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Why Did Washington Press Corps Invite Trump to Dinner?

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2026 //
16

Kevin Cullen, a columnist for The Boston Globe, lambasted the Washington press corps for inviting Trump to be their speaker. What did they expect he would say? Did they want to be insulted as “enemies of the people” and “fake news”?

Sure, it’s customary to invite the President. But did anyone expect Trump to forget about his hatred of the media? Cullen thinks they should be more careful in choosing a speaker, like picking someone who appreciates the First Amendment.

He wrote:

So many questions after a deranged, thankfully inept gunman tried to force his way into the White House Correspondents’ Association gala, where President Trump was a guest.

The biggest one being: Why was Trump there in the first place?

Like all fascists, Trump hates a free press and has done his level best to humiliate, intimidate, harm, cancel, and even prosecute journalists and news outlets. Like all authoritarians, he has tried to limit press scrutiny of himself and his administration.

So what on earth were the White House press corps thinking when it invited this guy to their annual dress-up party?

It’s like inviting your obnoxious neighbor to a family barbecue after he relieves himself in your pool.

It’s like inviting a jackal to a tea party for a bunch of cute little bunny rabbits.

Let’s roll the tape:

In 2015, when he was running for president, Trump mocked New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from a congenital joint condition. Trump was just getting warmed up.

In 2017, after a Republican congressional candidate in Montana assaulted and body slammed a reporter for The Guardian, Trump voiced support for the attacker, saying, “He’s my kind of guy.”

In 2020, after MSNBC’s Ali Velshi was hit by a rubber bullet during a protest after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Trump called it a “beautiful sight.” Trump misidentified Velshi as being with CNN, but, hey, all the fake news is all the same to Trump anyway.

At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in November 2024, Trump stood behind bulletproof glass and reassured his supporters he was safe, noting that anyone who tried to shoot him would have to shoot through a bunch of journalists standing in front of him, adding, “I wouldn’t mind that so much.”

More recently, the FBI, led by Kash Patel, the laughably unqualified frat bro whom Trump appointed as FBI director, launched an investigation of Elizabeth Williamson, a New York Times reporter who had the temerity to point out that the FBI is spending untold taxpayer dollars providing a SWAT team to “protect” Patel’s girlfriend, Weymouth’s own Alexis Wilkins, when she engages in risky public acts like getting her hair done.

Even more recently, after Saturday’s attack, Trump insulted CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and questioned her professionalism, calling her a “disgrace” for asking a question about the gunman’s manifesto.

If you’re noticing a pattern here, Trump really doesn’t like women journalists who question him.

I could go on — and I haven’t even mentioned the shakedowns of all the networks, and Trump using his influence so Edward R. Murrow’s storied CBS News becomes more like Fox News Lite — but you get the point. 

And yet, Trump’s press secretary stood before journalists after Saturday’s attack and claimed, with a straight face, that the leftist press and Democrats are responsible for the violent rhetoric that leads to attacks like the one at the Washington Hilton.

So what did the Washington press corps think was going to happen when it gave Trump a platform at its shindig?

Did they think he would have some Jeffersonian conversion, pronouncing that if given the choice between a government without journalism or journalism without government, he would choose the latter?

Thomas Jefferson believed strongly in the idea of a free press that would act as a watchdog against government corruption and overreach.

Trump hates a free press for those very same reasons. He doesn’t want the public to know about his cons, about him using government to enrich his family and his cronies. He can’t stand the idea of the press, or anyone, questioning his judgment, or pointing out the folly of his ways, about him starting a needless war when he ran for president claiming he would never start a needless war.

Trump resembles not Thomas Jefferson, but George Jefferson, the TV character who hated everyone and everything. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest Trump is more familiar with George Jefferson than Thomas Jefferson.

Why give Trump a platform to spew his fascist hatred of a robust, free press?….

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Extremism, Fake News, Fascism, Freedom of the Press, Trump

Trump’s Tenuous Relationship to Reality

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2026 //
3

Brian Stelter writes “Reliable Sources” for CNN. He is a reliable source himself.

In the second part of the article, watch Trump’s response to a question he doesn’t want to answer. Trump is predictable: he says “I hadn’t heard about that” or he changes the subject. In this case, he changes the subject or pretends he didn’t hear the question.

He wrote today:

Trump vs. Fox polls

Every so often, an hour of television showcases President Trump‘s reliance on “alternative facts” and his supporters’ reluctance to tell him the truth.

Fox‘s “The Five” was that hour of TV yesterday. Trump called into the show and claimed that real polls about his meager approval rating are “fake.” He said that liberal co-host Jessica Tarlov, who was absent from the segment, “uses fake numbers. She’ll give, ‘Well, he’s only polling 42%.’ That’s not right. I’m polling very high, actually.”

That was at 5:29 p.m. At 6 p.m., Fox released a new national poll showing Trump’s approval rating stands at 41%. 

“That’s down two points from a month ago and eight points from a year ago,” Jacqui Heinrich said on “Special Report.”

Of course, many Fox fans trust Trump over Fox’s reporters and pollsters. And Trump has a long history of attacking the Fox polling unit and denying statistical reality. When he complained yesterday about real polls — “I hate people that use fake polls because polls are just like bad journalists. You know, bad journalists, they write fake stories, well, fake polls do damage also” — no one on “The Five” interjected.

Too bad Tarlov wasn’t there. “Was so bummed to miss the show today!” she wrote on X. “But I definitely would’ve said he’s even inflating his numbers to 42%!”

When Bret Baier asked House Speaker Mike Johnson about the poll’s findings, Baier said, “The president doesn’t love Fox News polls, but these polls track with others.” He showed this graphic 👇🏻 and said the “tough numbers” are “real,” and Johnson concurred, “They’re real.”

Another peculiar moment from ‘The Five’ chat…

What the president believes — and where he gets his information, even about his popularity — has heightened relevance in wartime. Wednesday’s NBC News story about Trump watching a rah-rah daily video montage about the Iran war is continuing to get picked up for that reason. NBC said the highlight reel has raised concerns among allies “that he may not be receiving the complete picture of the war.”

