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Joyce Vance: Trump Plans to Rig the 2026 Elections

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2026 //
13

Joyce Vance, former federal prosecutor for northern Alabama, sounds the alarm about a looming threat to the integrity of the fall elections. Trump knows he is likely to lose control of the House and possibly even the Senate. His own poll numbers are very low, in the mid-30s. His war on Iran is unpopular. Consumer prices are rising. Everyone feels the pain at the gas pump. The state of the economy is a millstone around his neck. Prominent MAGA boosters have defected, such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly.

Trump’s strategy: Eliminate the guardrails and put election deniers in charge, the people who think that Trump won in 2020, despite the fact that his claims were rejected in more than 60 courts, including the Supreme Court. In other words, cheat.

Joyce Vance warns us about what is happening and what we can do.

She writes:

My friends at Fair Fight, the Georgia-based pro-voting and pro-democracy organization reviewed the results of a ProPublica investigation into how Trump is systematically removing election protections, and produced this summary, that brings you up to date and also provides an important suggestion for what you can do.

We’re all responsible for protection the right to vote. So this is important information to take in.

Trump Has Eliminated Election Safeguards and Installed Loyalist Election Deniers in Key Roles

“The election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government.”

On Monday, ProPublica released a massive new investigation breaking down how Donald Trump has dismantled federal guardrails that stopped him from overturning his 2020 election loss.

The 4,700+ word investigation, based on interviews with about 30 current and former executive branch officials, provides an unprecedented and detailed account of how thoroughly critical election security guardrails have been gutted within the federal government ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Key Findings from ProPublica’s Investigation:

We read the entire piece (twice) to make sure you’re aware of the findings.

  • Career officials who protected elections are gone – election deniers have taken over. ProPublica found that at least 75 career officials across several agencies who played key roles in safeguarding the 2020 election have been fired, resigned, or reassigned. They have been replaced by roughly two dozen political appointees Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Many are election deniers and ten actively worked to reverse Trump’s 2020 loss.
  • Federal programs designed to safeguard elections have been dismantled. Since Trump took office, nearly all federal election protection programs have been eliminated, severely defunded, or had nearly all their staff removed or reassigned:
    • CISA election team
    • NSC election security group
    • ODNI Foreign Malign Influence Center
    • DOJ Public Integrity Section
    • DOJ Civil Rights Division’s voting section
    • FBI Public Corruption Team
    • FBI Foreign Influence Task Force
    • FBI and DOJ Election Day command posts
  • False claims and politicization now drive federal election policy. ProPublica reports that White House election lawyer Kurt Olsen – sanctioned by judges for false 2020 claims – pressured the FBI’s Atlanta chief to seize Fulton County’s 2020 ballots using a discredited report. When the FBI chief examined the evidence and found it didn’t hold up, and was already dismissed by Georgia Republican officials, he was forced out. The raid happened anyway – using a version of the same rejected evidence. Former DOJ Public Integrity lawyers said they likely would have tried to block the investigation.

Trump is “flooding the zone” to distract us. Billionaires are trying to control what you see, buying up media and controlling algorithms. Share this. Help spread the word.

Comment from Lauren Groh-Wargo, Fair Fight Action CEO: “Let’s be clear about what ProPublica has documented – the federal officials who stopped Trump from overturning his 2020 election loss have been systematically removed and replaced by the same people who tried to help him do it. At least eight key election security programs have been gutted since Trump took office. This is a coordinated effort to ensure there are no guardrails left when Americans go to vote in 2026 – everyone must understand what’s at stake.”

This Investigation Builds on a Pattern of Reporting

ProPublica’s investigation is revealing a coordinated effort to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections:

  • In February, they revealed that several high-ranking Trump officials – including Kurt Olsen and DHS election integrity official Heather Honey – attended a summit convened by Michael Flynn where election deniers with White House access and influence discussed plans to declare a national emergency to take over the midterms.
  • In March, ProPublica reported that David Harvilicz, the DHS official in charge of voting machine security, has called to ban voting machines, questioned the validity of Democratic wins, and pushed for Republicans to overhaul election systems to their advantage. Harvilicz co-founded a technology company an election denier who participated in attempts to seize voting machines and spread false claims which Trump considered using as a basis to declare martial law and seize voting machines in 2020.
  • Taken together, the reporting reveals an effort to embed election deniers inside key federal government roles and use government power to reshape the 2026 midterms.

The Election Integrity Network is the Connective Tissue

The Election Integrity Network, founded by Cleta Mitchell after Trump’s 2020 loss, is the organizational thread connecting these appointees. Mitchell played a central role in efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss, she joined Trump’s infamous phone call to “find” votes in Georgia, was later subpoenaed by the House January 6th Committee and recommended to face charges by a Georgia grand jury.

At least 11 Trump officials have ties to Mitchell’s election denial network – they’ve been installed in agencies like DHS, DOJ, and CISA. One key example is Heather Honey, often seen as a protege of Mitchell. Honey falsely claimed more ballots were cast in Pennsylvania than there were voters in 2020, a claim Trump cited on January 6th – now holds a newly created DHS election integrity role and still gives EIN members private briefings from inside the government. Experts warn this coordination would likely have violated ethics rules under previous administrations, including Trump’s first term.

What Can You Do?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Trump and his allies are trying to put their thumb on the scales ahead of the 2026 midterms. They’ve spread false conspiracy theories about voting machines and voter rolls – and reporting shows those claims are now being used to justify federal action.

Trump’s March 2025 executive order attempted to force the decertification of voting machines used in multiple states. Courts blocked it – but the people who pushed for it are still in charge. False claims assembled by election deniers were used to justify the FBI’s seizure of 2020 ballots in Fulton County and federal power is being used to pressure states into handing over their un-redacted voter rolls containing Americans’ personal, private information.

This isn’t a red state or blue state issue. These efforts can target elections anywhere in the country. Regardless of who you support politically, you should want your vote to be protected and your elections to be fair.

