in the Trump administration, including in the White House, State Department, Justice Department and Pentagon. “They’re everywhere….”
Soon after Leo took an interest in Teneo, the group’s finances soared. Annual revenue reached$2.3 million in 2020 and nearly $5 million in 2021, according to tax records. In 2021, the bulk of Teneo’s income — more than $3 million — came from one source: DonorsTrust, a clearinghouse for conservative, libertarian and other charitable gifts that masks the original source of the money. In 2020, the Leo-run group that received the Chicago business owner’s $1.6 billion donation gave $41 million to DonorsTrust, which had $1.5 billion in assets as of 2021.
Teneo’s other funders have included marquee conservative donors: hedge fund investor Paul Singer, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the DeVos family, according to Baehr.
As the group’s finances improved, its videos became much more professionally produced, and its website underwent a dramatic upgrade from previous iterations. All of this was part of what Baehr called “Teneo 2.0,” a major leap forward for the group, driven in part by Leo’s guidance and involvement….
Many of the connections happen at Teneo’s annual retreat, which brings together hundreds of members and their spouses, plus allies including politicians like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and DeSantis as well as business leaders and prominent academics. Speakers at past Teneo retreats have included luminaries spanning politics, culture, business and the law: New York Times columnist David Brooks, federal judge Trevor McFadden, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, “Woke, Inc.” author and 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, former Trump cabinet official and 2024 presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, ultrawealthy donors and activists Dick and Betsy DeVos, and Chick-fil-A board chair Dan Cathy.
These are the only posts today. Read them. Think about it. What did you learn? What should we do? None of us is a billionaire. How can we save our democracy?
Organize. Be informed. Vote.
Several years ago, I went to an art house cinema to see a film about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Society. I didn’t know much about this group other than that they were students who stood up to the Nazis and lost their lives. I am always interested in learning true stories about people who demonstrated courage against overwhelming odds. The film was indeed moving and inspiring. It ends when Sophie and her brother are guillotined. The audience knew the ending, yet many sat in stunned silence as a gesture of respect for these brave young Germans. Some wept.
Thanks to Greg B., I learned that the last surviving member of the White Rose Society just died, at the age of 103. Her name was Traute Lafrenze. She was repeatedly imprisoned. After the war, she moved to the U.S. She married an American. She died in South Carolina. The German government awarded her its highest civilian honor on her 100th birthday.
Read about her in The Smithsonian.
Or the New York Times.
She and the White Rose Society, these courageous idealistic young Germans, should be remembered forever. That is their ultimate triumph over the monster who murdered them.
I had the pleasure of speaking by Zoom to a meeting of the Pastors for Florida Children. The event was reported by Baptist Global News.
The morning session was also addressed by Baptist minister and retired Arkansas Judge Wendell Griffen. Although we have never met, our messages were in synch: Do not let the authoritarian Governor Ron DeSantis intimidate you!
Baptist minister and retired Arkansas judge Wendell Griffen stood before an audience of faith leaders and education advocates in Tallahassee, Fla., March 9, pointed to his lapel and dared Gov. Ron DeSantis to have him apprehended for being politically and racially aware.
“I wore a ‘woke’ button on purpose. I want to get arrested for being woke. I plead guilty to being woke. I want to be convicted of being woke,” Griffen said during a prayer breakfast sponsored by Pastors for Florida Children.
Wendell Griffen
Griffen, a BNG columnist and pastor of New Millennium Church in Little Rock, urged the in-person and virtual interfaith and multiracial audience to be equally defiant of Florida’s political leaders. “Be a community of prophets but teach as one and correct, confront, organize, interact, defy, dissent, disrupt.”
Jewish, Christian and Muslim participants who prayed ahead of the speeches by Griffen and education historian Diane Ravitch focused on DeSantis’ prohibition of books that teach about racial injustice and inclusion….
Please open the link and read his bold, wise, and brave advice.
Ravitch opened with a double-barreled barrage at DeSantis’ efforts to dismantle freedom of inquiry in public schools.
“I write a daily blog, and I find that it’s being overwhelmed by the bad news from Florida,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be anything good coming from your elected officials. If anything, it seems to be building a more and more authoritarian empire to control the thinking of everybody in the state.”
