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Robert Hubbell: The Death of Outrage

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2022 //
152

Robert Hubbell is a blogger who writes consistently insightful, common sense commentaries. In this one, he makes an important point. What happened to outrage?

I recall when presidential candidate Senator Gary Hart of Colorado dropped out of the race after the press got photos of him on a boat with a woman who was not his wife. Imagine that! I remember when a president (Nixon) was forced to resign his office because he lied about his role in burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee. At least official Washington had public standards of behavior. Republican Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee was as appalled by Nixon’s behavior as members of the other party. Yet Lamar Alexander, who claimed Baker as his role model, twice refused to vote to impeach Trump for violating his oath of office and for actions far more dangerous than anything Nixon did, even though Alexander was retiring.

Hubbell wrote this before the Uvalde school massacre. Watch the process: Americans are outraged. The media are outraged. What happens next? Our attention shifts. Uvalde fades, as Sandy Hook faded, as Parkland faded, as Buffalo will fade.

The capacity for outrage—in the political class, in the media, and in the public— seems to have vanished.

Hubbell writes:

“The apparent death of outrage is one factor driving many Americans to distraction, if not despair. Stories that would have shaken the foundations of democracy a decade ago barely reverberate for a single news cycle today. Quick! Answer this question: What was the biggest story of last Friday (as in two days ago)? It is that the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice actively encouraged Arizona legislators to overthrow the Constitution by appointing fraudulent electors. The January 6th Committee previously discovered that Ginni Thomas forwarded emails from other election deniers to members of the Trump administration, but the most recent revelation clarifies that Ginni Thomas was a direct participant in the plot to subvert democracy. But by Sunday evening, the story has dropped from the pages of every major newspaper in America.

And, of course, Justice Clarence Thomas reviewed Mark Meadows’ request to block the disclosure of emails and texts from Ginni Thomas about the attempted coup. Before the endless stream of Trump scandals killed outrage, those facts would have prompted Justice Thomas to submit his resignation and spend the remainder of his life in solitude and shame. Instead, Thomas is on a revenge tour at the Antonin Scalia School of Law, where he is scolding women for protesting an impending decision that will grant state governments control over their reproductive choices.

Over the weekend, Senator Rick Scott couldn’t find the decency to say that leaders of the GOP should condemn white supremacy. Talking Points Memo, Scott Deflects On Whether GOPers Should Condemn White Nationalism. Scott agreed that racism was bad and that “all Americans” should condemn “any hate” and “any white supremacy,” but repeatedly dodged the question of whether Republican leaders had a responsibility to do so. Instead, he volunteered that “We have to stop asking people on government forms for their skin color” and “every Senate candidate on both sides is going to decide what is important to them”—evasions that leave room for his Republican colleagues to wink-and-nod to white supremacists on the campaign trail.

Also over the weekend, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held its annual meeting in Hungary so that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán could lecture aspiring American autocrats on how to subvert “illiberal democracy.” The panel of speakers included Trump, Tucker Carlson, and a Hungarian journalist infamous for writing that Jews are “stinking excrement,” that Roma are “animals,” and that Black people are [unprintable]. See Times of Israel, Hungarian journalist who called Jews’ stinking excrement’ addresses CPAC conference. Do either Trump or Carlson feel any need to distance themselves from the reprehensible views of their co-presenter? Ha! It was not worth the electrons to type that rhetorical question on my laptop.

On Friday of last week, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy attempted to explain away the high maternal mortality rates in his state. Cassidy made the following repugnant statement:

About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear.

See Business Insider, Maternal death rate isn’t as bad if you don’t count Black women, GOP senator says. Cassidy’s statements were so offensive it is difficult to know where to begin. To be clear, Louisiana’s maternal death rate among Black women is worse than the maternal death rate for Black women in other states, so Cassidy’s racist statistics are wrong. But what does Cassidy mean, “if you correct our population for race?” By “correcting” for race, Cassidy clearly implies that the “correct” race in Louisiana is white. But Cassidy’s comments have been largely ignored by the mainstream media.

And then there is Dr. Oz, who went out of his way on election night thank Fox News personality Sean Hannity for helping his campaign. That would be the same Sean Hannity who was busy trashing one of Dr. Oz’s opponents in the primary (the late-surging Kathy Barnette) as Hannity acting as a a “behind the scenes advisor” to Oz. See Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner in Steady, Crossing the Line. Rather and Kirschner write that Fox News “is a functional arm of the Party of Trump.” Does anyone care? As Rather astutely observes,

Needless to say, if a reporter at a news organization other than Fox supported a candidate with half as much complicity as Hannity did Dr. Oz, it would be grounds for immediate termination. Not surprisingly, at Fox News, Hannity’s actions don’t even earn a slap on the wrist.