Call your Secretary of State (contact info):

  • Tell them: False claims about elections are being used at the highest levels of government to justify seizing ballots and targeting voter rolls.
  • Ask them: What are you doing to protect our votes in 2026?

They have a duty to protect the integrity of our elections – make sure they know you expect them to do it.

Speak up. Remain vigilant. Be ready to vote.

Fair Fight Action Team

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.
Categories Accountability, Cheating, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

Peter Greene: The Texas “Ten Commandments” Ruling Is Irreligious Baloney

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2026 //
16

I sent out a bulletin when I learned that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had reversed lower federal courts and approved the Texas law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom.

Peter Greene read the opinion and in this post he shows what a lot of malarkey it is. The more than five million children in Texas public schools are attached to many different faiths or to none at all, but the state is promoting only one. The Founding Fatheres would be horrified.

Greene writes:

Texas was one more state passing a law to mandate the display of the state-approved version of the Ten Commandments. That law was challenged, and U.S. District Judge Fred Biery blocked the law; Texas AG Ken Paxton asked the full 17 judges of the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to revisit the case and overturn the decision. This week they found in favor of the law. “It doesn’t violate the First Amendment at all,” declares the court in a ruling that depends heavily on some really special reasoning.

Paxton and the state used the tired old talking point that this isn’t a religious thing– they’re just “honoring a core ethical foundation of our law” that’s an important part of the nation’s history and heritage and anyway there’s no such thing as the “bogus” separation of church and state, which (you may have heard) is a phrase that does not appear in the Constitution (much like the Ten Commandments).

Anyway, the full court went by a slim majority for Paxton, the decision written by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan.

First the court disposes of the Establishment Clause. And boy do they dispose of that.

If you’ve been following the dismantling of the wall between church and state, you may recall that Kennedy v. Bremerton, the case of the coach who wanted to lead prayers on the 50 yard line– a case that SCOTUS decided by actively ignoring facts— put a final stake through the heart of the Lemon Test, a three-pronged test for whether or not someone was violating the Establishment Clause (legal scholars have assured me that Lemon was not really used, anyway, but let’s move on). This new decision makes it a point to dance on Lemon’s grave and then announce the new test of the clause–

In place of Lemon, courts now ask a question rooted in the past: does the law at issue resemble a founding-era religious establishment?

In other words, is the state trying to “establish” a religion the same way that the King of England established the church of England. Colonies in the 1600s achieved religious uniformity through civil power. If we don’t see “laws compelling attendance at the official church; laws controlling doctrine, worship, and governance; laws punishing dissenters; laws exacting religious taxes; and laws deploying churches for public functions,” then there’s no infringement of the Establishment Clause.

The Texas law doesn’t “tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship” and it doesn’t punish anyone for rejecting the Ten Commandments. It rejects the plaintiffs’ argument that putting the decalogue up in a classroom is inherently coercive. “Not so,” says the glib-ass judges. The law doesn’t require religious observance. So, no Establishment Clause violation, because this law doesn’t all look like the Church of England in the late 1700s.

The plaintiffs had a go at using the historical argument themselves, saying there’s little evidence that schools had a “tradition” of posting the Ten Commandments. But that, says the court, is a whole other thing. The plaintiffs try to argue that “if a practice does not fit within some historical tradition, it violates the Establishment Clause,” but “that does not follow.” See (stay with me here) if something has a root in 18th century tradition, then it is okay, but just because it doesn’t have a root in tradition, that doesn’t mean it’s not okay– so argues the court.

Meanwhile, in states across the country today, simply allowing students to be exposed to a rainbow on a classroom poster is considered too intrusive and might offend some people’s religious beliefs.

Anyway, that’s the new rule according to this court– the state can endorse, publicize, support, pick religious winners and losers, and expose students to as much religion as it wants, as long as it doesn’t start punishing anyone for disagreeing.

What about the Free Exercise Clause?

The plaintiffs brought up Mahmoud v. Taylor, the SCOTUS case that involved parents who wanted to opt their children out of being exposed to books with gay stuff. The plaintiffs likely felt that Mahmoud’s foundation of “parents should direct the religious upbringing of their own children” applied here, but the District Court gets around that, mostly by misrepresenting Mahmoud.

The case rested on the idea that being exposed to books with gay characters would disrupt the educational instruction of parents (the decision also rested on misrepresentation of those books as well). But the district court sees something far more sinister. “Those materials were deployed by teachers with lesson plans designed to subvert children’s religiously grounded views on marriage and gender.”

But nobody is making the students recite, believe, or “affirm their divine origin” (a phrase that I think assumes a fact not in evidence), the court believes the plaintiffs didn’t prove that the law “substantially burdens their right to religious exercise.”

There’s lots more (Duncan uses a footnote to take issue with Biery’s “creative” opinion). I’m going to just pick a few moments.

In a concurrence, Oldham argues that maybe the plaintiffs don’t even have standing because this is textbook “offended observer” stuff:

From top to bottom, the idea is that the plaintiffs (1) worry that they will one day see a poster; (2) worry that they might find that poster offensive; so (3) they invoke federal jurisdiction for protection from potential, hypothetical future offenses.

This is, I guess, totally different from being offended that somebody might some day ask you to make a cake for a gay wedding.

The dissent pushes back on some of the legal arguments. Kennedy did not throw out Stone or the Lemon test, and it was plenty clear that it “observed” the “heightened concerns with protecting freedom of conscience from subtle coercive pressure in the elementary and secondary public schools.” The case established a concern about exactly the kind of coercion that SB 10 represents. Put a poster of commandments in front of impressionable children (with the directive that the poster be visible from any place in the room) and you have coercion. And it is true that SCOTUS went out of its way (and far from reality) to argue that the praying coach was praying privately and personally and not exerting any coercion on his players, suggesting it would have been coercive otherwise.

