The following letter appeared on the blog of Steve Nelson. I think you can guess who sent it. He calls himself “the Prince of Peace.” He also signed the letter, but used only his first name. Steve is a retired headmaster of the Calhoun School.
Dear Pete,
I watched your confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Forces Committee with great interest, Don’t feel either singled out or special. I watch everything on Earth with great interest.
It was somewhat disappointing to hear your regular references to me. First, I have no place in the secular proceedings of Congress, as my inclusion contradicts the 1st Amendment of your Constitution. The fact that such contradictions are increasingly commonplace makes them more, not less, problematic.
Two aspects of your testimony were particularly troubling.
As you know, perhaps, the Bible refers to me as the Prince of Peace. I’m actually not a biblical literalist, as it gets many things wrong, but that part is essentially accurate. It is, therefore, deeply troubling that you uttered the words “warrior” and “lethal” throughout your answers. While justifications for war are seldom convincing, your posture and rhetoric were those of a man spoiling for a fight; your right, I suppose, but not a personal or professional quality with which I wish to be associated.
If you know your Bible, this may be familiar:
“For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us;
And the government will rest on His shoulders;
And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.”
I am that son.
While, God forbid, the government does not rest on My shoulders, it may partially rest on yours. I fear your inclinations seem more belligerent than peaceful.
Also, about that tattoo you’re so proud of that got you kicked off the security detail:
Leviticus 19:28 (YLT)- “`And a cutting for the soul ye do not put in your flesh; and a writing, a cross-mark, ye do not put on you; I [am] Jehovah.”
The other thing that troubled me deeply was your apparent belief that I have offered or could offer you redemption.
“I have failed in things in my life, and thankfully I’m redeemed by my lord and savior Jesus.”
I might offer the retort,”Who says so?” Your public assertion, reverting to my original faith, takes a lot of chutzpah.
But let us stipulate that I can offer redemption. Given that redemption, whether through good works, 12-step programs or profound honesty and remorse, is possible, you have not earned such grace. (By the way, the claim that I could turn water to wine was metaphorical, not a suggestion to drink wine like water.)
In response to questions about your serial infidelities, sexual assault and many episodes of public and private drunkenness, you could only say, “Anonymous smear.” While that might have served as cover for your MAGA enablers, the so-called “smears” are not anonymous. Inconveniently for you, at least as redemption goes, I remind you that I’ve seen it all – and I don’t mean that in the, “Well, now I’ve seen it all!” sense. I’ve actually seen it all.
The victims of your aggressions, assaults and indecency were absent in the testimony, both by affidavit or by any acknowledgment or statement of remorse on your part. And to think that you dodged those issues in part by alluding to a child born of your affair with a mistress while married! Chutzpah on steroids….
To finish reading this stern reprimand of Pete Hegseth, open the link.
The article focuses on one community college that they targeted, North Idaho College, which may lose its accreditation, not because of academic or financial problems but because its board is in chaos.
The extremists target all public education. They think education is indoctrination. They think it’s dangerous, even vocational and technical education.
Here are a few illustrative paragraphs:
The charter violations that kicked off this accreditation scandal four years ago never had anything to do with academics. The two-year community college offers a solid education and features the top nursing program in the state. Their finances are stable too. No, NIC might go under because the Board of Trustees has existed in a state of toxicity, chaos, and dysfunction ever since the far right gained a board majority four years ago.
It is difficult to overstate how catastrophic disaccreditation would be for the people of North Idaho. With a price tag 65 percent lower on average than four-year state institutions, community colleges place higher education within reach of the least advantaged Americans; over a third of their students make less than $20,000 per year. At NIC, 57 percent of students receive financial aid. Local businesses depend on the college for employee training on everything from office software to forklift operation. High school students can enroll in dual credit programs, which let students get a head start on their first year of college and allow homeschoolers to obtain official transcripts….
How could this happen? The problem goes far beyond a three-person majority on the trustee board of a small community college. NIC and many other institutions are in danger because, over the last decade and a half, a core group of extremists has slowly taken over the Idaho Republican Party in the same way that a parasitic wasp slowly takes over its host. This required no astroturfing or Koch-fueled cash infusions, just a regular, everyday indifference to hyperlocal politics. The tactic is underway elsewhere, but Idaho got a head start. This crisis is what happens when insurgency bears fruit….
The consequences of that agenda go far beyond NIC’s accreditation crisis. Idaho’s abortion laws are among the strictest in the country; citing difficulty recruiting doctors given the risk of criminalization, two hospitals havealready closed their labor and delivery departments, leaving many rural Idahoans hours from maternal care. Armed militia members have shown up in the children’s section of libraries looking for pornography, and libraries are limiting service due to legislation that holds librarians criminally liable for books deemed inappropriate. Idaho’s primary and secondary schools are literally falling apart; it spends less per student than any other state and ranks 43rd in education quality.
This “parasitic wasp” is at work in other red states.
In October 2020, near the end of his first term, Trump imposed a new classification for career civil servants called Schedule F. It was intended to strip job security from career civil servants so they could be replaced by Trump loyalists. One of Joe Biden’s first actions was to eliminate Schedule F.