And therein lies the problem: The capacity for outrage is becoming a one-way street. Hannity can break all rules of journalistic independence, and no one cares. Senator Cassidy can suggest that Blacks are not part of Louisiana’s “correct” race, and no major mainstream sources bother to report on the comments. The wife of a Supreme Court justice can encourage insurrection, and the justice goes on the attack against “liberals.” But . . . If any of those situations were reversed such that a liberal journalist, Democratic Senator, or liberal justice was involved, the outrage from the right would be unending, unforgiving, and shrill.

We must not lose our capacity for outrage. We cannot allow insurrection to be normalized. We cannot allow the sheer volume and velocity of GOP scandals to overwhelm and exhaust us. Indeed, we must recognize that conservatives try to turn outrage to their benefit by making more of it—to provoke “outrage fatigue.”

The wife of a supreme court justice participated in an attempted coup. That fact is outrageous and should matter to every American and should remain on the front pages of every newspaper in America until the justice resigns or recuses himself from all election-related cases.

More one-sided reporting in WaPo.

The Washington Post is running a story in its Monday edition, Democrats See Headwinds in Georgia, and Everywhere Else. The subheader says that Democratic candidates will “be running against President Biden’s low ratings as well as their G.O.P. rivals.” The article accurately reports on the challenges facing Democrats but does not acknowledge that Republicans are led by a twice-impeached failed coup-plotter who insists on absolute allegiance to a disproven conspiracy theory and has led the effort to deny women the right to control their reproductive choices.

About two-thirds of the way through the story, the author makes a nod to the difficulties faced by the GOP—but only by describing comments from a Republican voter:

[Democrats] need to do more to communicate clearly with voters that they are a steady hand at the wheel of getting the economy back on track for people.” Ms. Bourdeaux said. But she, too, saw a chance to draw a sharp contrast with what she described as ascendant far-right Republicans. “The other side, candidly, has lost its mind,” she said, pointing to efforts to restrict voting rights and abortion rights.

Hmm . . . if a Democratic voter had said that the Democratic Party “has lost its mind,” that would be the headline in the article. Oh, and here is the clincher: The author concedes near the end of the article that “Most polling shows a close race for [Georgia] governor and Senate, with a slight Republican advantage.”

Got that? The races for Governor and Senator in Georgia are “close,” but the story focuses on “headwinds” faced by Democrats because of the economy and Biden, with almost no mention of the challenges for the GOP created by an out-of-control Trump, reversal of Roe v. Wade, and unrestrained concealed carry of handguns by June.

More accurate headlines for the article could include, “One reporter’s attempt to trash the Democrats by rehashing the economy and Biden’s favorability ratings” or “According to one Republican voter, ‘The GOP has lost its mind.’” I will let you choose your favorite headline or suggest alternatives in the Comments section or by reply email to me.

Concluding Thoughts.

There is an old joke that goes like this: “I just flew into Las Vegas and, boy, are my arms tired.” My wife and I just spent forty-eight hours taking care of one granddaughter while simultaneously pinch-hitting with a second granddaughter for eight hours on Saturday, and boy, are my arms tired! It was tough writing the newsletter tonight because I could not get the words of the literary classic Good Dog Carl Visits the Zoo out of my mind. (Reading a book out-loud dozens of times over the course of forty-eight hours will do that to you.) A sign of my desperation is that I was delighted to take a mental break by watching The Little Mermaid after failed multiple failed attempts to get our granddaughter to take a nap. Let me say that The Little Mermaid is an underappreciated classic that deserves a place alongside The Godfather and Citizen Kane (at least that’s how I feel tonight).

In lieu of my own closing thoughts (which are often the most challenging part of the newsletter to write), I include a list of Democratic candidates to support, supplied by Ellie Kona. Many of you may know Ellie as a frequent commenter on Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter on Substack, Letters from an American. Per Ellie, “Here is a handy-dandy list of Dems to support, along with their Twitter handles (courtesy of Nick Knudsen):

PA Gov: @JoshShapiroPA

PA Sen: @JohnFetterman

PA Lt Gov: @AustinDavisPA

NC Sen: @CheriBeasleyNC

NC-01: @DonDavisNC

NC-13: @wileynickel

OR Gov: @TinaKotek

OR-04: @ValHoyle

OR-06: @AndreaRSalinas

Provided by NickKnudsen at DemCast

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Fascism, History, International, Propaganda, Racism, Republicans

Bob Shepherd: A Lament for a Destroyed City

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2022 //
52

Bob Shepherd is our resident polymath.

What have they done to you, Mariupol?

