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Arlington National Cemetery Censors Links and Study Guides to “Notable Graves” of Blacks, Hispanics, Women

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2025 //
8

Matt White, writing in “Task & Purpose” describes the censorship that has been imposed on Arlington National Cemetery by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, implementing the Trump policy of removing all references to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In practice, this policy seems to mean that all people should be described without reference to race, gender, or ethnic origin.

TOMBSTONE OF HUMBERT ROQUE VERSACE AT ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY, A SPECIAL FORCES OFFICER AND MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT KILLED IN ACTION IN VIETNAM. THE CEMETERY RECENTLY REMOVED LINKS AND REFERENCE TO A PAGE OF “NOTABLE GRAVES” OF HISPANIC SERVICE MEMBERS WHICH INCLUDED THE PHOTO OF VERSACE’S GRAVE. 

ARMY PHOTO

White writes:

Arlington National Cemetery is the most venerated final resting ground in the nation, overseen by silent soldiers in immaculate uniforms with ramrod-straight discipline. Across its hundreds of acres in Virginia, they watch over 400,000 graves of U.S. service members dating back to the Civil War, including two presidents, and more than 400 Medal of Honor recipients.

But in recent weeks, the cemetery’s public website has scrubbed dozens of pages on gravesites and educational materials that include histories of prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members buried in the cemetery, along with educational material on dozens of Medal of Honor recipients and maps of prominent gravesites of Marine Corps veterans and other services.

Cemetery officials confirmed to Task & Purpose that the pages were “unpublished” to meet recent orders by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth targeting race and gender-related language and policies in the military.

Gone from public view are links to lists of dozens of “Notable Graves” at Arlington of women and Black and Hispanic service members who are buried in the cemetery. About a dozen other “Notable Graves” lists remain highlighted on the website, including lists of politicians, athletes and even foreign nationals. 

Also gone are dozens of academic lesson plans — some built for classroom use, others as self-guided walking tours — on Arlington’s history and those interred there. Among the documents removed or hidden from the cemetery’s “Education” section are maps and notes for self-guided walking tours to the graves of dozens of Medal of Honor recipients and other maps to notable gravesites for war heroes from each military service. Why information on recipients of the Medal of Honor — the nation’s highest award for combat valor — would be removed is unclear, but three of the service members whose graves were noted in the lessons were awarded the Medal of Honor decades after their combat actions following formal Pentagon reviews that determined they had been denied the award on racial grounds.

Like the “Notable Graves” lists, some of the lesson plans remain live but ‘walled-off’ on the cemetery’s website, with no way to reach them through links on the site. Task & Purpose located the de-linked pages by copying the original URL addresses from archived pages at Archive.org or by searching specifically for the pages on Google, which still lists them.

On at least one page that can still be accessed on search engines, language referring to civil rights or racial issues in the military appears to have been altered. A page on Black soldiers in World War II read in December that they had “served their country and fought for racial justice” but now only notes that memorials in the cemetery “honor their dedication and service.”

Altered language on a since-hidden page on African American History at Arlngton National Cemetery. In December, the page was home to over a dozen lesson plans, maps and fact-sheets intended for school groups and visitors. All of those documents have been “unpublished,” according to an Army spokesperson, but will be reposted after they are “updated.” 

A spokesperson at Arlington National Cemetery — which is operated by the Army under the Army Office of Cemeteries — confirmed that the pages had been delisted or “unpublished” but insisted that the academic modules would be republished after they are “reviewed and updated.” The spokesperson said no schedule for their return could be provided.

“The Army has taken immediate steps to comply with all executive orders related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) personnel, programs, and policies,” an Army spokesperson at Arlington told Task & Purpose. “The Army will continue to review its personnel, policies, and programs to ensure it remains in compliance with law and presidential orders. Social media and web pages were removed, archived, or changed to avoid noncompliance with executive orders….”

The removal of the academic lessons hit hard for Civil War historian Kevin Levin, who first noted that Arlington had removed the pages on his substack newsletter. Levin lectures and writes on Civil War history and each year leads trips of history teachers — mostly high school and middle school teachers — through Arlington, so they can better teach students about the cemetery.

Levin noticed that the lessons were missing, he told Task & Purpose, when a teacher he works with tried to prepare a lesson for her students…

“I know the historians and the educators at Arlington, because they meet with our staff every year, and they’ve done a great job of creating lesson plans, they go out of their way to meet with teachers. And I know for a fact that a lot of our teachers are using these lesson plans,” Levin said. “I get the sense that this is being carried out in the sloppiest manner. I get the sense that we’re talking about people who are setting up algorithms and are looking for certain things. I don’t know if this is the end of it. I don’t think it is, I just don’t think these people, whoever is responsible, really knows what they’re doing.”

