Archives for category: Extremism

Peter Greene retired after 39 years of teaching, and now is the best-informed and most prolific writer about misguided and sometimes malicious efforts to “reform” public schools.

Peter has his own blog–Curmudgucation–and also writes a column about reform frauds for FORBES.

In this post, he tells the remarkable and unsavory story of vouchers in Nebraska. Nebraska is a solid red state, but its voters don’t want vouchers. Rural legislators–even Republicans–know it’s a waste of money and are sure to defund their public schools.

But the voucher-pushers keep looking for clever ways to bypass the voters, who have made it clear that they don’t want vouchers.

Peter Greene writes:

Nebraska’s voucher fans are bound and determined, like legislators in many states, to get around the voters so they can get vouchers installed.

In May of 2023, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen signed into law LB 753, creating tax credit vouchers for subsidizing private schools.

The concept has been floated in Nebraska before, notably turning up more than once in 2022’s session. In 2023, it finally progressed through the legislature. But NSEA political action director Brian Nikkelson told the Nebraska Examiner that the public did not support the vouchers, and if the bill was passed, there would be a petition drive to force the bill to go on the ballot for voters to decide.

And so there was. It was a heck of a battle, with the pro-voucher forces have attracting a mountain of money, some of it from outside the state. Paul Hammel at the Nebraska Examiner reported that big money contributors include C.L. Werner, an Omaha-based trucking company executive ($100,000), Tom Peed and his son Shawn of a Lincoln publishing company ($75,000 each), and former Nebraska governor U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts ($25,000). Governor Pillen himself has contributed $100,000 to the campaign to save vouchers from a vote.

At the same time, Hammel reported, the American Federation for Children, the school choice advocacy group founded by Betsy DeVos, has contributed $103,000 in in-kind services and $583,000 in cash to the campaign.

It didn’t matter. Support Our Schools needed 60,000 signatures to force a referendum. They ended up with about twice that number (that’s roughly 10% of all eligible voters in the state). So this November, the voters of Nebraska were supposed to have their say. So you’d expect that voucher fans, who keep telling us how much everyone loves vouchers, would just sit back, secure in the knowledge that their program would win the referendum handily.

Well, no.

Instead, legislators cooked up LB 1402. This bill proposed to repeal the Opportunity Scholarships that were created under LB 753, and then to replace them with a new version of Opportunity Scholarships. This version would have been an education savings account (ESA) style super-voucher that hands over taxpayer money to send a student to a private or parochial school. It was more sketchy than last year’s bill because it appropriates state funds (rather than tax-credited contributions) to pay for the vouchers.

But mostly what it did it render the petition drive moot, because it repealed the version of vouchers that the public was going to vote on. “Ha,” they apparently thought. “That’ll stop those damned voters.”

In 67 days, the coalition of opponents gathered the necessary signatures—again. That repeal passed in November 2024, with 45 out of 49 legislative districts voting to repeal, and Nebraska’s voucher law was toast. The voters had sent a clear and unequivocal message.

Surely the state’s leaders would say, “Well, the voters have spoken, so that’s that.”

Fat chance.

Voucherphiles were back with a new proposal in January 2025. “I’m not dissuaded by the fact that it was defeated at the ballot box,” said freshman State Sen. Tony Sorrentino of Omaha.

To nobody’s surprise, Governor Jim Pillen was first to jump on the as-yet-rule-free federal school voucher proposal. Okay, it was a small surprise, because Nebraska is not known for grabbing federal dollars, but hey– this is Free Federal Money for private schools. In fact, U.S. Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., helped Congress usher the tax credits provision onto President Donald Trump’s desk, even though his home district was among those shooting down vouchers in 2024.

Pillen’s new idea is to sell vouchers for the “gap” year, the year between the time when Nebraska’s vouchers are required to end and the time when the federal vouchers are supposed to kick in. The proposal is being sent through the state’s Labor Department rather than the Department of Education because that would skirt the requirement for any sort of hearing or debate, probably because voucherphiles have a pretty good idea of how that would go.

Nebraska is one of those states where rural Republicans have opposed all attempts at vouchers, and they aren’t sounding any friendlier about this one. Zach Wendling at Nebraska Examiner talked to State Sen. Tom Brandt of Plymouth, a Republican who opposed Linehan’s previous proposals; he said he is opposed to using any public money for private school choice. He’s still waiting to see how the federal tax credit program includes public schools (because, remember, there are no actual rules yet attached to the federal voucher program).

“The referendum simply eliminated that. Period, end of story,” he continued on the state policy. “There’s no other interpretation you can draw from that.”

The gap funding would cost about $5 million for around 2,500 students. Of course, with no rules in place, it’s possible that not all of Nebraska’s current voucher students would qualify for federal vouchers. Nor can we predict what slice of the federal money pie Nebraska would be entitled to. If it comes to that, we could expect voucherphiles to argue that more gap funding is needed to cover new gaps, or maybe to expand above and beyond the federal offerings.

Nebraska voucher fans are making a lot of “think of the children” noises, but families have plenty of time to look for new arrangements (i.e. finding the student a new school or going back to paying the full tuition with their own money).

This is the same story we’ve seen over and over again. Vouchers never win when voters have a chance to be heard. Every single taxpayer-funded voucher program in this country has been created without giving the taxpayers a say or ignoring the say they had already said. Taxpayer-funded vouchers are all the result of legislators backed by deep-pocketed voucher fans deciding they are going to inflict these on the taxpayers. Nebraska’s taxpayers just happen to have a few more tools to fight back with, but Nebraska’s voucherphiles just keep looking for a way to avoid that whole pesky democracy thing.

Categories Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Nebraska, Privatization, Rural Schools, School Choice, Vouchers

Thom Hartmann: A Message to MAGA Voters: You Got Played

By dianeravitch

March 23, 2026 //

Thom Hartmann is a veteran journalist who write The Hartmann Report, where this article appeared:

Dear MAGA voter,

I’m not writing this to mock you. I’m writing because you were lied to. And it wasn’t by the people you were told to hate, but by the man you trusted the most.

You were pissed off when you voted in 2024. Honestly, rightfully angry. Your town lost its factory. Your kids can’t afford the house they’ve been dreaming of for years. The politicians in Washington kept promising you things and delivering nothing; in fact, Republicans even took away your Medicaid and food stamps as well as your kids’ school lunches. You wanted someone who’d finally blow the whole damn thing up and put regular people first.

So did I and millions of other Americans. The difference is who we trusted to do it. Let’s talk about what actually happened.

You were told Trump would “drain the swamp” of corruption in Washington DC. Instead, as Marjorie Taylor Greene can tell you, Donald Trump has built the most corrupt, billionaire-stuffed cabinet (13 of them!) in American history. Epstein-buddy Howard Lutnick. Billionaire hustler Scott Bessent. Hedge fund managers and Wall Street insiders as far as the eye can see.