I thought “Pod Save America” co-host Tommy Vietor was joking when he summed up another moment from “The Five” this way: “Dana Perino asks Trump how the Iranian people are doing in the midst of this horrible war. He responds that he remembers having lunch with Dana years ago, and piothat she looks hotter now.” 

But Vietor was simply summarizing what actually happened. Perino asked, “Do they have drinking water? Do they have food? It’s upsetting.”

Trump said, “I do” have insight about that, “but first, do you remember when we had lunch years ago in the base of Trump Tower… You haven’t changed. You have not changed. Now, I’m not allowed to say this, it’s the end of my political career, but you may be even better looking [now], okay. I don’t know what you’re doing…”

Trump did not circle back to Perino’s humanitarian concerns. But he did invoke gruesome scenes of Iranian protesters being “women being shot right between the eyes” and people “bleeding from the brain badly.” Then he somehow came back around to Fox and started complimenting “Fox & Friends”and Maria Bartiromo.

“You have so many great people,” he exclaimed. “A couple of bad ones, but you can’t have everything.”

Categories Fake News, Lies, Trump

Trump Reverses Climate Change Policies, Alarms Scientists

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2026 //
11

We have long known that Donald Trump despises science. We also know that he refuses to accept the science concerning climate change. Yesterday, Trump accepted an award as the “Champion of Coal.” He wants to turn the clock back a century. He will go down in history for his willful ignorance and for the harm he has unleashed on the public.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

*The Trump administration has repealed the 2009 endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, eliminating the foundation of much of U.S. climate policy.

*The decision reverses decades of environmental progress despite overwhelming scientific evidence and opposition from health experts, environmental groups, 50 cities and 17 states.

*Experts warn the repeal will increase pollution, respiratory disease and planet-warming emissions over the coming decades.

The Trump administration on Thursday reversed the U.S. government’s longstanding scientific assertion that planet-heating pollution seriously threatens Americans, erasing a foundational piece of the country’s efforts to address climate change.

The repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding — a conclusion based on decades of science that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare — represents one of the biggest environmental rollbacks in U.S. history, and the latest in a series of actions by President Trump to scrap policies and regulations designed to curb the use of fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to clean energy.

The administration on Thursday also repealed all federal regulations governing vehicle emissions.

Experts and scientists condemned the action. The Environmental Protection Network — a bipartisan group of more than 700 former staff and appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency — described it as “unprecedented and dangerous.”

“This move is a fundamental betrayal of EPA’s responsibility to protect human health,” said Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of the EPA Office of Air and Radiation. “It is legally indefensible, morally bankrupt and completely untethered from the scientific record.”

Independent researchers around the world have long concluded that greenhouse gases released by the burning of gasoline, diesel and other fossil fuels are warming the planet and worsening weather disasters.

Categories Environment, Fake News, Health, Trump

The Most Annoying Story of the Month About Schools

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2025 //
31

Every so often, I read a story about education that is truly annoying. The most recent one is in The Atlantic. It was written by Idrees Kahloon, a staff writer at the magazine. It is titled “America is Sliding Toward Illiteracy.” The subtitle is “Declining standards and low expectations are destroying American education.”

As a historian of American education, I have read the same story hundreds of times. In the 19th century, these warnings that children were not learning anything in school were commonplace. The cry of “crisis in the schools” appeared frequently in every decade of the 20th century. We are only 25 years into this century, and similar views appear in the popular press regularly.

Long ago, attacks on the schools were intended to produce more funding for them, or higher standards for those entering teaching..

Now they serve the purposes of those pushing privatization of public schools, those who are promoting vouchers, charters, homeschooling, and every other way of destroying public schools.

Test scores have fallen! The culprit? Smart phones! Social media! Low expectations! Low standards! Bad teachers! Bad Schools!

George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law of 2002 raised standards and expectations but it raised them absurdly high, to a literally unreachable goal. A rebellion formed among those who didn’t think it possible that “all students” would reach “proficiency” by 2014.

NCLB required that all students would be “proficient,” not just at grade level, by 2014. By NAEP standards, “proficient” does not mean grade level. It means “A” performance. In no other nation in the world are all students rated “proficient” on the NAEP scale. Nor has any district or state ever reached that goal.

But the Cassandras of American education have monopolized the podium for many years, wailing that we will be an impoverished third-world country if test scores don’t rise dramatically.

Think about it. The biggest explosion of doom-and-gloom was caused by the Reagan-era report called “A Nation at Risk” in 1983. It flatly predicted that our economy was imperiled by a “rising tide of mediocrity.” But what has happened since 1983? Our economy is booming, we have not been eclipsed by other nations. We continue to be a land of innovation, creativity, scientific and medical pre-eminence.

How is our nation’s success possible, given the cry for more than 40 years that our schools are hobbling our economy and compromising our future?

Instead of complaining about our schools and lambasting them nonstop, the critics should be complaining about poverty and inequality. These are the root causes of poor student outcomes.

If the critics are worried about our future, they should shout out against Trump’s orders to withhold funding for research in science and medicine. If they really wanted great schools, they would stop diverting public funds to nonpublic schools and homeschoolers–where there are low or no standards for teachers– and make sure that every student has certified, experienced teachers, small classes, and the amenities available in every school that are typically available only in wealthy suburban districts.

No, our kids are not sliding into stupidity. If you don’t agree, I dare you to take an eighth grade math test and release your scores. You will be surprised.

The greatest generation sits in our public high schools today, unless our government continues to impose moronic policies of choice and competition that have failed for the past thirty-five years.

Categories Accountability, Data, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Fake News, Hoax, Standardized Testing, Students

Paul L. Thomas: There Is No Reading “Crisis!

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2025 //
14

Paul L. Thomas was a high school teacher in South Carolina for nearly twenty years, then became an English professor at Furman University, a small liberal arts college in South Carolina. He is a clear thinker and a straight talker.

He wrote this article for The Washington Post. He tackles one of my pet peeves: the misuse and abuse of NAEP proficiency levels. Politicians and pundits like to use NAEP “proficiency” to mean”grade level.” There is always a “crisis” because most students do not score “proficient.” Of course not! NAEP proficient is not grade level! NAEP publications warn readers not to make that error. NAEP proficient is equivalent to an A. If most students were rated that high, the media would complain that the tests were too easy. NAEP Basic is akin to grade level.

