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This is How Democracy Ends: Trump Calls for Arrest and Conviction of His Political Enemies

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2024 //
123

The Supreme Court just ruled that the President has absolute immunity to do whatever he wants so long as it’s “official,” and Trump is giving the public a view of how he will use that power: to prosecute and jail his enemies, especially Liz Cheney. He could imprison them in Guantanamo and tried for treason by a military tribunal,

This is the kind of thing that happens in dictatorships, not in the USA. Right? In a Trump future, July 4 would be celebrated with a military parade of tanks and missiles. Do you think our men and women in the military can learn the goose step?

The New York Times reported:

Former President Donald J. Trump over the weekend escalated his vows to prosecute his political opponents, circulating posts on his social media website invoking “televised military tribunals” and calling for the jailing of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and former Vice President Mike Pence, among other high-profile politicians.

Mr. Trump, using his account on Truth Social on Sunday, promoted two posts from other users of the site that called for the jailing of his perceived political enemies.

One post that he circulated on Sunday singled out Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who is a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s, and called for her to be prosecuted by a type of military court reserved for enemy combatants and war criminals.

“Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason,” the post said. “Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.”

A separate post included photos of 15 former and current elected officials that said, in all-capital letters, “they should be going to jail on Monday not Steve Bannon!” Those officials included Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris, Mr. Pence, Mr. Schumer and Mr. McConnell — the top leaders in the Senate — and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker.

The list in the second post also had members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, including Ms. Cheney and the former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger, another Republican, and the Democratic Representatives Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, Pete Aguilar, Zoe Lofgren and Bennie Thompson, who chaired the committee.

In a statement, the Trump campaign did not address Mr. Trump’s posts, instead repeating allegations of misconduct by members of the committee, saying “Liz Cheney and the sham January 6th committee banned key witnesses, shielded important evidence, and destroyed documents” related to their investigation.

To think that this vile man might be re-elected ruins my day.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Insane, Trump

Why the New York Times Is Hypercritical of Biden While Treating Trump as Normal

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2024 //
45

As a daily reader of The New York Times, I’ve often been baffled by its negative coverage of Biden, coupled with its kid-glove treatment of Trump. For example, the Times constantly harps on Biden’s age, highlighting every verbal gaffe. When the Hur Report was released, containing gratuitous remarks about Biden’s mental acuity, the Times featured it in multiple stories but paid no attention to critiques by retired federal prosecutors about Hur’s highly partisan background. And after the debate between Biden and Trump, the Times editorial board was quick to call on Biden to step down, but not the convicted felon Trump, who lied nonstop throughout the debate. Since the debate, readers of The Times have seen a steady flow of articles urging Biden to step down. Just last night, I counted six concurrent articles about Biden’s infirmity and why he should leave the race.

There’s no question that Biden has slowed down, and his gait is not as vigorous as it was in the past. As everyone agreed, including Biden, his debate performance was awful. Nonetheless, he’s only three years older than Trump, and he has a wealth of experience and knowledge, as well as a well-qualified staff. Why does the Times echo the Republicans’ main talking points?

Contrast their coverage of Trump. Every time he holds a rally, he attacks the integrity of American institutions and hurls personal insults at his opponents. He curses and carries on like a bully. He lies about the 2020 election and leads his followers to believe that elections are routinely “rigged,” unless he wins. He ridicules the judiciary, the civil service, and describes the economy as failing. He says that America is a failing country. No person or institution is spared his insults unless they are on his team. And they don’t have a place on his team unless they agree that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden is an illegitimate president. The Times pays little attention to the anti-democratic, authoritarian tone of his speeches and seldom mentions his unhinged rants, where he goes off topic and speaks nonsense.

I think I found the explanation. It’s contained in this post by media watcher Daniel Froomkin. The editor-in-chief of the Times has made clear that the paper will not take sides. It will not be partisan. Therefore it must treat Trump as a normal candidate—not a wannabe fascist with dangerous plans—and must bend over backwards to criticize Biden.

Froomkin writes:

Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing.

He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency.

But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor.

Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party:

To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.