And then he handed the core agencies of the federal government — with no vote, no vetting, no accountability to anyone — over to Elon Musk, the single richest human being on the planet. Not a populist or a Washington outsider: the most powerful oligarch alive, whose source of wealth came from Obama bailing out Tesla and who now gets tens of billions in annual government contracts.

Musk’s teenage hackers then stole your Social Security information and destroyed America’s soft power by gutting USAID: as Bill Gates said, “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.” This is your swamp now, one that’s already literally killed at least a million children around the world while handing our nation’s soft power over to Putin.

He also said there would be no more “stupid wars.” Yet he’s spending $1 billion a day and has already destroyed six American lives in Iran and still can’t explain to us why he attacked them or what actual threat that country represented to America. It appears he just did it because Putin, Netanyahu, and Kushner all encouraged him to.

And now The Washington Post is reporting that Putin is giving Iran “targeting information” so they can kill American troops, just like when Putin put a bounty on US soldiers in Afghanistan and that was fine with Trump during his first term. Is that the kind of war you want? Somehow I doubt it.

You were also promised lower drug prices. Remember that? Trump made it a centerpiece of his campaign pitch. He looked straight into the camera and said he’d take on Big Pharma. But the pharmaceutical industry is making more money than ever before, and now the same Republican Congress that cheers Trump’s every move has cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid (the cuts come later this year).

That’s the national healthcare program that covers roughly one in five Americans, the majority of them in rural, working-class communities that voted for the same Republicans who gutted it on Trump’s orders. Your neighbors. Your family members. People who believed in him. Cuts made simply to pay for a trillion dollars of Trump’s $5 trillion tax break for himself, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and the other billionaires who put him into office.

And then there’s the tariffs, which he told you China would pay. But China isn’t paying: you are. Tariffs are taxes collected at the border and paid by American importers, that are then passed on to American consumers like you and me.

The people most exposed to rising prices on clothes, appliances, groceries, and cars are working-class families who spend a higher share of their income on the necessities of life. That’s you. The billionaires in his cabinet can absorb and even profit from Trump’s inflation; you can’t.

And while all this is happening, the national debt keeps exploding. It ballooned by $7 trillion during his first term. His second-term tax proposals are deficit-financed giveaways that only benefit corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

Trump talks about “no taxes on tips” and “no taxes on Social Security” but those cuts are very, very limited and expire in a few years; the tax breaks on billionaires are deep and last forever. Your grandchildren will spend their lives paying off Trump’s tax cuts for people who summer in the Hamptons. This isn’t fiscal conservatism: it’s looting dressed up in a red hat.

Remember the wall? Mexico was going to pay for it. Mexico didn’t pay for a single inch of it. And remember when Elon Musk publicly defended keeping H-1B visas, the program Trump uses to import European workers for his shabby golf motels and that let corporations import cheaper foreign labor and hold down American wages? That caused a genuine civil war inside MAGA world for about a week, before the Murdoch/Ellison Epstein-class billionaire media moguls changed the subject. Trump sided with the billionaires; being one himself, he always sides with the billionaires.

Don’t forget Social Security and Medicare. He swore — repeatedly, explicitly — that he’d never cut them. Watch what the fine print says, particularly since he fired over 7,000 Social Security workers to make it really hard on people who are trying to sign up. That’s about encouraging people to move to the Medicare Advantage scam plans that are so profitable to his insurance industry donors.

Watch what DOGE is circling. Watch the budget proposals coming out of his own party’s Congress. The cuts aren’t coming for the people at Mar-a-Lago: they’re coming for you.

And perhaps the cruelest irony of all: the communities hit hardest by Trump’s policies are the communities that supported him most. Farmers crushed by retaliatory tariffs from trading partners. Rural hospitals dependent on federal funding now facing existential pressure. FEMA cuts hurting people in bright red Southern states. The economic pain is landing heaviest on the people who believed in him the most.

None of this is an accident. This is what happens when you elect a pathological liar who talks like a populist but governs for the donor class. Your anger was real. His betrayal is real.

I’m not asking you to become a Democrat. I’m not asking you to agree with me about anything except this: a man who fills his cabinet with hedge fund managers, hands power to the world’s richest oligarch, lets Big Pharma walk, starts a war to distract us from news he raped 13-year-old girls, and watches your grocery bill climb while calling it “victory” is not on your side.

He never was.

The swampy system you were furious at? It’s still there. It just has a new Dear Leader.

You deserve better than this. Heck, we all deserve better than this.

Categories Billionaires, Extremism, Hoax, Lies, Trump

Federal Judge Orders Reinstatement of 1,000 Employees of Voice of America

By dianeravitch

March 18, 2026 //

One of the shocking actions of Trump’s first year of his second term was his decision to shutter the widely respected Voice of America. Not only were almost all employees laid off, but the leadership of the government agency was put in the hands of MAGA zealot Kari Lake. Lake ran for governor and senator in Arizona, losing both races.

Scott Nover of The Washington Post reported:

Voice of America employees have spent a full year on paid administrative leave while President Donald Trump’s administration has tried to shrink the international broadcaster to its “statutory minimum.” That extended absence is coming to an end.

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the wind-down of operations at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, VOA’s parent, is unlawful and ordered the agency to bring more than 1,000 employees back to work.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that the near-total shutdown of USAGM, which oversees VOA and funds several international broadcasters such as Radio Free Asia, violated federal administrative law. He ordered the full-time employees to return to work by March 23 and told the agency to resume international broadcasting, which it has mostly abandoned during the past year — save for some airing in languages such as Farsi.

Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, criticized the government’s “flagrant and nearly year-long refusal” to uphold statutory requirements set by Congress and lambasted Kari Lake, the Trump official who oversaw the dismantling of the agency. Lamberth recently ruled that Lake has been running the agency illegally. “The defendants’ persistent omission and withholding of key information in this case has been a Hallmark production in bad faith,” he wrote of Lake and the government in a footnote.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Media, Trump

FCC Chair Threatens to Revoke Licenses of Broadcasters that Express Negative War Coversge

By dianeravitch

March 15, 2026 //

In a startling attack on freedom of the press, Brendan Carr–chairman of the Federal Communications Commission–threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters whose coverage of the war on Iran is negative. With Trump ally, the billionaire Ellison family, buying control of CBS and CNN, Carr’s threat is ominous. One of the first steps of fascist leaders is to gain control of or silence the media.

The job of the media in a democracy is to inform the public, not to serve as a propaganda arm of the government.

Clarissa-Jan Lim of MS NOW reported:

President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman is threatening to revoke the licenses of news broadcasters over their coverage of the Iran war.