To your beautiful theatre with its park, your many museums, your galleries, your grand churches and synagogues and mosques, your restaurants, your 81 schools, your football club and water polo team and canoeing club and basketball club, your 60 hospitals and medical offices, your stunning beach on the Sea of Azov, your 20 newspapers, your 7 television stations, your nightclubs, your gardens, your parks and play facilities, your cinemas, your restaurants and cafes, your libraries, your marina and its sailors, your 500,000 men, women, teenagers, children, toddlers, babies? Where are your old men playing chess, your young people strolling and in love, your children at their games, your gorgeous, friendly people dancing and singing at one of your many festivals? Where are your guilds of artists, journalists, poets, novelists, dramatists, actors, musicians? What has become of your monuments? Your homes?

Where are Alla and Anatoly, Vasylyna and Vitali, Yeva and Ivan, . . . Maryna and Maksym, Natalia and Nazar, . . . Sofiia and Stepan, Titiana and Tymur, . . . Yuliia and Yakiv?

Gone. Obliterated. Turned into smoke and ashes and body parts and blood by war criminal Chekist reptile Tsar Vladimir.

Categories Cruelty, Evil, Fascism

Love the Unborn, Neglect the Born

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2022 //
117

Caitlin Huey-Burns writes for CBS News that the states most likely to ban abortion are the states LEAST likely to provide resources for children. Their politicians love the unborn. The born and living, not so much.

The expectation that Supreme Court is about to scrap decades of federal protections of abortion rights is highlighting another issue: the lack of resources and support available for women to have and raise children.

More women living in states without abortion access, should Roe v. Wade be overturned, will likely carry to term. Yet, not one of the two dozen states with laws on the books restricting abortion access offers paid family leave.

Eight of them have opted out of expanding Medicaid coverage under the health care law, which covers pregnancy through postpartum for low-income Americans.

And Mississippi, whose abortion restriction law is at the heart of an impending Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, ranks as the state with the highest rate of young child poverty and low birth weight and among the highest when it comes to infant mortality rates.

It is also ironic that the states with the most horrible history of racism are likely to see an increase in their black population, since impoverished black women are not likely to have the money to travel to a state where abortion is protected by law. Over many years, the black population in Mississippi may grow large enough to demand a change in the political order.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Evil, Mississippi, Poverty, Shame

Valerie Strauss: Gov. DeSantis’ War on Public Education

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2022 //
29

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post recently summarized the efforts by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to destroy public schools in his state.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has been fighting with the Walt Disney Co. for weeks now since it angered him by criticizing a law he championed that limits discussions of gender issues in public school classrooms. But his attacks on public school districts began just as soon as he took office in 2019.

DeSantis had been governor barely a month when he offered a new definition of public education that eliminated the traditional division between public and private schools. To DeSantis and his allies, “public education” includes any school — including religious ones — that receives public funding through voucher and similar programs. “Look, if it’s public dollars, it’s public education,” he said in February 2019. “In Florida, public education is going to have a meaning that is directed by the parents, where the parents are the drivers because they know what’s best for their kids.”

That was the start of what has evolved into the most aggressive anti-public education battle waged by any governor in the country. In the past year — and especially in recent months — as he has worked to amass more than $100 million for his 2022 reelection campaign, and possibly for a 2024 Republican presidential run, he has quickened the pace of his attacks.

He has, among other things: limited what teachers can say in classrooms about race, gender and other topics and appointed anti-public education figures to his administration, including a QAnon supporter, and, as education commissioner, an employee of a charter school management organization. He has also legally empowered parents to sue school districts as part of his “parental rights” initiative and micromanaged and limited the power of local school districts.

In what his critics say is a revealing move about their educational intentions, DeSantis and Florida legislators routinely exempt charter and private/religious schools from many of the restrictions and actions they take against public school districts. For example, the law that restricts classroom discussions on gender and sex education — known as the Parental Rights in Education law — applies to a state statute dealing with school board powers, according to the Tampa Bay Times. The Florida Department of Education did not respond to a query about this.

DeSantis and his like-minded compatriots make no secret about wanting to privatize public education — arguably the country’s most important civic institution. Their “school choice” movement means expanding alternatives to public school district. They include charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately managed — as well as voucher and similar programs that use taxpayer money to pay for tuition and other costs at private and religious schools. These schools can legally discriminate against LGBTQ and other students and adults.

To these activists, public schools are not the mainstay of America’s democratic system of government that tries to instill civic values to students from different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds. Rather, as the libertarian Cato Institute says on its website: “Government schooling often forces citizens into political combat. Different families have different priorities on topics ranging from academics and the arts to questions of morality and religion. No single school can possibly reflect the wide range of mutually exclusive views on these fundamental subjects.”
Critics say this mind-set rejects the notion that America is a melting pot that flourishes by the coming together of people from different places, backgrounds, races and religions. They also say that school “choice” efforts to use public funding for private and privately run education take vital resources away from the public districts that enroll the vast majority of the country’s schoolchildren.

