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Johann Neem: Is the Supreme Court On Track to Outlaw Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2025 //
8

Johann Neem is a professor of history at Western Washington University. He is the author of Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America. His essay appeared originally in Education Week. The question Neem poses is this: Should students be allowed to opt out of any discussion of issues that offend their religion? The Supreme Court said yes. Need questions whether this is possible in a school where parents hold very different views.

He wrote:

On June 27, the Supreme Court released its decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor. The decision has not received the attention it merits. A close reading of the conservative majority’s opinion suggests that the high court is moving toward determining that public schooling violates the First Amendment of the Constitution. The decision could mean the end of public education in America.

The case concerned the Montgomery County, Md., board of education’s decision to integrate LGBTQ+ inclusive readings into its literacy curriculum to further its goal of representing diversity. At first, the district permitted parents to opt out their children, but when that policy became unworkable, it decided that parents would no longer be notified when the books were being used.

In response, several parents sued, arguing that exposing their children to the books threatened their right to raise their children according to their faith.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the parents. The court’s majority opinion concluded that exposing students to progressive ideas about marriage and gender placed an unconstitutional burden on parents’ religious liberties. Writing for the court’s six conservative justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued that the determining precedent is Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), in which the court decided that a law mandating all children attend high school violated the religious liberties of the Amish community.

The majority determined that Yoder, far from an isolated case concerning a discrete community, is a general precedent applicable to all parents. In other words, all parents are Amish now, with the right to require the public schools to protect their children from curricula that burdens their capacity to raise their children according to their faith.

What, then, constitutes a burden on religious freedom? The court first disputed the school board’s claim to be merely exposing students, arguing that the record showed that the school board’s goal was to teach students to support same-sex marriage and gender fluidity.

If the court had stopped there, that would have been one thing, but Alito makes an additional move, arguing that even exposure to ideas that go against parents’ faith could be unconstitutional. The issue is not whether public schools coerce students’ beliefs but whether introducing an idea might undermine parents’ religious freedom. “We reject this chilling vision of the power of the state to strip away the critical right of parents to guide the religious development of their children,” Alito wrote.

In her dissent, signed by the three liberal justices, Justice Sonia Sotomayor responds that the court’s majority decision is untenable. “Given the great diversity of religious beliefs in this country,” she writes, “countless interactions that occur every day in public schools might expose children to messages that conflict with a parent’s religious beliefs.”

Sotomayor predicts the result of the decision will be “chaos for this Nation’s public schools.” “Never, in the context of public schools or elsewhere, has this Court held that mere exposure to concepts inconsistent with one’s religious beliefs could give rise to a First Amendment claim.” Ultimately, Sotomayor concludes, “to presume public schools must be free of all such exposure is to presume public schools out of existence.”

Sotomayor’s objection is ultimately practical: The majority’s opinion is so broad and its criteria so loose that public schools will not be able to function. Instead of elected school boards working things out locally, courts will ultimately adjudicate all curricular decisions at great cost of time and money.

Within the court’s majority opinion, however, lies a deeper threat to the existence of public schools. Because the court determined that exposure to objectionable material violates parents’ rights, policies involving that exposure are subject to “strict scrutiny,” the highest standard of judicial review. This level of judicial review requires that the government must demonstrate that the policy in question both serves an interest of the “highest order” and is “narrowly tailored” to achieve that interest.

The Supreme Court would, no doubt, agree that an educated citizenry is a public interest “of the highest order.” What the court does not address is whether public school systems are “narrowly tailored” to achieve the state’s goals.

Today, elected officials at the state and local levels choose the curricula that their schools will teach. But in effectively determining that any curriculum will violate parents’ rights, the court took a step toward outlawing public schools.

What might the court deem a more “narrowly tailored” policy to achieve the state’s goals of an educated citizenry? Although the court does not say so, the answer may be a private school voucher program in which parents choose schools that fit their faith rather than common schools that serve an entire community.

One cannot exaggerate how dangerous and unhistorical this ruling is. The founding generation considered increasing access to education one of government’s most important functions, enshrining it in the young country’s revolutionary state constitutions. In the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, the federal government even stated that “schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged” and followed through by requiring land be set aside in new territories to generate revenue for public schools.

Today, every state constitution mandates a public education system, with many explicitly framing education as one of the state’s highest obligations.

All this history is at risk of being jettisoned. Instead, the court has determined that the need to protect students from being exposed to ideas hostile to their family’s religious beliefs trumps everything else. Under the court’s new rules, no curriculum could ever be constitutional unless parents are always informed in advance and can protect their children from anything objectionable to their specific religious beliefs.

Given this burden, states may be forced to find a more “narrowly tailored” approach to educating citizens. And before we know it, one of America’s greatest successes, one of the most popular American institutions, and one of the few we still share in common, will be gone.