Brendan Carr, the head of the agency, warned broadcast news organizations on Saturday to “correct course,” following the president’s rants over news coverage of his war with Iran, including stories about U.S. aircraft tankers sustaining damage in a strike.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr said in a post on X, without naming any media outlets. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

The FCC did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.

Carr referenced a Truth Social post from Trump Saturday morning denying reports that five U.S. Air Force refueling planes were struck at a military base in Saudi Arabia. Trump directed his screed at the The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, The New York Times and “other Lowlife ‘Papers’ and Media,” claiming they “actually want us to lose the War.”

In his own social media post later in the day, Carr pointed to Trump’s 2024 election win as an example of the lack of trust in the media from the American people.

“When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong,” the FCC chairman said. [Editor’s note: Trump did not win a landslide victory in 2024. Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote, while Harris won 48.3%.]

Carr’s threat was met with immediate blowback from free speech advocates and political figures.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the threat “flagrantly unconstitutional.” Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a frequent Trump critic on the right, condemned it as “unacceptable and unamerican.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment advocacy group, called Carr’s statement an “authoritarian warning,” adding, “Again and again, Carr’s tenure as FCC chairman has been marked by his shameless willingness to bully and threaten our free press. But even by Carr’s standards, today’s hypocrisy is shocking — and dangerous….”

Carr, an author of Project 2025 whom Trump hand-picked to run the FCC, has sought to use his powerful position to bend media outlets — and late-night talk show hosts — to the Trump administration’s will. Under his watch, the FCC has opened investigations into multiple news outlets and threatened to strip the licenses of broadcasting companies deemed to have covered the administration and the president unfavorably.

But his latest missive took the administration’s assault on what the president routinely calls the “fake news” a step further. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said in an X post, “This is a clear directive to provide positive war coverage or else licenses may not be renewed. This is worse than the comedian stuff, and by a lot. The stakes here are much higher. He’s not talking about late night shows, he’s talking about how a war is covered.”

Trump and members of his administration have repeatedly bemoaned the media coverage of the war. Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused the press of being too focused on American troops’ deaths than the military’s successes.

“But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news,” Hegseth said. “I get it; the press only wants to make the president look bad. But try for once to report the reality.”

He again criticized the press on Friday for reporting on the economic fallout of the war.

“Some in this crew, in the press, just can’t stop,” he said.

Late on Friday night, Trump railed against coverage of the war, saying on Truth Social: “The Fake News Media hates to report how well the United States Military has done against Iran.”

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of the Press, Propaganda, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Is Trump a KGB Agent?

By dianeravitch

March 12, 2026 //

Thom Hartmann asks a question that many have suspected but were reluctant (or afraid) to say out loud: Is Donald Trump a KGB agent? Does Trump take orders from Putin? How else to account for his close alignment with Putin’s wishes? How else to explain his habit of checking with Putin before he talks to Zelensky? How else to explain his efforts to torpedo NATO? How else to explain his obeisance to Putin? How else to explain the glee he expressed while waiting to meet Putin in Alaska, rolling out the red carpet and pacing excitedly? Why else would Trump put relations with Putin in the hands of personal friends and his son-in-law, not career foreign service officers? Why meetings between them with no one else present to take notes or translate?

This is the only post that will appear today.

Hartmann writes:

Eight of our American service members are dead and over 140 wounded because Iran’s military has suddenly gotten really good at targeting our soldiers, Airmen, and Marines. News reports say they’ve been able to hit us with such precision because Russia is using their extraordinary spy satellite, spy plane, and advanced radar capabilities to help Iran’s military.

The Washington Post, which first reported on this, quoted a Russian military expert as saying that Iran is now “making very precise hits on early-warning radars or over-the-horizon radars,” seeming to validate the concern. The article added:

“Iran possesses only a handful of military-grade satellites, and no satellite constellation of its own, which would make imagery provided by Russia’s much more advanced space capabilities highly valuable — particularly as the Kremlin has honed its own targeting after years of war in Ukraine…”

When asked about the reports, Trump — who’d just returned from the soldiers’ bodies’ dignified transfer — basically downplayed Russian efforts to hurt Americans, just like he did when he learned in 2020 that Putin was paying Afghan insurgents a bounty to kill our soldiers. He pointed out that the US had been sharing intelligence with Ukraine during the Biden administration, so apparently, according to him, Russia is justified in helping Iran kill American service members:

“They’d say we do it against them. Wouldn’t they say that we do it against them?”

His fellow real estate billionaire, Steve Witkoff (whose sons are making billions with Trump’s sons in the Middle East and has been regularly traveling to Moscow for private meetings with Putin) similarly shrugged off the report, tellingCNBC:

“I can tell you that yesterday, on the call with [President Trump], the Russians said they have not been sharing. That’s what they said. So, we can take them at their word, but they did say that.” Witkoff later added, “Let’s hope that they’re not sharing.”

Putin himself, though, was nowhere near as circumspect, saying:

“On my part, I want to confirm our unwavering support of Tehran and our solidarity with our Iranian friends. Russia has been and will remain the Islamic Republic’s reliable partner.”

As if to confirm that Trump is Putin’s toady, just last week, in the wake of Iran shutting off the Strait of Hormuz and cutting oil supplies to Asia and the Subcontinent, our president signed a waiver to our Russia sanctions so Putin can now sell unlimited amounts of Russian oil directly to India.

Every time Putin says “Jump,” Trump asks, “How high?”

Which raises the question: “Why? Why does Trump always give Putin whatever he wants and why is he so terrified of speaking out against him?”

Is it possible that Trump is actively working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? Or is blackmailing him? And has been running him as an Russian asset since at least 2017?

That sort of treason would be more important than Russian agents Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).

And let’s not forget that right after Trump won re-election in November of 2024, Russian state TV published explicit nudie pictures of Melania Trump and their anchors were laughing about it and at Trump. Was this Putin’s first assertion this cycle that he still owns Donald?

Jack Smith’s case in Florida was limited to Trump stealing sensitive documents and sharing them on two publicly known occasions (and didn’t even reference other known acts like Kid Rock’s allegation that Trump showed him Top Secret maps in the White House: this was apparently a regular thing for Trump).

That said, you can bet your bottom dollar that the FBI and other agencies worked as hard as they could to contain the damage done by Trump’s leaving documents that could cause “grave damage” to America in public places where spies could simply waltz in and take cell-phone pictures of them by attending a wedding or paying $200,000 for essentially unlimited access Club membership.

But what if it goes beyond that? What if Putin has owned him for years?

From Russian oligarchs laundering money through Trump’s operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering — to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?

Or perhaps blackmailing him?