She said DeSantis seems to be going out of his way to disprove Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous saying that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“Your governor and your legislature are trying to flatten that arc so that it does not bend
towards justice,” she declared.
Current political events in Florida do not impact public schools alone, Ravitch said. “Florida today is at the very apex of a movement to turn the clock back a century, to turn the clock back on religious freedom, on racial justice and on all the evolution we have experienced over this past century to make ours a more just society. Your governor is creating a model of thought control and calling it freedom. Every time I see him standing in front of a banner that says ‘freedom,’ I’m reminded of George Orwell’s 1984, where freedom equals slavery.”
The conservative attack on the concept of “woke” is another sign of burgeoning authoritarianism, she said.
“We have to redeem that word. It means being awake — awake to injustice, awake to history, awake to all the things that are wrong in our society and that have been wrong over the centuries. And his (DeSantis’) idea of woke is simply to eliminate critical thinking about history and even knowledge of history. And this is very dangerous.”
And that’s only the beginning.
Dana Milbank, a fabulous columnist at The Washington Post, reviews Kevin McCarthy’s long record of claiming that he didn’t know, he didn’t see it, he didn’t hear it, he has no opinion.
After McCarthy gave 40,000 hours of security video from January 6, 2021, to Tucker Carlson, he was surprised to hear that Tucker Carlson took clips to “prove” that nothing much happened that day. He was confused. I’m confused too as I thought that Carlson had long advanced the claim that the insurrection and violence that we saw that day was actually a “false flag” operation, manipulated by the FBI, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter. All along, Carlson has pandered to his viewers by insisting that Trump supporters had nothing to do with the turmoil and desecration of the nation’s Capitol.
Just another day at the Capitol is the new line at FOX. If you thought otherwise, your eyes deceived you. The insurrectionists were actually peaceful protestors, now victims and patriots.
This new line was too much for many of the Republicans who were there that day and ran for their lives.
Milbank wrote:
Not since the Know-Nothing Party disappeared in the 1850s has a public figure boasted about his ignorance with as much gusto as Kevin McCarthy does.
It doesn’t seem to matter what you ask the speaker of the House. He hasn’t read it, seen it or heard about it.
The explosive documents from the Dominion case showing Fox News hosts privately said Donald Trump’s election lies were hokum but promoted the lies on air anyway?
“I didn’t read all that. I didn’t see all that,” McCarthy told The Post.
The way Fox News’s Tucker Carlson (predictably) manipulated the Jan. 6, 2021, security footage McCarthy (foolishly) gave the propagandist, giving the false appearance that the bloody insurrection was “mostly peaceful”?
“I didn’t see what was aired,” McCarthy asserted.
Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, in an implicit rebuke of McCarthy, blasting the Carlson propaganda while holding up a statement from the Capitol Police chief denouncing Fox News’s “outrageous,” “false” and “offensive” portrayal of the insurrection?
You guessed it. McCarthy “didn’t see” McConnell do that.
The benighted McCarthy has been amassing this impressive body of obtuseness for some time. If ignorance is bliss, the California Republican has been in nirvana for years now.
How about Trump’s speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, provoking the sacking of the Capitol?
“I didn’t watch it,” McCarthy said.
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) calling the insurrectionists’ rampage a “normal tourist visit”?
“I don’t know what Congressman Clyde said,” quoth McCarthy, and “I didn’t see it.”
When his own designated negotiator reached a bipartisan agreement to form a commission to probe the Jan. 6 attack (a commission McCarthy ultimately killed)?
Trump, in a recorded phone call, demanding Georgia’s secretary of state “find” enough votes to overturn the election results?
Trump telling four congresswomen of color (three of them U.S.-born) to “go back” where they came from, prompting chants of “send her back” among his rallygoers?
“I didn’t get to see the rally.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) harassing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) with shouts and slander just off the House floor?
“I didn’t see that. I don’t know what happened.”
Trump’s ludicrous allegation that former GOP congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may have murdered a staffer?
“I don’t quite know about the subject itself. I don’t know this subject well.”
Trump’s scandalous claim that Democrats inflated the death toll from a hurricane in Puerto Rico to “make me look as bad as possible”?
“I haven’t read it yet,” McCarthy pleaded.
At best, McCarthy’s willful cluelessness is just a dodge. But this week, McCarthy’s see-no-evil approach was just plain evil.