Categories Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, History, Supporting public schools

Headstart Leaders Speak Out Against Kennedy’s Order to Ban Children of Non-Citizens

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2025 //
7

The first iteration of Trump’s Big Ugly Bill included the elimination of Headstart. This program was birthed in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” It provides food, medical screening, education, and socialization skills for low-income children ages 3-4. It also provides jobs for some of the children’s mothers.

But there must have been enough negative feedback from Republicans to cause Headstart to survive.

However, the Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared that children of undocumented immigrants would not be allowed to participate in Headstart. How will the programs know which children to exclude? The announcement outraged Headstart providers, those brave enough to speak out.

The blog Wonkette reported on the negative reactions:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. added further shame to his family’s legacy Thursday, announcing that effective immediately, undocumented immigrant children will be banned from the Head Start preschool program, which not only provides child care and preparation for kindergarten to low-income preschoolers, but also provides school meals and health screenings. The point is to finally crack down on undocumented three- to five-year-olds to send the message that they must not come to the US without proper legal authorization. 

In addition to kicking an unknown number of children out of Head Start, the change in HHS policy also bars everyone in the country without legal status from multiple HHS programs including access to public clinics, family planning, mental health and substance abuse treatment, and the federal low-income energy assistance program. Sure, some people will probably get sick and die, but that’s the point. The Trump war on immigrants must ratchet up cruelty at every opportunity, just as the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws systematically excluded German Jews from every aspect of public life. 

People living in the US without authorization are already prohibited from most public benefits like Medicaid and SNAP, but a 1998 rule enacted by the Clinton administration allowed them to use some public health programs, including Head Start, under the logic that a healthy public, including children attending preschool, is actually better than sickness and ignorance. Kennedy reversed that interpretation, redefining Head Start and a bunch of other HHS programs as “federal public benefits’’ that are only available to citizens and to permanent legal residents. You know, at least until Stephen Miller figures out how to invalidate all green cards, too. The MAGA faithful can never be satisfied in their demands for eradication of ILLEGALS.

Kennedy said in a press release that even the most basic health and education measures “incentivize illegal immigration,” which of course is some bullshit, so we won’t quote any of his other lies. 

Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the National Head Start Association, issued a statement pointing out that in its 60 years of existence, Head Start “has never required documentation of immigration status as a condition for enrollment,” and that nothing in the Head Start Act justifies the new restrictions. Vinci added that “Attempts to impose such a requirement threaten to create fear and confusion among all families who are focused on raising healthy children, ready to succeed in school and life,” which of course is the point. She also noted that Kennedy’s action

“undermines the fundamental commitment that the country has made to children and disregards decades of evidence that Head Start is essential to our collective future. Head Start programs strive to make every child feel welcome, safe, and supported, and reject the characterization of any child as ‘illegal.’”

We will just assume that her comments were met with angry complaints from MAGA that it’s dishonest to call someone a “child” when in fact they’re an ILLEGAL ALIEN, which automatically wins every argument. 

As for wisely using taxpayer money, HHS claimed that banning undocumented kids from Head Start would save $374 million a year, at the low, low cost of only $21 million annually to document eligibility. Not included in the estimate was any guess at how many US citizen children would be thrown out of Head Start because their parents fear submitting paperwork to the government, or how many kids of US citizens would lose access to the program because of paperwork snafus. 

The number of children affected by the decision is difficult to assess, since according to experts, most of the young children of parents here without papers were born here in the US. Julie Sugarman, who directs K-12 research for the Migration Policy Institute, told the Washington Post, “The actual number of children this would affect is probably very, very small.” Of course, the ban is also so vaguely defined that the administration may intend for it to exclude any children of undocumented parents regardless of the child’s own citizenship status. 

We’ll add that ripping away education and health services from any children at all as a means of punishing their parents is cruel on the face of it. And of course Donald Trump is still itching to end birthright citizenship so babies can be deported more easily. 

For that matter, the Right has long despised Head Start and sought to wipe it out altogether because preschool is communist, and allows poor families to have some childcare they don’t deserve. It’s a bit of a wonder that the administration’s draft budget plan to zero out Head Start, leaked in April, didn’t ultimately make it into the Big Shitty F**k Poor People Twenty Ways From Sunday Bill. But then, there’s little reason to think Trump won’t decide at some point to simply eliminate Head Start by decree, since he considers funding passed by Congress only a suggestion anyway.

In the longer term, red states and groups like the Heritage Foundation keep pushing their efforts to pass laws to ban undocumented children from public schools altogether. The 1982 Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe ruled that states can’t deny access to public education based on immigration status, but that’s yet another thing that gets rightwingers spittin’ mad. Bills that would have required schools to collect information on families’ immigration status failed this year in Indiana, New Jersey, Texas, and Tennessee, but eventually one is nearly certain to pass and make its way to the Supreme Court.