Oh, there are pages and pages of legal argle bargle here, papering over a decision that joins some Texas leaders in saying, “We want to promote our brand of Christianity to be the dominant religion in this state.” And as always, I will argue that this kind of stuff is bad for everyone, that religion is not improved when the state tries to edit sacred texts and commandeer and control expressions of faith.

In that spirit, let’s wrap this up with the opening of Judge Leslie Southwick’s separate dissent.

What is not part of my dissent is a rejection of the importance of searching for faith. Religion, though, is a matter of the mind and the heart. Faith cannot flourish when it is forced. A poem voices my concern and, I humbly offer, that of the First Amendment:

The livid lightnings flashed in the clouds;
The leaden thunders crashed.

A worshipper raised his arm.

“Hearken! hearken! The voice of God!”

“Not so,” said a man.

“The voice of God whispers in the heart

So softly

That the soul pauses,

Making no noise,

And strives for these melodies,

Distant, sighing, like faintest breath,

And all the being is still to hear.”

Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines, Lines xxxix (1895), reprinted in The Collected Poems of Stephen Crane 41, 41 (Wilson Follett ed., 1930). Like any effective poetry, these lines can give different meaning to different readers at different times. In this opinion, they capture for me that government promotion of religion in every classroom is simulated lightning and thunder, compulsorily seen and heard.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Extremism, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas

How NOT to Celebrate the First Amendment!

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2026 //
6

On Saturday April 25, the White House Correspondents Association will hold its annual dinner, which honors the First Amendment and raises scholarship funds for journalism students.

This year, for the first time, Trump has accepted the invitation. Trump avoided the dinner in the past, because it’s customary to roast the President and his administration.

Trump likes to hurl insults at others, but he can’t tolerate being laughed at, nor is he capable of making fun of himself. He likes to think that he is the best President in history, smarter than the generals and scientists. Everything he does, he thinks, is an unparalleled success.

Humor is not part of his deck of cards. Insults, boasting, and bullying are his main suits.

As it happens, the online publication STATUS got a copy of an invitation to an “intimate gathering” from billionaire David Ellison, whose father bought CBS and is closing in on CNN. According to Status, CBS invited Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller to be their guests at the dinner on the 25.

So many ironies! No administration in memory has done more to erode the First Amendment than the current one. No president has done more to insult and belittle the press than Trump. No Cabinet member has stifled First Amendment rights more than Hegseth. The only coverage he tolerates is sycophancy.

And better yet, Ellison is holding his dinner at the U.S. Institute of Peace. The USIP was a private organization that was evicted from its building by DOGE. Trump decided it should bear his name.

So our great “peace” president is now at war with Iran, a war of choice. Our man of peace issued a warning that he would eliminate Iran’s entire civilization if they did not accept his demands. That’s a war crime.

Somewhere in the wings is Trump’s “Board of Peace,” which collected $1 billion each from countries that wanted to join. Trump is chairman of its board forever. There will be no audits. Trump has collected a bushel basket of billions to spread his gospel of peace.

It’s really sick.

The White House Correspondents dinner will not feature a comedian this year. Comedians might make the dire error of ridiculing Trump. So, instead of a comedian, they invited illusionist Oz Perlman to perform. That’s safe!

To show some backbone, I propose that they invite an unannounced guest to perform: Stephen Colbert.

The very idea of honoring Trump at a dinner that also honors the First Amendment is absurd. This president constantly attacks the press and calls them “fake news,” ridicules female reporters, says belligerently that the press is “the enemy of the people.” He does not deserve to be honored.

The best thing for the White Hiuse Correspondents to do is to boycott their dinner; or to hiss when he is introduced; or to withhold any applause at the end of his remarks.

These are not normal times. Trump is not a normal president. He is an ignorant, bitter narcissist, who is declining physicallly and mentally. He can be counted on to lie and spread hatred. He deserves no honor, no applause.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Hoax, Hypocrisy, International, Trump

An Activist in Indianapolis Mourns the Death of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2026 //
1

Nigel Long is a graduate of Shortridge Public High School in Indianapolis and the parents of students in the Indianapolis Public Schools. He lived through the systematic destruction of his city’s public schools. He opposed the so-called reformers, as he watched them erode and finally eliminate democratic control of the public schools.

Here he expresses his outrage at the theft of democratic control of the city’ schools. His article was posted by the Indiana Coalition for Public Education.

Nigel Long wrote;

Guest Blog – How to Steal a Public School System: The Indianapolis Playbook

I want to talk about what happened in Indianapolis recently, not just for us, but for every city in America.

The Indianapolis Public Education Corporation board was announced. An unelected body now controls school closures, buildings, property taxes, and transportation across the entire boundaries of Indianapolis’ largest and oldest school district. 

David Harris, the man who founded the Mind Trust in 2006, chairs the board. Janet McNeal leads Herron Classical Schools, a network the Mind Trust incubated. Edward Rangel runs Adelante Schools, another Mind Trust launch. Dexter Taylor leads Paramount Brookside, same ecosystem. The IPS board members included were elected with the same dark money that’s been buying school board seats since 2012. And Micheal O’Connor, the consultant the city paid over half a million dollars in public money to design the process that produced this board is now its acting executive director. This board didn’t emerge from the community. It was assembled by the people who funded the takeover.

“This board didn’t emerge from the community. It was assembled by the people who funded the takeover.”

This is the final chess piece in a 20-year game. And I know that because I was there for the first one.

I was a 9th grader at Shortridge High School when the Mind Trust brought John Legend to Indianapolis. I remember being on that field trip, sitting in that room, caught up in the excitement of a global superstar telling us that the future of our schools was bright. I didn’t know then that I was watching the beginning of the end of IPS as we know it. I was a kid. I didn’t know what any of it meant.

I graduated from Shortridge 13 years ago. And I have spent the years since watching that moment slowly reveal itself for what it was.

John Legend wasn’t there for us. He was there to give community cover to the privatization of Indianapolis public schools: a coordinated decades-long effort involving the Mind Trust, Stand for Children, RISE Indy, the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart), Bloomberg Philanthropies, Reed Hastings (Netflix), John Arnold (Enron), and the political allies who carried their water at the statehouse. The money trail is all public record. You don’t raise $134 million and fly in a Grammy winner because you’re running an education experiment. You do it because you need people to stop asking questions.