Trump pledged during his 2024 campaign to implement Schedule F. He calls the Civil Service “the deep state.” He believes that career bureaucrats slow-walked or impeded some of his most extreme ideas. And he is on his way, with full control of the Executive branch, both Houses of Congress, and (usually) the Supreme Court.
By implementing Schedule F, Trump would gain control of 50,000 jobs that are now held by civil servants. He and his deputies could replace them with MAGA loyalists.
The creation of the Civil Service was considered a very important reform and has been sacrosanct for more than a century. Before the Civil Service Commission was created in 1883, government jobs were handed out based on party affiliation. This was known as “the Spoils System.” The saying went “to the victor goes the spoils.” Win the election and appoint the people of your own party, who will be loyal to you.
Trump wants a return to the Spoils System, so he can appoint Trump loyalists. He wants to turn the clock back more than a century.
The first comprehensive merit-based civil service system was put in place by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which created the United States Civil Service Commission. The Act ended the Spoils System by specifying that merit – qualifications measured by testing – is the basis of hiring decisions. For the first time, appointments were open to all citizens, made based on merit, and were given to the best qualified applicants. The Act also protected incumbents from being thrown out of office simply because of a change in the Presidency, providing tenure protection for employees and ensuring their political neutrality. Initially, only about 10.5% of Federal jobs were included in the competitive civil service system. By the end of the century, approximately 42% were included; by the early 1900s, it was over 60%; and by 1952, over 90% of Federal jobs were included in the civil service system.
Merit-based civil service systems followed in the states and at the local level. The first state civil service law was enacted under the leadership of then-Assembly Member Theodore Roosevelt and then-Governor Grover Cleveland in New York in 1883. Teddy Roosevelt also served as a commissioner on the United States Civil Service Commission and was a staunch supporter of the civil service during his presidency, leading to a period of major government expansion and further reforms of the civil service system. Roosevelt is known as the “Father” of modern civil service….
After World War II, the rise of collective bargaining in the public sector and the civil rights movement affected the civil service system, bringing the ideas of Equal Employment Opportunity, affirmative action, and equal pay for equal work into the world of personnel administration. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Equal Pay Act of 1963, Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 all marked the growing inclusiveness of public personnel policies and procedures. These movements clearly spoke to the fundamental civil service ideal that appointments are based on merit established by competitive processes, not on any other factors.
By the 1970s, a new civil service reform movement began with the goal of making civil service more responsive to the personnel needs of executives and managers. While the first reforms begun in the late nineteenth century established the principles of competitiveness and merit, they also created a significant separation between management and personnel administration.
Managers had little control over personnel issues and their day to day operational needs were often stymied by overly restrictive civil service rules. Despite the decentralization of civil service systems during the Roosevelt era, personnel offices still retained significant control and managers continually found there were significant barriers to effectively attracting, retaining, evaluating, disciplining, rewarding, and terminating employees.
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 was designed to address these issues at the Federal level. The Act abolished the Civil Service Commission and created the Office of Personnel Management in its place. Agency chief executives were given direct policy control over personnel functions and the purpose of the civil service system moved from a regulatory function to a service orientation in order to better support organizational and leadership efforts.
Civil service processes were streamlined and simplified; the merit system restated and expanded to include an employee’s abilities, education, experience, and job performance; and the emphasis turned to recruitment, career advancement, performance based compensation, and performance appraisal. The Act also created the Senior Executive Service, which is designed to help attract and retain high level senior executives outside of the civil service system. Many of these changes were mirrored at the state and local levels.
This latest reform movement lost momentum under President Reagan during the early 1980s and many of the same concerns brought to light during the 1970s regarding the responsiveness of civil service systems continue to exist today.
The primary goal of the civil service system has been and continues to be to ensure that appointments to government jobs are based on merit and ability as determined through a competitive process. The principles of civil service specify that the most qualified person be appointed to the job; that appointments not be based on any other factors such as political activity or patronage; and that incumbents are protected from the political whims of elected officials. This primary purpose of civil service has remained constant throughout the various historical movements that have changed and shaped civil service over the last 200 years.
Adapted from the website for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (www.opm.gov) and The New Public Personnel Administration by Nigro, Nigro, and Kelloug
Texas is offering a curriculum for K-5 classrooms that is infused with Biblical stories. It is called the Bluebonnet Learning Materials. Its proponents contend that this cultural knowledge will prepare students to understand art, literature, and history, but the children are way too young to absorb the religious lessons as part of their lifelong knowledge. Critics also complain that one religion is favored above all.
Controversy has surrounded new state-approved lessons referencing the Bible that are being offered as part of the Texas Education Agency’s elementary reading curriculum, with some confusion on financial incentives to adopt the materials. Months after the State Board of Education approved the materials created through House Bill 1605, some districts still don’t know exactly how the funding will be used and what the limitations are….
The TEA’s Bluebonnet Learning materials are free educational resources owned by the state of Texas. The resources Texas has commissioned include textbooks for grades K-5 in reading and math materials through algebra.
The bill bans materials associated with “Balanced Literacy.”
All materials approved had to meet certain requirements, such as being free of three-cueing content in kindergarten through third grade, the practice of using context clues to find the meaning of unknown words before sounding them out. The law also mandated that materials not be obscene or include harmful content, as delineated in the Texas Penal Code, and that they have parent portal compliance. ..