They point out that the public has no way to hold private and many charter schools accountable, because their operations are not transparent. There is irony, they say, in the fact that the people pushing the “parental rights” movement seeking transparency in public school districts don’t demand it of nonpublic schools that they want funded with public funds.

Last year, DeSantis visited a Catholic school in Hialeah to sign a bill that greatly expanded voucher programs while reducing public oversight. Originally intended for students from low-income families, DeSantis’s administration now also allows vouchers to go to a family of four earning nearly $100,000.

He has also played a leading role in the right-wing movement to restrict what teachers can and can’t say in the classroom about subjects including race, racism, gender and sex education. On April 22, he signed into law the “Stop WOKE Act,” which limits how race-related topics can be discussed in public school classrooms and workplace training, while essentially accusing public school teachers of trying to indoctrinate students.

About three weeks earlier, on March 28, he signed what critics dubbed the “don’t say gay” bill that limits teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity. While numerous similar bills have been considered in legislatures in years past, it was DeSantis who pushed through the first one to become law.

On April 15, his administration announced that it had rejected publisher-submitted math textbooks books for including passages his administration doesn’t like, including those it says are about critical race theory and social-emotional learning.

DeSantis’s appointments to his administration reveal his attitude about public education. On April 21, he nominated state Sen. Manny Diaz (R) — who works at an affiliate of Academica, a for-profit Miami-based charter school management firm — as the state’s new education commissioner. Diaz will almost certainly be approved by the Florida Board of Education.

Diaz — who is chief operating officer of Doral College, a private college owned by Academica — has been instrumental in the legislature in expanding charter school growth. Florida, where charter schools have virtually no oversight, has seen a raft of financial scandals related to the industry.

Ten days before appointing Diaz, DeSantis’s administration appointed Esther Byrd, an office manager at her husband’s law firm, to the Board of Education. Byrd has on social media expressed sympathy with QAnon beliefs and offered a defense of those “peacefully protesting” the confirmation of the 2020 presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021, when the U.S. Capitol was overrun by a pro-Trump mob. She has alluded to “coming civil wars.” According to the Florida Times-Union, she and her husband, state Rep. Cord Byrd (R), flew a QAnon flag on their boat.

DeSantis also appointed to the Board of Education radiologist Grazie Pozo Christie, a senior fellow for the Catholic Association who wrote an article a few years ago saying the best thing parents can do for their children is to take them out of public schools.


Last October, while discussing “parental rights” in education and touting mask-optional policies at a news conference, DeSantis invited Quisha King, a leader of the right-wing Moms for Liberty group, to join him. King has called for “a mass exodus from the public school system.”

During the pandemic, DeSantis became a leader among governors of the anti-mask movement when he issued a ban on mask mandates in public schools — and then proceeded to penalize districts that required masks in compliance with federal government recommendations. His administration withheld the salaries of some superintendents and school board members that defied him — prompting the Biden administration to promise to make up for the deficit. He has also backed a plan to withhold a total of $200 million in different funding from districts that angered him.

His wrath at local school boards that don’t do his bidding has blown apart the Republican Party’s traditional stance that local education is the business of local issues. In March, one of the bills he signed into law included a provision that limits local school board terms to 12 years — without asking local voters if that’s what they wanted.
He also established a charter school commissioner office inside the Florida Department of Education, which has the power to approve or reject applications for charter schools without local school district input. Even the National Association of Charter School Authorizers thought it was a bad idea, writing on its website:

“Once a school is approved, the Commission would have no other authorizing responsibilities and the local district would be required to do all other authorizing duties. This goes against national best practice. … This is a bad idea since research shows that an authorizer’s commitment and capacity are essential to strong charter schools.

Last June, the DeSantis administration intervened in a local decision by the Hillsborough County School Board, which met to discuss a dozen proposals to open charter schools or extend the operating agreements on others. After it voted to close four existing charters, it received a letter from the Florida Department of Education saying that unless it kept those schools open, it would lose millions of dollars in state funding.

Finally, whatever the governor’s reason, Florida was the last state to tell the U.S. Education Department how it intended to use $2.3 billion in federal American Rescue Plan funds, which had been approved by Congress to help public schools recover from the pandemic. The deadline for states to apply for the money was in June 2021. Months later, on Oct. 4, Ian Rosenblum, then deputy assistant secretary for policy and programs in the U.S. Education Department, sent a letter to the DeSantis administration noting that Florida’s delay in applying for the funding was creating “unnecessary uncertainty” for school districts that needed the cash. Florida filed it a few days later.