Since 2006, the Mind Trust has raised over $134 million (their own number, from their own website) working toward this exact moment. They used dark money to purchase school board seats. They ran a legislative process that was designed from the beginning to land exactly where it landed.

The cruelest part of this privatization agenda is that real parents with real concerns were recruited, conditioned, and in some cases compensated to be the public face of something they were never given the full picture on. Their frustration was real. What was done with it was manipulation. They took the pain of Black and brown families navigating a broken system, pointed it in the direction that served them, and called it community engagement. That’s not parent voice. That’s manufactured consent with a marketing budget.

And long before any institution took an official position, there were everyday people in this city, parents, teachers, neighbors, who saw exactly what was happening and said so out loud. They got dismissed. They got ignored. They got outspent. The community has been screaming about this for years. What happened recently is what it looks like when nobody in power listens or cares about the community they are tasked to serve.  

When nearly twice as many people testified against this plan as those who supported it, it didn’t matter. The votes were already lined up. The legislation was already written. The board members were already chosen.

That’s not democracy. That’s the performance of it.

My grandmother had a saying: fat meat is greasy. It means learning a lesson the hard way after ignoring advice that was right in front of you.

A lot of us have been saying this for years. The receipts have been public. The Mind Trust got exactly what they came for. Now all of us — students, parents, educators, communities — have to live in whatever comes next. If this is the first time you’re hearing it, I hope today is the day it becomes impossible to ignore.

I want to be clear about where accountability lives here because this is not a partisan story. State Republicans wrote the legislation and pushed it through. Local Democrats, on the city council and beyond, had every opportunity to protect democratic governance in this city and chose not to. Mayor Hogsett convened the very process that produced these recommendations and appointed the board that will now run our schools. There is no version of this story where the spineless performance of our local elected officials doesn’t deserve to be named directly.

Both parties failed Indianapolis. Full stop.

IPS spent years being held up as a broken system that needed fixing. What actually happened was a live demonstration of how to take a public school system apart and replace democratic accountability with private control without firing a single shot. The enrollment flight that became the justification for this takeover was engineered by the same organizations now running the solution. And everyone in that room when the final vote was cast knew exactly where it was going.

I say this as someone who cares about every child in this city, Black, brown, white, charter school, public school, all of them. Every student in Indianapolis will feel this. Charter families included. This was never about kids versus kids. It was always about who controls the institution.

This was never about kids versus kids. It was always about who controls the institution.

We are living through modern day colonialism dressed up in innovation language. And the proof is in the outcome. Our schools are more segregated today than they have ever been. That’s not an accident. That’s by design.

The IPS that shaped me — that shaped generations of Indianapolis kids — has potentially changed forever. That matters beyond politics because schools are not just buildings and test scores. They are where communities build identity, pass down culture, and figure out who they are. This city has a documented history of coordinated institutional action against Black communities that most people were never taught. Crispus Attucks was built in 1927 to keep Black students out of white schools, segregation dressed up as institution building. Indiana Avenue, once a thriving Black cultural and economic district, was deliberately destroyed between the 1950s and 1970s through highway construction, IUPUI expansion, and eminent domain. Over 12,000 people were displaced. 400 acres of Black history erased. Coordinated by universities, hospitals, city leaders, and state government. Busing in 1981 put the burden of desegregation on Black children while white families simply moved further out. And now this. One day this moment will be remembered alongside all of those — another decision about Black children where the outcome was predetermined before the community ever had a real say. Different decade. Different language. Same intention.

IPS was first. This sets a dangerous precedent for every district in this state. The Indianapolis-Marion County townships, the rural districts, the suburban districts. Any community that powerful people decide isn’t capable of governing itself is vulnerable to exactly what happened here. That’s the part that should terrify everyone regardless of where your kids go to school. This isn’t just about Black and brown communities anymore. It’s about who gets to decide that a community isn’t smart enough or capable enough to make decisions about their own children’s education, and then build the infrastructure to take that power away from them. Indianapolis just showed them how.

The only chance we have going forward is making sure our next mayor isn’t full of shit. And it means holding every elected official, Democrat and Republican, local and state, accountable for what they did and didn’t do when it mattered.

Here’s what I know. The ability to elect the people who make decisions about your children’s education is not a bureaucratic detail. It is democracy’s most basic promise. When you erode that at the school board level and nobody stops it, you have established that it can be done. And if it can be done with education, the institution we trust most with our children and our future, then nothing is off the table.

This feels like a loss because it is one. But public schools have survived worse because the communities behind them refused to quit. That community is still here. It has always been here. No appointed board can change that. The fight doesn’t stop today.

Show up for our school boards. Know who represents us. Demand better from our mayor, our city council, our state legislators.Get involved in our local elections like our kids’ future depends on it, because it does.The people making these decisions are counting on our exhaustion. We can’t give it to them.

Nigel Long is a cultural organizer, event producer, and community builder based in Indianapolis. He is the Founder of SoundOff and serves as Chairperson of BLACK: A Festival of Joy. He is a proud graduate of Shortridge High School and an IPS parent.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Indiana, Indianapolis, Inequity, Privatization

The Court Decision Requiring U of Penn to Compile a List of Jews on Campus Is Wrong

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2026 //
21

Erwin Chemerinsky writes on the legal site Cafe that a judge’s ruling upholding the Trump administration’s demand for a list of Jews at U of Penn is “egregiously wrong.”

Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at UC Berkeley and a constitutional scholar.