What if Putin got him the presidency, and he knows that if America found out for sure, it would destroy him? Or has Epstein’s videos of Trump with underage girls? Or his own pictures, taken when Trump was in Moscow for one of his beauty pageants?

Which begs the question: exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what does he have planned for the next three years of this second term?

And is he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow recently documented?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his last presidency, Donald Trump was having regular secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days beforethe 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and when, and it appears Russia jumped in to social media to provide the needed help.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison and ended any investigations. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago was just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin, who has agents in those countries, told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can makes money off them. Or he’s scared.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s FBI team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump himself trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was freaked out because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally given a man working for the FBI to Putin — a man whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled, “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.

“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

And now, to complicate matters, it appears Elon Musk took with him access to the payroll records of all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk who, himself, The Wall Street Journal reports has also reportedly been having his own secret conversations with Putin.

If it turns out that Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bild when the StB’s files were declassified, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey.

Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:

“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”

An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, DC for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

He then purchased a large ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on September 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? … The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

As The Guardian reported in 2021:

“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.

“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor, who also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also an unregistered agent of a foreign government while working in the White House: he had taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine to letting Russia help kill American soldiers in the Gulf region, Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

The big question is, “Why?”

Categories Extremism, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Inexcusable Incompetence!

By dianeravitch

March 11, 2026 //

Jennifer Rubin, ex-columnist for The Washington Post, now leads The Contrarian, a home for dissatisfied ex-Republicans and outraged democrats. She wrote the following.

“Everyone saw this coming except the President.” An “unmitigated disaster of epic proportions.” Were these the words from Democrats decrying Donald Trump for failing to plan to evacuate hundreds of thousands of civilians under a blizzard of retaliatory fire raining down on the Gulf States? No, those were Republicans excoriating former president Joe Biden for the botched 2021 exit from Afghanistan. Back then, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) thundered, “It’s a very dire situation when you see the United States Embassy being evacuated.”

Fast forward to last week. The Trump regime closed down three of our embassies (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Kuwait), abandoning U.S. citizens in those countries. Trump’s minions failed to consider advanced planning to evacuate Americans from the region, leaving them to fend for themselves in places where missiles are flying and buildings are ablaze.

Story after story has documented Americans scared, stranded, and left to find their own transportation out of countries made dangerous by his careless whims. Many have expressed their understandably fury that their government could be so derelict. The State Department has failed spectacularly in one of its essential missions — protecting Americans around the world.

The Trump regime’s level of recklessness and indifference to human life and international order should appall all Americans. Trump’s excuse for making no evacuation plans — “Well, because it happened all very quickly” — is ludicrous, considering the U.S. and Israel apparently spent months planning the military assault. His jaw-dropping admission that Iran’s bombardment of neighboring countries in retaliation was “probably the biggest surprise” reflects how little thought he put into a war with global ramifications.

Even in Afghanistan in 2021, after initial mayhem, the State Department scrambled, mounted a all-hands-on-deck rescue operation, enlisted personnel worldwide, and evacuated over 100,000 people in just a couple weeks. We see no comparable sense of urgency now.

Foreign policy professionals who have planned and executed mass evacuations of civilians in war zones over decades blasted Trump’s negligence. State Department veteran and Middle East expert Jeffrey Feltman recently argued, “It is a complete dereliction of duty for President Trump and his administration to have been planning this war for the past month, however long it’s been since they’ve been moving assets, without planning for an evacuation of American citizens.” He expounded on the cavalier and irresponsibly failure to protect Americans:

You know, Biden rightly got criticized for the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan. But we’re talking now about the potential of… American citizens being trapped in 14 different countries when they could have been planning all along for how they were going to deal with this. Right now, right now, the statements are, “Use commercial means to leave.” Well, there are no commercial means to leave. There’s been some hints they’re looking at this, but they could have put all this in place.

How could they not have expected a country with a stockpile of missiles would retaliate across the region, endangering tens of thousands of Americans? Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s pathetic excuses for neglecting elemental steps to protect Americans left Democrats, ordinary people, and foreign policy insiders flabbergasted.

Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) reported his office was inundated with “panicked calls from Americans stuck in the Middle East, outraged that our government has provided zero evacuation support.” Combat veteran Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) was outraged by the absence of any “evacuation plan for Americans in the region when he launched his reckless, needless and unconstitutional war of choice against Iran.” Others joined in denouncing the institutional malpractice.

This display of incompetence should not surprise us, given that the MAGA crew harbors such contempt for government. The massive cuts and loss of scores of foreign policy professionals (collectively representing centuries of experience) mean institutional knowledge is scarce. DOGE cuts conducted by know-nothing twenty year olds, partisan witch hunts, early retirements, and mass resignations have hollowed out the State Department, leaving it in the hands of a skeletal staff retained for their political loyalty — not expertise and experience. (Rubio also slashed staff at the National Security Council, which is supposed to oversee interagency planning.) In any other administration, the secretary of state/national security adviser would get canned or forced to resign in disgrace after such management malpractice.

As Columbia University Professor Elizabeth Saunders explained, Trump and Rubio’s “gutting of the State Department and blowtorching of US diplomatic capacity and credibility is an accelerant to this spiraling war and will seriously undercut US/allied efforts to pick up the pieces after.” If they bollixed up something as foreseeable as evacuations, imagine what chaos will ensure when the fighting stops.

For over a year, buffoonish Cabinet secretaries and their senior advisers have demonstrated the Trump regime is no “meritocracy.” As in all corrupt regimes that value sycophancy over competence, avoidable errors multiply over time. Americans trapped in a regional war zone (not to mention our armed service and regional allies) now pay the price for an unhinged and impulsive president enabled by careless, juvenile advisers who think war is a video game.

Meanwhile, no one at the White House has the temerity to contradict Trump’s “gut” impulses. Without aides to restrain Trump’s whims (e.g., Mr. President we need to get the Americans out first), he blunders forward.

To compound the problem, MAGA’s cult of personality that necessitates Republicans abdicate their legislative responsibilities, Congress would have voted for a war powers resolution, or at the very least, initiated aggressive oversight. Alas, the Republicans (who have time to quiz the Clintons behind closed doors about the pedophile scandal) show no interest in determining how this travesty unfolded and what is being done to remedy it. Instead, Hill staffers are left to field angry calls from constituents begging for help.

Congress must rouse itself to focus on a foreign policy disaster that makes the Iraq War look like a masterstroke. Rubio and other top officials under oath and in public should answer for their lapses, account for every dime spent, and give Congress some basic information. (What is the plan to extract Americans? When does the war end? Are we now targeting civilians?) The last thing Congress should do is agree to any request, as the Trump team is reportedly contemplating, to shovel more money into the coffers of this gang of bumblers.