Levin said he hesitated to post about the missing documents because public exposure could reflect poorly on the professional historians who work at the cemetery and who are “exactly what you want from a federal agency that is responsible for interpreting the past….”

But the slash-and-burn approach to the website, he said, was too much.

“I’ll put it bluntly, this is a shitshow,” he said. “And this one hit home, so I did what I did.”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Race, Trump

Why Does Trump Want to Destroy America’s Biomedical Research Institutions?

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2025 //
30

Jeff Nesbit, who worked at both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, wrote this article for The Contrarian. The question is one that I keep asking about many federal government programs that are being eliminated by Trump and Musk, like USAID.

Why? It makes no sense.

The fact that Trump chose Robert F.Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services should have been an alarm bell; Kennedy is not only unqualified, he is stridently hostile to science.

The only beneficiary of this insane and reckless slashing of our most successful programs would be our international enemies, Russia and China. They want us to fail. Trump and Musk are making their dreams come true.

Nesbit wrote:

A siren call is cascading wildly through the corridors of every major academic center in America right now with a huge question firmly at its epicenter: Why are Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and President Donald Trump’s White House team hellbent on destroying the National Institutes of Health, the world’s gold standard of biomedical research?

There isn’t an easy answer to the question, unfortunately.

What is true and known is that Kennedy’s HHS team has halted communications activities about NIH grants; throttled necessary peer-reviewed grant-review meetings; ordered the federal agency staff to review dozens of keywords in thousands of existing grants and issue termination letters based on what it finds; threatened to fire hundreds of expert reviewers and core staff at the agency; placed a cap on indirect costs that underpin basic scientific and medical research; and put woefully unprepared, lower-level career staff in charge of key functions at the agency.

The actions have ground NIH to a halt and sent shockwaves through academia and the biomedical research institutions that have created nearly all our life-saving breakthroughs in the past quarter century. Higher education leaders have halted Ph. D. programs in response. Major research labs are being shuttered or told to stop most of their research.

An American biomedical research enterprise that has been the envy of the world’s science and medical community for decades has been surprised and shocked by the careless destruction of core staff functions and almost mindless efforts to purge NIH of hundreds or thousands of grants for reasons that seem ideological at best and irrational and dangerous at worst.

The question, again, is why? Why are Kennedy, Musk and Trump determined to eviscerate the most successful biomedical research system the world has ever known—a scientific enterprise that produces life-saving medicines and leads to breakthroughs (via basic scientific and medical research) that the private sector would never support?

There was a time, once, that NIH was supported by majorities of Republican and Democratic politicians. NIH’s budget, which supports the entire biomedical research field, has grown year after year with large, non-controversial, bipartisan majorities in Congress.

Until now. Trump and Musk have clearly determined that NIH and the National Science Foundation (NIH’s companion in the world of basic scientific research funding) need to be eviscerated and then reoriented away from life-saving scientific and medical research toward some destination not yet revealed. And while this effort has been racing forward, there has been almost no pushback from politicians—at least not yet.

One reason for this is that scientists are historically apolitical and, to be blunt, quite bad at the political game that dominates Washington, D.C. Scientists aren’t nearly as adept as others at advocating for themselves or their priorities to politicians who make funding decisions…

Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust scientists or academia—and clearly don’t hear or recognize the immense value that the biomedical research enterprise brings to American progress.

NSF funding built and then supported the internet and led to nearly every modern computer and basic scientific advancement we recognize in the hard sciences. NIH medical and scientific research led directly to the creation of nearly all the life-saving drugs developed in the past quarter century that Americans rely on today.

The economic impact to states with large bioscience research centers would be enormous. Tennessee, for instance, would be devastated by the NIH cuts. Vanderbilt University Medical Center is one of the top research hospitals in America. It received nearly half a billion dollars in 2024 for medical research, the second most in the country. Its budget would be cut by more than 10 percent. Nearly 50,000 jobs and 4,000 businesses in Tennessee are dependent on the biosciences research enterprise in the state and would be severely impacted by the NIH cuts.

Other states, such as Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, would be similarly devastated by the cuts. Washington University in St. Louis received $717 million from NIH last year and would lose an estimated $108 million. The University of Michigan received $708 million and stands to see a cut of $119 million. Two Pennsylvania universities – the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh – received nearly $1.3 billion and could lose $244 million. All of those add up to massive job losses and devastating impacts to each state’s economies.

But Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust the scientific and medical research enterprise. They don’t hear the entreaties by scientists who merely want to do great work that benefits the greater good. And they don’t listen to those calls of bewilderment from scientific and medical research leaders that are falling on deaf ears. This could be happening because scientists are particularly bad at politics.