The resources were built off materials from Amplify, a New York-based publisher, that were purchased during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Amplify declined to supply further revisions, according to a story from The 74, after they were allegedly asked to create lessons around certain stories from the Bible but not other world religions. TEA officials said this claim was “completely false” and the material “includes representation from multiple faiths…”
If districts choose a resource from the State Board of Education’s approved list for high-quality instructional materials, they receive an extra $40 per enrolled student on top of the instructional materials and technology allotment, or IMTA, of $171.84 per student. If the district chooses to adopt Bluebonnet, they would also receive an extra $20 for printing the materials, totaling $60 per student…
Both Republicans and Democrats have condemned the Bluebonnet resources for their inclusion of certain Bible-specific lessons and stories. Other religions are referenced in the resources, but according to a study commissioned by the Texas Freedom Network,the religious source material addressed is overwhelmingly Christian. Hinduism is briefly mentioned, despite the significant population of Hindus in Texas. Buddhism and Sikhism are also briefly mentioned. The first version of the Bluebonnet Learning did not include references to Hinduism, Buddhism or Sikhism, and some deities were characterized as “mythical,” while the truthfulness of the Christian God was not qualified.
In one kindergarten lesson, students are asked to use sequencing skills to order the creation events as portrayed in Genesis.
Critics also had concerns that the textbooks whitewashed historical events by using gentler language to describe colonization, such as “share” or “introduce.” In some units, the lessons teach students that abolitionists used their beliefs in Christianity to argue against slavery, without noting that Christianity was also used as a justification for slavery in U.S. history.
“I really struggled with the Bluebonnet materials, especially on the (English Language Arts) side of things, because, while there was representation from other religions, other faith-based communities, it was overwhelmingly written with Christian bias,” Perez-Diaz said.
Texas law does require districts to include “religious literature, including the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and New Testament, and its impact on history and literature” in curricula, but critics felt that the reliance on Christianity at an early age for students goes beyond what the law requires. Conservative critics had said that the interpretation of certain Bible passages was not in-line with all Christian belief systems and that only parents should have the right to teach their children about their religion.
Gary Rayno, veteran journalist in New Hampshire, reports on the Legislature’s pending decision on expanding vouchers. It is astonishing that any state is still considering universal vouchers, in light of what we have learned from the experience of every state that has done so.
We know now that the overwhelming majority of vouchers are used by students already enrolled in private and religious schools. In other words, they are for the most part a subsidy for families already able to pay tuition.
We know now that universal vouchers bust the state budget by offering to pay private school tuition.
We know now (see Josh Cowen’s recent book The Privateers) that when poor kids leave public schools for voucher schools, their academic performance declines, often dramatically.
We know now, based on state referenda, that the public opposes vouchers.
Gary Rayno writes about what’s happening in New Hampshire:
The advocates for opening the state’s school voucher program, Education Freedom Accounts, to all students in the state regardless of their parents’ income did a massive public relations and organization effort before the public hearing last week on House 115, which would remove the salary cap from the four-year old program.
While many parents with their children turned out for the public hearing that needed three rooms in the Legislative Office Building to hold the attendees, the people responding electronically —many posting testimony — on the bill were opposed by a more than four-to-one margin, 3,414-791.
Groups like the Koch Foundation funded by Americans for Prosperity sent out at least three email “urgent” messages to its followers encouraging supporters to attend the public hearing.
Department of Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut sent out a press release the day before the public hearing with the headline “New Hampshire’s cost per pupil continues upward trend,” indicating the state’s average per-pupil cost increased from $20,323 last school year to $21,545 this school year and noting the enrollment has been trending down.
In his press release he also noted the average national cost per pupil at $15,591, while noting that New Hampshire’s largest school districts were the cheapest with Manchester at $17,734, Nashua at $18,270, Bedford at $18,498 and Concord at $23,159, while rural Pittsburg, at the very top of the state, has the highest cost at $44,484.
“The taxpayers of New Hampshire have worked hard to support students, families and our public schools, increasing funding by more than $400 million since 2021, resulting in a record high cost per pupil,” Edelblut said. “New Hampshire remains dedicated to continuing efforts to expand educational opportunities and pathways to help every child succeed in a fiscally responsible approach. The persistent trend of declining student enrollment combined with rising costs creates substantial financial strain on school districts, taxpayers and communities, necessitating new and creative approaches to educating our children in a system that can be sustained over the long term.”
In other words these skyrocketing public education costs cannot be sustained, and efforts like the EFA program is the wave of the future for taxpayers and students, although the program offers no guarantees the state money flowing into the program is being used for what it was intended or wisely by parents.
He does not mention that New Hampshire is either 49th or 50th in financial support for K to 12th grade public education, while cities and towns are picking up over 70 percent of the costs of public education and yet their residents are the ones approving the budgets that increased per-pupil spending.
Edelblut also doesn’t mention that the state downshifted the obligation of hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 15 years to school districts, municipalities and counties when it stopped paying 35 percent of the retirement costs for employees, or that he has failed over the last five years to request additional money for the special education catastrophic aid program although costs have been rising substantially further downshifting millions more in costs to local school districts.
And the public hearing on the bill was held on one of the earliest days in the session, which says the Republican leadership wants to separate this bill from the state budget as much as possible.