But critics like me aren’t asking the Times to abandon its independence. We’re asking the Times to recognize that it isn’t living up to its own standards of truth-telling and independence when it obfuscates the stakes of the 2024 election, covers up for Trump’s derangement, and goes out of its way to make Biden look weak.

Kahn’s position is, not coincidentally, identical to that of his boss, publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who I recently wrote about in my post, “Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants.”

And to the extent that Kahn has changed anything in the Times newsroom since Baquet left, it’s to double down on a form of objectivity that favors the comfortable-white-male perspective and considers anything else little more than hysteria.

Throwing Baquet under the bus, Kahn called the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests “an extreme moment” during which the Times lost its way.

“I think we’ve learned from it. I think we found our footing after that,” he said.

I translate that to mean that the old guard has reasserted total control over the rabble.

But how, exactly, the Times lost its footing, he doesn’t explain. I’d love to see him point to a few articles that he considers went too far. Best I can tell, his real complaint is that the Times under Baquet hired too many young and diverse people who — in his view — don’t understand the rules.

“I think there’s a larger number of people who we might at some point have hired, but we’ve asked the kind of questions or looked at the sort of work that they do, and wondered whether they’d be a good fit for us,” Kahn said, making it clear he won’t make that mistake again.

His example was hyperbolic and not even vaguely credible:

We’re looking more closely and asking more questions and doing more interviews. … We’ve actually asked people, “What happens if you got an assignment to go and report on some people that have said some nasty things and that you don’t like, what would you do?” And some people say, “I’d reject the assignment.” Okay, well, then you should work somewhere else.

I’d be willing to bet a large sum that no job candidate at the Times has ever said any such thing.

On Democracy

In one small paragraph, Kahn outdid himself. He:

  • Dismissed the importance of democracy as a political issue.
  • Disclosed that the Times coverage is poll driven.
  • Asserted that coverage of the economy and immigration is favorable to Trump.
  • Whined that more coverage of democracy was tantamount to becoming a partisan publication.

Here’s what he said:

It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign?

(Smith had asked Kahn to respond to Pfeiffer, a former Obama official, who recently complained that the editors at the Times  “do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.”)

That one paragraph, posted on social media by NYU professor Jay Rosen, elicited a storm of critiques.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling was among those upset by Kahn’s dismissal of democracy as a key issue.

Hate to Godwin’s Law this, but what if the Berlin Bugle in 1931 said, Hitler may be a threat to democracy, but polls show that most Germans are most concerned about Communism and the Jewish problem. A journalist’s job is not to reflect the polls, but to cover the objectively important stories.

University College London professor Brian Klaas wrote:

It is insane to me that someone in this role doesn’t understand that democracy is the superstructure for literally everything else. Democracy isn’t an issue that matters because of public opinion. It’s *the* issue that makes free public opinion possible.

Veteran political observer Norm Ornstein wrote:

This is both cringeworthy and frightening. I can’t say it is sleepwalking to dictatorship. He is not sleeping. It is marching in that direction.

Entrepreneur and writer Anil Dash concluded:

Just so you know, NYT fully believes they have no obligation to stop the fascist attack on America. They’ve finally said so explicitly. Act accordingly.

Many objected to Kahn’s argument that democracy is a partisan issue. Extremism researcher Mark Pitcavage wrote:

This quote strongly suggests the exec editor of the NYT can’t even think of democracy as an issue other than as a Biden campaign strategy.

OG blogger Heather “Digby” Parton wrote:

This is so, so tiresome. Nobody says it’s his job to “help” Joe Biden. It would be nice if they could find it in their hearts not to sabotage him though.

Others were horrified that Kahn breezily suggested that the economy and immigration were favorable stories for Trump. Journalist and author James Surowiecki wrote:

If the NYT covers it accurately, the economy is not an issue that is “favorable to Trump.”

A Twitter user named Hank Hoffman wrote:

The Exec. Editor of @nytimes believes immigration, the economy, & inflation are issues “favorable to Trump.”

Just to take immigration, why would a plan for militarized mass deportations & concentration camps be “favorable to Trump?” How’s a STRONG economy “favorable to Trump?