But it also could be that Trump, Musk and Kennedy are willing to destroy the most successful biomedical research enterprise the world has ever known simply because it is a direct way to harm elite academic institutions that they believe harbor leaders and academics who are ideologically opposed to their aims and politics.

And that is a dangerous story that every American needs to hear and fully take to heart right now—before the Trump administration capriciously destroys a hundred years of scientific and medical progress in a matter of weeks or months.

Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services (which includes NIH) in the Biden administration, and the director of legislative and public affairs at NSF during the Bush and Obama administrations.

After I put this article in the queue, I came across this article about John’s Hopkins University:

More than 2,000 positions related to global health are being cut from the Johns Hopkins University after the Baltimore institution saw $800 million in federal grants disappear, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday.

Hopkins’ medical school; the Bloomberg School of Public Health, including its Center for Communication Programs; and JHPIEGO, the university’s health initiative that focuses on global public health, will be affected by the cuts. USAID was the main funder for both JHPIEGO and CCP.

“This is a difficult day for our entire community. The termination of more than $800 million in USAID funding is now forcing us to wind down critical work here in Baltimore and internationally,” Hopkins’ spokesperson said in a statement.

The Trump administration, through advisor Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, is slashing federal spending across agencies in an effort to end wasteful spending. Such cuts have an outsized effect on Hopkins, which comes in first of all universities in federally funded research. By extension, those cuts affect Baltimore and Maryland, where Hopkins is the city and state’s largest largest private employer. Hopkins says it accounts for more than $15 billion in economic output in the state.

The funding cuts for research institutions are hurting universities in multiple states.

Who determines that basic research in science and medicine are unimportant?

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, Insane, Musk, Elon, Science, Trump, Tyranny

Trump Cuts School Program to Buy Food from Local Farmers

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2025 //
6

Trump wants to wipe out any program associated with Biden, no matter who is hurt. He wants to fire every employee hired during the previous four years. The State Department just announced revocation of security clearances for everyone who worked in the State Department during the Biden administration.

Never have we seen a President so driven by spite.

One of Trump’s latest cuts eliminates a $1 billion + program that enabled schools to buy fresh food from local farmers. The schools could offer healthy fresh foods, and the farmers supplemented their income. Win-win.

Trump killed it.

The Agriculture Department has axed two programs that gave schools and food banks money to buy food from local farms and ranchers, halting more than $1 billion in federal spending.

Roughly $660 million that schools and child care facilities were counting on to purchase food from nearby farms through the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program in 2025 has been canceled, according to the School Nutrition Association.

State officials were notified Friday of USDA’s decision to end the LFS program for this year. More than 40 states had signed agreements to participate in previous years, according to SNA and several state agencies.

The Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which supports food banks and other feeding organizations, has also been cut. USDA notified states that it was unfreezing funds for existing LFPA agreements but did not plan to carry out a second round of funding for fiscal year 2025.

In a statement, a USDA spokesperson confirmed that funding, previously announced last October, “is no longer available and those agreements will be terminated following 60-day notification.

The spokesperson added: “These programs, created under the former Administration via Executive authority, no longer effectuate the goals of the agency. LFPA and LFPA Plus agreements that were in place prior to LFPA 25, which still have substantial financial resources remaining, will continue to be in effect for the remainder of the period of performance.” 

The Biden administration expanded the spending for both programs to build a more resilient food supply chain that didn’t just rely on major food companies. Last year, USDA announced more than $1 billion in additional funding for the programs through theCommodity Credit Corporation, a New Deal-era USDA fund for buying agricultural commodities.

The Trump administration’s move to halt the programs comes as school nutrition officials are becoming increasingly anxious about affording healthy food with the current federal reimbursement rate for meals. As food costs have risen in the last few years, more people are turning to food banks and other feeding organizations to supplement their increased grocery bills.

Now, what he have against Canada?

Categories Budget Cuts, Disruption, Extremism, Funding, Health, Rural Schools, Stupid, Trump

Washington Post: New White House Strategy: Promote Trump as “King”

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2025 //
16

Jeff Bezos may have neutered the editorial pages of The Washington Post but he has not silenced the news reporting. Here is a terrifying example. Their communications strategy is to focus relentlessly on Trump as a “king,” a man of supernatural power. This is a gift article so you should be able to open the link and see the illustrations.

Drew Harrell and Sarah Ellison wrote:

When actress Selena Gomez posted an Instagram video in January in which she cried about the Trump administration’s deportations of children, the viral clip threatened to stoke nationwide unease over the policy’s human impact.

But the White House digital strategy team had a plan. They dispatched videographers to interview the mothers of children killed by undocumented immigrants. They put President Donald Trump’s face on a Valentine’s Day card reading: “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally and we’ll deport you.”