A trend of declining revenues, the drying up of the federal pandemic aid and past surpluses, along with the elimination of the interest and dividends tax, which is a huge benefit to the state’s wealthiest residents, and business tax rate cuts will make difficult work for lawmakers and new Gov. Kelly Ayotte, who gives her first budget address next month.
The GOP leadership doesn’t want to discuss the $100 million in new expenses in HB 115 when budget discussions hit snags over what to fund.
During the public hearing, a number of parents brought their children with them to talk about the wonderful things they have been able to accomplish by using the state taxpayer money for alternative education settings.
Many also trashed public schools saying they failed their children although the public schools continue to serve about 90 percent of the state’s students.
Some of the parents noted public schools don’t align with their beliefs or political philosophies, which really says they do not want their children to be exposed to different beliefs or cultures.
David Trumble of Weare noted that some of the private and religious schools don’t take LGBTQ+, special education or English-as-a-second language students.
“There is nothing universal about universal vouchers. The only universal option is the public schools because they accept every single child and give every one of them a good education. That is why you have a constitutional duty to fund them. You have no obligation to fund the private schools,” Trumble told the House Education Funding Committee.
“Our first obligation is to fund the public schools.”
Under the EFA program, 75 percent of the students did not attend public schools when they joined the program, meaning that neither the school districts nor the state was paying for their education, their parents were.
In other states where universal vouchers have been approved almost all of the new money goes to families currently sending their children to private or religious schools or being homeschooled, which is a new expense to those states just as it would be in New Hampshire, where the potential for additional costs is over $100 million annually.
The money for New Hampshire EFA program comes from the Education Trust Fund which also provides almost all of the state education aid to public schools including charter schools.
The trust fund once had over a $200 million surplus, but ended the last fiscal year June 30, 2024 at $159 million, and is projected to drop to $125 million at the end of this fiscal year.
If the bill passes, it won’t be long before money is drained and the squeeze is on public education because of the new education system set up by the legislature that many told the committee last week lacks accountability and transparency.
Many of the people in opposition to the bill said the state first needs to meet its constitutional obligation to pay for an adequate education for the state’s children before setting up any new program costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
But universal vouchers are not only a priority for New Hampshire Republicans, it is a priority at the national level as well.
It continues a movement begun in the late 1950s and 1960s advised by James Buchanan, an economist from the University of Chicago, who was influenced by Frank Knight as was Milton Friedman.
The plan was to both develop more conservative Republicans through the education system and through state legislatures.
One of the targets was public education and reforming it into a private system where if you have the money you can receive a good education, but if you don’t, well too bad.
While the EFA program was touted as helping lower income parents find an alternative education setting for their children who did not fare well in a public education environment, it has essentially been a subsidy program for parents whose children were already in private and religious schools or homeschooled.
Many of the parents speaking in favor of expanding the EFA program said they wanted every child to experience what they experienced.
Rep. Ross Berry, R-Weare, told the committee why should the EFA program be means tested, when public schools don’t require wealthy parents to pay for their children to attend.
That was one of the catch phrases uttered several times during the hearing along with “support for the student not the system.”
Someone had distributed the talking points.
But several opponents noted the program would not help eliminate educational inequity, it would exacerbate it, because a lower-income parent would not be able to afford to send their child to one of the private schools where the average tuition is over $20,000 with a $5,200 voucher, while those already able to send their child to a private school will be able to cut their costs by the same amount.
Once again New Hampshire is a great place to live if you have money, if you don’t, not so much.
The EFA program is part of the push for individual rights over the common good. You see it in education where parents want to remove their child from those who do not have the same beliefs or philosophies, you also see in health care with the establishment of specialty and boutique practices where if you have the money you receive the best care, and in the judicial system where if you have enough money you never have to be accountable for your crimes.
If HB 115 passes, and it probably will, the legislature will have created a situation where the public schools including charter schools will face operating with less state aid, not more as the courts said the state needs, and that will impact many sectors including businesses who will not know if the state has a sufficiently educated workforce or not.
The state should not want businesses asking that question.
Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.
On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order eliminating birthright citizenship. He intends to amend the Cinstitution of the United States by his order. This is unprecedented. Eighteen state Attorney Generals filed suit today against this action.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution begins with these words:
AMENDMENT XIV
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Attorneys general from 18 states sued President Trump on Tuesday to block an executive order that refuses to recognize the U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants as citizens, the opening salvo in what promises to be a long legal battle over the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
The complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Massachusetts was joined by the cities of San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
The states view Mr. Trump’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship as “extraordinary and extreme,” said New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin, who led the legal effort along with the attorneys general from California and Massachusetts. “Presidents are powerful, but he is not a king. He cannot rewrite the Constitution with a stroke of the pen.”
On Monday, in the opening hours of his second term as president, Mr. Trump signed an order declaring that future children born to undocumented immigrants would no longer be treated as citizens. The order would extend even to the children of some mothers in the country legally but temporarily, such as foreign students or tourists.
Mr. Trump’s executive order asserts that the children of such noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and thus aren’t covered by the 14th Amendment’s longstanding constitutional guarantee.
We will learn soon enough whether Trump has corrupted enough judges so that he is free to revise the constitution with a stroke of his pen.
The AP reported on a promising development. A Taliban leader says that girls and women should be allowed to get an education. But don’t celebrate until there is an actual policy change.