He wrote:

A federal judge in Philadelphia was egregiously wrong in upholding an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission subpoena to the University of Pennsylvania that effectively requires it to provide a list of its Jewish faculty and staff. At a time of increasing antisemitic acts, and at a moment when the likes of Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens are expressing vile anti-Jewish hate to massive audiences, it should be unthinkable to ask a university to compile and turn over a list of Jewish people on campus, including their home addresses and phone numbers. The University has appealed and the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit should quickly reverse federal district court Judge Gerald Pappert’s truly insensitive opinion…

The EEOC’s goal is to force the University to create a list, with contact information, of as many Jewish faculty and staff on campus as possible so that the agency can reach out to interview them.  It is a fishing expedition by the EEOC with the hope that if it contacts enough Jewish faculty and staff, it might find evidence of antisemitism on campus.

For many reasons, this is unconstitutional; it also is deeply frightening. The Supreme Court has held for almost 70 years, since NAACP v. Alabama in 1958, that requiring organizations to disclose their members violates freedom of association. In that case, the Court held that Alabama violated the First Amendment in requiring that groups like the NAACP disclose their membership lists. Many cases since have reaffirmed this principle. For example, in Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta (2021), the Court declared unconstitutional a California requirement that non-profit groups turn over their list of donors that they already were required to provide to the federal government….

There are also serious privacy concerns in requiring that the University compile and turn over contact information. The district court said the information here—personal home addresses and phone numbers, task-force participation, survey receipt—is not “highly personal.” This is just wrong as a matter of law. In U.S. Department of Defense v. FLRA (1994), the Supreme Court recognized substantial federal employee privacy interests in home addresses. Moreover, a list of home addresses and phone numbers is one thing; a list of home addresses paired with religious identity is another. Similarly, in Kallstrom v. City of Columbus (1998), the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit recognized that disclosure of home addresses can threaten personal security when linked to a category that a hostile actor has targeted. Hostile attacks on Jewish victims are at their highest number in decades….

This egregious decision should be reversed on appeal.

Categories Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Pennsylvania, Privacy, Religion, Trump

Robert Reich: The Worst Justice in Modern Supreme Court History

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2026 //
9

Robert Reich has selected the Supreme Court Justice whom he believes is the worst in modern history. The two likeliest nominees are clearly Samuel Alito, who wrote the decision that reversed Roe v. Wade and that is responsible for the deaths of many women who were unjustly denied medical care because of Justice Alito.

But no, he chooses Justice Clarence Thomas. In this post, he explains why.

Friends,

I’ve long assumed that Samuel Alito was the worst. 

Alito — who authored the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the case that ended constitutional abortion rights by merely asserting that the high court’s prior opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973) was wrongly decided; who accepted a 2008 luxury fishing trip to Alaska, including private jet travel, from hedge fund billionaire and GOP donor Paul Singer yet failed to disclose it on Alito’s financial forms and didn’t even recuse himself from decisions involving Singer’s subsequent business before the Supreme Court; who hoisted an inverted American flag outside his Virginia home shortly after the January 6 Capitol riot, a symbol of support for Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 election — has the moral and intellectual stature of a poisonous toad. 

But I’ve come to revise my view of the court’s worst Justice.

Clarence Thomas is 77 years old. He has now served on the Supreme Court for over 34 years, making him the longest-serving member of the Court. He is a bitter, angry, severe hard-right, intellectually dishonest, ideologue. After reading his latest thoughts on America, I’ve concluded Thomas is even worse than Alito. 

Last Wednesday, Thomas gave a rare public address at the University of Texas in Austin that began as a banal tribute to the Declaration of Independence before degenerating into a misleading screed against progressivism. 

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream,” Thomas intoned. “The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.”

Thomas went on to blame progressives for the worst crimes of the 20th century, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao” were all “intertwined with the rise of progressivism,” as was “racial segregation,” “eugenics,” and other evils. 

This is pure rubbish. 

In reality, America’s Progressive era emerged at the start of the 20th century from the corruption and excesses of America’s first Gilded Age (we’re now in the second, if you hadn’t noticed) — its record inequalities of income and wealth, its “robber barons” who monopolized industries and handed out sacks of money to pliant legislators, it’s dangerous factories and unsafe working conditions, its violent attacks on workers who tried to form unions, its corporate control over all facets of government, its widespread poverty and disease, and its corrupt party machines. 

In many ways, the Progressive Era — whose most prominent leader was Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, not Woodrow Wilson, by the way — saved capitalism from its own excesses by instituting a progressive income tax, an estate tax, pure food and drug laws, and America’s first laws against corporate influence in politics.

Then, under Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin (Franklin D.), came Social Security, the 40-hour workweek (with time-and-a-half for overtime), the right to form unions, and laws and regulations that limited Wall Street’s ability to gamble with other people’s money. 

Clarence Thomas got it exactly backwards. Had we not had the Progressive Era and its reforms extending through the 1930s, America might well have succumbed to fascism — as did Germany under Hitler, and Italy under Mussolini, or to communist fascism, as did Russia under Stalin. Progressive and New Deal reforms acted as bulwarks against the rise of fascism in America.

In fact, it’s been the demise of such reforms since Ronald Reagan that have opened the way to Trumpian neo-fascism. 

Over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized in the 1950s, giving them bargaining leverage to get higher wages and better working conditions. Now, fewer than 6 percent are unionized, which has contributed to the flattening of wages, a contracting middle class, inequalities of income and wealth rivaling the first Gilded Age, and an angry and suspicious working class that’s become easy prey for demagogues. 

Wall Street has been deregulated — allowing it to go on gambling sprees such as the one that produced the financial crisis of 2008, which claimed millions of working peoples’ homes, savings, and jobs. 

America’s social safety nets have become so frayed that almost a fifth of the nation’s children are now in poverty. Yet Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump have slashed taxes on the rich and on big corporations and have allowed giant corporations to merge into giant monopolies rivaling the trusts of the first Gilded Age. And Trump has ushered in an era of corruption the likes of which America hasn’t seen since that earlier disgraceful era. 

Thomas claims that “The century of progressivism did not go well.” Baloney. It helped America create the largest middle class the world had ever seen, while also extending prosperity to millions of Black and brown people. 