And they mimicked a style of video popular for its meditative soundscapes, known as ASMR, with a presentation that featured the rattling handcuff chains of a deportation flight. Gomez deleted her video shortly after posting, without specifying why. The Trump team’s video has been viewed more than 100 million times.

The effort was part of a new administration strategy to transform the traditional White House press shop into a rapid-response influencer operation, disseminating messages directly to Americans through the memes, TikToks and podcasts where millions now get their news.

After years of working to undermine mainstream outlets and neutralize critical reporting, Trump’s allies are now pushing a parallel information universe of social media feeds and right-wing firebrands to sell the country on his expansionist approach to presidential power.

For the Trump team, that has involved aggressively confronting critics like Gomez, not just to “reframe the narrative” but to drown them out, said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team.

“We thought it was necessary to provide pushback in the harshest, most forceful way possible,” he said. “And through that, we had a viral hit on our hands.”

Stephen K. Bannon, a senior White House aide during Trump’s first term and the host of the “War Room” podcast, said the White House has reimagined itself as a “major information content provider.” What Trump does “is the action, and we just happen to be one of the distributors,” he said.

“Rapid-response communications are normally defensive,” he said. “They’re all offense, all the time.”

The White House’s rapid-response account posted 207 times to X on Tuesday, the day of Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress, or nearly nine posts an hour, including Trump sound bites, supporter interviews and Democrat-slamming memes and attack lines. When a Fox News analyst called Trump “the political colossus of our time,” the team got the clip cut, captioned and posted online within 11 minutes.

In press rooms, the administration is welcoming friendly “new media” podcasters, X users and YouTubers to deliver what White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt calls “news-related content” to their millions of followers.

And on social media, the White House is firing off talking points across every platform in a bid to win online attention and reach viewers who have tuned out the traditional press. In an X post, communications director Steven Cheung described their goal: “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”

The administration has produced news-style reports trumpeting Trump’s successes and put them in email newsletters and Leavitt-narrated “MAGA Minute” video segments; soon, they’ll be delivered via text.

The team has worked to humanize the president with picturesque postcards of a White House snowfall and behind-the-scenes videos from the Oval Office — where a New York Post showing the president’s mug shot hangs framed just outside the door. But the digital team has also gone for shock factor, posting a photo of chained men shuffling onto a transport jet (“Deportation Flights Have Begun”) and a portrait of Trump with a golden crown (“LONG LIVE THE KING”).

The president has appointed influential social media figures across the federal government — like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kash Patel — who amplify his messages with their own marketing pushes. Trump has also fired off attention-getting posts of his own, including an AI-generated videotransforming the war-torn Gaza Strip into a gilded Trump beach resort, in line with his call to forcibly remove millions of people from Palestinian land.

The administration’s brash campaign-style tactics are designed to stand out on a crowded internet and speak to voters that officials believe are hungry for aggressive action.

“Even the tagline we’ve been using — ‘America is back’ — is very much saying: ‘We’re here. We’re in your face.’ It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic,” Dorr, 32, said. (A veteran of both Trump campaigns, Dorr also worked as a “head of engagement” at Gettr, the right-wing social network run by Jason Miller.)

The posts have shocked and repulsed the left, leading Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats to say on X: “To find joy and entertainment in this is truly vile.” But the Trump team has been emboldened to go even further by the millions who have watched, shared and followed the accounts since Trump’s inauguration. Half of the White House’s Instagram views have come from non-followers, Dorr said, a sign that the team’s messages are gaining traction beyond Trump’s base.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement that the approach is built to reach audiences without the media’s help and to broadcast Trump’s “America First message far and wide.”

But this model of messaging could supercharge the presidential bully pulpit until it shifts Americans’ perception of events, according to experts who study propaganda and the press. Like Trump’s moves to shore up loyalty in Congress and remake the judiciary, the strategy is designed to weaken his opponents and dismantle checks against executive power.

Undermining the accountability mission of the Fourth Estate and building a viral pipeline of state media helps the administration — and future ones — stifle dissent, said Anya Schiffrin, a senior lecturer at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs.

And by replacing dispassionate observers with partisan cheerleaders, political leaders are elevating a class of messengers incentivized to defend their decisions, no matter the seriousness or scale. Every policy maneuver could turn into a meme.

Said Renee Hobbs, a communications professor at the University of Rhode Island: “It’s an effort to replace the mainstream press with a partisan press” that will function as the new “purveyors of reality.”

‘Going to be great television’

Though members of the digital team serve on the front lines of what the White House calls the “most transparent administration” in history, Trump officials requested that their identities remain anonymous, citing personnel policy and concern over public backlash.