After Carlson aired his phony portrayal of the insurrection, several Republicans finally spoke up about Fox News’s lies: “Inexcusable and bull—-” (Sen. Thom Tillis, N.C.), “whitewashing” (Sen. Lindsey Graham, S.C.), “dangerous and disgusting” (Sen. Mitt Romney, Utah).
Then there was McCarthy, questioned by reporters just outside the speaker’s office, which the supposedly “peaceful” insurrectionists had ransacked that terrible day.
“Do you regret giving him this footage so he could whitewash the events of that day?” asked CNN’s Manu Raju.
“No,” McCarthy replied, adding some gibberish about “transparency” (which is the very opposite of Carlson’s fabrication).
“Do you agree with his portrayal of what happened that day?” Raju pressed.
“Look,” McCarthy said. “Each person can come up with their own conclusion.”
Talk about dangerous and disgusting. Given a choice between fact and fiction, between law and anarchy, between democracy and thuggery, the speaker of the House proclaimed his agnosticism. In doing so, he threw the power of the speakership behind the insurrectionists and against the constitutional order he swore to uphold. McCarthy’s leadership team even endorsed Carlson’s fakery, promoting a link to the segment from the House GOP conference’s official Twitter account with four alarm emojis and a “MUST WATCH” recommendation.
Of course, were McCarthy to turn against Fox News, the speaker, weakened by the promises he made to secure the speakership, would be swiftly replaced by the likes of GOP caucus chair Elise Stefanik of New York (who claimed Carlson’s propaganda “demolished” the “Democrats’ dishonest narrative” about Jan. 6), or Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.), who went on Carlson’s show to congratulate him on his deception.
So McCarthy sells out democracy to preserve his title. He gave the security footage to Carlson in the first place because he promised that to the far-right Republicans denying him the speakership during his 15-ballot quinceañera in January.
Even Fox Corp.’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, has expressed some regret over the network’s role in perpetrating Trump’s “big lie,” saying it should have been “stronger in denouncing it.” The internal documents exposed in the Dominion lawsuit show beyond any doubt that Fox News hosts knew the truth about the 2020 election and yet encouraged viewers night after night to believe Trump’s lies.
Those hosts continue to deceive and manipulate viewers nightly. The same day Carlson aired his Jan. 6 fabrication, Trump said on Sean Hannity’s radio show that he would have been willing to let Vladimir Putin “take over” parts of Ukraine. But when Hannity played excerpts of the interview on Fox News, the network edited out Trump’s proposed surrender.
The latest Fox News lies have proven too much for the Senate GOP leader. Though McConnell has enabled Trump at crucial moments, he said at a news conference this week that it was “a mistake” for Fox News to portray the insurrection “in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here in the Capitol thinks.”
Yet McCarthy continues to put himself before his country. In just two months on the job, McCarthy “already … has done more than any party leader in Congress to enable the spread of Donald Trump’s Big Lie,” the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, charged on the Senate floor this week. The speaker, he said, “has made our democracy weaker.”
And McCarthy isn’t finished with his depredations. Greene, given a position of influence and respectability by the speaker, is launching a probe, complete with a field trip to a D.C. jail, into the “inhumane treatment” allegedly suffered by the accused insurrectionists awaiting trial. McCarthy has also given the green light to a new probe designed to challenge the conclusions of the Jan. 6 committee.
The man who will lead that panel, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), declared this week that Americans “didn’t see the other side” of the insurrection. “I think the truth is going to be somewhere between the violent videos and the supposedly peaceful actions there,” he said.
No. The only truth is that Jan. 6 was a violent attack on the seat of American democracy. There was nothing peaceful about an armed insurrection attempting to overturn an election — even if some people there that day weren’t themselves violent.
But that truth — and this democracy — are threatened by a dangerously weak speaker of the House, who has concluded that the only way to preserve his own power is to support Fox News in its sabotage of this country.
Governor Ron DeSantis is doing his best to crush academic freedom and the expression of views that differ from his own. He won a sweeping re-election victory in 2022, and his party has a super-majority in both houses of the legislature. Whatever DeSantis wants, the legislature will give him.
But that’s not enough. The Democratic Party is powerless and supine, but they have the nerve to speak out against the Governor’s authoritarian policies. He can’t tolerate any nay-sayers.