Pushback to the latest assault on Head Start and undocumented children came very quickly. The Illinois Head Start Association on Friday instructed its hundreds of members not to make any changes to who they serve, pointing out that the government hasn’t provided any directions on how providers are supposed to put the ban in place and screen out undocumented children. (Or parents? Nobody knows!) 

“We have never asked for [the] status of our children that we’re serving, and to do so creates fear and anxiety among our community,” said Lauri Morrison-Frichtl, head of the Illinois Head Start Association, which supports about 600 centers statewide serving the 28,000 students in Head Start in the state. “So we’re really worried that families will stop bringing their children, they won’t be able to go to work [and] children will be in unsafe places.”

The Illinois Head Start Association is also one of several educational organizations and parent groups who filed a federal lawsuit in April aimed at stopping Trump’s threatened cuts to Head Start. The ACLU, which is representing the plaintiffs, immediately announced that the plaintiffs will amend their complaint in the case to fight the administration’s latest attack on Head Start.

Now that Trump’s polling on immigration policy is deep underwater with Americans, who support deporting dangerous criminals but are horrified by Trump’s fascist stormtrooper shit, this new cruelty aimed at little kids is only going to make people more disgusted with the administration. Americans freaking love education. We hate seeing kids harmed. Let Republicans know you aren’t going to stand for this crap.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Health, Injustice

Jan Resseger: Trump Is Obliterating Civil Rights Laws

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2025 //
4

Jan Resseger is a social justice warrior who worked for the United Church of Christ. In retirement, she writes lucid, carefully researched articles about social policy and its effect on the nation’s most vulnerable people.

I should post everything she writes but I miss some. Here is Jan on Trump’s Big Ugly Bill and how it will hurt the neediest children and families.

This article about Trump’s assault on civil rights law was posted by the National Education Policy Center.

She writes:

On Wednesday, April 23rd, President Donald Trump released an executive order banning the use of disparate impact when the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights investigates disparities in school discipline under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Under the concept of disparate impact, officials in the Office for Civil Rights have been able to document discrimination by measuring the effects of a school’s or school district’s discipline practice on the mass of the  school’s or school district’s students even when there is no proof that staff members intended to punish some students mores severely due their race or ethnicity or sexual orientation. Staff at the Brookings-Brown Center on Education Policy, Rachel Perera and Jon Valant, define “disparate impact”: “Disparate impact is the idea that school discipline policies that disproportionately harm students of color may constitute illegal racial discrimination even if those policies are… applied in an evenhanded way.”

Academic researchers have been examining unjust school discipline policies for decades. In 2014, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA described groundbreaking work to define “the school-to-prison pipeline” as a metaphor for disparate impact in discipline policies across many U.S. public schools. Researchers documented differences in the kind of punishment imposed on students based on their race or ethicity or disability: “The Civil Rights Project has been working on the school discipline issues since 1999, under the leadership of Daniel Losen. Research from CRP’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies… finds that far too many districts suspend students in droves, while many others have little or no racial disparities and adhere to the common sense philosophy that suspensions, expulsions and arrests are strictly measures of last resort.”

In her new book, Original Sins, sociologist Eve Ewing describes how a punitive, prison-like, school culture, including systemic disparate impact, can infuse a school’s treatment of different groups of students because individual teachers and staff just get caught in the system in which they operate every day: “As sociologist Carla Shedd has written, the ‘routines and rituals’ created by carceral logic—everything from interacting with police officers in schools to strict uniform codes of conduct—become integral to the way a school functions, and can ultimately undermine the ostensibly educational purpose of the school building by making students feel unsafe… From within the space of the school, such regimes of discipline can become so routine that they escape notice by those who are accustomed to them.” (Original Sins, pp, 156-157)

For decades, disparate impact in school discipline has been at the heart of many of the complaints filed and consent decrees established between school districts and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. But on April 23, as the NY Times’ Erica Green reports, “President Trump has ordered federal agencies to abandon the use of a longstanding legal tool used to root out discrimination against minorities, a move that could defang the nation’s bedrock civil rights law. In an expansive executive order, Mr. Trump directed the federal government to curtail the use of ‘disparate-impact liability,’ a core tenet used for decades to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by determining whether policies disproportionately disadvantage certain groups… ‘This order aims to destroy the foundation of civil rights protections in this country, and it will have a devastating effect on equity for Black people and other communities of color,’ said Dariely Rodriguez, the acting co-chief counsel at the Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law….”

Green explains: “The disparate-impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more. Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities… Mr. Trump’s order resurrects a last-ditch effort made in the final days of his first term to repeal disparate-impact regulations through a formal rule-making process… Now the Justice Department’s embattled civil rights division has halted the use of disparate-impact investigations altogether, officials said.”