He writes:

After her controversial appointment, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon posted this apparently uncontroversial claim on social media: “When 70% of 8th graders in the U.S. can’t read proficiently, it’s not the students who are failing — it’s the education system that’s failing them.”

Americans are used to hearing about the nation’s reading crisis. In 2018, journalist Emily Hanford popularized the current “crisis” in her article “Hard Words,” writing, “More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s.”

Five years later, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof repeated that statistic: “One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.”

Each of these statements about student reading achievement, though probably well-meaning, is misleading if not outright false. There is no reading crisis in the U.S. But there are major discrepancies between how the federal government and states define reading proficiency.

At the center of this confusion is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a congressionally mandated assessment of student performance known also as the “nation’s report card.” The NAEP has three achievement levels: “basic,” “proficient” and “advanced.”

The disconnect lies with the second benchmark, “proficient.” According to the NAEP, students performing “at or above the NAEP Proficient level … demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” But this statement includes a significant clarification: “The NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments).”

In almost every state, “grade level” proficiency on state testing correlates with the NAEP’s “basic” level; in 2022, 45 states set their standard for reading proficiency in the NAEP’s “basic” range. Therefore, it is inaccurate to say that nearly two-thirds of fourth-graders are not capable readers.

The NAEP has been a key mechanism for holding states accountable for student achievement for over 30 years. Yet, educators have expressed doubt over the assessment’s utility. In 2004, an analysis by the American Federation of Teachers raised concerns about the NAEP’s achievement levels: “The proficient level on NAEP for grade 4 and 8 reading is set at almost the 70th percentile,” the union wrote. “It would not be unreasonable to think that the proficiency levels on NAEP represent a standard of achievement that is more commonly associated with fairly advanced students.”

The NAEP has set unrealistic goals for student achievement, fueling alarm about a reading crisis in the United States that is overblown. The common misreading of NAEP data has allowed the country to ignore what is urgent: addressing the opportunity gap that negatively impacts Black and Brown students, impoverished students, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities.

To redirect our focus to these vulnerable populations, the departments of education at both the federal and state levels should adopt a unified set of achievement terms among the NAEP and state-level testing. For over three decades, one-third of students have been below NAEP “basic” — a figure that is concerning but does not constitute a widespread reading crisis. The government’s challenge will be to provide clearer data — instead of hyperbolic rhetoric — to determine a reasonable threshold for grade-level proficiency.

What’s more, federal and state governments should consider redesigning achievement terms altogether. Identifying strengths and weaknesses in student reading would be better served by achievement levels determined by age, such as “below age level,” “age level” and “above age level.”

Age-level proficiency might be more accurate for policy and classroom instruction. As an example, we can look to Britain, where phonics instruction has been policy since 2006. Annual phonics assessments show score increases by birth month, suggesting the key role of age development in reading achievement.

In the United States, only the NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment is age-based. Testing by age avoids having the sample of students corrupted by harmful policies such as grade retention, which removes the lowest-performing students from the test pool and then reintroduces them when they are older. Grade retention is punitive: It is disproportionately applied to students of color, students in poverty, multilingual learners and students with disabilities — the exact students most likely to struggle as readers.

Some evidence suggests that grade retention correlates with higher test scores. In a study of U.S. reading policy, education researchers John Westall and Amy Cummings concluded states that mandated third-grade retention based on state testing saw increases in reading scores.

However, the pair acknowledge that these were short-term benefits: For example, third-grade retention states such as Mississippi and Florida had exceptional NAEP reading scores among fourth-graders but scores fell back into the bottom 25 percent of all states among eighth-graders.

The researchers also caution that the available data does not prove whether test score increases are the result of grade retention or other state-sponsored learning interventions, such as high-dosage tutoring. Without stronger evidence, states might be tempted to trade higher test scores for punishing vulnerable students, all without permanent improvement in reading proficiency.

Hyperbole about a reading crisis ultimately fails the students who need education policy grounded in more credible evidence. Reforming achievement levels nationwide might be one step toward a more accurate and useful story about reading proficiency.

The article has many links. Rather than copying each one by hand, tedious process, I invite you to open the link and read the article.

As I was writing up this article, Mike Petrilli sent me the following graph from the 2024 NAEP. There was a decline in the scores of White, Black, and Hispanic fourth grade students “above basic.”

70% of White fourth-graders scored at or above grade level.

About 48% of Hispanics did.

About 43% of Blacks did.

The decline started before the pandemic. Was it the Common Core? Social media? Something else?

Should we be concerned? Yes. Should we use “crisis” language? What should we do?

Reduce class sizes so teachers can give more time to students who need it.

Do what is necessary to raise the prestige of the teaching profession: higher salaries, greater autonomy in the classroom. Legislators should stop telling teachers how to teach, stop assigning them grades, stop micromanaging the classroom.

Categories Data, Fake News, Hoax, Lies, Literacy, NAEP

Jennifer Berkshire: A New Path, with Less Opportunity and Less Social Mobility

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2025 //
10

Jennifer Berkshire sums up the malicious goals that are embedded in Trump’s One Big Ugly Budget Bill. It will widen the distance between those at the bottom and those at the top. It will reduce the number of students who can pay for graduate degrees. All to assure that the very rich get a a tax break.

While the media may have moved on from the big awful bill that is now the law of the land, I continue to mull over its mess and malice. The single best description I’ve come across of the legislation’s logic comes from the ACLU’s Stefan Smith, who reminds us that the endless culture warring is all a big distraction. The real agenda when you add up all of the elements is “creating more friction for those climbing up the economic ladder in order to ease competition for those already there.” In the future that this legislation entrenches, rich kids will have an even greater advantage over their poor peers, of whom there will be now be many more. Smith calls this “reordering pipelines;” moving the rungs on the ladder further apart or kicking the ladder away works too. However you phrase it, our ugly class chasm just got wider by design.