Unfortunately, we know how this will play out. Trump and his arrogant yes-men will never admit error, let alone apologize; Republicans on the Hill will not stir themselves to do their jobs. It will be up to the voters to throw out every elected Republican and force removal of the architects of this catastrophe. Until that happens, Americans here and abroad will needlessly suffer and die

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Extremism, Stupid, Trump

Joyce Vance: Will We Normalize ICE Brutality?

By dianeravitch

March 10, 2026 //

Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor. She is currently a contributor to CAFE, a blog where legal experts comment on current issues. Here, she expresses her concern about the use of federal force to occupy and terrorize American cities. Will we grow to accept the presence of masked, brutish federal agents in our cities?

She writes:

ICE may have left Minneapolis (or at least officials have said they are drawing down—“Border Czar” Tom Homan said over the weekend that a “small” federal security force would stay behind “for a short period of time”), but we cannot afford to forget what they did there. Even though this particular ICE surge was in Minnesota, it matters for all of us.

We cannot afford to forget Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and the other people and incidents, even, perhaps especially, those we do not have names or faces to attach to because of the sheer volume. When a government shoots and kills its own citizens—citizens exercising essential constitutional rights lawfully and in public, we must not forget. When that government lies about what happened, demonizes the victims, calls them terrorists, and opens an investigation into one of their family members instead of the law enforcement agent who pulled the trigger, we cannot afford to look away. If we do, if what happened in Minneapolis becomes just one more horror to be tossed with the rest of the trash at the end of its news cycle, we will forever lose a big, significant piece of what it means to be an American.

If you had federal agents killing American citizens in broad daylight on your 2026 bingo card, congratulations. Most of us didn’t. But shock and surprise are no reason to let what happened fade away, to push it aside because it’s too painful to stay focused on. If anything, Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s deaths reinforce the reasons we can’t forget that Trump militarized federal immigration enforcement agencies to terrorize people on the streets of an American city. A president who once said he could shoot someone in broad daylight on 5th Avenue without losing his followers’ support must not be permitted to turn that cynicism into prophecy.

This administration has shown no remorse for what it did in Minneapolis. It has defended and continues to defend the surge in court. ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security. In a normal administration, regardless of party, you would have expected the Secretary to be outraged and demand a thorough investigation into what happened if personnel in one of the agencies she oversaw killed Americans in broad daylight. Instead, she called what happened self-defense and publicly defended the officers’ actions despite video of both events that showed it was not.

Two days after Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, Noem’s top adviser and unofficial chief of staff Corey Lewandowski, with whom she is rumored to have been having an affair for years, “messaged Trump’s pollster with a request: They needed to cut an ad to help her.” She sought support for herself, not accountability. Noem subsequently, according to reporting, tried to fire her Coast Guard pilot for failing to move her blanket from one plane to another. She was forced to rehire him when she realized there was no one else to fly her plane home.

That’s the level of function at DHS these days. Meanwhile, the agent who shot Renee Good appears to be facing no serious consequences from the federal government, while Alex Pretti’s death is only under investigation because of unambiguous footage of the shooting showing he wasn’t a threat to anyone. There are no guarantees of a fair investigation or of a timely outcome. Nothing suggests Americans aren’t at risk of repetition in another time, and another place, if the president chooses to deploy his militarized law enforcement agency again.

Even for those who may not have caught on to this fact yet, we are all affected by this administration’s response to citizen dissent. In Maine, where ICE briefly surged in January in an effort that local reporting said was directed toward the state’s Somali community, an ICE agent filmed a woman who was observing his activity, and when she asked why, he told her, “Because we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.” Anyone who opposes this administration runs that risk.

It’s an administration that arrests first and validates later, which means it has swept up people with legal immigration status as well as American citizens, in the race to rack up statistics for its mass deportation plan. A CBS News report, citing internal government data, found that fewer than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s first year back in office had violent criminal records. We can’t afford to ignore or forget about it. Memory is the key.

It is all about threats, intimidation, and the risk of violence—all conduct that Americans are deeply ingrained against expecting from their government. Late last week, the New York Times ran a storyabout DHS, reporting that it sent Google, Meta and other companies hundreds of subpoenas for information on accounts that track or comment on ICE. Whether there is actually an investigation, whether they get the information or not, putting a report like this in circulation is a great tactic for a regime that wants to frighten people, to get them to second-guess themselves before they post on social media or attend a rally. It’s not what democracies do. In a democracy, leaders tolerate voices that disagree with them, they don’t shoot them.

How dangerous of a stage are we at when a government starts killing its own citizens? I asked Princeton Professor Kim Scheppele, who studies comparative law and has expertise in Hungary, among other failing democracies, whether there is any precedent after Nazi Germany for a supposed democracy to use paramilitary forces to execute its own people in public. “Not in any country that pretends to be a democracy,” she told me. “That’s why the 20th-century dictators are different. And now so are we.”

Scheppele explained that the new autocrats, the ones who have come to power in the 21st Century, don’t kill their own citizens until very late in the process of autocratic consolidation, and even then, not in the type of direct, public confrontations that led to Good and Pretti’s deaths. In Russia, opponents of the regime started falling from windows about 10 years into Putin’s reign, but they were difficult to attribute directly to the Kremlin. Erdogan, in Turkey, only began killing his own citizens (that is, outside Kurdish areas) after the attempted coup in 2016. Scheppele concluded that “Since most of the new autocrats pretend to be democrats, this sort of state violence and killing we’ve seen since the start of the surge immigration campaigns is quite rare.”

Dictators try to silence opposition, whether it’s through intimidation or violence. The question our democracy faces now is whether we’re going to let that happen here.

Stay Informed,
Joyce

CAFE Contributor Joyce Vance is a co-host of the CAFE Insider podcast and the former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. She is also a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law and a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.

Categories Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

National Parks Scrub Historically Accurate Signs and Exhibits that Offend Trump

By dianeravitch

March 10, 2026 //

In March 2025, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In reality, the order directed federal sites not to “restore truth and sanity,” but to replace them with lies and pablum. Park officials were told to remove signs and exhibits that “denigrated” American history and prominent Americans. Anything that cast events and people in U.S. history in a negative light was to be removed, even if the events depicted were factual and true.

What followed, of course, were efforts to scrub federal museums, parks, and historic sites of accurate information.

Fortunately, some federal employees built a website to catalog the reactions to the executive order. This article by Karin Brulliard and Brady Dennis in The Washington Post describes what happened.

At the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Mississippi, staff members asked the Trump administration to review an entire exhibit on the Black teen’s brutal 1955 killing by White men and his mother’s decision to publicize it — though the park’s staff warned that its removal would leave the site “completely devoid of interpretation.”