A senior Taliban figure has urged the group’s leader to scrap education bans on Afghan women and girls, saying there is no excuse for them, in a rare public rebuke of government policy.
Sher Abbas Stanikzai, political deputy at the Foreign Ministry, made the remarks in a speech on Saturday in southeastern Khost province.
He told an audience at a religious school ceremony there was no reason to deny education to women and girls, “just as there was no justification for it in the past and there shouldn’t be one at all.”
The government has barred females from education after sixth grade. Last September, there were reports authorities had also stopped medical training and courses for women.
In Afghanistan, women and girls can only be treated by female doctors and health professionals. Authorities have yet to confirm the medical training ban.
“We call on the leadership again to open the doors of education,” said Stanikzai in a video shared by his official account on the social platform X. “We are committing an injustice against 20 million people out of a population of 40 million, depriving them of all their rights. This is not in Islamic law, but our personal choice or nature.”
Stanikzai was once the head of the Taliban team in talks that led to the complete withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.
It is not the first time he has said that women and girls deserve to have an education. He made similar remarks in September 2022, a year after schools closed for girls and months and before the introduction of a university ban.
Think about it: in Afghanistan, women can be treated only by female doctors, but women are not permitted to study beyond sixth grade. How can women get any healthcare if women are not allowed to study and become doctors?
Don’t the Taliban care about the well-being of their mothers, their sisters, their daughters?
Ohio is one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation. Oh, wait. We’ve said that before. And before that. But the point here is that gerrymanders — like fair elections — have consequences, and this week we saw some of the worst. Governor Mike DeWine, famous here at Wonkette for giving trans kids a brief reprievefrom the worst impulses of Ohio’s GOP legislative supermajority, has spent the last year hurting trans folks over and over to make up for that one act of kindness. This week’s example goes extra further to attack all the QTs and their alphabet friends by signing Ohio’s very first “Don’t Say Gay!” bill, HB 8. The bill is now a law and goes into effect 90 days from Thursday.
The bill is modeled after Florida’s, of course, thus the identical nickname even if it’s officially known as the Parents’ Bill of Rights. From The Advocate:
H.B. 8 prohibits educators from discussing “sexuality content” in grades K-3, and mandates that instruction at other levels be “age appropriate.” The bill defines “sexuality content” as “oral or written instruction, presentation, image or description of sexual concepts or gender ideology.” It does not define “sexual concepts,” [or] “gender ideology[.]”
Of course it doesn’t. You define those things specifically if you want to be really certain you get rid of exactly the content that’s causing a problem. You don’t define things specifically if your goal is to create a climate of self-censorship, where teachers are constantly afraid that a truly innocent bit of information will get them fired if their principal or a student’s parent interprets “gender ideology” a little more conservatively than the teacher herself. Is telling a first grader that it’s okay for boys to cook and do dishes and maybe even their own laundry “gender ideology”? Could be!
“Sexuality content” now can’t be taught without advance notice to parents (who have a right to opt their kids out). Thinking about telling Tim and Tina that they can’t bully Terri for having two dads? That might be acceptable under the “incidental” exception in paragraph G(5)(b), but it also might not. Better get a permission slip first!
The entire bill is so full of insane bureaucratic requirements that the Don’t Say Gay! label really sells the crazy short. Before each student starts classes each year, and again if a child transfers schools, every parent must be notified of all medical services available at or through the schools, as well as any “facilitated” by the school. What constitutes “facilitation”? Unclear! But we know that any time a student starts or stops receiving school counseling another notice must be sent.
Read the bill and it requires notice after notice after notice. If the child might be trans, definitely send a notice, but it’s not just that! Parents are now entitled to a letter from the school about any number of possible teaching topics, as well as any changes in “Student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.” The bill spells out that this includes “Any request by a student to identify as a gender that does not align with the student’s biological sex,” but it doesn’t stop there. Injuries, a change in academic performance, psychological trauma all have to be reported.
Meanwhile, parents can remove their children from school for hours per day for “religious instruction” without those kids being considered absent so long as they don’t miss “core curriculum subjects.” Religious instruction had previously been available subject to district discretion, conditions and limits, but no more. Now districts must release students for religious education, with no maximum number of hours away from the classroom.
As a whole, the bill goes somewhat farther than Florida’s law, and it’s unlikely to be interpreted leniently if legislators have anything to say about it. A year ago one of the sponsors and advocates for HB 8, state Rep. Beth Lear, actually said opponents of an anti-trans bathroom bill (now law) were better off dead:
“In Luke 17, Jesus says that if you cause one of these little ones of mine to stumble, it would be better for you to have a millstone hung around your neck and be thrown into the deepest sea,” state Rep. Beth Lear said while defending House Bill 183 in a committee hearing.
Lear also compared transgender people to animals in her defense of the discriminatory bill, continuing: “If I had a child who thought he was a bird, am I going to take him to a doctor who tells him the best thing to do is to let him explore being a bird? And oh, by the way, there’s a five-story building next door — why don’t you jump off and see if you can fly?”
She seems nice!
With bathroom bills, sports bills, anti-trans regulations on health care meant to be onerous enough to make care impossible without attracting the negative attention of a ban, and now HB 8, Ohio’s trans kids have suffered a horrifying wave of attacks for twelve months now, and with the GOP defeating a bill that could have ended their gerrymanders, nothing is getting better any time soon.