This is why, for instance, the legislation includes seemingly arbitrary caps on how much aspiring lawyers and doctors can borrow in order to pay for school. By lowering that amount, the GOP just narrowed the pipeline of who can, say, go to med school. As Virginia Caine, president of the National Medical Association, bluntly put it: “Only rich students will survive.” Indeed, college just got more expensive and a lot less accessible for anyone who isn’t a rich student. Meanwhile, cuts to federal Medicaid funding will lead to further cuts in spending on higher education—the sitting ducks of state budgets—meaning higher tuition and fewer faculty and programs at the state schools and community colleges that the vast majority of American students attend. All so that the wealthiest among us can enjoy a tax cut.

This is also the story of the federal school voucher program that has now been foisted upon us. While the final version was an improvement over the egregious tax-shelter-for-wealthy-donors that the school choice lobby wanted, the logic remains the same, as Citizen Stewart pointedly points out:

It’s a redistribution of public dollars upward. And it’s happening at the exact moment many of the same politicians championing school choice are cutting food assistance, slashing Medicaid, gutting student loan relief, and questioning whether children deserve meals at school.

In their coverage of the new program, the education reporters at the New York Times, who’ve been pretty awful on this beat of late, cite a highly-questionable study finding that students who avail themselves a voucher are more likely to go to college. In other words, maybe vouchers aren’t so bad! Except that this sunny view misses the fast-darkening bigger picture: as states divest from the schools that the vast majority of students still attend, the odds of many of those students attending college just got steeper. That’s because as voucher programs balloon in cost, states confront a math problem with no easy answer, namely that there isn’t enough money to fund two parallel education systems. (For the latest on where the money is and isn’t going, check out this eye-opening report from FutureEd.)

Add in the Trump Administration’s decision to withhold some $7 billion from school districts and you can see where this is headed. In fact, when the folks at New America crunched the numbers, they turned up the somewhat surprising finding that the schools that stand to lose the most due to the Trump hatchet are concentrated in red states. Take West Virginia, for example, which is home to 15 of the hardest-hit districts in the land. The state’s public schools must 1) reckon with $30 + million in federal cuts even as 2) a universal voucher program is hoovering up a growing portion of state resources while 3) said resources are shrinking dramatically due to repeated rounds of tax cuts for the wealthiest West Virginians. That same dynamic is playing out in other red states too. Florida, which is increasingly straining to pay for vouchers and public schools, just lost $398 million. Texas, where voucher costs are estimated to reach $5 billion by 2030, just lost $738 million. While 28 states are now suing the administration over the funding freeze, no red state has spoken up.

Shrinking chances

On paper, budget cuts can seem bloodless. Part of the Trump Administration’s strategy is to bury the true cost of what’s being lost in acronyms and edu-lingo, trusting that pundits will shrug at the damage. But as states struggle with a rising tide of red ink, what’s lost are the very things that inspire kids to go to school and graduate: extra curriculars, special classes, a favorite teacher, the individualized attention that comes from not being in a class with 35 other kids. That’s why I’ve been heartened to see that even some long-time critics of traditional public schools are now voicing concern over what their destabilization is going to mean for students. Here’s Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, warning that the explosion of vouchers in red states is going to have dire consequences, not just for students in public schools but for the states themselves:

Enrollment loss will likely reduce the quality of schools that will continue to educate most children in the state. States will be left with large numbers of students who are unprepared for college and career success. 

David Osborne, who has been banging the drum for charter schools since the Clinton era, sounds even more worried. 

Over time, as more and more people use vouchers, the education market in Republican states will stratify by income far more than it does today. It will come to resemble any other market: for housing, automobiles or anything else. The affluent will buy schools that are the equivalent of BMWs and Mercedes; the merely comfortable will choose Toyotas and Acuras; the scraping-by middle class will buy Fords and Chevrolets; and the majority, lacking spare cash, will settle for the equivalent of used cars — mostly public schools.

Meanwhile, the billions spent on vouchers will be subtracted from public school budgets, and the political constituency for public education will atrophy, leading to further cuts.

We’ve seen this movie before

Well, maybe not the exact same movie but a similar one. Anybody recall Kansas’ radical experiment in tax cutting? Roughly a decade ago, GOP pols slashed taxes on the wealthiest Kansans and cut the tax rate on some business profits to zero. Alas, the cuts failed to deliver the promised “trickle-down” economic renaissance. What they did bring was savage cuts in spending on public schools. As school funds dried up, programs were cut, teachers were pink slipped, and class sizes soared, all of which led to a dramatic increase in the number of students who dropped out. Meanwhile, the percentage of high schoolers going to college plunged. 

Young people in the state “became cannon fodder in the fight to redistribute wealth upward,” argues Jonathan Metzl, a scholar and medical doctor, who chronicled the impact of Kansas’s tax-cutting experiment in Dying of Whiteness. Just four years of school budget cuts was enough to narrow the possibilities for a generation of young Kansans. 

But by taking a chainsaw to the public schools, the GOP also gave rise to a bipartisan parent uprising. And not only were lawmakers forced to reverse the tax cuts and restore funding for schools, but voters, who could see with their own eyes what the cuts had meant for their own kids and kids in their communities, threw the bums out the next time they had a chance. Today we’re watching as a growing number of states, with the aid of the federal government and the ‘big beautiful bill,’ embark on their own version of the Kansas experiment—slashing spending, destabilizing public schools, and limiting what’s possible for kids. They’re betting that red state voters will fall in line, sacrificing their own schools, and even their own kids, to ‘own the libs.’ That’s what the ideologues in Kansas thought too.

As I’ve been arguing in these pages, Trump’s education ‘action items’ represent the least popular parts of his agenda. Eliminating the Department of Education is a loser with voters, while cutting funds to schools fares even worse. The idea of cutting funds in order to further enrich the already rich has exactly one constituency: the rich. As the MAGA coalition begins to fragment and fall apart, we should keep reminding voters of all colors and stripes of this fact.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Cheating, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Economics, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fake, Fake News, Higher Education, Ignorance, Immigration, NPE Action Fund, Privatization, Propaganda, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, School Choice

404 Media: White House Partners with PragerU to Produce Cheerful Videos about U.S. History

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2025 //
9

I recently subscribed to 404 Media, which offers fascinating content about technology, like this post by Samantha Cole about the collaboration between the White House and PragerU. The post shows different AI-generated videos of the Founding Fathers, speaking and animated. There is a hackneyed phrase about “bringing history to life.” Now you can see it happen, even though it’s fake and politically slanted.