The team is made up of roughly a dozen employees — people mostly in their 20s and 30s from outside politics — who work out of the White House and are given wide leeway to craft content. By removing layers of bureaucracy before publishing, the team avoids the “analysis paralysis” of other messaging shops, Dorr said.

And members are expected to move at internet speed. When a federal judge declined to block the White House from banning the Associated Press from certain news events, the team raced to declare “VICTORY” in graphics that members slapped across White House TVs and social accounts.

They “have the buy-in from the [Trump] team to go out there and be unapologetic in our pursuit of advancing the administration’s goals,” Dorr said, “with the ferocity and the quickness and the pointedness” the White House demands.

For its rapid-response account, the White House employs video producers and editors, known as clippers, to create and post short videos on the fly. The role was first popularized by political activists looking to highlight opponents’ gaffes on the campaign trail, but Trump’s clippers often promote his moments, hoping to make them go viral in real time.

On Friday, within minutes of Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s fiery confrontation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the White House accounts blasted out video of major punch lines, meme-ready photos and images of the American flag. “This is going to be great television,” Trump said as reporters filed out of the Oval Office.

The approach seems to be resonating online: Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, which was live-streamed and featured billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk, has more than 6 million views on X. “Trump is literally overwhelming them with information” in a way that is “changing the nature of the presidency,” Bannon said. “How many young men under 30 years old would ever watch two seconds of a Cabinet meeting?”

That fast-twitch model has spread beyond the White House, including to the Defense Department, which this month launched a rapid-response account to praise Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, grapple with senators and declare that “REAL journalism is dead.” But it has also helped seed major advertising campaigns to reach viewers beyond the web.

Kristi L. Noem, head of the Department of Homeland Security, has posted videos of herself in a flak jacket at the southern border and on immigration raids, including one on Tuesday at an apartment complex in Northern Virginia.

Footage from the raids is used in an international TV and digital ad blitz that warns undocumented immigrants to leave the country or be hunted down. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, Noem said the ads had a budget of up to $200 million and had been personally requested by Trump.

“We’re not going to let the media tell this story,” Noem recalled Trump saying, as was first reported by Rolling Stone. “We’re going to run a marketing campaign to make sure the American people know the truth.”

‘Desecrate their idols’

As the administration has expanded its marketing arm, it has also worked to uproot the classic structure of the White House press corps. In her first briefing, Leavitt called on “podcasters, social media influencers and content creators” to apply for credentialed access to a briefing room long filled by legacy news outlets. More than 12,000 have since applied, according to the White House, and several have been ushered to exclusive new-media seats near the podium.

Administration officials have said the change reflects a fundamental shift in American culture, as journalists compete for relevance with a new generation of influencers who speak to audiences of millions online.

But virtually all of the new-media creators have come from right-wing outlets friendly to the Trump cause. The Breitbart writer Matt Boyle asked whether the White House would continue its “breakneck” pace. (Yes, Leavitt said.) The pro-Trump podcaster John Ashbrook asked whether the media was “out of touch” about the border. (Yes, Leavitt said.) And John Stoll, the head of news at Musk’s X, asked about the White House’s “confidence” in going “toe-to-toe with Vladimir Putin.” (Very confident, national security adviser Michael Waltz said.)

“The Trump White House is loyal, and they are loyal to people who stood with them,” podcaster Dan Bongino said while toasting Rumble chief Chris Pavlovski’s moment in the new-media spotlight. (Days later, Bongino was named deputy director of the FBI.)

Some of the new-media figures have eagerly promoted Trump’s domestic agenda. A few hours after podcaster Sage Steele asked about the importance of passing a law to ban transgender women and girls from women’s sports, she stood behind Trump as he signed an executive order on the same issue.

Other Trump-boosting creators have joined the administration outright, like the “Dear America” podcast host Graham Allen, newly hired as the Defense Department’s digital media director. Brenden Dilley, a pro-Trump meme maker, said of the news, “There’s going to be nobody left doing podcasts soon because the top people are all going to work for the government.”

Friendliness between the White House and its messengers of choice is nothing new, including during the first Trump term, when right-wing provocateurs like Mike Cernovich and blogs like Gateway Pundit held credentials alongside the legacy press.

But back then, the traditional press corps set the tone, Bannon said. The softer questions during Trump’s recent Cabinet meeting, he said, made the first term’s briefings look like “hand-to-hand combat.”

Today “the powerful media is the ecosystem of the right,” Bannon said, “while the mainstream media [is] suffering layoffs.”

The right-wing media figures embraced by the Trump administration have often returned the favor. After the banning of the AP, Brian Glenn — a correspondent for the pro-Trump media network Real America’s Voice and the boyfriend of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) — was given the rare opportunity to question Trump in the Oval Office. A few days later, he posted a selfie with Trump on X that read: “So much accomplished, and we’re still under a month in office.”