This statement was released by the White House today after Trump’s swearing in. Be sure to read the last two pledges:
The first promises to restore the names of Confederate leaders to federal facilities like military bases where they had been changed. They were changed to acknowledge that Confederate leaders were traitors. Trump will once again recognize them as heroes. Time will tell if he intends to re-erect the Confederate statues that were removed. For those that were destroyed, he could commission replacements.
The second pledges to remove any recognition of transgender people. Under Trump, they no longer exist.
. MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN
President Trump will take bold action to secure our border and protect American communities. This includes ending Biden’s catch-and-release policies, reinstating Remain in Mexico, building the wall, ending asylum for illegal border crossers, cracking down on criminal sanctuaries, and enhancing vetting and screening of aliens.
President Trump’s deportation operation will address the record border crossings of criminal aliens under the prior administration.
The President is suspending refugee resettlement, after communities were forced to house large and unsustainable populations of migrants, straining community safety and resources.
The Armed Forces, including the National Guard, will engage in border security, which is national security, and will be deployed to the border to assist existing law enforcement personnel.
President Trump will begin the process of designating cartels, including the dangerous Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations and use the Alien Enemies Act to remove them.
The Department of Justice will seek the death penalty as the appropriate punishment for heinous crimes against humanity, including those who kill law enforcement officers and illegal migrants who maim and murder Americans.
MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AND ENERGY DOMINANT AGAIN
The President will unleash American energy by ending Biden’s policies of climate extremism, streamlining permitting, and reviewing for rescission all regulations that impose undue burdens on energy production and use, including mining and processing of non-fuel minerals.
President Trump’s energy actions empower consumer choice in vehicles, showerheads, toilets, washing machines, lightbulbs and dishwashers.
President Trump will declare an energy emergency and use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure.
President Trump’s energy policies will end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.
President Trump will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
All agencies will take emergency measures to reduce the cost of living.
President Trump will announce the America First Trade Policy.
America will no longer be beholden to foreign organizations for our national tax policy, which punishes American businesses.
DRAIN THE SWAMP
The President will usher a Golden Age for America by reforming and improving the government bureaucracy to work for the American people. He will freeze bureaucrat hiring except in essential areas to end the onslaught of useless and overpaid DEI activists buried into the federal workforce. He will pause burdensome and radical regulations not yet in effect that Biden announced.
President Trump is announcing an unprecedented slate of executive orders for rescission.
President Trump is planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats. The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country. The President will also return federal workers to work, as only 6% of employees currently work in person.
President Trump is taking swift action to end the weaponization of government against political rivals and ordering all document retention as required by law. President Trump is also ending the unconstitutional censorship by the federal government. No longer will government employees pick and require the erasure of entirely true speech.
On the President’s direction, the State Department will have an America-First foreign policy.
BRING BACK AMERICAN VALUES
The President will establish male and female as biological reality and protect women from radical gender ideology.
American landmarks will be named to appropriately honor our Nation’s history.
Greg Olear is simply amazing. Read the post here and perhaps you will agree. He is wise, smart, learned, insightful, and inspiring. I know of no other writer who weaves together politics, literature, and history as seamlessly as Olear. He writes at Substack and charges no fee.
Dear Reader,
The great British historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote an indispensable series of books in which he divides the 20 decades after the French Revolution into historical “ages.” The period from the 1789 storming of the Bastille to the uprisings sweeping across Europe in 1848 he termed the Age of Revolution. Eighteen forty-eight until the end of the Great Boom circa 1875 is the Age of Capital. The Age of Empire spanned from the mid-1870s until the start of the Great War in 1914. And the “short twentieth century,” a term he coined, was dubbed the Age of Extremes, and ran from the assassination of the archduke until 1991.
Ever since I discovered his books in 2012, the year of his death, I’ve often wondered what Hobsbawm would have called the fifth historical “age”—the one that began in 1991. That was the year of the first Gulf War, and the banishment from Saudi Arabia of Osama bin Laden that kickstarted his Al Qaeda movement; the mysterious death of Robert Maxwell—friend to the British royal family, mentor to Jeffrey Epstein, business partner of the Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich, and Israeli spy—who fell off his yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands; the repeal of the apartheid laws in South Africa, where Errol Musk made his fortune; the rollout of the WorldWideWeb; and the breakup of the Soviet Union—on Christmas, no less, capitalism’s holiest of holy days.
Today, a mere 24 hours and change before we hand the federal government off to a hateful confederacy of Nazis, mobsters, Opus Dei weirdos, white Christian nationalists, and billionaire dorks, I think I know not only the name of the period after the Age of Extremes, but also its termination date. As I type this, we are living in the last few hours of the Age of Unreality. It ends tomorrow at noon.
Something else happened in 1991, you see—something that likely eluded Eric Hobsbawm. Producers at MTV were developing a TV show that would begin filming in February of 1992. It was called The Real World: New York. It was the first reality TV show—or, at least, the seminal reality TV show of the subsequent reality TV explosion. Riding the reality TV wave was a British producer named Mark Burnett, who would give us Survivor in 2000, and, four years later, what wound up being the most historically significant reality TV show of all time, The Apprentice.