DeSantis’s star power in the school “choice” movement is such that one of its longtime leading figures, former education secretary Betsy DeVos — who has called public education a “dead end” — solicited DeSantis’s help to promote a petition in her home state of Michigan to establish a voucherlike program. She and her family have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to DeSantis.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Evil, Florida, For-Profit, Funding, Racism, Religion, School Choice, Vouchers

Jane Mayer: A Dark Money Group That Is Trying to Block Every Biden Nominee

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2022 //
51

Jane Mayer is a brilliant and meticulous journalist for The New Yorker. She is the nation’s leading expert on “Dark Money,” the money funneled into politics whose donors are anonymous. In this article, she details the group that was behind the effort to derail the Supreme Court nomination of the highly-qualified Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. The smear campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, because it was built on lies and distortions, and the attacks foundered in the face of Judge Jackson’s poise, demeanor, and temperament.

Formed in 2020, the group is called The American Accountability Foundation. It is registered as a tax-exempt charitable organization (like the odious ALEC), but is up-to-its-eyeballs in negative political activism. Its goal appears to be to block all Biden nominees with smear campaigns, lies, and distortions of their record and their views.

She writes:

While the hearings were taking place, the A.A.F. publicly took credit for uncovering a note in the Harvard Law Review in which, they claimed, Jackson had “argued that America’s judicial system is too hard on sexual offenders.” The group also tweeted that she had a “soft-on-sex-offender” record during her eight years as a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. As the Washington Post and other outlets stated, Jackson’s sentencing history on such cases was well within the judicial mainstream, and in line with a half-dozen judges appointed by the Trump Administration. When Jackson defended herself on this point during the hearings, the A.A.F. said, on Twitter, that she was “lying.” The group’s allegation—reminiscent of the QAnon conspiracy, which claims that liberal élites are abusing and trafficking children—rippled through conservative circles. Tucker Carlson repeated the accusation on his Fox News program while a chyron declared “jackson lenient in child sex cases.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist representative from Georgia, called Jackson “pro-pedophile.”

Their attack on Judge Jackson failed, but Mayer shows that they have slimed other well-qualified nominees, leaving key positions unfilled. she calls AAF “the slime machine.”

Among the nominees the group boasts of having successfully derailed are Saule Omarova, a nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, and Sarah Bloom Raskin, whom Biden named to be the vice-chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board. David Chipman, whom the President wanted to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and David Weil, Biden’s choice for the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor, both saw their nominations founder in the wake of A.A.F. attacks. Currently, the group is waging a negative campaign against Lisa Cook, who, if confirmed, would become the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.

Tom Jones, the A.A.F.’s founder and executive director, is a longtime Beltway operative specializing in opposition research. Records show that over the years he has worked for several of the most conservative Republicans to have served in the Senate, including Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin; Ted Cruz, of Texas; Jim DeMint, of South Carolina; and John Ensign, of Nevada, for whom Jones was briefly a legislative director. In 2016, Jones ran the opposition-research effort for Cruz’s failed Presidential campaign. When I asked Jones for an interview, through the A.A.F.’s online portal, he replied, “Ms. Meyers . . . Go pound sand.” Citing an article that I had written debunking attacks on Bloom Raskin from moneyed interests, including the A.A.F., he said, “You are a liberal hack masquerading as an investigative journalist—and not a very good one.” Jones subsequently posted this comment on his group’s Twitter account, along with my e-mail address and cell-phone number…

Mayer describes vicious A.A.F. campaigns against Biden nominees, most of whom were women or people of color. one such was the sliming of Lisa Cook.

Mayer writes:

Liberal and conservative political groups habitually scrutinize a prominent nominee’s record or personal life in search of disqualifying faults. But the A.A.F. has taken the practice to extremes, repeatedly spinning negligible tidbits or dubious hearsay into damning narratives. The group recently deployed its unorthodox methods, Politico has reported, while “desperately pursuing dirt” on Lisa Cook, the nominee for the Federal Reserve. Cook, who has been a tenured professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University since 2013, has attracted bipartisan support. Glenn Hubbard, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the George W. Bush Administration, has said, “Cook’s talents as an economic researcher and teacher make her a good nominee for the Fed, adding to diversity of perspectives about policy.” In college, Cook won a Marshall Scholarship. She subsequently obtained a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and served as a staff economist on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. She also held appointments at the National Bureau of Economic Research and at various regional Federal Reserve banks. The A.A.F., though, has portrayed her as unqualified, and suggested that her tenure at Michigan State is undeserved.

On April 13th, Jones sent out the latest of at least three e-mail blasts from the A.A.F. to about fifty of Cook’s colleagues at Michigan State. In the most recent of these messages, which were obtained by The New Yorker, Jones said that Cook “did not warrant” tenure. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the A.A.F. obtained records showing that the school’s provost had granted Cook full professorship in 2020, overruling a decision not to give her that title the previous year. Jones sent these personnel records to dozens of Cook’s colleagues, and asked, “Are any of you concerned that . . . she’s not good enough to sit on the Federal Reserve Board?” He urged any detractors to “not hesitate to” contact him. Meanwhile, Jones fished for further information by posting a message on an anonymous online gossip forum, Economics Job Market Rumors, which has been decried by one prominent economist as “a cesspool of misogyny.”