For those working closely with Trump’s public-relations infrastructure, the first weeks have marked a huge opportunity for exclusive content. Benny Johnson, a Tampa-based MAGA influencer who calls himself the “Front Seat to the Golden Era,” got to interview Vance last month, then headed to the Capitol, where he live-streamed a friendly chat with two Republican senators before they voted to confirm Patel as FBI director.

“First time in history we’ll have the stream going from the senator’s office. This is amazing,” Johnson said on stream.

The night before, Johnson had posted a video of himself stopping to rejoice outside the shuttered offices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, once the world’s largest provider of food aid. “Destroy the idols of the conquered church, right?” he said with a laugh. “Desecrate their idols. Look at this. There it is. Blacked out. It’s gone.”

Cat Zakrzewski and Michael Scherer contributed to this report.

Categories Extremism, Lies, Media, Trump

Jan Resseger: Will the Trump Gang Succeed in Demonizing the Words “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”?

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2025 //
12

Jan Resseger reflects on the Trump administration’s determination to eliminate not only to eliminate programs based on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” but the words themselves. Those three words must be expunged from our vocabularity. We must not recognize that there is diversity of people, even within the same religion or race. We must not strive for equity, which means that everyone has an equal chance to thrive. When they don’t thrive, we ask why. But we mustn’t care anymore.

Inclusion is the third “dirty” word that must be extirpated, inclusion means “all.” Remember when you recited the Pledge of Allegiance in school? I do. We said, “with liberty and justice for all.” I suppose it will be changed now to “with liberty and justice for some.”

Read Jan’s post. As always, it is thoughtful, incisive and well researched.

Have faith. This madness and meanness will come to an end.

Categories Censorship, Equity, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Gender, Language, Lies, Stupid, Trump

Trump Speaks at DOJ, Urges Imprisonment of His Political Foes

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2025 //
14

It’s not customary for the President to speak at the Department of Justice, which seeks a measure of independence, but Trump is not a traditionalist. He spoke today at the DOJ, whined about how unfairly he had been treated (by clipping and hiding top secret documents and inspiring an insurrection to overturn the election), and railed against those who had prosecuted him. It was typical Trump: aggrieved, bitter, self-pitying, angry.

He said that his courtroom opponents were “scum,” the judges were “corrupt,” and the prosecutors “deranged.”

He said the people who did this to him are “bad people,” and they should be imprisoned.

Trump vowed to “remake the agency and retaliate against his enemies.”

He is unhinged, deranged, vindictive, and we are in deep trouble.

Categories Character, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Lies, Shame, Trump

Josh Cowen: Michigan Doesn’t Want Vouchers, But Trump May Impose Them

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2025 //
2

The DeVos family has poured millions into persuading the people of Michigan to endorse vouchers but they have failed. So far. In a statewide referendum in 2000 sponsored by the DeVoses, voters resoundingly rejected vouchers. Since no voucher referendum has ever passed in any state, the voucher pushers have to find another route that does not include letting voters decide.

Josh Owen thinks they may have found the strategy. He wrote the following editorial for The Detroit Free Press. His article was republished by the Network for Public Education.

New post on Network for Public Education.

Josh Cowen: Another GOP attempt to sneak school vouchers into Michigan — this time, it may work

Noted voucher scholar Josh Cowen wrote an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press warning Michigan that the GOP is trying yet another backdoor approach to getting vouchers into the state. 

Michiganders don’t want school vouchers. But the federal government might force vouchers into Michigan, whether we want them to or not.

In the coming days, Congress will consider whether to include the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA) among many GOP priorities as part of the budget reconciliation process that will set federal spending for next year and beyond.

That bill, which GOP leaders have introduced in both the Senate and the House, is a school voucher plan mixed with a tax credit that would allow donors to divert all or part of what they owe in federal taxes to other organizations that then distribute those funds for private K-12 tuition and other private educational expenses.

Put another way, this is the federal version of the voucher plans spreading in red states across the country — except this one is nestled inside a tax shelter for mostly wealthy donors. Those donors can give either $5,000 or up to 10% of their adjusted income — whichever is greater — for $10 billion in diverted revenue in the first year alone. Then that spending cap can go up. A similar, Michigan-specific version of this scheme was unsuccessfully backed by Betsy DeVos and allies three years ago.

The new federal bill would top off voucher spending in states that have those systems already, and force vouchers into states that have don’t have or want them — states like Michigan.

Our state constitution bans state funding from going to private K-12 schools. But the new voucher tax credit could circumvent that ban by using federal dollars instead. So much for “giving education back to the states,” as the Trump Administration says it wants to do.