Fabiola Santiago, a journalist for the Miami Herald, wrote with incredulity about the GOP’s fascist ambitions:
Now, I can truly affirm that I have seen it all in Gov. DeSantis’ Florida.
The state’s Republican Party is no longer a fan of multiparty American democracy — and they feel no shame in saying so in public. Nor in proposing legislation to dismantle it.
When the Florida GOP’s tweet appeared on my Twitter news feed, I thought it was a joke or a parody. But what Republicans are up to this legislative season is no laughing matter.
After easily winning the gubernatorial election and obtaining a Republican super-majority in the Legislature that allows the party to act unimpeded, GOP chairman Chris M. Ziegler says he’ll take nothing less than eradicating the Democratic Party. His threat to give Democrats no seat at all at the table is very real.
Republicans are acting like the hemisphere’s evil regimes. They know it, but don’t care.
On February 25, 2023, at 11:30 a.m., the chairman of the Florida GOP, Chris Ziegler, posted a tweet @FloridaGOP in which he wrote:
from Chairman @ChrisMZiegler: “Until we get every Democrat out of office and no Democrat considers running for office, we’re going to continue to step on the gas and move forward in Florida.”
Chris Ziegler’s wife Bridget is the founder of the extremist group Moms for Liberty, which is deeply involved in protests against masks, in book banning, in fighting “critical race theory,” and in attacking gays and the teaching of Black history.
Santiago continues:
The U.S. Constitution and the system of checks and balances be damned. There was immediate pushback on Twitter.
A person identifying as @k_kojei answered Ziegler: “I disagree. We need dissenting voices. That’s what a democracy is about. The problem is not helped by a one-sided view of things. Polarization is just that, no matter who does it! There has to be dialog and balance or we remain only half represented!”
Ziegler doubled down.
“We are doing just fine not giving Democrats a seat at the table in Florida,” he said, mimicking what the planet’s dictators, who think countries are their personal fiefdoms, say about the opposition.
“I recommend other states to do the same!”
More people enter the conversation, at first, remarkably civil in tone, given the sewer speech Twitter attracts.
Some of the horrified were Republican.
“That is extreme and Totalitarian by definition. Not a good look!” tweeted a man who describes himself as a “patriot” with “a recently restored account after two years. Starting from scratch. Unapologetically Conservative American!! #MAGA”
“No, it’s DEMOCRACY!” retorts Ziegler, the kind of Florida man who lives in an alternate universe, and so dumb — or sure of his party’s power — that he accuses the Republicans who disagree with him of being “leftist.”
Finally, a ‘fighting for our republic” Floridian from the Treasure Coast brings a fitting hashtag to the conversation — #FloridaWhereFreedomDies. She posts a checklist of tactics Nazis used in their rise to power.
It’s eerily familiar, but nothing new to those of us who have visited museums in Israel and Germany. It all begins with religious, ethnic and lifestyle persecution, silencing the media and obliterating political opposition.
The Florida GOP and DeSantis’ ballyhooed platform is ticking off a whole lot of unimaginably undemocratic boxes.
TAMARA LUSH • AP
Pictured in this April 14, 2017 photo, Christian Ziegler, 33, a marketing professional from Sarasota, has become the Florida GOP chairman going into the 2024 presidential race. He made the constitutionally questionable vow to eradicate Florida’s Democratic Party and defended a one-party state. (AP Photo/Tamara Lush)
Unfortunately, talk is only the beginning.
Destroying the Democratic Party is no empty threat.
As if the new GOP chairman acting like a two-bit Third World dictator-wannabe wasn’t egregious enough, his words were quickly followed by legislative action.
Former GOP chairman, Blaise Ingoglia, 2015-2019, threw the law behind Ziegler’s words.
Now Ingoglia, a 52-year-old Spring Hills home builder — named one of Tampa Bay’s most influential politicians — filed Tuesday “The Ultimate Cancel Act,” SB 1248, creating the conditions to force the Division of Elections to declare the Democratic Party illegal in Florida.
Reading the dangerous gobbledygook contained in Ingoglia’s bill is an exercise similar to interpreting Cuba’s repressive laws, where the bureaucratic entwining of edicts achieves the goal of making the repression look reasonable to the outside world.
Ingoglia has concocted a ruse: Rule the Democratic Party racist, claiming it’s because Southern Democrats supported slavery in the 1800s, and order it dismantled the way Confederate monuments are forced to come down.