Some of the A.A.F.’s attacks on Cook carried racial overtones. Cook had made donations to bail funds for impoverished criminal defendants, including racial-justice protesters who had been arrested; she was following a tradition of activist lawyers in her family, and considered it a form of charity. The A.A.F. argued on Twitter that she had made “racist comments” and “even bailed out rioters who burned down American cities.” Cook’s reputation was sullied enough that the Senate Banking Committee vote on her nomination resulted in a tie, with no Republicans supporting her. Cook’s nomination can still proceed to the Senate floor, but her confirmation remains in limbo, as one conservative news outlet after another repeats the A.A.F.’s talking points. A writer for the Daily Caller, Chris Brunet, said in a Substack column that Cook is a “random economist at Michigan State University who has shamelessly leveraged her skin color and genitalia into gaining the backing of several key White House officials.” Brunet tweeted proudly that his critique had been promoted on Fox News by Tucker Carlson.

Cook’s nomination might yet go forward, but other targets with exemplary records, have been rejected because of A.A.F. slime campaigns.

Dark Money is a blight on our democracy. This particular group is using its resources to derail the agenda of the Biden administration. It is yet another strategy to undermine our democracy by preventing the duly elected President from staffing his administration with fully qualified appointees of his choice.

Categories Accountability, Dark Money, Evil, Lies

Ukraine: Mariupol “Has Been Wiped Off the Face of the Earth”

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2022 //
49

The Washington Post reports on the fierce battle for Mariupol, which has been under siege for weeks:

As Russia appears poised to capture Mariupol more than six weeks into the invasion, the governor of Ukraine’s Donetsk region said Friday that while Ukrainian troops remain in control of the strategic port city, Mariupol “has been wiped off the face of the earth” by Russian forces.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor, told CNN that troops are still “courageously defending Mariupol” against the Russian forces that have bombarded the city on the Sea of Azov, leaving it in ruins.

“The enemy cannot seize Mariupol. The enemy may seize the land that Mariupol used to stand on, but the city of Mariupol is no more,” Kyrylenko said. “The city of Mariupol has been wiped off the face of the earth by the Russian Federation, by those who will never be able to restore it.”

This is barbarism.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Evil

Tennessee Legislature Passes Hateful Laws

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2022 //
22

Representative Gloria Johnson posted a series of tweets describing the hateful legislation that her colleagues in the Tennessee Legislature have passed. Her Twitter handle is @VoteGloriaJ

When I got home this weekend someone asked how things are going in Nashville, I’m not sure they were ready for my answer, but it went kind of like this…

We have a “Don’t Say Gay” bill worse than Florida’s and about 4 more bills to go along with it-all equally filled with hate. GOP and B list celebrities are accusing librarians and teachers of “grooming” kids.

We have a vigilante abortion bill worse than Texas’. A bill that makes your friends and family $10k if they rat you out. Heck, if you decide to abort your rapists baby, his family and friends can sue you for $10k.

Did you ever imagine TN would give more rights to a violent rapist than a victim of a violent rapist. He can choose the mother of his child, but she can’t choose not to have her rapist’s baby. That is pure evil folks. That is today’s GOP, they don’t believe women are equal.

We have a school funding formula that’s not ready for prime time. It takes away local control, doesn’t have details and is more than 50% rule making we won’t see until AFTER the vote. And counties will love the property tax it will inevitably bring in 3-4 years😬. #whenleeisgone

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Cruelty, Disruption, Education Industry, Evil, Fascism, Shame, Tennessee

Fiona Hill Explains Why Putin Invaded Ukraine

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2022 //
158

You may remember Fiona Hill. She was the nonpartisan Russia expert on the National Security Council who testified in Trump’s first impeachment trial. Politico interviewed her at length soon after Putin invaded Ukraine. Hill provides interesting political and historical insights into why Putin invaded Ukraine. She has been observing both Russia and Ukraine for many years, as well as Putin.

Hill says we are already in the midst of World War 3.

She warns:

Reynolds: The more we talk, the more we’re using World War II analogies. There are people who are saying we’re on the brink of a World War III.

Hill: We’re already in it. We have been for some time. We keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War. Many of the things that we’re talking about here have their roots in the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire at the end of World War I. At the end of World War II, we had another reconfiguration and some of the issues that we have been dealing with recently go back to that immediate post-war period. We’ve had war in Syria, which is in part the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, same with Iraq and Kuwait.