Although I confess to having enjoyed a few seasons of The Surreal Life, back when our eldest son was a baby—Flavor Flav does not disappoint!—I have never liked reality TV shows, encouraging, as they often do, the very worst of human behavior. I don’t like meanness. I don’t like ruthlessness. I don’t like watching anyone being voted off the island. I don’t like when people are fired. I don’t like talentless humans. I don’t like Kardashians. Most of all, I don’t like the unscripted-but-very-much-scripted fluff that has replaced actual shows written by actual writers. By encouraging us to believe in a heavily-retouched fictional universe presented as the real world—or, I suppose, The Real World—reality TV has left us more susceptible to Russian disinformation, to deep fakes, to conspiracy theories, to manufactured media narratives, to tech-bro charlatans, to pseudo-scientific arguments against vaccines, and to mendacious politicians who have supercharged lying to a form of warfare.
I have often grumbled, half in jest, that reality TV would bring about the end of Western civilization. I did not think it would also bring about the end of Western democracy. To paraphrase Don DeLillo: Reality TV has given us Joe Rogan; that alone warrants its doom.
(Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Freddie Mercury died in—when else?—1991.)
One of the most significant, world-altering events in this Age of Unreality was, of course, 9/11. In response to the WTC attacks, the FBI shifted its focus from transnational organized crime, which was already operating in the United States and growing more powerful by the day—a genuine threat to our society—to Islamic extremist terrorism, which involved not very many crazy people mostly living in caves far, far away from New York. In response to 9/11, we have to subject ourselves to TSA search before boarding an airplane. In response to 9/11, Bush and Cheney launched a long and expensive war on Saddam Hussein, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks, while simultaneously cutting taxes for their wealthy benefactors—two actions that, in tandem, starved the U.S. treasury and put the country so far into the red that it may never recover. In Britain, meanwhile, Tony Blair’s blind loyalty to Bush—a foreshadowing, perhaps, of Joe Biden’s blind loyalty to Bibi Netanyahu—paved the way for BREXIT and the series of hapless prime ministers that followed the disastrous decision to LEAVE.
Five days after 9/11, Anthony Lane, the New Yorker’s savagely witty film critic, published what remains one of the finest pieces of writing on the attacks, a short essay called “This Is Not a Movie.” I go back and revisit it every once in a while, when the mood strikes me. Reading it now, I see that Lane perfectly articulates the paradox of the Age of Unreality, the uneasy blur between fact and fiction, when he comments on “the degree to which people saw—literally saw, and are continuing to see, as it airs in unforgiving repeats—that day”—that is, September 11, 2001—“as a movie.” He notes that the elapsed time between the initial hijackings and the collapse of the north tower was “a little over two hours;” the length of a summer blockbuster disaster film.
Lane writes:
We are talking…of the indulgence that will always be extended to an epoch blessed with prosperity—one that has the leisure, and the cash, to indulge its fancies, not least the cheap thrill of pretending that the blessing could be wiped out. What happened on the morning of September 11th was that imaginations that had been schooled in the comedy of apocalypse were forced to reconsider the same evidence as tragic. It was hard to make the switch; the fireball of impact was so precisely as it should be, and the breaking waves of dust that barrelled down the avenues were so absurdly recognizable—we have tasted them so frequently in other forms, such as water, flame, and Godzilla’s foot—that only those close enough to breathe the foulness into their lungs could truly measure the darkening day for what it was.
There are echoes of this in the fires that have ravaged Los Angeles. Looking at those horrific images, it is impossible not to describe the fiery scenes as something from a movie—or, rather, a limited series, because, unlike with 9/11, the L.A. fires did not confine themselves to a movie-length running time. They began last Tuesday, almost two full weeks ago, and are still ongoing. If 9/11 was, as Lane suggests, a disaster film come to life, the fires are a combination of disaster film and horror movie: not just the fires themselves but the hundred-mile-an-hour winds and the dread of the fires spreading. Only those close enough to breathe the foulness into their lungs could truly measure the darkening days for what they are. My heart breaks for everyone in L.A., even as I know I can never fully understand their ordeal.
The fires are not a movie, just like 9/11 was not a movie. The fires are all too real.
As a country, we have not even begun to comprehend the extent of the damage, or its impact on all those hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena and beyond, much less the effect the fires will have nationally, culturally, societally—not least because the recovery will ultimately be overseen by an incoming administration not much known for its compassion, its competence, or its love for Hollywood.
The last paragraph of Lane’s essay is achingly, hauntingly beautiful. Many, many people wrote about 9/11 in the days that followed it, and it always struck me as both unlikely and somehow appropriate that a film critic would offer the purest take:
To be forced to disdain the ideal in favor of the actual is never a pleasant process. Even at its worst, however, it can deliver a bitter redemption. We gazed upward, or at our TV screens, and we couldn’t believe our eyes; but maybe our eyes had been lied to for long enough. Thousands died on September 11th, and they died for real; but thousands died together, and therefore something lived. The most important, if distressing, images to emerge from those hours are not of the raging towers, or of the vacuum where they once stood; it is the shots of people falling from the ledges, and, in particular, of two people jumping in tandem. It is impossible to tell, from the blur, what age or sex these two are, nor does that matter. What matters is the one thing we can see for sure: they are falling hand in hand. Think of Philip Larkin’s poem about the stone figures carved on an English tomb, and the “sharp tender shock” of noticing that they are holding hands. The final line of the poem has become a celebrated condolence, and last Tuesday—in uncounted ways, in final phone calls, in the joined hands of that couple, in circumstances that Hollywood should no longer try to match—it was proved true all over again, and, in so doing, it calmly conquered the loathing and rage in which the crime was conceived. “What will survive of us is love.”