[Please open the link to finish this excellent post.]

The above post was written in May.

More recently, the Times demonstrated Froomkin’s point about its habit of normalizing Trump.

Froomkin retweeted the following example:

@scaredlawyerguy: If Biden so much as flubs a word in a speech, there’s a week of “he’s lost it, too old, step down” argle bargle in the media but Trump? He can rant incoherently for an hour and the media is just like “the hold this guy has on his supporters, it’s INCREDIBLE”

Meisels’s:

Here is a short summary of Donald Trump’s June 9 speech in Las Vegas:

  1. Tells crowd “I don’t care about you. I just want your vote. I don’t care.”
  2. Tells contractors who set up mic and teleprompter they did a “shitty job” and he “won’t pay them.”
  3. Tells audience to choose “suicide over Biden.”
  4. Complains about teleprompter again.
  5. Asks “Do I get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark?”
  6. Claims he “aced” a dementia test twice: “Not easy to ace!”
  7. Says “There has never been people treated more horrifically than J6 hostages.”
  8. Calls prosecutor a “dumb son of a bitch.”
  9. Complains media is too focused on health of crowd in heat when they should “care about Trump.”
  10. Glitches multiple times.
  11. Speech ends. Trump whisked away on private jet paid for by donors.

We have all the receipts here

youtu.be/A27GiTMmXjE?si…

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Fascism, Media, Trump

Michael Tomasky: How to Defeat a Convicted Felon

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2024 //
30

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic offers good advice about defeating Donald Trump. It’s about shaping a narrative, constantly reminding people that he is a convicted felon.

It might also be helpful to reiterate that he had sex with a porn star while his wife Melanie was recuperating from childbirth; that a jury decided that he sexually assaulted and defamed journalist E. Jean Carroll and owes her nearly $100 million dollars; that the State of New York successfully sued him for fraudulently reporting the value of his properties to reduce his taxes and was ordered to pay more than $400 million.

Tomasky writes:

If there is such a thing as one infamous quote that defines an era, then during the George W. Bush presidency it was an on-background remark made by a Bush aide to the journalist Ron Suskind in 2002 that appeared two years later in The New York Times Magazine. A “senior adviser” who was unhappy about an earlier article by Suskind had called him on the carpet and then went on to explain the broader world view that Suskind failed to comprehend:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

The passage was instantly incendiary (everyone thinks it was Karl Rove; Rove has never confirmed this, and Suskind has never revealed his source). The arrogance of it, at a time when the Iraq War was hardly going to plan, was staggering. Some Democrats took the jibe as a badge of honor and began sporting “Reality-Based Community” buttons.

Republicans have a long track record of disastrous results. The Iraq War, which we were told in early 2003 would take a couple months, lasted years, killed hundreds of thousands, and cost trillions (and by the way, Iraq is still not close to being a free country). Bush also would go on to let a major American city drown (New Orleans) and nearly destroy the global economic order.

But we have to say this: None of that ever dims their confidence that they can create their own reality. And today, by which I mean right now, this week, Democrats can and must learn a thing or two from Republicans.

While Donald Trump was on trial, the conventional wisdom was that the outcome would have no effect on the election. The only people who disagreed were some conservatives—because they were sure it would actually help him.

But now we have a couple polls telling us something different. The conviction has the potential to hurt Trump. But emphasis on “potential.” It depends entirely on what the Democrats do with it. So this is the key question: Are the Democrats capable of creating their own reality? Do they have the imagination and courage to do it?

First, the polls. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken after Trump’s conviction, 10 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of independents said the conviction made them less likely to vote for Trump. To be sure, majorities of both said it would have no effect, and 35 percent of Republicans said a conviction made them more likely to back Trump.

But the important number is that 10 percent. That is a huge number. Think it through with me. In 2020, 158 million people voted. According to the CNN exit polls, 36 percent were Republicans. That’s 57 million voters. If Trump were to lose 5.7 million Republicans, he would not only lose but probably lose convincingly. Even if half of that 10 percent comes back to him, he’d lose 2.85 million. That’s still a huge number.