Does it bear repeating that PragerU is not a university by any definition? Or that its founder Dennis Prager was a rightwing talk-show host before he started hawking his whitewashed history videos? Or that some red states have adopted his videos for classroom instruction even though Prager is not a historian and has no credentials to teach history?

Samantha Cole:

Conservative content mill PragerU is partnering with the White House to make AI-generated videos of founding fathers and Revolutionary War-era randos.

PragerU is a nonprofit organization with a mission “to promote American values through the creative use of digital media, technology and edu-tainment,” according to its website. It’s been criticized for advancing climate denial and slavery apologism, frequently publishes videos critical of “wokeness” and “DEI,” and is very concerned about “the death of the West.” It has also been increasingly integrated into school curricula around the country.

PragerU held a launch event for the series, “Road to Liberty,” on June 25. Secretary Linda McMahon took some time away from dismantling the Department of Education to speak at the event. In person at the White House, visitors can tour a display of notable Revolutionary War people and places, and scan a QR code on displays that take them to PragerU’s AI-generated videos of people from that time period speaking. 

Each of the videos highlights a different person who was alive during the signing of the Declaration of Independence, from former presidents to relatively minor players in the fight for independence. The videos are clearly AI-generated, with the sepia-toned peoples’ mouths moving almost independently from the rest of their faces in some of them. In one, an AI-generated John Adams says “facts do not care about our feelings,” a phrase commonly attributed to conservative commentator and PragerU contributor Ben Shapiro. 

At the end of the videos, there’s a logo for the White House with the text “brought to you by PragerU,” and a disclaimer: “The White House is grateful for the partnership with PragerU and the U.S. Department of Education in the production of this museum. This partnership does not constitute or imply U.S. Government or U.S. Department of Education endorsement of PragerU.”

Professor of history Seth Cotlar spotted the videos in a thread on Bluesky….

I asked Cotlar, as someone who specializes in American history and the rise of the far-right, what stood out to him about these videos. I thought it was odd, I said, that they chose to include people like politician and disgraced minister Lyman Hall and obscure poet Francis Hopkinson alongside more well-known figures like John Adams or Thomas Jefferson. 

“You’re right to note that it’s a pretty odd collection of figures they’ve chosen,” Cotlar said. “My guess is that this is part of the broader right wing populist push to frame themselves as the grassroots ‘true Americans,’ and they’re including all of these lesser known figures with the hopes that their viewers will be like ‘oh wow, look at all of these revolutionary freedom fighters like me who were just kinda ordinary guys like me but who still changed history.’” 

He also said it’s noteworthy that the “Road to Liberty” lineup so far is almost entirely white men, including the random dudes like Hall and Hopkinson. “The lack of any pretense to inclusion is pretty notable. Even conservative glosses on the Revolution from the pre-Trump era would have included things like the Rhode Island Regiment or Lemuel Haynes or Phyllis Wheatley. Needless to say, they absolutely do not include Deborah Sampson,” Cotlar said. All of the people in the “coming soon” section on PragerU’s website are also white men. 

AI slop has become the aesthetic of the right, with authoritarians around the world embracing ugly, lazy, mass-produced content like PragerU’s founding father puppets. Here in the U.S., we have President Donald Trump hawking it on his social media accounts, including AI-generated images of himself as the Pope and “Trump Gaza,” an AI video and song depicting the West Bank as a vacation paradise where Trump parties alongside his former bestie Elon Musk. As Republicans used the response to Hurricane Helene to blame migrants, Amy Kremer, founder of Women for Trump, posted an AI image of a child caught in a flood hugging a puppy and then said she didn’t care that it wasn’t real: “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” she wrote on X. Mike Lee shared the same image. AI slop makes for quick and easy engagement farming, and now it’s being produced in direct partnership with the White House.

I’m not sure what app or program PragerU is using to make these videos. I thought, at first, that they might be using one of the many basic lipsyncing or “make this old photo come alive” mobile apps on the market now. But the videos look better, or at least more heavily produced, than most of those apps are capable of. Just to make sure they haven’t somehow advanced wildly in the last few months since I checked one out, I tried one of them, Revive, and uploaded an image of John Adams to see if it would return anything close to what PragerU’s putting out. It did not. 

The PragerU videos aren’t this bad, but they also aren’t as good as what would come out of Veo 3, the newest AI video generator, which generates highly realistic videos complete with sound and speech, from text prompts. I gave Veo a painting of John Adams and told it what to say; PragerU probably isn’t using this generator, because the result is much more realistic than what’s in the “Road to Liberty” series, even when I use a screenshot from one of their videos.

JOHN ADAMS IN VEO 3 USING A PAINTING AS A PROMPT.

On the off chance the culprit is Midjourney—although the series’ style and the way the subjects’ mouths move almost independently of the rest of their faces don’t match what I’ve seen of Midjourney’s videos—I tried that one, too. I just gave Midjourney the same Adams portrait and a prompt for it to animate him praising the United States and it returned a raving lunatic, silently screaming. 

Striking out so far, I emailed Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and Chief Science Officer of synthetic media detection company GetReal, and asked if he had any leads. He said it looked similar to what comes out of AI video creation platform HeyGen, which creates AI talking heads and generates speech for them using ElevenLabs. I tried this on screenshots of the avatars in PragerU’s Martha Washington and John Adams videos to see if the puppet-mouth-style matched up, and they were pretty close.

0:00

/0:011×

HEYGEN JOHN ADAMS

HEYGEN MARTHA WASHINGTON

PragerU’s videos are still more heavily produced than what I could make using the free version of HeyGen; it’s possible they used a combination of these to make the videos, plus some old-fashioned video editing and animation to create the final products. PragerU reported almost $70 million in income last year, they can afford the effort. 