His legal maneuvering is purely a power trip. Sad to say, but it’s unnecessary. The inept Florida Democrats, the 2020 midterms showed, aren’t a serious political threat.
The GOP, however, should scare every Floridian — and, given DeSantis’ 2024 ambitions, every American. We’re just a stepping stone.
The Florida GOP is DeSantis’ party. Nothing happens behind his back. This hardened, fascist Florida is a carefully planned, if sometimes stupidly executed, plot to destroy the United States as we know it.
This isn’t unlike the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021, only the men leading the charge are in suits instead of camouflage.
What institution will defend Floridians from tyranny when the GOP has so cleverly staged a takeover of every sector in the state?
Emboldened Florida Republicans aren’t happy with simply winning by big margins.
They want what every dictator has: total domination over what people think, whom they love, what they read. Total political control over law and policy without organized opposition to offer an alternative.
Floridians must wake up. It’s imperative.
None of this is happening without DeSantis’s knowledge and support. It sounds insane and fascist, but it is real. Ron DeSantis shows his true colors.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson summarized Secretary of State Anthony Blinken‘s address to the U.N. Security Council Ministerial Meeting on Ukraine Sovereignty and Russian Accountability. We must never forget that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, and it is irrelevant that it belonged to Russia in the past or during the repressive era of the Soviet Union. Ukraine belongs to the people of Ukraine. I have highlighted sections of his speech that touched me. Open the link to read the footnotes.
She wrote:
“One year and one week ago—on February 17th, 2022—I warned this council that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the United Nations Security Council Ministerial Meeting on Ukraine Sovereignty and Russian Accountability today.
“I said that Russia would manufacture a pretext, and then use missiles, tanks, soldiers, cyber attacks to strike pre-identified targets, including Kyiv,” Blinken continued, “with the aim of toppling Ukraine’s democratically elected government. Russia’s representative—the same representative who will speak today—called these, and I quote, ‘groundless accusations.’
“Seven days later, on February 24th, 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion.”
When Putin’s initial attack failed to give him control of Ukraine, Blinken continued, “he called snap referenda in four occupied parts of Ukraine, deported Ukrainians, bussed in Russians, held sham votes at gunpoint, and then manipulated the results to claim near unanimous support for joining the Russian Federation.”
“Over the last year,” Blinken said, “Russia has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian men, women, and children; uprooted more than 13 million people from their homes; destroyed more than half of the country’s energy grid; bombed more than 700 hospitals, 2,600 schools; and abducted at least 6,000 Ukrainian children—some as young as four months old—and relocated them to Russia.
“And yet, the spirit of the Ukrainians remains unbroken; if anything, it’s stronger than ever.”
Blinken’s remarkable speech told the history of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, then highlighted that the world community has come together to stand behind Ukraine and the principles of the United Nations Charter that make all countries safer and more secure: “No seizing land by force. No erasing another country’s borders. No targeting civilians in war. No wars of aggression.”
He noted that the war had caused hardship around the globe, but the “vast majority” of states in the United Nations have condemned Russia’s violations of the U.N. Charter, including 141 who voted for a resolution along those lines just yesterday.
When Putin tried to use hunger as a weapon to end sanctions, more than 100 countries stepped up to bring down world grain prices; when Putin tried to use energy as a weapon, the rest of the world redirected national gas supplies so that the countries he was targeting could keep their people warm, and Europe worked hard to end its dependence on Russian energy.
Blinken said that if we do not defend the basic principles of the U.N. Charter, “we invite a world in which might makes right, the strong dominate the weak. That’s the world this body was created to end.”
While everyone—especially Ukraine—wants peace, he said, that peace must be durable, not simply an excuse to let Russia rest, rearm, and relaunch the war. As Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has outlined, any peace must honor Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. Putin has rejected this condition out of the box, saying that Ukraine must accept his “annexation” of Ukraine’s territories.
Blinken reminded his listeners that not everything in the world has two sides. “In this war, there is an aggressor and there is a victim,” he said. “If Russia stops fighting and leaves Ukraine, the war ends. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. The fact remains: One man—Vladimir Putin—started this war; one man can end it.”