At Arches National Park in Utah, park managers wondered whether a sign about the damage that graffiti and invasive species leave on the iconic red rock landscape violates a Trump directive to focus solely on America’s natural beauty.

And at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia, staff members have asked federal officials to decide whether a document that describes an abolitionist’s murder by a mob might “denigrate the murderers.”

These displays and materials are among several hundred that managers have flagged at hundreds of national park locations since last summer in response to administration orders to scrub sites of “partisan ideology,” descriptions that “disparage” Americans, or materials that stray from a focus on the nation’s “beauty, abundance, or grandeur.” The submissions were compiled in an internal government database and reviewed by The Washington Post, which confirmed its authenticity with current federal employees.

The database does not make clear which of the plaques, maps, films and books ultimately will be removed or recast by the Interior Department, though some have already been axed. But the submissions provide a sweeping portrait of the scope of President Donald Trump’s bid to reconsider how national park sites address the historic legacy of racism and sexism, LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, and pollution — or whether to acknowledge them at all.

A group describing itself as “civil servants on the front lines” posted the database on two public websites Monday, saying in an attached note that it did so to show Americans how the administration is “trying to use your public lands to erase history and undermine science.”

Asked for comment, the Interior Department issued a statement Monday saying that the “draft, deliberative internal documents” in the database “are not a representation of final action taken.” The statement, from spokesperson Charlotte Taylor, asserted that the documents were “edited before being inappropriately and illegally released to the media in ways that misrepresented the status of this effort.”

The department did not respond to questions about the status or process for the reviews, nor about specific examples in the submissions.

The tone and content of the materials described and submitted to Interior by park managers vary widely, reflecting a mix of careful attempts to obey administration orders, confusion about what might violate them and, at times, apparent skepticism about the entire endeavor.

Staff members identified a brochure at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, in North Carolina, for “possible disparaging of a prominent American” because it mentions that aviator and onetime Smithsonian Institution secretary Samuel Langley failed to achieve flight. A park staffer at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona asks for clarification about whether displays on California condors’ return from the brink of extinction disparage hunters “or tell a success ??

Several submissions ask for reviews of book covers, book chapters and entire books on sale at gift shops, including “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” an autobiography by abolitionist Harriet Jacobs.

“They are mostly on slavery and the black experience in Washington DC as well as a few on Lincoln’s assassination,” wrote a park official at Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site. “Not sure they all disparage historical figures, but they do cover dark periods in American history.”

Another inquiry came from the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, where employees shared a list of books on the third president. “I am not sure if they really disparage Thomas Jefferson, but they do aknowledge [sic] that he had children with Sally Hemings,” the inquiry notes.

Bill Wade , executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, said the breadth of the submissions revealed the many hours of work that Trump’s order imposed on already overextended park employees, who “probably should’ve been doing other things most of us believe would be more important.”

The exercise, Wade added, runs counter to the reasons many National Park Service employees gravitated toward their work in the first place. “Park rangers everywhere, and all park employees for that matter, have been passionate about telling true stories about history, and about science,” said Wade, a former superintendent of Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. “It’s a real affront to the values that rangers have.”

Others have embraced Trump’s effort, including Sen. Jim Banks (R-Indiana), who last summer wrote to top officials at Interior and the Park Service over concerns about “woke” projects he said appeared to violate the president’s order.

“The President’s executive order rightfully opposes a decades-long effort by our institutions to usurp American history with an ideology-based narrative that casts America’s founding and history in a negative light,” Banks wrote at the time.

In nearly a year since Trump’s order, National Park sites have responded by removing exhibits that address slavery and the challenges overcome by minority and marginalized groups, as well as signs about the science of climate change.

But there also has been sustained pushback.
Last month, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ordered the Trump administration to restore displays that discussed slavery at a site in Philadelphia where George Washington lived as president.

U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania compared the displays’ removal earlier this year to the mind control employed by the government in George Orwell’s novel “1984.”

Rufe’s ruling — issued on Presidents’ Day — granted an immediate injunction, requiring the reinstallation of 34 educational panels removed in January by the Park Service from a site at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.

Two weeks ago, a coalition of scientific, preservation and historical groups sued the Trump administration over changes that already have been made, arguing that the removal of information about civil rights, climate change and other topics at multiple national parks amounts to illegal censorship.

That lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Massachusetts, argues that Interior officials ignored well-established principles and legal requirements when seeking to overhaul information presented at national parks.

Democratic members of Congress have also sharply criticized the effort, which they describe as a bid to whitewash the American story. “It is absurd that any president would go down this road of trying to retrofit history and culture in their own image instead of getting actual historians to tell us these stories,” said Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee.

The hundreds of submissions reviewed by The Post run the gamut, from signs and exhibits about slavery and the civil rights movement, to how the effects of climate change already are altering American landscapes, to how the nation remembers Indigenous people who inhabited lands long before there was a United States…

At Cape Hatteras, staff members asked whether information on the effect of light pollution on turtles might be “disparaging against park users.” The park also pointed out a Junior Ranger booklet’s mention of female pirates in the 17th and 18th centuries dressing like men to hide among ship crews. “Please review for appropriateness,” the park’s staff asked. At the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington, staff members who surveyed bookshop items submitted pins, magnets and mugs that read: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

But many of the submissions involve even weightier topics in the nation’s history.
At Cane River Creole National Historical Park in Louisiana, park staff members flagged a planned exhibit about the history of the train depot that is used as the site’s visitor center. The depot was still segregated when it ended rail service in 1965, and the exhibit relied on extensive consultation and oral history collection with Black community members, according to a former park employee who worked on the project.

“For the community, it means for the first time having that story being told in an honest way — and actually just being told,” said the former employee, who was laid off from the Park Service last year.

It is now unclear whether the exhibit will be installed

At Harpers Ferry, site of abolitionist John Brown’s raid in 1859, an employee singled out a document that describes how a “mob murders” an abolitionist. “Does this denigrate the murderers?” the employee wrote. “We can reword to: ‘Abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy is murdered for his views.’”

A Civil War battlefield driving tour map was also flagged for its inclusion of direct quotes about the cause of the war from secession documents and Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. The quotes cite slavery as the cause.

“True, but is this considered cherry picking and denigrating southerners?” the park’s staff wrote.
Those quotes were used to provide context and avoid downplaying the role of slavery in the Confederate rebellion, according to a former Harpers Ferry media specialist who inserted them.

Changing the documents and the map would amount to “pulling us back into a position of supporting White supremacy and supporting the ‘Lost Cause’ narrative and erasing the importance of African American history,” said the specialist, who retired last year and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Along the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, staffers highlighted signs and literature that discuss segregation in the South and how “non-violent civil rights demonstrators” crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on “Bloody Sunday” in 1965 “were attacked” by armed officers.