“While the PragerU stuff is distinctly terrible, it’s not like our culture has commemorated the Revolution with high-minded sophistication,” Cotlar told me. “I was 8 during the bicentennial and while I definitely learned some stuff about the founding era, most of what I absorbed was pretty schlocky.” He mentioned the “Bicentennial minutes” that were broadcast in 1975 and 76, sponsored by Shell, and which TV critic John J. O’Connor called “so insubstantial as to be almost meaningless.” The series won an Emmy.

In the last two years, several states, beginning with Florida, have approved PragerU content to be taught in public school classrooms. In Oklahoma, teachers relocating from states with “progressive education policies” will have to undergo an assessment in partnership with PragerU to determine if they’re allowed to teach. “If you want to teach here, you’d better know the Constitution, respect what makes America great, and understand basic biology,” State Superintendent Ryan Walters said in a press release. “We’re raising a generation of patriots, not activists, and I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep leftist propaganda out of our classrooms….”

Open the link to continue reading.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam Cole is writing from the far reaches of the internet, about sexuality, the adult industry, online culture, and AI. She’s the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.

Samantha Cole

404 Media is a new independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox.

© 2025 404 MEDIA. PUBLISHED WITH GHOST.

Categories Curriculum, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fake News, History, Trump

CBS Sells Out, Capitulates to Trump’s Demand for Payoff

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2025 //
2

During the 2024 Presidential campaign, “60 Minutes” invited both Trump and Harris to sit for an interview. Harris accepted, Trump declined. The interview took about an hour. As is customary, the editors cut the interview back to 20 minutes, the customary time slot.

CBS used a short response from Harris about the war in Gaza to promote the show. In the show itself, the promotional clip was replaced by a different response. To the editors, it was a distinction without a difference, a routine editorial decision.

Trump, however, saw the switch in the short clip and the longer one as a financial opportunity. He sued “60 Minutes” and CBS for $10 billion (later raised to $20 billion) for portraying Harris in a favorable light, interfering in the election, and damaging his campaign.

Since he won the election, it’s hard to see how he could demonstrate that his campaign was damaged. Most outside observers thought it was a frivolous lawsuit and would be tossed out if it ever went to trial.

But Trump persisted because the owner of CBS and its parent company Paramount, Shari Redstone, needed the FCC’s approval to complete a deal to be purchased by another company. Trump could tell his friend Brendan Carr to approve the deal or to block it. Shari Redstone would be a billionaire if the deal went through.

A veteran producer at “60 Minutes” resigned in anticipation of corporate leaders selling out their premier news program. The president of CBS News followed him out the door.

As expected, corporate caved to Trump. CBS will pay $16 million towards the cost of his Presidential library. He once again humbled the press. He did it to ABC, he did it to META, he did it to The Washington Post.

Will any mainstream media dare to criticize him?

Larry Edelman of The Boston Globe wrote about Trump’s humbling of the most respected news program on network TV:

💵 A sell-out

The show is almost over for National Amusements, the entertainment conglomerate with humble beginnings as a Dedham drive-in movie theater chain.

Unlike most Hollywood endings, this one is a downer.

Shame on Shari Redstone.

Recap: Redstone is the daughter of Sumner Redstone, the larger-than-life dealmaker who transformed the theater company started by his father into the holding company that owns CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, and the Paramount movie studio.

On Tuesday, Paramount Global, controlled by Shari Redstone, said it agreed to pay $16 million to settle President Trump’s widely criticized lawsuit stemming from the “60 Minutes” interview of Vice President Kamala Harris during last year’s election campaign. The payment, after legal fees, will go to Trump’s presidential library.

Why it matters: It’s impossible not to see this as an unabashed payoff intended to win the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of Redstone’s multibillion-dollar deal to sell Paramount to Skydance Media, the studio behind movies including “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.”

Everyone involved denied the settlement was a quid pro quo. If you believe that, I have some Trump meme coins to sell you.

In a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS last year, Trump alleged that “60 Minutes,” part of CBS News, deceptively edited the Harris interview in order to interfere with the election.

Legal experts said Trump’s chances of winning the case were slim to none given CBS’s First Amendment protections for what was considered routine editing. But his election victory in November gave him enormous leverage over Redstone.

Reaction: “With Paramount folding to Donald Trump at the same time the company needs his administration’s approval for its billion-dollar merger, this could be bribery in plain sight,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement after the settlement was announced.

“CBS and Paramount Global realized the strength of this historic case and had no choice but to settle,” a spokesperson for Trump’s lawyers said. The president was holding “the fake news accountable,” the spokesperson said. 

Of course, the lawsuit was all about putting the news media under the president’s thumb.

“The enemy of the people” — Trump’s words — is a power base Trump wants desperately to neutralize, along with other perceived foes such as elite universities and big law firms.

Columbia University and law firms including Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison have already caved. Harvard University had no choice but to come to the negotiating table, though it also is battling the White House in court.

“The President is using government to intimidate news outlets that publish stories he doesn’t like,” the conservative editorial board of The Wall Street Journal wrote.

For what it’s worth: The two points I’d like to make here may seem obvious but are worth repeating.

First: The ownership of news outlets by big corporations is a double-edged sword. 

Yes, they can provide financial shelter from devastation wrought by Google and Meta — and the brewing storm coming from artificial intelligence. 

But they also own bigger — and more profitable — businesses that need to maintain at least a civil relationship with the federal government.

That’s why Disney ended Trump’s dubious defamation case against ABC News by agreeing to “donate” $15 million to the presidential library, and why Meta, the parent of Facebook, coughed up $25 million to settle a Trump lawsuit over the company’s suspension of his accounts after the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol. 

Second: Private sector extortion — multiple law firms promised $100 million in pro-bono work for causes favored by Trump — dovetails with the president’s use of the power of the office to make money for himself and his family.

Trump’s crypto ventures, including the shameless $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, have added at least $620 million to his fortune in a few months, Bloomberg reported this week. Then there are all those real estate deals in the Middle East, the Qatari jet, and the licensed products, from bibles to a mobile phone service.