Let’s do a little more math. In the key swing state of Arizona, the vote total was about 3.3 million. If we follow the CNN exit polls that put the GOP vote nationwide at 36 percent, then just shy of 1.2 million Arizona voters were Republican. If Trump were to lose 5 percent of them, that would amount to about 59,000 votes. And Arizona was decided, of course, by about 12,000 votes in 2020. In Georgia, which again was decided by roughly 12,000 votes, Trump would lose around 88,000 votes. In Michigan, it would be 99,000 votes lost if just 5 percent of Republicans desert him. In Pennsylvania, it would be close to 124,000 votes. And remember, I’m lowballing Republican defections from the poll’s 10 percent to half that, and I’m not even counting independents.

I trust you see the importance here.

Second post-conviction poll: Morning Consult found that 15 percent of Republicans believe Trump should end his candidacy. Now, there are no numbers to crunch here, and Trump is obviously not going to do that. But if roughly every seventh Republican really thinks Trump should end his candidacy, that is a staggering number, and again a potentially devastating one for him.

And again—emphasis on “potentially.”

Democrats, the ball is in your court. You can make your usual “judicious study of discernible reality” and buy into the lazy—and apparently wrong—conventional wisdom that says the verdict will make no difference.

Or you can create a new reality in which the verdict makes a big difference—maybe the difference between Joe Biden being reelected and Donald Trump destroying our democracy.

How to do it? There are lots of ways. But let’s start with this. “Convicted felon Donald Trump.” Not once. Not 10 times. Not 10,000 times. More like 500,000 times.

Seriously: No federal Democratic officeholder should, for the foreseeable future, say the name “Donald Trump” without putting the words “convicted felon” before it. We might give Biden himself a partial exemption here, because for a president, that kind of blunt, partisan repetition may be a little undignified. But no one else. Chuck Schumer. Hakeem Jeffries. Cori Bush on the left. Jared Golden on the right. Every. Single. One of them.

Blunt repetition may be boring. Democrats and liberals are intellectually averse to it, because it’s intellectually dull, and we’re supposed to be the smart side, always finding clever new arguments. But it works. People need to hear things over and over and over for it to lodge in their long-term memory.

Think of how many times you heard “Crooked Hillary” in 2016. Did they sound like mentally dull robots? Yes. But did it sink in, for millions of swing voters? Well, we do know this: As many as 40 percent of voters in 2016 polls said they thought she was corrupt. And when James Comey reopened that email investigation in late October, many of those voters thought: Aha. Crooked Hillary. Just what the Republicans have been saying.

This is how people’s brains work. Don’t take it from me. Take it from Gretchen Smelzer, a psychologist whom I admit I just found on Google on Sunday morning but who appears to be legit and whose 2018 book Journey Through Traumaearned a brief but respectful write-up in The New York Times. On her website, Smelzer writes:

There are only three ways that information can move from short-term memory to long term memory: urgency, repetition, or association.…

Repetition is the most familiar learning tool—everyone has memorized facts or vocabulary words by repeating them, and some have improved basketball free-throw shooting or playing piano scales through practice. Repetition creates long term memory by eliciting or enacting strong chemical interactions at the synapse of your neuron (where neurons connect to other neurons). Repetition creates the strongest learning.…

So Democrats. Here’s your situation. You can let this drop, thus ensuring that by November 5, Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts by a jury that deliberated for less than 10 hours will be totally forgotten, and no one will carry the thought of it into the voting booth. Or you can hammer away at it, never letting voters forget it—and by the way, driving Trump crazy the whole time, making it likely that he’ll say nuttier and nuttier things about it—and do all you can to swing those 59,000 votes in Arizona and all the rest.

It’s up to you. Do you want to wake up on Wednesday, November 6, with Trump having won, and with exit polls showing that his conviction made no difference? If not, well … as Malone (Sean Connery) said to Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) about stopping another mobster: “What are you prepared to do?”

Categories Accountability, Character, Elections, Ethics, Fascism, Fraud, Politics, Trump

South Carolina Imposes Sweeping Book Censorship on School Libraries

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2024 //
9

Judd Legum at Popular Information writes about South Carolina’s sweeping censorship of school libraries. The state superintendent Ellen Weaver is affiliated with the notorious Moms for Liberty. Clearly this group does not support the “liberty” to read the books of your choice.