The tragedy is that America turned its back on progressivism and on social progress, in part because of the Supreme Court and Justice Clarence Thomas. 

Flashback: I was in law school in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe, protecting a pregnant person’s right to privacy under the 14th amendment to the Constitution. 

Clarence Thomas was in my law school class at the time, as was Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Clinton) and Bill Clinton.

The professors used the “Socratic method” – asking hard questions about the cases they were discussing and waiting for students to raise their hands in response, and then criticizing the responses. It was a hair-raising but effective way to learn the law.

One of the principles guiding those discussions is called stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided.” It’s the doctrine of judicial precedent. If a court has already ruled on an issue (say, on reproductive rights), future courts should decide similar cases the same way. Supreme Courts can change their minds and rule differently than they did before, but they need good reasons to do so, and it helps if their opinion is unanimous or nearly so. Otherwise, their rulings appear (and are) arbitrary — even, shall we say? — partisan.

In those classroom discussions almost fifty years ago, Hillary’s hand was always first in the air. When she was called upon, she gave perfect answers – whole paragraphs, precisely phrased. She distinguished one case from another, using precedents and stare decisis to guide her thinking. I was awed.

My hand was in the air about half the time, and when called on, my answers were meh.

Clarence’s hand was never in the air. I don’t recall him saying anything, ever.

Bill was never in class.

Only one of us now sits on the Supreme Court. And he has shown no respect for stare decisis. 

Nor has he respected judicial ethics. 

A federal law — 28 U.S. Code § 455 — requires that “any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Thomas’s wife, Ginni, actively strategized with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on overturning the election results. Between Election Day 2020 and the days following the January 6th attack on the Capitol, she exchanged 29 text messages with Meadows, in which she spread false theories about the election, urged Meadows to overturn the election results, and called for specific actions from the White House to help overturn the election. She also served as one of nine board members of a group that helped lead the “Stop the Steal” movement and called for the punishment of House Republicans who participated in the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack. 

Yet Clarence Thomas has repeatedly participated in cases that have come to the high court directly or indirectly involving the 2020 election results, refusing to disqualify himself. 

In addition, he failed to disclose his wife’s income from her work at the Heritage Foundation, in violation of the Ethics in Government Act. 

Finally, there’s his speech last week in Austin. How can Americans be expected to believe in the impartiality of the Supreme Court in general and Clarence Thomas in particular when he condemns an entire philosophy of government — progressivism — and all the people who continue to call themselves progressives, in effect labeling them neo-fascists? 

At the start of his speech last week in Austin, Clarence Thomas noted that “My wife Virginia and I have many wonderful friends and acquaintances here, and it is so special to have our dear friends Harlan and Kathy Crow join us today.”

He was, of course, referring to the Republican mega-donor who has spent the last twenty years lavishing Thomas with personal gifts, luxury yacht trips, fancy vacations, and funding for Ginni Thomas’s political organization. 

Small wonder that Clarence Thomas prefers the Gilded Age over the Progressive Era. He’s the living embodiment of The Gilded Age’s public-be-damned excesses. 

Hence, he’s my nominee for the worst justice in modern Supreme Court history.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, History, Justice

Hegseth Promotes His “Holy War” and Denounces Journalists as Pharisees

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2026 //
10

Brian Stelter of CNN reports in his “Reliable Sources” that Pete Hegseth can’t stop pushing his Christian fundamentalist talk about the Iran war.

He wrote:

Hegseth goes biblical on the media

Andrew Kirell writes: This morning, Pete Hegseth unloaded on the press again, this time invoking the Bible and likening journalists to the Pharisees, the New Testament figures who opposed Jesus.

Hegseth accused the press of constant negativity despite Trump’s “historic and important success” in Iran. “Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what side some of you are actually on,” he added.

He then launched into a lengthy biblical analogy, describing the Pharisees (and thus journalists) as “self-appointed elites of their time” who “witnessed a literal miracle” yet sought to “explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda.” The “legacy, Trump-hating press,” like the Pharisees, he said, is “calibrated only to impugn.”

The sermon-like rant stood out, given the recent dust-up over Trump sharing an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus — a post he later deleted and claimed was meant to depict a “doctor.” The White House may have backed away from the religious comparison, but Hegseth’s comments only seem to resurrect it. “So…they are doubling down on Trump being Jesus?” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller wrote.

Stelter’s take

This sentence from Hegseth was the tell: “I just can’t help but notice the endless stream of garbage, the relentlessly negative coverage, you cannot resist pedaling.” He just can’t help himself. 

The “holy war” type talk, insinuating that doubting Trump is like doubting Christ, was both deeply offensive and surprisingly insecure. 

Gretchen Carlson put it perfectly on X: “As a Christian, how dare you use religion to shame those who simply ask questions.”

As a practical matter, a defense secretary who thinks the press is ignoring US military victories (the press has not done that, but I digress) would provide greater access to service members and share videos from the war zone. There are lots of ways to do that. But Hegseth has been pushing the press out. He’s not even giving fulsome access to MAGA media outlets.

 >> Bottom line: Hegseth’s media-bashing hasn’t worked. The polling hasn’t budged. Trump and Hegseth’s messaging is not moving public opinion, which remains broadly opposed to the war.

Categories Accountability, Extremism, Religion

Texas: Politicians Fight to Exclude Islamic Schools from New Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2026 //
2

Texas Governor Greg Abbott waged a multimillion dollar campaign to defeat moderate Republicans in the Hogse of Representatives so he could finally get the legislature to pass his voucher bill. He wanted to subsidize private Christian schools and was shocked when Islamic schools wanted their students to get vouchers.

Abbott falsely claimed that public schools were “indoctrinating” students, and he wanted the state to pay for students to go to religious schools, whose explicit purpose is indoctrination.

As usual, the overwhelming majority of voucher applicants had never attended a public school. Most were already enrolled in a religious or private school or were none-schooled.