Shari Redstone’s $16 million payment is chump change by comparison. And it makes perfect business sense. It smooths the way for National Amusements to salvage at least $1.75 billion from the sale of its stake in Paramount. Sumner Redstone, a consummate dealmaker, would have done the same thing.

Skydance, by the way, was launched by another child of a billionaire, David Ellison.

His father, Larry Ellison, founded software giant Oracle and is worth nearly $250 billion. Oracle is negotiating to take a role in the sale of TikTok by its Chinese owner, a transaction being orchestrated by Trump.

Small world, eh?

Final thought: After nearly 90 years in business, National Amusements, now based in Norwood, is going out with a whimper, not a bang.

The company has struggled with heavy debt, declining cable network profits, and huge costs for building out its streaming business. Paramount’s market value has dropped to $9 billion from $26 billion when Viacom recombined with CBS to form the new company in 2019.

To get the Skydance rescue deal done, Redstone, 71, sold out the journalists at CBS News — the onetime home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and still one of the most respected names in the business.

That’s one bummer of an ending.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Fake News, Freedom of the Press, Hoax, Media, Politics, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump’s Politics of Distraction

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2025 //
10

Heather Cox Richardson uses her well-honed skills as a historian to weave together disparate events and demonstrate the media strategy of the Trump administration. It could be summarized by the succinct phrase: “Dazzle them with BS.”

She writes:

MAGA world is performing over-the-top outrage over a photo former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey posted on Instagram, where he has been teasing a new novel. The image shows shells on a beach arranged in a popular slogan for opposing President Donald J. Trump: “86”—slang for tossing something away—followed by “47”, a reference to Trump’s presidency.

Using “eighty-six” as either a noun or a verb appears to have started in the restaurant industry in the 1930s to indicate that something was out of stock. It is a common term, used by MAGA itself to refer to getting rid of somebody…until now.

MAGA voices are insisting that this image was Comey’s threat to assassinate the president. Trump got into the game, telling Brett Baier of the Fox News Channel: “that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear…. [H]e’s calling for the assassination of the president…that’s gonna be up to Pam and all of the great people…. He’s a dirty cop.” Trump’s reference to Attorney General Pam Bondi and law enforcement paid off: yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service are investigating Comey. He showed up voluntarily at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., today for an interview.

In the past day, Trump’s social media account has also attacked wildly popular musical icons Bruce Springsteen and, somewhat out of the blue, Taylor Swift. Dutifully, media outlets have taken up a lot of oxygen reporting on “shellgate” and Trump’s posts about Springsteen and Swift, pushing other stories out of the news.

In his newsletter today, retired entrepreneur Bill Southworth tallied the times Trump has grabbed headlines to distract people from larger stories, starting the tally with how Trump’s posts about Peanut the Squirrel the day before the election swept like a brushfire across the right-wing media ecosystem and then into the mainstream. In early 2025, Southworth notes, as the media began to dig into the dramatic restructuring of the federal government, Trump posted outrageously about Gaza, and that story took over. When cuts to PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the U.S. Agency for International Development threatened lives across Africa, Trump turned the conversation to white South Africans he lied were fleeing “anti-white genocide.”

Southworth calls this “narrative warfare,” and while it is true that Republican leaders have seeded a particular false narrative for decades now, this technique is also known as “political technology” or “virtual politics.” This system, pioneered in Russia under Russian president Vladimir Putin, is designed to get people to vote an authoritarian into office by creating a fake world of outrage. For those who do not buy the lies, there is another tool: flooding the zone so that people stop being able to figure out what is real and tune out.

The administration has clearly adopted this plan. As Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, the administration set out to portray Trump as a king in order “to sell the country on [Trump’s] expansionist approach to presidential power.”

The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of sound bites, interviews with loyalists, memes slamming Democrats, and attack lines.

“We’re here. We’re in your face,” said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. “It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic.” The White House brought right-wing influencers into the press pool, including at least one who before the election was exposed as being on the Russian payroll. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung, who before he began to work for Trump was a spokesperson for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”

Dominating means controlling the narrative. That starts with perceptions of the president himself. Trump’s appearances have been deeply concerning as he cannot follow a coherent thread, frequently falls asleep, repeatedly veers into nonsense, and says he doesn’t know about the operations of his government. Yesterday, after journalist S.V. Date noted that the administration has posted online only about 20% of Trump’s words, Cheung told Date “You must be truly f*cking stupid if you think we’re not transparent.”

The White House also pushed back dramatically against a story that appeared in Business InsiderMonday, comparing Donald Trump Jr. to former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The White House suggested it would take legal action against Business Insider’s German parent company.

Controlling the narrative also appears to mean manipulating the media, as Russians prescribed. Last month, Jeremy Kohler and Andy Kroll of ProPublica reported that Trump loyalist and political operative Ed Martin, now in charge of the “Weaponization Working Group,” in the Department of Justice, secretly seeded stories attacking a judge in a legal case that was not going his way. Martin has appeared more than 150 times on the Russia Today television channel and on Russian state radio, media outlets the State Department said were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem,” where he claimed the Democrats were weaponizing the court system. Now he is vowing to investigate Democrats and anyone who criticizes the administration.

As Trump’s popularity falls, Trump’s political operators have spent in the “high seven figures,” Alex Isenstadt of Axios says, to run ads in more than 20 targeted congressional districts to push lawmakers to get behind Trump’s economic program. “Tell Congress this is a good deal for America,” the ad says. “Support President Trump’s agenda to get our economy back on track.”

In their advertising efforts, Musk’s mining of U.S. government records is deeply concerning, for the treasure trove of information he appears to have mined would enable political operatives to target political ads with laser precision in an even tighter operation than the Cambridge Analytica program of 2016.

The stories the administration appears to be trying to cover up show a nation hobbled since January 20, 2025, as MAGA slashes the modern government that works for ordinary Americans and abandons democracy in order to put the power of the United States government into the hands of the extremely wealthy.

Trump vowed that high tariffs on goods from other countries would launch a new golden era in the United States, enabling the U.S. to extend his 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, some of which expire at the end of this year. But his high tariffs, especially those on goods from China, dramatically contracted the economy and raised the chances of a recession.