Read the full op-ed here. You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/josh-cowen-another-gop-attempt-to-sneak-school-vouchers-into-michigan-this-time-it-may-work/

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Michigan, Privatization, Trump, Vouchers

Quick: What’s the Purpose of the EPA?

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2025 //
3

The EPA is the Environmental Protection Agency. It was established in 1970 during the Nixon administration. The creation of EPA was a response to public and scientific concern about pollution of the air, land, and water by chemicals discarded by industry.

Republicans at the time were conservatives, and they prided themselves on championing clean air and clean water.

But in the age of Trump, environmental protection is considered a hindrance to industry. It also is a burden to the coal industry.

Trump appointed one of his most loyal allies to lead EPA. This is how he defines its mission:

“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a news release.

  1. To drive down the cost of living.
  2. To unleash American energy.
  3. To bring back auto jobs to the U.S.

Notice what’s missing? Any reference to reducing toxic pollution from the air, land, and waters.

Zeldin announced that he intends to eliminate dozens of EPA regulations. More toxic chemicals will be dumped into lakes and streams. More smokestacks will belch smoke into the air. More brownfields of chemicals will poison the land.

A sad day for America.

Categories Corruption, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

Robert Kennedy Blames Child’s Measles Death on Poor Nutrition and Exercise, Not Lack of Vaccination

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2025 //
5

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised at his confirmation hearings that he was no longer a vaccine-denier and swore he would follow the science.

He lied.

When addressing the death of a Mennonite child in Texas who was unvaccinated, Kennedy attributed the death to poor nutrition and lack of exercise, not to her parents’ failure to get her vaccinated. He emphasized that the choice to get vaccinated was personal, not a matter of public health. And he reiterated the risks of getting vaccinated. He is an unrepentant vaccine-denier. The Atlantic just published a story by Tom Bartlett, who interviewed the child’s father. Mennonites don’t trust vaccines. Bartlett points out that before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, 400-500 measles deaths occurred every year. Measles deaths are rare now.

The New York Times reported:

In a sweeping interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, outlined a strategy for containing the measles outbreak in West Texas that strayed far from mainstream science, relying heavily on fringe theories about prevention and treatments.

He issued a muffled call for vaccinations in the affected community, but said the choice was a personal one. He suggested that measles vaccine injuries were more common than known, contrary to extensive research.

He asserted that natural immunity to measles, gained through infection, somehow also protected against cancer and heart disease, a claim not supported by research.

He cheered on questionable treatments like cod liver oil, and said that local doctors had achieved “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries with steroids or antibiotics.

The worsening measles outbreak, which has largely spread through a Mennonite community in Gaines County, has infected nearly 200 people and killed a child, the first such death in the United States in 10 years.

Another suspected measles death has been reported in New Mexico, where cases have recently increased in a county that borders Gaines County.

The interview, which lasted 35 minutes, was posted online by Fox News last week, just before the President Trump’s address to Congress. Segments had been posted earlier, but the full version received little attention.

Mr. Kennedy offered conflicting public health messages as he tried to reconcile the government’s longstanding endorsement of vaccines with his own decades-long skepticism.

Mr. Kennedy acknowledged that vaccines “do prevent infection” and said that the federal government was helping ensure that people have access to “good medicines, including those who want them, to vaccines.”

“In highly unvaccinated communities like Mennonites, it’s something that we recommend,” he said.

Mr. Kennedy described vaccination as a personal choice that must be respected, then went on to raise frightening concerns about the safety of the vaccines.

He said he’d been told that a dozen Mennonite children had been injured by vaccines in Gaines County. People in the community wanted federal health workers arriving in Texas “to also look at our vaccine-injured kids and look them in the eye,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Yet the M.M.R. vaccine itself has been thoroughly studied and is safe. There is no link to autism, as the secretary has claimed in the past. While all vaccines have occasional adverse effects, health officials worldwide have concluded that the benefits far outweigh the very small risks of vaccination.

Mr. Kennedy asserted otherwise: “We don’t know what the risk profile is for these products. We need to restore government trust. And we’re going to do that by telling the truth, and by doing rigorous science to understand both safety and efficacy issues….”

In later comments, Mr. Kennedy suggested that severe symptoms mainly affected people who were unhealthy before contracting measles.

“It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” he said, adding later that “we see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regimen.”

West Texas is “kind of a food desert,” he added. Malnutrition “may have been an issue” for the child who died of measles in Gaines County.

Texas health officials said the child had “no known underlying conditions.”

Dr. Wendell Parkey, a physician in Gaines County with many Mennonite patients, said the idea that the community was malnourished was mistaken.