It is important to note that the Trump administration has not attempted, so far, to change the law itself, but instead to amend the federal guidance and rules that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has used in its investigations.  The Washington Post‘s Kim Bellware explains: “Trump’s order directs federal agencies to ‘deprioritize enforcement’ of statutes and regulations that include disparate-impact liability, which has long enabled courts to stop policies and practices that unfairly exclude people on the basis of protected characteristics such as race, gender, and disability.”

When disparate impact is cited, the disparities are regularly documented with large data studies.  For example, back in 2008, in his powerful book, So Much Reform: So Little Change, the University of Chicago’s Charles Payne described national data indicating the widespread disparate impact of discriminatory school discipline: “According to data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year, African American students nationally are suspended or expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students. In Minnesota, Black students are six times as likely to be suspended as whites, but that seems downright friendly compared to New Jersey, where they are almost 60 times more likely to be expelled. In 21 states, the percentage of Black suspensions is more than double their percentage in the student body. These disproportions affect middle-class as well as working-class Black students and there is no reason to believe that they can be reduced to actual differences in student behavior. At least some of the discrepancy seems to be about teachers interpreting similar behaviors differently when they come from students of different races… We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that African American students perceive school climate less favorably than white students or staff.” (So Much Reform: So Little Change, p. 112)

In 2014, in its own “Dear Colleague Letter,” the Obama administration announced a formal policy affirming the use of “disparate impact” as evidence in school discrimination cases. Here is constitutional law professor, Derek W. Black, in a 2016 book, Ending Zero Tolerance: The Crisis of Absolute School Discipline: “On January 8, 2014, the Departments of Education and Justice went beyond individual enforcement actions and formally announced their policy on school discipline moving forward… The policy guidance distinguished between disparate treatment (treating minority students and whites differently in terms of discipline) and disparate impact (facially neutral policies that result in racially disparate outcomes). It came as no surprise that schools cannot suspend an African American student for fighting and only send his white classmate to study hall. But the (formal policy) guidance on racial disparities was significant.” (Ending Zero Tolerance, p. 84)

In 2018, the first Trump administration tried to end the use of disparate impact as a way to measure civil rights violations by ending Obama’s rules and guidance. Perera and Valant reported: “When the Trump administration rescinded the Obama Dear Colleague Letter in 2018… it dropped any reference to disparate impact theory and defined much narrower conditions (for) OCR investigations.”

Perera and Valant add that the Biden administration did, in another Dear Colleague Letter, try to restore Obam’s rules and guidance, but they write that Biden administration’s “letter lacks a definition of illegal discrimination, information about how the federal government will enforce civil rights law, guidance for school districts on mandated data collection, or suggested practices and policies to prevent discrimination.”

Nevertheless, despite the weak Biden policy statement, President Biden’s Department of Education continued to investigate and enforce civil rights violations in school discipline based on disparate treatment.

Here we are now in 2025 with President Trump’s new executive order that attempts to cancel the use of disparate impact in civil rights enforcement altogether. Fortunately Trump’s new executive order will likely face lawsuits.  Erica Green explains why: “Mr. Trump’s executive order, which is likely to face legal challenges, falsely claimed that the disparate-impact test was ‘unlawful’ and violated the Constitution. In fact, the measure was codified by Congress in 1991, upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015 as a tool in the work of protecting civil rights, and cited in a December 2024 dissent by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.”

In the meantime in late March 2025, a month before Trump’s new executive order banning the use of disparate treatment in civil rights investigations, Trump’s Office for Civil Rights, in a move demonstrating Trump’s view of civil rights enforcement using “disparate impact,” dismissed a consent degree established in the Biden years to address discriminatory school discipline. The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler describes what happened in Rapid City, South Dakota: “For years, Native American students in the Rapid City, South Dakota, school district were more likely to be disciplined and less likely to enroll in advanced courses than their White peers. In 2010, the Education Department opened an investigation to see if racial discrimination was to blame… The original investigation found that Native American students in the district were twice as likely as White students to be referred for discipline, more than four times as likely to be suspended and more than five times as likely to be referred to law enforcement officials.”

Meckler continues: “The effort lingered until last year, when investigators came to a voluntary agreement with the district. In a 28-page letter signed last May, the federal government outlined its concerns that Native American and White students had been treated differently. The school district, which is the second-largest in South Dakota, agreed to take a number of steps, including staff trainings, better communication with parents and ongoing monitoring.”