Justin Miller of The Texas Observer writes:

What would’ve been school-choice proponents’ triumphant publicity tour after the application period closed on Texas’ shiny new voucher program, in mid-March, was instead consumed by catty finger-pointing between two top state officials over who’s to blame for the state seemingly botching its attempt to religiously discriminate against some program participants.

It’s the sort of comedic tragedy that has become all too common in the red empire of Texas: Pass a harmful new policy while prevaricating as to its actual intent, create a pretext to carry out the policy in a clearly discriminatory fashion, invite a costly lawsuit that will ultimately end with the state being forced to comply, muddy the waters over who’s to blame. 

While pushing the private-school voucher bill through the state House and Senate last year, Republican legislative hands repeatedly insisted, when presented with various theoretical scenarios, that this near-universal “Texas Education Freedom Accounts” program would be open to any and all types of private schools—of all creeds and persuasions. Religious freedom was to reign supreme. How dare thee even question the universality of this venerable program, Republican legislators inveighed. 

In predictable fashion, the Texas GOP—lately in the throes of another virulent anti-Muslim bender—hasn’t quite lived up to that promise. In the lead-up to the official voucher rollout, acting Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock—who is currently in charge of administering the program and was, at the time, trying to win a primary election to hold onto his appointed post—used the administrative process to effectively block certain Islamic schools from participating by alleging such potential applicants were affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a national civil rights group akin to the NAACP or LULAC, and the Egypt-based transnational organization the Muslim Brotherhood, each of which the state has deemed a “foreign terrorist organization.” (The rule also sought to block schools affiliated with the darned Chinese Communist Party.) The conflation of CAIR with the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine’s Hamas is a theory that’s long brewedin the right’s more feverish swamps. (CAIR is suing the State of Texas over this designation.) 

In response, a group of Islamic schools and Muslim families went to court over the discriminatory exclusion from the program: “The exclusion is not based on individualized findings of unlawful conduct by any specific school, but rather on categorical presumptions that Islamic schools are suspect and potentially linked to terrorism by virtue of their religious identity and community associations,” the lawsuit read. A federal judge ordered the state to extend its application deadline to allow for these schools to go through the process. 

The comptroller’s office has since said that it has accepted all eligible Islamic schools that applied to participate in the program—including Houston’s Quran Academy—but not before Hancock sent a letter critiquing Attorney General Ken Paxton’s handling of the court case and urging Paxton to strip Quran Academy, which the state unsubstantially claims has links to the Muslim Brotherhood, of its ability to operate in the state. In the letter, Hancock—fresh off being blown out in his primary bid to be the duly elected comptroller by ex-state Senator Don Huffines—effectively accused Paxton of being soft on terrorism. “Texas cannot be asleep at the wheel as radical Islam spreads,” Hancock wrote. 

Paxton, in the midst of a heated runoff battle with John Cornyn after coming in second in his own primary bid to ascend to the U.S. Senate, took exception to being scolded by the likes of a RINO such as Hancock (i.e., one of the two GOP senators who voted to convict Paxton in his impeachment proceedings in 2023). The still-AG issued a scorched-earth retort, calling the interim comptroller an incompetent never-Trump hack nursing a deep political grudge—and demanding Hancock be fired. (It’s not clear who, if anyone, would have the authority to fire him.) 

Paxton then said his office, whose duties include serving as legal counsel for state agencies, would no longer be defending the comptroller in the federal vouchers lawsuit, claiming Hancock’s letter undermined the state’s case and introduced “incendiary” accusations against Quran Academy that had not been entered into evidence in court. 

“Never before have I witnessed such a fundamentally unserious person be both an unbelievable embarrassment to the State and put his own interests above Texans,” Paxton wrote. “It would be easy to disregard Kelly Hancock’s letter as nothing more than hotheaded, politically-motivated behavior from someone desperately clinging to relevancy, but it’s far worse than that: His actions hurt my office’s ability to defend the Comptroller’s office in these critical cases.”

For vouchers, there have been some other PR snags as well. For instance, one religious school—Cypress Christian in the Houston area—that hosted a pro-voucher event during Governor Greg Abbott’s promotional tour last year, has itself opted not to participate in the program. 

Per the Houston Chronicle, the school’s leader told parents that the institution is “governed exclusively by biblical doctrine and scripture” and that enrolling in the voucher program would inherently result in “ongoing government entanglement.” Many other high-end private schools—where the annual tuition typically far exceeds the standard $10,000 voucher allotment—in the Houston area have also optedagainst participation. 

All the while, Abbott—who claims political ownership of both the school voucher program, having succeeded in ramming it through a humbled Texas House, and Kelly Hancock’s comptrollership, an ally whom he plucked from the state Senate to take over the statewide office and launch of the program—was radio silent. The governor, in late March, spent his allotted time at CPAC in Dallas, while Paxton and Hancock traded potshots, droning on about the urgent need to stop the “Talarico takeover of Texas,” referencing the Democrats’ Senate candidate. 

Meanwhile, how does the voucher program—which was sold as a tool to allow low-income families to get their kids out of the state’s failing woke indoctrination facilities, known as public schools, and into predominantly Christian private schools—appear to be sizing up with its mission? 

It’s certainly succeeded in getting more applications than the $1 billion that the state has initially appropriated can cover, which is about 90,000 spots. Applications had been submitted for about 275,000 students as of late March. But just 25 percent of those—about 60,000—were for students currently enrolled in public schools, according to state comptroller data. (That, per the Texas Center for Voucher Transparency, amounts to about 1 percent of the state’s 5.5 million public school students.)

To be clear, that means the vast majority of the students who are applying for vouchers are already enrolled in private schools, being homeschooled, or entering school for the first time. There were roughly 2,300 schools enrolled in the program so far—though those schools have full discretion in whether or not to accept a voucher recipient. Many of the enrolled schools are parochial Catholic schools or Christian academies. As the Texas Observer has previously reported, dozens of these enrolled schools have policies that restrict admission based on religion and even sexual identity. 