All of the conflicts that we’re seeing have roots in those earlier conflicts. We are already in a hot war over Ukraine, which started in 2014. People shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that we’re just on the brink of something. We’ve been well and truly in it for quite a long period of time.

But this is also a full-spectrum information war, and what happens in a Russian “all-of-society” war, you soften up the enemy. You get the Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps doing your job for you. The fact that Putin managed to persuade Trump that Ukraine belongs to Russia, and that Trump would be willing to give up Ukraine without any kind of fight, that’s a major success for Putin’s information war. I mean he has got swathes of the Republican Party — and not just them, some on the left, as well as on the right — masses of the U.S. public saying, “Good on you, Vladimir Putin,” or blaming NATO, or blaming the U.S. for this outcome. This is exactly what a Russian information war and psychological operation is geared towards. He’s been carefully seeding this terrain as well. We’ve been at war, for a very long time. I’ve been saying this for years…

What Russia is doing is asserting that “might makes right.” Of course, yes, we’ve also made terrible mistakes. But no one ever has the right to completely destroy another country — Putin’s opened up a door in Europe that we thought we’d closed after World War II.

Categories Evil, Fascism, History, International

Umair Haque: Has World War III Started?

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2022 //
56

Umair Haque is a technologist and future thinker whose writings are insightful. A few days ago, he posted an article asserting that World War III has already started, and we are asleep. It is well worth your while to read this article in full. He argues that Putin has cleverly sowed dissension in the U.S., in the U.K., and in Europe. Based on new evidence, he believes that Putin helped Trump win the election in 2016. Trump advanced Putin’s goals by threatening the future of NATO and bringing about division in the U.S. He also argues that Putin funded BREXIT, which weakened the Atlantic Alliance.

He writes:

Do you remember the story of the Trojan Horse? Troy accepted it as a gift, knowing full it shouldn’t have — because it was a gift to their gods, fine and beautiful. It was made irresistible by the Greeks. A Trojan horse was delivered to our societies in the West — one that glittered, too. It was made of Russian money, Russian oil, resources, finances. And we accepted it, without a second thought.

That was just after the fall of the USSR, as Putin came to power, in the late 2000s or so. What happened next? Our societies in the West began to destabilize, badly. A new far right movement began to emerge. It gained power and ascended in influence. Where had it come from? Nobody could quite say. And yet it spoke literally the language of Putin’s philosophers — figures like Dugin and Ilyin, who called for a “planetary confrontation” against “globalists” and spoke of the soil belonging to the pure of blood and true of faith.

This new far right movement had seemingly emerged from nowhere all across the West. From America to Britain to France and beyond. Mighty coincidence, no? An even bigger coincidence that it spoke the literal language of Putinism. An even bigger coincidence that it deployed the Kremlin’s Orwellian “firehose” model of propaganda: gaslight reality, turn it inside out, call the peaceful people the Nazis and fascists, call freedom the enemy of peace, bombard innocent people with those messages a million times a day on Facebook and Twitter. Carpet-bomb them with the inversion of reality — War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength — until their weary minds, baffled, finally gave out…and gave in.

What a coincidence. Of course, it was no coincidence at all. That the far right had suddenly emerged in the West all at once, in unison, like a choir of idiocy. That hate had begun to proliferate like a pandemic, and a kind of bilious populist rage was shaking the foundations of the Western world. That it used tactics from a literal Kremlin propaganda manual. As we know now, all this was funded, financed, organized, and coordinated by Russia.

But back then? The West was still innocent. That the first stages of World War III were beginning. Instead of worrying about these obvious links, the West still revelled in the easy money oligarchs gave it, as they bought up entire districts like Mayfair and Chelsea, and straddled Cannes and Nice in their superyachts. The West was still seduced by how the Trojan horse glittered and shone — even as the soldiers poured out.

What happened next? The attacks began. The big ones. All the disinformation and propaganda that was by now being poured across the West like a great toxic oil slick had a point. And now Russia smiled, and flicked a match.

Categories Evil, International

Jim Sleeper: It Can Happen Here

By dianeravitch
January 30, 2022 //
86

Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale and an author. He wrote the following post in 2018, when the horrors of the Trump regime were fresh. It is still relevant.

Donald J. Trump isn’t a Nazi, although his father came close. It’s true that historical analogies between Trump’s policies and Hitler’s are often facile, and sometimes dangerously misleading. But here’s one that I’m not inclined to shrug off.

During a long stay in Berlin in 2009, I went often to the Grunewald railway station to have my coffee. It’s a picturesque little station, built in the 1899, fronted by a cobblestone square and surrounded by splendid, well-preserved villas of that period.

It’s also the point from which more than 50,000 Berlin Jews were shipped to concentration camps, a few hundred a week, from 1942 to 1945. At the station’s Track 17, a steel strip along the platform edge records, in raised letters, each week’s shipment of several hundred “Juden” to Theresienstadt, Minsk, Riga, Kaunas, Łódź and, later, directly to Auschwitz and other death camps.