At the end of March 2025, reports Meckler, “the Trump administration told the Rapid City Area School District it was terminating the agreement.”  But school district personnel in Rapid City did not consider the termination of the consent agreement to be a victory: “The Trump administration letter, sent March 27, came as a shock to the Rapid City Area School District, which did not ask for a change, a district spokeswoman said. She said the district plans to continue to abide by its terms, even though federal officials will not be monitoring to see if it does so. ‘While political priorities may shift, our core educational values remain steadfast,’ Cory Strasser, the district’s acting superintendent said in a statement. ‘Our mission remains to provide a safe, positive, and nondiscriminatory learning environment where all students can achieve their full potential.’ “

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Injustice, Trump

Measles Returns, 25 Years After It Was Eradicated

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2025 //
2

Measles is back! This is bad news. Our nation officially eradicated measles in 2000, yet measles is having a banner resurgence.

Why? We all know by now. The COVID pandemic launched an anti-vaccine movement, joined by large numbers of parents who distrusted science and wanted to protect their children: not by immunizing them but by refusing to immunize them.

Now that an anti-vaxxer–Robert F. Kennedy Jr.– is in charge of the nation’s public health system, we can anticipate an active effort to discourage parents from vaccinating their children. This is sad. In fact, it is tragic because children who are unvaccinated stand a high risk of death.

The New York Times reported:

There have now been more measles cases in 2025 than in any other year since the contagious virus was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, according to new data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The grim milestone represents an alarming setback for the country’s public health and heightens concerns that if childhood vaccination rates do not improve, deadly outbreaks of measles — once considered a disease of the past — will become the new normal.

Experts fear that with no clear end to the spread in sight, the country is barreling toward another turning point: losing elimination status, a designation given to countries that have not had continuous spread of measles for more than a year.

“It’s a huge red flag for the direction in which we’re going,” said Dr. William Moss, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has studied measles for more than 25 years.

Most of the cases this year have been tied to the Southwest outbreak — the largest single outbreak since 2000 — which began in January in a Mennonite community in West Texas and has since jumped to New Mexico and Oklahoma.

But cases have also popped up in 38 states, which experts say represents a concerning vulnerability to diseases of the past. Because of the contagiousness of the virus, researchers often think of measles as the proverbial canary in a coal mine. It is often the first sign that other vaccine-preventable diseases, like pertussis and Hib meningitis, might soon become more common.

In total, 1,288 people have had a confirmed case of measles this year, 92 percent of whom were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown….

While measles symptoms typically resolve in a few weeks, the virus can cause pneumonia, making it difficult for patients, especially children, to get oxygen into their lungs. It may also lead to brain swelling, which can cause lasting damage, including blindness, deafness and intellectual disabilities.

For every 1,000 children who get measles, one or two will die, according to the C.D.C. Two unvaccinated children and one adult have died this year, the first such deaths in the country in a decade.

The outbreak’s full effect on public health may not be apparent for years.

The virus causes “immune amnesia,” making the body unable to defend itself against other illnesses it has already been exposed to and leaving patients more susceptible to future infections. And very rarely, the virus can cause a degenerative and almost always deadly neurological condition that may appear a decade after the original infection.

Until now, 2019 held the record for the highest number of measles cases since the virus was eliminated. (Before that, large outbreaks sickened tens of thousands of people in some years.) Most of the 1,274 cases that year were connected to a large outbreak that spread through Orthodox Jewish communities in New York State for nearly 12 months.

To see graphics that show where outbreaks of measles have occurred, open the link.

Categories Accountability, Extremism, Health, Science

GOP Has a New Culture War Target: Superman

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2025 //
14

Democrats are tied up in knots trying to frame “the right message.”

Republicans are focused relentlessly on stupid, misleading culture war issues, invented out of whole cloth. They skillfully maneuver voters into arguing about fake issues, enabling them to sidestep their truly terrible policies and goals.

A few years back, Republicans launched a full-scale attack on “critical race theory,” which demonized any honest examination of American history. Parents turned out to school board meetings to protest the phantom CRT, which allegedly made white kids feel bad.

Republicans harped on the issue, and red states passed laws banning CRT and other “divisive” concepts. The base fell for the anti-CRT campaign hook, line, and sinker.

Have you heard about CRT lately? NO. It served its purpose. On to fomenting hate against other targets.

In the 2024 campaign, the Republican Party had two burning issues: transgender people and violent immigrants. They harped relentlessly on parents’ fears that teachers were indoctrinating their children to be gay, even to be transgender. School nurses, it seemed, were performing surgery at school so that students could switched to a different gender, even though the same nurses won’t prescribe an aspirin without parental permission.

Stoking hatred towards immigrants was equally successful for Republicans. Undocumented immigrants were here to rape and murder. When the election was over, Trump used the hatred he had stoked to unleash masked thugs to kidnap people off the streets and throw them into unmarked vans. The mass roundups continue, despite pleas by farmers and the tourist industry to leave their workers alone.

The centerpiece of Trump’s massive Big Ugly Bill was the billions allotted to dertaining and expelling the immigrants that Trump used to stoke fear and hatred.