Mennonites often avoid processed foods, raise their own livestock and make their own bread, he noted. From a very young age, many members of the community also help with farming and other physically demanding jobs.

“They’re the healthiest people out here,” he said. “Nutritionally, I would put them up against anybody.”

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science

Bill Kristol: Trump Betrays Ukraine and Our Ideals

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2025 //
2

Bill Kristol was a prominent conservative until Trump. He edited The Weekly Standard. Now he is an outspoken critic of Trump because Trump is betraying America and is destroying the Republican Party. In this post, he speaks out against Trump’s craven abandonment of Ukraine and his craven embrace of Putin.

He writes:

The betrayal of Ukraine continues apace.

On Friday, President Donald Trump stopped sharing American intelligence with Ukraine, and Russia responded by immediately stepping up its strikes on civilian Ukrainian targets.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk explained the situation succinctly: “This is what happens when someone appeases barbarians. More bombs, more aggression, more victims.”

But Tusk was being diplomatic. He was maintaining the pretense that Trump was merely foolishly or wishfully appeasing Putin. Trump isn’t acting foolishly or wishfully. He wants to help Putin.

Indeed, the distinguished military historian Phillips P. O’Brien wrote on Saturday:

What we have seen over the last few days is so extreme that it deserves to be said out loud and acknowledged as soon as possible. The United States has not just abandoned Ukraine, the United States is now actively helping Vladimir Putin and the Russian state kill Ukrainians to try and force Ukraine to accept a bad peace deal that very well might spell the end of their country. At the same time, the USA is now bending over backwards to help protect the Russian military.

O’Brien provides evidence for these charges, which you can and should read if you have the stomach for it. And since O’Brien’s newsletter, we’ve had reports that Trump won’t restore military aid with Ukraine even if there’s a deal on mineral resources, and that the Trump administration wants to depose Volodymyr Zelensky as president.

As the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser remarks: “Trump’s demands right now are Putin’s demands.”

By Sunday night, Trump was telling reporters that the administration had “just about” lifted the pause on Ukraine intel sharing. But the details of the lift were left unclear. Indeed, the alleged willingness to lift the pause seems to be laying the groundwork for failing to do so, or for putting the pause on again, when Zelensky fails to make sufficient concessions for “peace.”

Those looking for optimism continue to try to advance the proposition that Trump is merely stepping back a bit in Europe to focus on the China threat. But there are reports that China, Russia, and Iran are now engaged in new naval exercises near Iran’s Chabahar port. This is only one of many instances of the autocracies of Europe and Asia working together.

And the fact is that Trump wants to cut deals with all the autocrats—with Russia, China, Iran, and for that matter North Korea. Those are the leaders with whom he wants to work to make the world safe for autocracy.

Not all Republicans are on board this agenda. The Reaganite pulse in the GOP still beats, if faintly. And so one reads about Hill Republicans having concerns about Trump’s policy. But as Adam Kinzinger mordantly remarked about his former colleagues: “If only they had votes in say, a legislative body, to do something about it. But no, they can only be ‘concerned.’”

Three House Republicans. Four GOP senators. That’s what it might take to stop or impede Trump’s sellout of Ukraine. They could vow not to support Trump’s agenda, and to vote with the Democrats if necessary, as long as the betrayal of Ukraine continues. They could start with the government funding bill that must pass by the end of this week.

But no, Hill Republicans are still bending the knee to Trump.

And so a Republican who’s been staunchly pro-Ukraine like GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick feels he has to pretend that cutting off intelligence sharing with Ukraine is :an escalate to de-escalate tactic by the administration to bring these parties to the table.”

An escalate to de-escalate tactic.

The mental gymnastics of Republicans who know better, but who do not want to confront Trump, never cease to amaze.

It’s all sickening. It’s sickening to see the betrayal of Ukraine, because one thinks of what will happen to the Ukrainian people.

But it’s also sickening to see the betrayal of Ukraine because of what it will say about what’s happening to us.

As a French friend of America, Bernard-Henri Levy, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week:

I don’t know if the Americans will grasp that in Mr. Zelensky’s dignity lies their “city upon a hill” creed and that American leaders, from the Founding Fathers all the way to Kennedy and Reagan, would have been proud of a deep bond with this leader.

I don’t know, really, if any of this will be properly understood after that incident, display, fiasco, debacle, monstrosity—call it what you will—in the Oval Office.

It’s proper to blame President Trump for the “incident, display, fiasco, debacle, monstrosity” in the Oval Office. But Trump’s our president. It’s our Oval Office. If Americans in both parties don’t do their utmost to check and overturn the president’s actions, we will all have been part of the betrayal of Ukraine. We will all have been part of a betrayal of America.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Trump
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