When Russia and its defenders say the ongoing war is diverting resources from others in need, Blinken said, “look at Moscow’s actions” and look at the numbers. Last year, the U.S. contributed $13.5 billion in food aid and funded more than 40% of the World Food Program’s budget. Russia pays less than 1% of that budget.
Blinken went on: “Based on the latest UN figures, the United States donates over nine times as much as Russia to UN peacekeeping. We donate 390 times as much as Russia to UNICEF. We give nearly a thousand times as much as Russia to the UN Refugee Agency.”
Blinken reminded his listeners that the atrocities we are seeing Russians commit in Ukraine are not normal. “Bucha is not normal,” he said. “Mariupol is not normal. Irpin is not normal. Bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal. Stealing Ukrainian children from their families and giving them to people in Russia is not normal.
“We must not let President Putin’s callous indifference to human life become our own.”
Today, the leaders of the international Group of Seven, known as the G7, met virtually with Zelensky. The G7 includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the European Union.
The statement they issued echoed Blinken’s speech, then went on to pledge to continue food and humanitarian aid as countries suffer from the war, and to continue to design sanctions to make sure those countries continue to have access to food and fertilizers. The G7 leaders expressed “profound sympathy” for those affected by the “horrifying earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria” and pledged continued support.
“Above all,” they said, “our solidarity will never waver in standing with Ukraine, in supporting countries and people in need, and in upholding the international order based on the rule of law.”
The Biden administration today announced $2 billion in military aid to Ukraine, including drones, communications equipment, HIMARS rockets, and 155-millimeter artillery ammunition, while the G7 has increased its 2023 support for Ukraine to $39 billion, and both Germany and Sweden committed to sending more Leopard 2 tanks.
The deputy chair of Russia’s security council, former president Dmitry Medvedev, said today that Russia planned to “push the borders of threats to our country as far as possible, even if these are the borders of Poland.” Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), meaning an attack on it would be an attack on the rest of NATO, including the United States.
At a press conference in Kyiv today, Zelensky said: “Victory will be inevitable. I am certain there will be victory.”
“We have everything for it. We have the motivation, certainty, the friends, the diplomacy. You have all come together for this. If we all do our important homework, victory will be inevitable.”
Austin Bailey writes in The Arkansas Times about a disappearing kind of Republican: the old-timers who supported their community public schools. As they die out, they are replaced by the newcomers in the mold of Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who abhor anything provided by government, no matter what the consequences.
Sanders has proposed a sweeping voucher bill that will send hundreds of millions of dollars to students already enrolled in private and religious schools. A while back, there were Republicans who would have fought her. Their numbers are dwindling.
Bailey writes:
It’s a different era at the Arkansas Capitol these days, with emboldened and Trumpy Republicans unafraid to mislead, obfuscate and say the quiet parts out loud.
Innocent and harmless trans kids get crammed into metaphorical lockers over there all the time now, a convenient scapegoat for white evangelical bullies virtue signalling their Aryan heteronormativity. Poor people who need housing and food are also sitting ducks, powerless to punch back at upper-middle-class legislators chastising them to get a job already.
But the most deafening quiet part blaring in our ears this week was the message that providing a solid education to all children in Arkansas is kind of a drag, so the state should give up on that idea altogether and let the free market handle it. Sure, we will be leaving families who lack the cash, resources or elitism required to bail on democracy’s greatest invention to languish in public schools whose funding bases shrink as taxpayer money goes to private schools. But for those who stay put in those starving public schools — either because they love them, or because there are no other options close by, or because a $7,000 voucher covers only part of the tuition and other expenses required for a private education — well, that’s their “choice.”BRIAN CHILSONRep. Bruce Cozart is plumb worn out.
Rep. Bruce Cozart (R-Hot Springs), former chair of the House Education Committee and a 10-year Capitol veteran, all but admitted this week that the fight for equity in education is lost. Cozart met with a cluster of public school teachers who came to Little Rock from across the state to try to figure out what the hell is going on. Gov. Sarah Sanders continues to dangle foreboding sound bytes about “bold, conservative reform,” “education freedom accounts” and merit pay, but there’s nothing yet on paper and teachers are understandably desperate for details.
A veteran in the fight against school vouchers, Cozart is laying down his sword.
“I know you are disappointed in me, but I have been fighting vouchers for eight years and I am just tired. There is nothing I can do,” he told teachers Wednesday.