Culture war issues are very successful for Republicans because they distract the public from what is really happening. They distract from informed discussions of the radical downsizing of the federal government, the shutdown of foreign aid, the elimination of programs authorized by Congress, the incoherent tariff wars that alienate our allies.

The latest culture war issue has been building against the new “Superman” movie. It is even more pointless than the war against CRT and trans kids.

The best description of the Republicans’ efforts to gin up fear of the new movie was written by journalist Parker Molloy, who writes an excellent blog called “The Present Age.”

She wrote:

So apparently Superman believing in “basic human kindness” is now controversial. Who knew?

James Gunn, director of the new Superman film hitting theaters this Friday, recently sat down with The Times of London for an interview about his take on the Man of Steel. His crime? Describing Superman as “the story of America” — specifically, as an immigrant story centered on the apparently radical notion that being kind to people is good, actually.

“I mean, Superman is the story of America. An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country,” Gunn told the newspaper. “But for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”

Pretty anodyne stuff, right? The most famously wholesome superhero represents wholesome values. An alien refugee who becomes Earth’s greatest champion might have something to do with immigration. Real “water is wet” territory here.

But in the right-wing media ecosystem, Gunn’s comments were treated like he’d just announced Superman would be spending the entire movie reading The Communist Manifesto while wearing a pussy hat. Fox News immediately branded the film “Superwoke.”Jesse Watters suggested Superman’s cape should read “MS13.” Breitbart called it “terrible,” “superficial,” and “overstuffed” — which is impressive considering they hadn’t seen it yet. One OutKick writer declared that Gunn was “obviously upset that President Donald Trump is deporting illegal immigrants by the millions.”

All because a director pointed out that Superman — a character literally created by the children of Jewish immigrants — is an immigrant story about being nice to people.

The manufactured outrage machine kicked into overdrive so fast, you’d think Gunn had suggested replacing the S on Superman’s chest with a hammer and sickle. But this isn’t really about Superman. It’s about how conservative media takes the most innocuous statements and transforms them into culture war ammunition. It’s about how the right-wing ecosystem has become so reflexively oppositional that even “basic human kindness” reads as a partisan attack.

And perhaps most tellingly, it’s about what happens when you’ve built an entire media apparatus that needs a constant supply of things to be mad about — even if that means getting upset that Superman, of all characters, stands for truth, justice, and helping people.

Let’s trace how this nonsense actually unfolded, because watching the outrage assembly line in action is genuinely instructive.

The Times interview dropped on July 6. Within hours, the right-wing media apparatus had stripped Gunn’s comments of context and repackaged them as an assault on American values.

Fox News didn’t just report on Gunn’s comments; they created an entire narrative. “Superwoke” became their branded shorthand, repeated across segments like a mantra. Kellyanne Conway appeared on the network to declare, “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us.” Because apparently, suggesting people should be kind is now “ideology.”

But it was Jesse Watters who really went for it, quipping, “You know what it says on his cape? MS13.” Yes, the Fox News host actually tried to connect Superman — SUPERMAN — to a Salvadoran gang. Because he’s an immigrant, get it? Real subtle stuff.

The escalation was predictable. Ben Shapiro released a YouTube video through The Daily Wire, focusing his ire on lead actor David Corenswet’s refusal to say “the American way” in interviews. Instead, Corenswet had said “truth, justice, and all that good stuff,” which apparently constitutes treason in Shapiro’s America. “The reality that Hollywood is so far to the left that they cannot take a core piece of Americana and just say it’s about America,” Shapiro complained, seemingly unaware that “the American way” wasn’t even added to Superman’s motto until the 1950s.

The coordination across outlets was almost impressive. All the right-wing news organizations hit the same talking points within 48 hours. “Go woke, go broke” appeared in nearly every piece, because if there’s one thing conservative media loves, it’s a catchphrase that rhymes.

What’s particularly rich about all this pearl-clutching is that these same outlets constantly complain about “cancel culture” and “mob mentality.” Yet here they are, organizing a pre-emptive boycott of a movie because its director said… checks notes… immigrants can be good people and we should be nice to each other.

There is more to her brilliant critique. Open the link and finish reading. I subscribed.

Meanwhile, the actual film is getting great reviews and audience reactions. We are all in danger of being nice and kind to one another.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democrats, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Republicans

Trump Throws Global Economy into Chaos with On-again, Off-again Tariffs

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2025 //
7

The New York Times said bluntly that Trump has plunged the global economy into chaos with his wild and wooly tariffs. He doesn’t know what they are, who pays for them, how they affect trade. He is listening only to Peter Navarro, the tariff evangelist. Trump is not the master of “the art of the deal” (a ghost-written book). He is the master of obfuscation and chaos.

The New York Times reported:

Six months into his new administration, President Trump’s assault on global trade has lost any semblance of organization or structure.