Larkin, the poet who wrote that line—and who is, like Lane, British—was not at all a sentimental sort. His stuff is gloomy, sourpuss, almost defeatist. Throughout his poems we see a struggle between, on the one hand, recognizing the futility of life, and on the other, being paralyzed by the fear of death. It is his poem “This Be The Verse,” about how our parents “fuck us up,” that the pub owner quotes, somewhat incongruously, in Ted Lasso:
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
Sunny stuff, right? Larkin’s entire worldview is neatly encapsulated in this line from “Aubade,” a title that indicates this is a poem about the dawn:
And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.
The antecedent of the “it” in the first line is “death.” But we may just as well substitute “Trump,” and the lines work just as well: the standing chill, the furnace-fear and the rage, the necessity of other people and a good stiff drink, the futility of courage.
The poem that Lane quotes is called “An Arundel Tomb.” At Arundel, a medieval British town, is the tomb of Richard FitzAlan, the tenth Earl of Arundel, who died in 1371, and that of his second wife, Eleanor of Lancaster, who predeceased him by a few years. The tomb is capped by stone statues of the couple, who are, surprisingly, holding hands:
Side by side, their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone,
Larkin, a dour librarian and bemoaner of the decline of civilization who seems not to have believed in love (even as he juggled three women for most of his adult life), calls bullshit on this romantic display:
They would not think to lie so long. Such faithfulness in effigy Was just a detail friends would see: A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
In other words, while the holding of stony hands has stood the test of time, the love it represents was probably a figment of the artist’s rosy imagination. (Note the double meaning of “lie.”)
How soon succeeding eyes begin To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths Of time. . .
Until,
Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age. . . Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
Larkin is saying that what the statues represent isn’t real—that our “almost-instinct” is to believe in the much-ballyhooed power of love, and that the “stone fidelity” of the earl and his wife is so compelling as to make said love-power “almost true.” Almost true is not true; almost true is AI true—a lie we want badly to believe in. The entire poem is him expressing his deep, nasty cynicism. The oft-quoted last line is intended to be ironic—a fitting epitaph for our Age of Unreality.
Even so, what survives of Larkin is “What will survive of us is love.” And I like to think, as Lane does, that, whatever the poet’s intention, the Arundel sentiment is real.
The Age of Unreality began in 1991, when all the ingredients of the historical cocktail were thrown into the shaker: the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of the Russian mafia, the ascendance of Jeffrey Epstein, the dawn of reality TV, the end of apartheid, and the last time that a coalition of Western democracies repulsed an attempt by a despot to invade a sovereign nation—thus upholding the tenets of the Westphalian order. Out of that cocktail shaker, cold as ice, was poured Jeffrey Epstein and Semion Mogilevich, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Tomorrow, that mindfuck age draws to a close, and a new one begins. What it has in store for us is anyone’s guess. Will the last barriers between fantasy and reality be worn away, or, as Lane poetically puts it, have our eyes been lied to for long enough? Will democracy really die, as the fascism scholars have been warning us for years, or will the Trump power-grab finally wake up the American people and restore our love of liberty? Will generative AI destroy all art, or will a new analog artistry emerge? What will happen to our beloved Hollywood, to which Trump has named meathead Sylvester Stallone, rightwing wacko Jon Voigt, and radical Catholic weirdo Mel Gibson his MAGA “ambassadors?”
I take some small solace in knowing that we’ve been here before. As Hobsbawm notes in The Age of Capital, the United States in the late nineteenth century—the America Trump wants us to return to—was marked by
the total absence of any kind of control over business dealings, however ruthless and crooked, and the really spectacular possibilities of corruption both national and local—especially in the post-Civil War years. There was indeed little that could be called government by European standards in the United States, and the scope for the powerful and unscrupulous rich was virtually unlimited. In fact, the phrase ‘robber baron’ should carry its accent on the second rather than the first word, for, as in a weak medieval kingdom, men could not look to the law but only to their own strength—and who were stronger in a capitalist society than the rich? The United States, alone among the bourgeois world, was a country of private justice and armed forces….
Our current crop of robber barons is orders of magnitude worse than its forebears—but maybe the abject awfulness of these despicable people will make their reigns shorter, their fall more humiliating, and their historical impact less profound.
Even so, for all my optimistic tendencies, I fear tomorrow as surely as Larkin feared death, which he describes as
The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
Death is permanent and absolute, but dictatorships are neither; moreover, Donald isn’t a dictator yet, and may well never be. Even as I have witnessed the poltroonish capitulation of our political leaders, our robber barons, our media figureheads, even our Snoop Doggs, I have faith that we will somehow find a better way, that we will repulse this ugly MAGA incursion, that the moral arc of the universe will bend towards justice, that the better angels of our nature will prevail. My faith will be tested, surely. But it will remain.
Nothing more true than this: What will survive of us is hope.