“While these statements are historically accurate and supported by firsthand accounts,” staffers noted in the submissions, “they may be perceived as disparaging by individuals who are less familiar with the history of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Amid the numerous materials submitted for review at Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial, just across the Potomac River from the District, was a line in a Junior Ranger book that reads, “In 1829, Robert E. Lee promised to serve in the Army and protect the United States. In 1861, he broke his promise and fought for slavery.”

Staffers at Arches National Park raised questions about a sign devoted to the effects of human-caused climate change already visible in the park. “The park seeks guidance on whether this entire panel is within the scope of Secretary’s Order 3431 and should be covered or removed,” the submission reads.

In other places, it appears that park officials are wrestling with whether entire exhibits — or even entire sites — somehow conflict with Trump’s order to “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.

At the Mississippi site commemorating Till, the very place deals with one of the grimmest examples of racial violence in the United States.
Without this exhibit to share the difficult Till story, the new NPS site would be almost completely devoid of interpretation,” an employee notes in an inquiry shared with The Post. “The exhibit emphasizes ‘progress of the American people’ toward a better future.”

Wade said he was encouraged by the ruling that ordered the Trump administration to restore displays that discussed slavery at the site in Philadelphia. Wade’s group was also among the plaintiffs in the recently filed lawsuit seeking to halt the administration’s changes and deletions at national parks, saying they amount to censorship.

But if such legal avenues ultimately fail, Wade said, he suspects the push to alter the telling of history at many sites will continue.

“The impact is that the visitors are just not going to get true, accurate stories,” he said. “I just think the public ought to be really concerned about that.”

In some places, such as the preserved home of civil rights activist Medgar Evers or the Manzanar National Historic Site in California, where the U.S. government once incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II, the entire site exists to commemorate painful moments in the nation’s history.

“If you take away the stories, you take away the purpose of the park itself,” Wade said.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Racism

Federal Judge Voids Mass Layoffs at Voice of America

By dianeravitch

March 8, 2026 //

One of Trump’s most puzzling decisions last year was shutting down the Voice of America. It had 360 million listeners every week around the world and was widely respected as a source of news, not propaganda.

Trump put Kari Lake in charge of VOA’s parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, will appeal the decision. Her assignment was to close down VOA and turn whatever remained open into a Trump propaganda machine. Lake is an election denier and failed candidate from Arizona.

Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, said that she was serving illegally because she had never been confirmed by the U.S. Senate and voided her decisions.

Some 1,000 journalists and staff are expected to return to their jobs if she loses on appeal.

The shutdown of VOA was the first salvo in Trump’s ongoing efforts to gain control of the media.

The New York Times reported:

In his ruling, Judge Lamberth called Mr. Trump’s decision to have Ms. Lake lead the global media agency without Senate confirmation or appropriate procedures required for an acting head “violence to the statutory and constitutional scheme.”

The judge found that Ms. Lake’s appointment violated the law that determines who can serve as an acting head of an agency whose permanent leader would require Senate confirmation. The law, the Vacancies Act, requires that an acting head must be the second senior officer of an agency, be appointed by the president with the Senate’s consent or be a senior officer who had been at the agency before a vacancy arose.

Judge Lamberth found that Ms. Lake did not satisfy those conditions.

Ms. Lake claimed that she had not assumed the official title of the acting chief executive of the media agency, but rather, that the authority of its chief executive position had been delegated to her. That allowed her to exercise sweeping power over layoffs, funding cuts and contract terminations at the news agency, she said.

But the judge rejected her argument, writing that “allowing the president to circumvent Congress’s carefully crafted limitations” through delegations would violate the spirit of the Constitution.

Categories Censorship, Extremism, Media, Propaganda, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: A Chaotic Few Days

By dianeravitch

March 6, 2026 //

Heather Cox Richardson pulled together the extraordinary events of the past few days. She is the master of the question, “Make it all make sense,” even when it doesn’t. Her commentaries are wildly popular. She has about 3 million subscribers on Substack and an equal number who follow her on Facebook.

President Donald J. Trump is behaving more and more erratically these days, seeming to think he can dictate to other countries.

This morning, Trump told Barak Ravid and Zachary Basu of Axios that he needs to be involved personally in choosing the next leader of Iran. Speaking of Iranian politicians who are preparing to announce a new leader, Trump told the reporters: “They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodríguez] in Venezuela.”

Foreign affairs journalist Olga Nesterova of ONEST reported that in a call with Israel’s Channel 12 this morning, Trump called Israel’s president Isaac Herzog “a disgrace” and demanded Herzog pardon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “today” because Trump doesn’t want Netanyahu distracted from the war with Iran. Trump said Herzog had “promised” him “five times” to pardon the prime minister, and he appeared to threaten Herzog when he added: “Tell him I’m exposing him.”

In a statement, Herzog noted that “Israel is a sovereign state governed by the rule of law” and said the pardon is being dealt with by the Justice Ministry, as the law requires. After its ruling, Hertzog’s office said, he will examine the issue according to the law and “without any influence from external or internal pressures of any kind.”

In a conversation today with Dasha Burns of Politico, Trump insisted that “[p]eople are loving what’s happening” and said: “Cuba’s going to fall, too.”

The most astonishing example of Trump’s international aggression came from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Although Trump initially said he attacked Iran to keep it from acquiring nuclear weapons, Leavitt yesterday explained that Trump joined Israel in a military attack on Iran because Trump had “a feeling based on fact” that Iran was going to attack the United States.

Trump’s assertion of power globally contrasts with increasing setbacks at home.

Since the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as unconstitutional, the administration has tried to slow walk repaying the $130 billion the government collected under those tariffs. But yesterday, Judge Richard Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that companies that paid the tariffs are entitled to a refund.

After the Supreme Court’s decision, Trump immediately imposed new tariffs of 15% on all global trade, using as justification Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. As Lindsay Whitehurst and Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press noted, this is awkward because the Department of Justice under Trump argued in court last year that Trump had to use the IEEPA because Section 122 did “not have any obvious application” in fighting trade deficits.

Today the Democratic attorneys general of more than twenty states filed a lawsuit to stop the new tariffs imposed under Section 122. “Once again, President Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution to effectively raise taxes on consumers and small businesses,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement Thursday.

The Department of Justice has also quietly backed away from Trump’s demand that it investigate whether former president Joe Biden broke the law by using an autopen to sign presidential documents. Yesterday, Michael S. Schmidt, Devlin Barrett, and Alan Feuer reported in the New York Times that prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., “were never quite clear what crime, if any, had been committed by the Biden administration’s use of the autopen.”