Did he really say this stuff? Yes! Reached by phone Friday morning, Cozart gave some lip service to what he said were the good intentions of his Republican colleagues, but confirmed the conversations.
There are other Republican advocates of public schools in the Arkansas Legislature, but they’re seemingly a dying breed. Sen. James Sturch, an educator and reliable public school champion, got primaried and lost his seat in 2022 to pro-voucher candidate John Payton. Republican Rep. Jim Wooten of Beebe is still hard at work trying to push bills to keep vouchers from widening the gap between “haves and have-nots.” A couple of Republicans recently went along with Wooten’s bill to require private schools that accept public money in the form of vouchers to issue standardized tests and admit all comers, but most Republicans in the House Education hearing did not. The bill died in committee.
Sanders’ Arkansas LEARNS is expected to drop any day now, and it’s going to whip the rug out from under all the educators, families and students who believe in the ideals of community and collective opportunity our public schools still embody.
It’s absolutely true that many Arkansas public school students struggle in the classroom. That’s because they struggle outside the classroom, too. Arkansas kids face more than their share of poverty, food insecurity and trauma, and without fixing those external factors, these students won’t have the energy and focus they need to excel in the three Rs.
But ending hunger and poverty is hard; shitting on public schools is easy. The governor and her compliant stairwell full of cheering white conservatives know it’s much easier to blame poor showings on national standardized test dashboards on bleeding heart teachers and their crumbly old schools.
Arkansas LEARNS, this looming assault on the children who need help the most, will literally send hundreds of millions of public dollars to families already paying private school tuitions without taxpayers’ help, and we need to talk about it.
“The rich want vouchers. That’s who this legislation is for. The rich. They want it and they are going to get it. I am sorry but that’s just the truth,” Cozart said. Sometimes saying the quiet part out loud isn’t a bad thing
Timothy Snyder, the noted historian of democracy and tyranny at Yale University, wrote a post listing fifteen reasons why the world needs Ukraine to win and defeat Russian aggression against its very existence as a nation. Most important is to stop the genocidal slaughter of Ukrainians. The New York Times documented 339 significant cultural sites—museums, performing arts centers for theater, music, and dance, historical sites, and other cultural treasures—that have been destroyed in the Russian effort to eliminate Ukrainian existence as a nation.
He writes:
Why does the world need a Ukrainian victory?
1. To halt atrocity. Russia’s occupation is genocidal. Wherever the Ukrainians recover territory, they save lives, and re-establish the principle that people have a right not to be tortured, deported, and murdered.
2. To preserve the international legal order. Its basis is that one country may not invade another and annex its territory, as Russia seeks to do. Russia’s war of aggression is obviously illegal, but the legal order does not defend itself.
3. To end an era of empire. This could be the last war fought on the colonial logic that another state and people do not exist. But this turning point is reached only if Russia loses.
4. To defend the peace project of the European Union. Russia’s war is not directed only against Ukraine, but against the larger idea that European states can peacefully cooperate. If empire prevails, integration fails.
5. To give the rule of law a chance in Russia. So long as Russia fights imperial wars, it is trapped in repressive domestic politics. Coming generations of Russians could live better and freer lives, but only if Russia loses this war.
6. To weaken the prestige of tyrants. In this century, the trend has been towards authoritarianism, with Putinism as a force and a model. Its defeat by a democracy reverses that trend. Fascism is about force, and is discredited by defeat.
7. To remind us that democracy is the better system. Ukrainians have internalized the idea that they choose their own leaders. In taking risks to protect their democracy, they remind us that we all must act to protect ours.
8. To lift the threat of major war in Europe. For decades, a confrontation with the USSR and then Russia was the scenario for regional war. A Ukrainian victory removes this scenario by making another Russian offensive implausible.
9. To lift the threat of major war in Asia. In recent years, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan has been the leading scenario for a global war. A Ukrainian victory teaches Beijing that such an offensive operation is costly and likely to fail.
10. To prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons. Russia, a nuclear power, then invaded. If Ukraine loses, countries that can build nuclear weapons will feel that they need to do so to protect themselves.
11. To reduce the risk of nuclear war. A Ukrainian victory makes two major war scenarios involving nuclear powers less likely, and works against nuclear proliferation generally. Nothing would reduce the risk of nuclear war more than Ukrainian victory.