His constant monkeying with tariff rates has created deep uncertainty in the economy, as well as raising concerns that at least some of his pronouncements are designed to manipulate the market. Today, Walmart announced it would have no choice but to raise prices, and the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to its second lowest reading on record.

Trump insisted earlier that other countries would come begging to negotiate, but now appears to have given up on the idea. “It’s not possible to meet the number of people that want to see us,” he said, announcing today that he will simply set new rates himself. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump argued that other countries would pay high tariff duties, helping the U.S. Treasury to address its high deficits at the same time the wealthy got further tax cuts.

Over the course of this week, Republicans tried to push through Congress a measure that they have dubbed “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” a reference to Trump’s term for it. The measure extended Trump’s tax cuts at a cost to the nation of about $4.6 trillion over ten years and raised the debt ceiling by $4 trillion. At the same time, it cut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and a slew of other programs.

The Republicans failed to advance that bill out of the House Budget Committee Friday afternoon. Far-right Republicans complained not that it cut too much from programs Americans rely on, but that it cut too little. Citing the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. and the uncertain outlook for the American economy, Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of the country today from AAA to AA1.

Since Trump took office, the “Department of Government Efficiency” also claimed to be slashing “waste, fraud, and abuse” from government programs, although actual financial savings have yet to materialize. Instead, the cuts are to programs that help ordinary Americans and move money upward to the wealthy. News broke today that cuts of 31% to the enforcement wing of the Internal Revenue Service will cost money: tax evasion among the top 10% of earners costs about $700 billion a year.

The cuts were driven at least in part by the ideological extremism of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, which calls for decimating the federal government.

Vought talked about traumatizing federal workers, and has done so, but the cuts have also traumatized Americans who depend on the programs that DOGE tried to cut. Cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) meant about $2 billion less in contracts for American farmers, while close to $100 million worth of food that could feed 3.5 million people rots in government warehouses.

Cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration have left airports without adequate numbers of air traffic controllers. After two 90-second blackouts at Newark Liberty International Airport when air traffic controllers lost control with airplanes, yesterday the air traffic controllers at Denver International Airport lost contact with planes for 2 minutes.

Cuts to a program that funds the healthcare of first responders and survivors of the September 11 World Trade Center terror attacks are leaving thousands of patients unclear whether their cancer treatments, for example, will be covered. Yesterday, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) David Richardson told staff that FEMA is not prepared for hurricane season, which starts on June 1, and will work to return responsibility for the response to emergencies to the states. A document prepared for Richardson and obtained by Luke Barr of ABC News said: “As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood, thus FEMA is not ready.”

Yesterday, news broke that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been in talks with the producers of the reality show Duck Dynasty for a new reality show in which immigrants compete against each other in cultural contests to win the chance to move their U.S. citizenship applications ahead faster. It is made-for-TV, just like so many of the performances this administration uses to distract Americans from the unpopular policies that are stripping the government of benefits for ordinary Americans and moving wealth upward.

Such a show might appeal to confirmed MAGA. But it is a profound perversion of the American dream.

Categories Character, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Fake News, Trump

Where Did Trump Get the Nutty Idea of Reopening Alcatraz?

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2025 //
12

Have you visited Alcatraz? It’s a fun way to spend time in San Francisco. You take a boat ride with other tourists and get a guided visit around the infamous prison. It sits on a 22-acre island known as “The Rock.” To describe Alcatraz as dilapidated would be an understatement. You learn about the notorious gangsters who were locked up there (including Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly), about the many efforts by prisoners to escape, and you see the tiny, grim cells they lived in. Then you visit the gift shop for souvenirs and books about Alcatraz.

While it’s often said that no one ever escaped Alcatraz, despite many attempts, three men built a raft and took off undetected in 1962: Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers. They were never seen again, so authorities think they must have drowned. But it’s likely they made it to the mainland and started new lives. No one knows.

Trump announced that he wants to reopen Alcatraz because it is time to get tough on hardened criminals. He said he was reacting to the madness of judges ruling that criminals were entitled to due process. This was impossible, he said, because he wanted to toss out millions of criminals, and there are not enough judges to give due process to so many criminals.

At its height, Alvarez housed fewer than 350 prisoners.

Malcolm Ferguson of The New Republic thinks he found out why Trump suddenly discovered Alcatraz as a solution. He saw a movie about Alcatraz!

Ferguson writes in The New Republic

President Trump may have gotten his half-brained idea to reopen and expand the infamous Alcatraz prison from a movie that aired on WLRN this past weekend. 

“REBUILD, AND OPEN ALCATRAZ! For too long, America has been plagued by vicious, violent, and repeat Criminal Offenders, the dregs of society, who will never contribute anything other than Misery and Suffering. When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” the president wrote on Truth Social Sunday evening. 

“I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders,” he continued. “We will no longer be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and Judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals, who came into our Country illegally. The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”  

A Bluesky user provided some more details on this seemingly random announcement. 

“I may have context for this! Last night WPBT in Palm Beach broadcast the 1979 Clint Eastwood film ‘Escape from Alcatraz,’” they wrote. Trump was in Palm Beach on the night in question. 

Trump potentially making major policy decisions based on the last movie he watched is bleak but unsurprising. Alcatraz is a dilapidated full-time museum off the coast of San Francisco that closed in the 1960s because it was too expensive to operate and many of the buildings were falling apart. Getting it back to a full-time jail would be incredibly costly and labor intensive. 

“Alcatraz closed as a federal penitentiary more than sixty years ago. It is now a very popular national park and major tourist attraction,” California Representative Nancy Pelosi wrote on X. “The President’s proposal is not a serious one.”

Rachel Maddow had a different theory about why Trump suddenly wanted to revive Alcatraz. She thinks he purposely distracts the public and the media. Toss out a shiny object for people and the media to get excited about, and it distracts them from serious policy failures. Alcatraz is bread & circus for the rubes, like the proposal to rename the Gulf of Mexico. Better to have them talk about something silly than to talk about Pete Hegseth’s latest mess at the Pentagon or RFK Jr.’s relentless war against modern science.

Categories Fake News, Immigration, Trump
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