He has changed deadlines suddenly. He has blown up negotiations at the 11th hour, often raising unexpected issues. He has tied his tariffs to complaints that have nothing to do with trade, like Brazil’s treatment of its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, or the flow of fentanyl from Canada.

Talks with the United States were like “going through a labyrinth” and arriving “back to Square 1,” said Airlangga Hartarto, the Indonesian minister for economic affairs, who met with U.S. officials in Washington on Wednesday.

The resulting uncertainty is preventing companies and countries from making plans as the rules of global commerce give way to a state of chaos.

“We’re still far away from making real deals,” said Carsten Brzeski, global head of macroeconomics at the bank ING in Germany. He called the uncertainty “poison” for the global economy.

Gone is the idea that the White House would strike 90 deals in 90 days after a period of rapid-fire negotiation, as Mr. Trump pledged in April. Instead, Washington has signed bare-bone agreements with big trading partners including China, while sending many other countries blunt and mostly standardized letters announcing hefty tariffsto start on Aug. 1.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Economics, Economy, Extremism, Stupid, Trump

The Cartoonist Who Was Canceled by MAGA

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2025 //
15

Adam Zyglis of the Buffalo News was supposed to have a showing of his drawings in Buffalo. But it was canceled due to threats from MAGA people who don’t like his artwork or his politics.

This cartoon, in particular, was denounced by rightwing media, who agreed it was “vile.”

Categories Censorship, Creativity, Extremism, Humor

Trump Budget Guts Scientific Research

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2025 //
3

William J. Broad, science writer for The New York Times, reports on the Trump administration’s draconian cuts to scientific research. As the U.S. cuts back on investments in basic research, China is increasing its spending.

I invite anyone who reads this to try to explain why this administration is reducing spending on scientific research.

Broad writes:

President Trump’s budget plan guts federal science funding for the next fiscal year, according to an overview published by an external group. Particularly at risk is the category of basic research — the blue-sky variety meant to push back the frontiers of human knowledge and sow practical spinoffs and breakthroughs in such everyday fields as health care and artificial intelligence.

The group says it would fall by more than one-third.

The new analysis, made public Wednesday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a general scientific society based in Washington, D.C., added up cuts to the budgets of hundreds of federal agencies and programs that do scientific research or provide grants to universities and research bodies. It then compared the funding appropriated for the current fiscal year with the administration’s proposals for fiscal year 2026.

For basic science research, the association reported that the overall budget would fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, a drop of roughly 34 percent. For science funding overall — which includes money for basic, applied and developmental work, as well as for facilities for research and development — the analysis found that the federal budget would fall to $154 billion from $198 billion, a drop of 22 percent.

The new analysis shows that the Trump administration’s budget plan, if adopted, “would essentially end America’s longstanding role as the world leader in science and innovation,” said Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities.

His group, Mr. Smith added, is working with Congress to develop “a funding plan for strategic investment that would help to sustain continued American scientific leadership rather than destroying it.”

Mary Woolley, president of Research America, a nonprofit group that promotes science, said the new analysis showed that the budget plan “is threatening not only science but the American public. If approved by Congress, it will make the public less safe, poorer and sicker.”

Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, did not reply to a request for comment on the new analysis.

In early May, the White House unveiled a budget blueprint that listed proposed cuts to a handful of science agencies. For instance, it sought a reduction in the budget of the National Science Foundation, which sponsors much basic research, to $3.9 billion from $8.8 billion, a drop of 55.8 percent.

Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the science association, said in an interview that the comprehensive analysis drew on several hundred proposed budgets from federal science agencies and programs, as well as figures supplied by the White House Office of Management and Budget. In May, the budget office made public the rough sketch of the administration’s overall proposal for next year but included only a small number of science agencies and figures.

The Gutting of America’s Medical Research: Here Is Every Canceled or Delayed N.I.H. Grant. Some cuts have been starkly visible, but the country’s medical grant-making machinery has also radically transformed outside the public eye.

Ms. Zimmermann added that the association’s new compilations would be updated as new budget data from federal agencies and programs became available. However, she said, the group’s estimates of cuts to federal basic research are “not going to be undone by a minor number change.”

The science group has long recorded the ups and downs of the federal government’s annual spending on science. Taking inflation into account, Ms. Zimmermann said the administration’s proposed cut of $44 billion would, if approved, make the $154 billion figure the smallest amount that the federal government has spent on science in this century…

In May, science appeared to be high on the list for significant funding cuts, while large increases were proposed for the Pentagon and Homeland Security. Until the science association updated its reports on the proposed presidential budget for fiscal year 2026, however, the public had no clear indication of the overall size of the federal cuts.

The proposed drop in federal funding for science research, if approved by Congress, could let China match or take the lead in global science investments, Ms. Zimmermann said.

In April, the science group published figuresshowing that China had greatly increased support for its scientific enterprise in the past two decades. As of 2023 — the most recent year available for comparisons — China’s investment was close to equaling that of the United States.