The application period closed on March 31, then the process moved on to the next phase in which the state—through its privately contracted voucher vendor—will determine who receives the limited number of vouchers, based on a convoluted, multistep process accounting for family income and other variables. 

By that point, it seems assured, some new brouhaha will be consuming the program. 

Categories Extremism, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Iran Mocks U.S. in Searing Short Videos

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2026 //
11

While the U.S. has eliminated its agencies that speak to the world, like Voice of America, Iran has been producing videos mocking the United States, portraying its history as a long series of atrocities, and linking the current war to Jeffrey Epstein.Virginia Heffernan tells the story in The New Republic.

She writes:

There’s a new way to teach American history. It’s not woke. But it’s not patriotic, either. It’s not the 1619 Project or the 1776 project.

It’s the Iranian History of the United States, as seen in “One Vengeance for All,” the most cosmological of the recent pieces of pro-Iran Lego-style agitprop. This is the series you’ve probably caught a glimpse of—the obscene, masterful, and viral AI videos that have hammered the internet since the start of Donald Trump’s ruinous war in Iran. The series, which has been labeled “slopaganda,” is sometimes called “Operation Epstein Fury.”

The strongest entries in the series are producedby an anonymous student activist group called Explosive News (Akhbar Enfejari). Shorter videos in the same style, which look less polished, are reportedly fan-made. All of the videos treat the war with max cartoonery and max ideological torque. Russian and Iraniangovernment accounts regularly boost them. (China has also made its own anti-American propaganda pegged to the war.) 

Scare up the extremely violent videos at your own risk, but here’s a plot summary. In an early one, Trump, panicked about his culpability in the Epstein affair, smashes a red button to strike Iran as a distraction. After Iran strikes back and slams shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu run scared from Iran’s strategic genius and godlike military might. In the next few videos, the U.S. Army loses personnel, planes, helicopters, and popular support; capital markets spiral. Coffins draped in American flags pile up. 

“One Vengeance for All” stands out from the rest because it contains more American history than breaking news. And what a way to see our once-promising nation. The Iranian History of the United States features no pilgrims, Revolutionary War, Civil War, or wars in Europe. Also absent: slavery, civil rights, feminism, and unions. 

Instead, you get 53 seconds of 600 years of American jingoism and genocide. The video opens on an AI caricature of an Indigenous man in a headdress looking to the heavens from the Western plains. Cut to a little boy carrying a dead infant amid smoldering rubble in Hiroshima. These are ghosts.

From there to Vietnam. A middle-aged woman carries a scythe, in a rice field, and again looks skyward. Then come slain Iranian leaders: Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February. All ghosts. Now there’s a girl at a refugee camp in Gaza. We’re given to understand from her hopeful expression that help is coming, and that the help is the Iranian army, though it has no intention of “liberating” or “saving” the ghosts. Instead, with centuries of pent-up resentment in its arsenal, Iran will avenge their suffering with fire and fury.

About two-thirds of the way in, the narrative rounds on the American people, and finds Trump’s victims among us. A blond girl in a pink dress, no older than 6, is pictured in a tropical landscape. It’s Epstein Island. The island’s enigmatic blue-striped building, which some speculate is a reference to the Israeli flag, stands behind her. This girl is also a victim of American imperialism, courtesy of the Trump-Epstein class that merged capital and executive power; private-sector monopolies with political world domination. 

This girl’s Iranian counterpart appears in the next image, a young schoolgirl in a blue coat and white hijab, and she seals the connection. She’s abandoned in the deserted courtyard of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Hormozgan Province. This is the schoolyard where around 170 people were murdered, elementary school students, when the school was bombed by U.S. forces back in February on the war’s first day. 

At once, a sisterhood of ghosts coalesces. From Epstein Island to southern Iran, schoolgirls pair with schoolgirls, the specters of abused children whose lives or spirits have been extinguished by sadistic American tyrants.

Trump is globally known for sex crimes and, like Hegseth, charges of sex crimes—and the Iranian videos depict the two men explicitly as rapists. In one video, the Lego Trump has doll-like girl figures on his bed and lap, and Hegseth is shown in military garb, repeatedly committing rape. Assaults on girls are the modus vivendi of these videos’ versions of Trump and Hegseth.

These sequences are not idle trolling. Rape is, of course, a crime against humanity. But rape is implicated more immediately in the brief for this war, which centers not on strategic goals but on the relentless use of violence against innocents to humiliate an entire people. 

As Jamelle Bouie put it recently, “Forcing others to submit through the indiscriminate use of force does not really sound like war. That does sound like something else. It sounds like rape.” He concluded that the ideology of Trump and Hegseth is “the ideology of the rapist.” 

After 9/11, President Bush used to tell Americans that our enemies resented “our way of life.” In his memorable “Why Do They Hate Us?” speech of September 20, 2001, Bush answered his own question, “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” 

This may or may not have been true of the terrorists a quarter century ago. But it’s not at all true now of Iran, which the U.S. attacked without permission from the people or provocation from Iran. Iran hates the American government for its cruelty toward hundreds of millions of people across six centuries. It’s hard not to see the logic in it. 

In Trump, the ideology of the rapist was unmistakable a decade ago, when he crowed about the joy he takes in humiliating human beings by mauling their crotches. With this war, he’s trying, as usual, for highly aestheticized spectacles of humiliation, and he’s getting them—but not for Iran. For himself, and for the United States.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, History, Trump

Hungarian Voters Oust Viktor Orban!

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2026 //
31

In what appears to be a historic turnout, voters in Hungary ousted Viktor Orban!

This is great news for NATO and bad news for Trump and Putin, who lauded Orban as the future of Europe. MAGA loved Orban, who claimed to have created an “illiberal democracy.”

Orban was a European version of Trump, censoring or closing down anyone who disagreed with him. He harmed freedom of the press, universities, and the judiciary. He stridently opposed LGBT rights.

The victory of Peter Magyar, who seems to have won more than 2/3 of the seats in Parliament, means a new day for Hungary, NATO, and the European Union.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Higher Education, International
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