They concluded there was no credible case to make against Biden. The journalists noted that “the failed inquiry has only added to the sense among many federal investigators that Mr. Trump has become increasingly erratic in his desire to use the criminal justice system to punish his political adversaries for behavior that comes nowhere close to being criminal.”

Trump had been so invested in his attacks on Biden over his quite ordinary use of an autopen that he replaced a White House picture of Biden with one of an autopen, so the prosecutors’ shelving that investigation has to sting. Likely even more painful, though, is today’s news that Trump’s hand-picked National Capital Planning Commission has put off a vote to approve the ballroom Trump is proposing to replace the East Wing of the White House that he suddenly tore down last October.

At a Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday, Trump called attention to his ballroom and boasted: “I built many a ballroom. I believe it’s going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.” But the American people do not share Trump’s vision. The chair of the commission said “significant public input” has caused him to delay the vote until April 2. Jonathan Edwards and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post say that of the more than 35,000 comments the commission received, more than 97% were opposed to Trump’s plans for the ballroom.

But perhaps the biggest setback for the Trump administration showed in the testimony of now-former secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem before Congress this week. There, days after Trump launched a major military operation in the Middle East without consulting Congress, angry lawmakers of both parties exposed the lawlessness and corruption taking place in the department under Noem’s direction. But their stance was about more than Noem: her lawlessness and corruption represented the larger lawlessness and corruption of the Trump administration.

Noem testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. In both chambers, Democrats jumped right to a central feature of the way in which Noem and the administration are setting up the idea that anyone who opposes the actions of the Trump administration is participating in “domestic terrorism.”

They tried to get Noem to walk back her statements that Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both shot and killed by federal agents acting under her authority in Minnesota, were “domestic terrorists.” Noem refused to do so. She has not actually called them “domestic terrorists” but has said they were engaged in “domestic terrorism,” a distinction that reveals the administration’s attempt to criminalize political opposition. Rachel Levinson-Waldman of the Brennan Center explained that “[t]o actually be called a ‘domestic terrorist, an individual must commit one or more of 51 underlying ‘federal crimes of terrorism,’” which involve nuclear or chemical weapons, plastic explosives, air piracy, and so on. Good and Pretti, and the many others administration officials have accused, do not fit that description. But on September 25, 2025, Trump’s NSPM-7 memo claimed that those opposing administration policies are part of “criminal and terroristic conspiracies” and that those who participate in them are engaging in “domestic terrorism.”

Noem refused to back away from the idea that Trump’s opponents are engaging in “criminal and terroristic conspiracies” by, for example, opposing the behavior of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. Leaving that definition behind would undermine the administration’s entire domestic stance.

Democrats slammed Noem for her handling of detentions and deportations, ignoring court orders, and detaining U.S. citizens. In the House, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, said she “turned our government against our people, and…turned our people against our government.”

Republicans also called Noem out. Noem’s poor handling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has left North Carolina still suffering after terrible storms in 2024, and Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) went after her.

He highlighted a letter from the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), who said the department’s leaders have “systematically obstructed” the work of him and his staff. He identified eleven instances in which the department had refused to provide records and information. In a criminal investigation with national security implications, the department would permit him to access a database only if he revealed details of the investigation of individuals who might be related to the investigation.

Tillis said: “Does anybody have any idea how bad it has to be for the [Office of Inspector General] in this agency to come out and do this publicly? That is stonewalling, that’s a failure of leadership, and that is why I’ve called for your resignation.”

Lawmakers also focused on the corruption in DHS, which now commands more than $150 billion thanks to the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Lawmakers referred to a November 2025 ProPublica story in which reporters traced a $220 million contract for an ad campaign featuring Noem. The contract went first to a brand new small company organized by a Republican operative just days before winning the contract, and then to a subcontractor, Strategy Group, owned by Noem’s former spokesperson’s husband and closely associated with Noem’s advisor and reputed affair partner Corey Lewandowski.

Noem insisted she had nothing to do with the contract award and claimed Trump had signed off on the ad campaign. About the contract, Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO) commented in apparent disbelief: “You want the American people to believe that this is all above board, that $143 million of taxpayer money just happened to go to this one company that doesn’t have a headquarters, doesn’t have a website, has never done work for the federal government before, and is registered apparently or attached to a residence from a political operative, and of course one of the subcontractors of that contract, as you know, is a political firm that’s tied to, to you back when you were governor of South Dakota?”

Since Noem’s testimony, the Strategy Group released a statement saying it received only $226,137.17 for its work on the ad campaign.

Also under scrutiny was Noem’s purchase of a private plane with a luxurious bedroom in it, which brought up questions about whether, as is widely reported, she is having a sexual relationship with a subordinate. She refused to answer, and insisted Lewandowski had had no role in approving contracts. Joshua Kaplan and Justin Elliott of ProPublica promptly fact-checked her: in fact, Lewandowski has signed off on a number of contracts.

Lawmakers’ indictment of Noem for her extreme partisanship, disregard of the law, corruption, and lying condemned similar behavior from the administration in general. Today Trump told Steve Holland and Ted Hesson of Reuters that he “never knew anything about” Noem’s $220 million ad campaign, suggesting she lied to Congress under oath. This afternoon, just before she went on stage to speak, Trump announced by social media post that he was replacing Noem with Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.

This is an assertion of power the president does not have: he can nominate Mullin, but the Senate must confirm or reject his appointment.

Apparently unaware she was fired, Noem proceeded to give a speech in which she recited a false quotation from George Orwell, the writer who devoted much of his work to the importance of manipulating language to facilitate authoritarianism, a fitting end to Noem’s career in the Trump administration.

But Noem is not likely to disappear from the news. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker recorded a video saying: “Hey, Kristi Noem, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Here’s your legacy: corruption and chaos. Parents and children tear-gassed. Moms and nurses, U.S. citizens getting shot in the face. Now that you’re gone, don’t think you get to just walk away. I guarantee you, you will still be held accountable.”

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) was more direct: “Turns out lawlessness is not a winning strategy,” he posted. “See you at Nuremberg 2.0.”

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Notes:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/trump-demands-disgraced-herzog-immediately-pardon-netanyahu-so-pm-can-focus-on-iran-war/

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/responding-to-trump-herzog-says-hes-not-dealing-with-pardon-request-mid-war-will-decide-without-pressures-of-any-kind/

https://www.axios.com/2026/03/05/iran-leader-trump-khamenei

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-iran-war-white-house-briefing-b2931933.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-new-tariffs-lawsuit-b2932816.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-rules-companies-are-entitled-refunds-trump-tariffs-rcna261870

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-court-rejects-trump-administration-attempt-slow-tariff-refund-rcna261445

https://apnews.com/article/global-15-tariffs-trump-lawsuit-2247451a7cbc9b8283c4574e3ee54537

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/05/trump-ballroom-federal-review-panel/