Legum writes:

On Tuesday, the South Carolina State Board of Education will impose a centralized and expansive censorship regime on every K-12 school library in the state. The new regulations could result in the banning of most classic works of literature from South Carolina schools — from The Canterbury Tales to Romeo and Juliet to Dracula. The rules were championed by South Carolina State Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, who is closely aligned with Moms for Liberty, a far-right advocacy group seeking to remove scores of books from school libraries.

The regulations restricting library books, which were first proposed by the State Board of Education in September 2023, would ban any instructional materials, including library books, that are not “Age and Developmentally Appropriate.” The term “Age and Developmentally Appropriate” is defined as “topics, messages, materials, and teaching methods suitable to particular ages or age groups of children and adolescents, based on developing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral capacity typical for the age or age group.” This definition is so broad and subjective that it could justify the removal of virtually any material. 

Further, any library books (or other instructional materials) are automatically deemed “not ‘Age and Developmentally Appropriate’ for any age or age group of children if it includes descriptions or visual depictions of ‘sexual conduct,’ as that term is defined by Section 16-15-305(C)(1).” Critically, the regulations ban library books with any descriptions of “sexual conduct” whether or not those descriptions would be considered “obscene.” Under the South Carolina law, a library book is not considered obscene if it includes descriptions of “sexual conduct” if it has “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” or if the book, taken as a whole, does not appeal to a “prurient interest in sex.” This means that classic texts that contain descriptions of sexual content, including The Bibleand Ulysses, are not considered obscene.

The new South Carolina regulation refers only to Section 16-15-305(C)(1), which defines “sexual conduct” as “vaginal, anal, or oral intercourse, whether actual or simulated, normal or perverted,” “masturbation,” or “an act or condition that depicts actual or simulated touching, caressing, or fondling of, or other similar physical contact with, the covered or exposed genitals.” Starting tomorrow, any book that contains any descriptions of “sexual conduct” that meets that sweeping definition is required to be banned from South Carolina schools, regardless of whether it has literary merit or would be considered obscene. 

Similar language in an Iowa law “resulted in mass book bans affecting classics, 20th-century masterpieces, books used in AP courses, and contemporary Young Adult novels.”

The enforcement of the new regulation is highly centralized. Any South Carolina parent with a child enrolled in a public K-12 school can challenge up to five books per month on the grounds that they contain descriptions of sexual content or are otherwise not age-appropriate. The school district board is then required to hold a public meeting within 90 days to consider the complaint. At the meeting, the school district board is required to announce whether or not it will remove the book. If the school district board decides not to remove the book, the parent can appeal to the South Carolina State Board of Education. After the State Board receives the appeal, it must publicly consider it no later than the second public meeting. 

If the State Board decides that the book should be removed, that decision is binding not only on the school district where the complaint originated by all K-12 schools in South Carolina. Any school employee who fails to comply with the bans will be subject to discipline by the State Board. The State Board is empowered to impose any punishment, including termination, that it deems appropriate. 

The regulations are opposed by over 400 authors, prominent book publishers, and free speech groups. 

Moms for Liberty’s influence in South Carolina

Weaver is a close ally of Moms for Liberty, which has advocated across the country to remove books from school libraries. She appeared at the Moms for Liberty 2023 Joyful Warriors National Summit. “There is nothing more precious that God has created than the hearts and the minds of our young people,” Weaver said. “And that is what the radical woke left is after. Make no mistake: saving our country starts with saving our schools.” 

Many of the books challenged by Moms for Liberty activists address racial or LGBTQ issues. Earlier this month, Weaver’s department announced it would “eliminate Advanced Placement African American Studies in [South Carolina] high schools.” 

The South Carolina Association of School Librarians (SCASL) opposes Weaver’s efforts to impose a centralized censorship regime on school libraries. In response, Weaver wrote to the group and declared that “the South Carolina Department of Education will formally discontinue any partnerships with SCASL as an organization, effective immediately.” The SCASL has collaborated with the South Carolina Department of Education for over 50 years. Weaver said the move was punishment for suggesting her efforts to remove library books amounted to a “ban” or a “violation of educators’ intellectual freedom.”