Experts say it could take years of data gathering to know if China is pulling into the lead.

Categories Budget Cuts, Economy, Extremism, Funding, Health, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

Ted Cruz Slashed NOAA Funding for Weather Forecasting in Trump Budget

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2025 //
12

Since the disaster in Texas, where more than 100 lives were lost to a flash flood in the middle of the night, Senator Ted Cruz has been readily available to comment for every television camera.

He has warned Democrats and Republicans alike not to politicize the tragic events (forgetting that Republicans pounced on the Los Angeles fires to blame Democrats and DEI as the 98-mile-an-hour winds were still spreading disaster. They blamed Mayor Karen Bass [who is female and Black], they blamed the female leaders of the LA Fire Department, they blamed Governor Gavin Newsom for refusing to turn on an imaginary faucet in Northern California).

What Cruz has not mentioned is that he inserted a cut into Trump’s Big Ugly Bill that slashed $150 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget for forecasting the weather.

The Guardian reported:

“There’s no doubt afterwards we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say, ‘OK what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’” Cruz told Fox News. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.”

The National Weather Service has faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas, triggering floods that caused the deaths and about $20bn in estimated economic damages. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response, and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials.

But before his Grecian holiday, Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (Noaa) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis.

Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation bill, before its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150m fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around weather forecasting.

Cruz was vacationing in Greece with his family when the flood occurred. A few years ago, when the power grid in Texas collapsed during a bitter cold spell, Cruz and family were on their way to Cancun. Maybe he should put out public alerts about his vacations so we can all be prepared for disasters.

Politifact debunked the claim that Trump totally defunded NOAA and the National Weather Service, it acknowledged that cuts were made (at the insistence of DOGE).

“While the administration has not defunded the NWS or NOAA, it is proposing in 2026 to cut significant research arms of the agency, including the Office of Atmospheric Research, a major hot bed of research,” Matt Lanza, Houston-based meteorologist and editor of The Eyewall, a hurricane and extreme weather website, told PolitiFact. “Multiple labs that produce forecasting tools and research used to improve forecasting would also be impacted. The reorganization that’s proposed would decimate NOAA’s research capability.” 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Stupid, Texas

Stephen Miller: A Life and Career Driven by Hate and Ruthless Ambition

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2025 //
10

The New York Times published a long article about the rise and power of Stephen Miller. Miller is one of Trump’s closest aides. His title is Deputy Chief of Staff but he seems to be in charge of immigration policy and many more areas. His goal is to deport every immigrant out of the U.S.

This is a gift article, so you should be able to open it and read it.

Here are a few choice selections.

About the turmoil in Los Angeles, where Trump nationalized the state Guard and sent in hundreds of Marines, which generated protests:

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.

There is much truth to the conventional wisdom that the biggest difference between the first and second Trump presidencies is that, in the second iteration, Mr. Trump is unrestrained. The same is true of Mr. Miller. He has emerged as Mr. Trump’s most powerful, and empowered, adviser. With the passage of the big policy bill, ICE will have an even bigger budget to execute Mr. Miller’s vision and, in effect, serve as his own private army. Moreover, his influence extends beyond immigration to the battles the Trump administration is fighting on higher education, transgender rights, discrimination law and foreign policy….

Mr. Miller is more obdurate when it comes to domestic policy, particularly immigration. For Mr. Trump’s second term, he has led the president to stake out a series of maximalist positions, from the ICE raids to the use of the Alien Enemies Act to raising the possibility of suspending habeas corpus for people suspected of being undocumented immigrants. Mr. Trump seems to enjoy having Mr. Miller play the heavy on immigration. During his first term, he jokingly told people who urged him to take more moderate stances on immigration that Mr. Miller would never go for them. Last year, he reportedly quipped during a campaign meeting that if it was up to Mr. Miller, the population of the United States would be only 100 million people and they’d all resemble Mr. Miller. The humor, however, underscores something serious: On immigration, Millerism is a more consistent ideology than Trumpism.

While Mr. Miller is an ardent restrictionist, seeking to reduce all immigration to the United States, Mr. Trump has at times backed H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers; created a wait-list for a proposed special visa, called a Trump Gold Card, that wealthy immigrants could buy for $5 million apiece; and expressed regret about the impact ICE raids were having on the agriculture and hospitality industries. Indeed, the backlash to the ICE raids was so great that in early June, Mr. Trump reversed himself and declared the agriculture and hospitality sectors off-limits to that sort of strict immigration enforcement — before, after intense lobbying from Mr. Miller, he reversed himself again. Still, the hiccup was enough to hint at a broader potential rupture, especially if Mr. Miller’s immigration policies continue to prove unpopular. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 57 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration, once his greatest political strength.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Fascism, Immigration, Trump
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