It’s hard for most Americans, especially those of us whose parents fought in World War II, to imagine that people who boarded the trains had no idea of what lay ahead. Yet, although Jews had been vilified and some attacked on the streets since 1938, some things remained unthinkable to Berlin Jews, most of whom had been middle-class, law-abiding citizens since birth. They showed up at station on the appointed dates, children and luggage in tow, for what they’d been told would be deportation to resettlement and work centers. At worst, they expected something like what Japanese-Americans experienced in internment camps on our own West Coast during the same war.

Under the watchful eyes of German police, they took their seats in ordinary passenger coaches for many of these departures. Only later, far beyond Berlin, were they transferred to box cars. Some time after that, postcards they hadn’t written were sent to relatives or acquaintances whom they’d listed with the authorities, assuring them that all was well in their new locations.

One day in April of 2009, as I sipped my coffee at the Grunewald station alongside retirees in their 70s and near a beer-garden where younger Germans also overlooked the square, three police cars swept in and officers leapt out, commanding us, “Don’t Move.” Then approximately 45 young military officers in formal parade dress descended from a tourist bus. Their uniforms were attractive, but alien—clearly not German. As they milled about, one of the men seated near me asked a police officer, “Was is das?”

“Israelischen,” he answered. They were Israeli army officers.

A silence descended upon the square like nothing I’d ever felt, so thick you could have cut it with a knife. Not another word was spoken, but I thought that I sensed three dimensions in the quiet all around me. The first was straight out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind: “They’re here. They’ve come.” The second was of admiration, or at least respect, for these vibrant young officers, stunning negations of the image of “Juden” that some of these older men must have remembered from their infancy. The third dimension, I sensed from the tightened body language around me, carried a flicker of resentment at having to be reminded, instead of being left to sip one’s coffee in peace.

A black car with tinted windows ascended a ramp toward Track 17. The Israeli officers fell into formation and followed. They’d come to lay a wreath on Track 17 on Yom Ha’Shoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day. Ironically, I hadn’t remembered the day myself.

I recount this now because some Americans remind me of Berlin Jews who didn’t think the unthinkable when they should have. After watching the Trump administration tear apart weeping parents and children—on the initiative of its senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who’s Jewish—I’m thinking that although Trump has now found it politically expedient to halt the practice, more than a few of my fellow Americans were thinking, “Well, they deserve it, unlike me, a law-abiding citizen, and a veteran.”

Those Berlin Jews had been law-abiding citizens, too, at least until 1935, and more than a few were military veterans: Some 12,000 of the Jews who had served in the German military had fallen in World War I. In an irony beyond ironies, it was a Jewish lieutenant, Hugo Gutmann, who secured an Iron Cross, First Class, for a 29-year-old corporal under his command, Adolph Hitler.

We now know that German veterans of that war, Jews and non-Jews alike, were lied to and sent into harm’s way for no good reason. So were soldiers in the Nazi Wehrmacht 25 years later, whom my father, a corporal in the U.S. Army Combat Engineers, was ordered to supervise as prisoners as his 277th battalion clanked across northern Germany, because he spoke Yiddish, which is closely related to German.

He did it with mix of grief and revulsion. One day, when his battalion commandeered a Nazi-friendly baron’s estate in the town of Hohne, my father and others scouted a cottage behind the mansion and found a white-haired, well-spoken man who said he was a caretaker but whom the G.I.’s suspected was closer to the missing baron. As some of them prodded him down the hill toward the mansion, jabbing him roughly with their rifle barrels, my father said, suddenly, almost instinctively, “Cut that out.”

“Why? You should enjoy this Sleeper, you’re a Jew.”

“Cut it out, I said.” He had no illusions about Nazism. But he was a young American, emancipated from his ancestors’ European hell, and he thought he was fighting for a world better than one in which the tables of unjust power are merely turned, a world where justice—dare one say, “due process”?—is stronger than revenge.

Watching the fires that Trump is stoking week in, week out, I wonder when his supporters and enablers will see that the unthinkable could happen to them. I’m not inclined to alarmism, but what if, a couple of years from now, veterans who say they fought for an America where people are free to speak their minds decide to speak their own minds in ways Trump doesn’t like? How far might this admirer of Vladimir Putin go against Americans he thinks are his enemies? He’s already said that he wants to tighten libel laws; his ICE agents have developed arrest-and-detention tactics that a craven Congress would let him expand with the stroke of a pen; municipal police forces are more militarized than ever before.

Yes, historical analogies are risky. But, sipping coffee overlooking the Grunewald station’s charming cobblestone square, you’d never imagine what happened there if you hadn’t been told.

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Fascism, Trump
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