12. To head off future resource wars. Aside from being a consistent perpetrator of war crimes, Russia’s Wagner group seizes mineral resources by violence wherever it can. This is why it is fighting in Bakhmut.
13. To guarantee food supplies and prevent future starvation. Ukraine feeds much of the world. Russia threatens to use that food as a weapon. As one Russian propagandist put it, “starvation is our only hope.”
14. To accelerate the shift from fossil fuels. Putin shows the threat that hydrocarbon oligarchy poses to the future. His weaponization of energy supplies has accelerated the turn towards renewables. This will continue, if Russia loses.
15. To affirm the value of freedom. Even as they have every reason to define freedom as against something — Russian occupation –, Ukrainians remind us that freedom is actually for something, the right to be the people they wish to be, in a future they can help shape.
I am a historian of political atrocity, and for me personally number 1 — defeating an ongoing genocidal project — would be more than enough reason to want Ukrainian victory. But every single one of the other fourteen is hugely significant. Each presents the kind of opportunity that generations of policy planners wish for, but almost never get. Much has been done, we have not yet seen and seized the moment.
This is a once-in-lifetime conjuncture, not to be wasted. The Ukrainians have given us a chance to turn this century around, a chance for freedom and security that we could not have achieved by our own efforts, no matter who we happen to be. All we have to do is help them win.
23 January 2023
PS What can you do personally? Keep in touch with your elected representatives. Support military and humanitarian assistance. Make your views known. Write a letter to the editor. Share this post widely. Fly a Ukrainian flag. Put a sticker on your computer. Buy and wear Ukrainian merch. In great causes, small gestures matter.
If you want to keep Ukrainian soldiers alive, consider supporting this Ukrainian NGO and this international NGO (a 501(c)3). Here is a way to keep Ukrainians warm during winter (a 501(c)3). One of my commitments, with wonderful colleagues, has been Documenting Ukraine, a project that supports those in Ukraine who are chronicling the war (also a 501(c)3, “Partners” here). Thank you for reading, thinking, caring, and doing.
Peter Greene takes a hard look at the real goals of the voucher crowd: to kill public education. Not by offering better choices but by defunding it, step by step.
Doug Mastriano was not out of step with the movement; he was just a bit early.
Mastriano ran for governor of Pennsylvania with the idea that he could end real estate taxes entirely and cut state funding for public schools to $0.00. Just give everyone a tiny voucher and send them on their way. The idea was far enough out there that the campaigntried to back away from it (without entirely disowning it) and even other GOP politicians raised eyebrows and said, “No, not that.”You slice them off at the knees, right here–
The thing is, this is not a new idea. It has been the fondest dream of some choicers all along. Nancy MacLean, professor of history and public policy at Duke University, offered a succinct digest in the Washington Post of what Milton Friedman, granddaddy of the not-overtly-racist wing of the school choice movement, thought about the movement and its ultimate goals.Friedman, too, was interested in far more than school choice. He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.
Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”
You don’t have to set the wayback machine to find folks saying this quiet part out loud. Utah is one of several red states racing to ram through a voucher bill. Here’s Allison Sorenson, executive director of Utah Fits For All, an outfit marketing the voucher plan like crazy; in this clip, she’s explaining that the folks who back Utah’s plan can’t come right out and say they’re going to defund public education entirely, that admitting the goal is to destroy public education would be too politically touchy.
Vouchers are not about choice. Just look at Florida, which has worked to disrupt, defund and dismantle public schools for years, while simultaneously shutting down and limiting what choices schools are allowed to offer. Look at every state’s voucher law; they all enshrine a private “education provider’s” right to deny and discriminate as they wish, thereby denying choice to any students they wish to deny choice to. One of the biggest limiters of school choice is not the public system, but the private system’s unwillingness to open their doors to all these students who, we hear, are just thirsting for choices.
We know what a free market education system looks like–it looks like the US post-secondary education system. Occasional attempts at free-to-all schools are beaten down by racist and classist arguments, along with charges of socialist indoctrination. You get as much choice as you can afford, the private schools only accept (and keep) the students they want, and those who aspire to certain levels of schooling have to sink themselves in debt to get it. Meanwhile, state’s slowly but surely withdraw financial support from the few “public” universities left.
Please open the link and finish his article.
Diane Ravitch's blog 