Please open the link to finish the post.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, South Carolina

Lithwick and Ornstein: A Last Chance for Democracy?

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2024 //
88

Dahlia Lithwick and Norman Ornstein are lawyers and close observers of national politics. In this article, they urge us to take Trump’s threats seriously. They are not just campaign rhetoric or empty promises. He means what he says. As Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Most of the mainstream media (MSNBC is an exception) attempts to normalize Trump, as though he’s just another in a long line of conservative politicians. He is not. He is an autocrat who longs to have total control and to use that control to get vengeance for his enemies (no “loyal opposition” for him).

The first term was a warning. Trump tried in some cases to pick good people, but they didn’t last long. He won’t make the same mistake. He will demand loyalty, total loyalty. Anyone he appoints will have to agree that the election of 2020 was rigged and stolen.

He says he will take bold steps to reverse the progressive gains of the past 90 years, which he will attribute to “communists, socialists, fascists vermin, and scum”

Lithwick and Ornstein write at Slate about The dangers posed by Trump:

Most would-be dictators run for office downplaying or sugarcoating their intentions, trying to lure voters with a vanilla appeal. But once elected, the autocratic elements take over, either immediately or gradually: The destruction of free elections, undermining the press, co-opting the judiciary, turning the military into instruments of the dictatorship, installing puppets in the bureaucracy, making sure the legislature reinforces rather than challenges lawless or unconstitutional actions, using violence and threats of violence to cow critics and adversaries, rewarding allies with government contracts, and ensuring that the dictator and family can secrete billions from government resources and bribes. This was the game plan for Putin, Sisi, Orbán, and many others. It’s hardly unfamiliar.

Donald Trump is rather different in one respect. He has not softened his spoken intentions to get elected. While Trump is a congenital liar—witness his recent claim that he, not Joe Biden, got $35 insulin for diabetics—when it comes to how he would act if elected again to the presidency, he has been brutally honest, as have his closest advisers and campaign allies. His presidency would feature retribution against his enemies, weaponizing and politicizing the Justice Department to arrest and detain them whether there were valid charges or not. He has pledged to pardon the Jan. 6 violent insurrectionist rioters, who could constitute a personal vigilante army for President Donald Trump, presumably alongside the official one.

He has openly said he would be a dictator on Day One, reimplementing a Muslim ban, purging the bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash protests and take on opponents while replacing military leaders who would resist turning the military into a presidential militia with pliant generals. He would begin immediately to put the 12 million undocumented people in America into detention camps before moving to deport them all. His Republican convention policy director, Russell Vought, has laid out many of these plans as have his closest advisers, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, among others. Free elections would be a thing of the past, with more radical partisan judges turning a blind eye to attempts to protect elections and voting rights. He has openly flirted with the idea that he would ignore the 22nd Amendment and stay beyond his term of office.

The battle plan of his allies in the Heritage Foundation, working closely with his campaign via Project 2025, includes many of the aims above, and more; it would also tighten the screws on abortion after Dobbs, move against contraception, reinstate criminal sanctions against gay sex while overturning the right to same-sex marriage, among other things. His top foreign policy adviser, Richard Grenell, has reiterated what Trump has said about his isolationist-in-the-extreme foreign policy—jettison NATO, abandon support for Ukraine and give Putin a green light to go after Poland and other NATO countries, and reorient American alliances to create one of strongmen dictators including Kim Jong-un. Shockingly, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson violated sacred norms and endangered security by bypassing qualified lawmakers and appointing to the House Intelligence Committee two dangerous and manifestly unqualified members—one insurrectionist sympathizer, Rep. Scott Perry, who has sued the FBI, and one extremist demoted by the military for drunkenness, pill pushing, and other offenses, Rep. Ronny Jackson—simply because Donald Trump demanded it. They will have access to America’s most critical secrets and will likely share them with Trump if his status as a convicted felon denies him access to top secret information during the campaign. This is part of a broader pattern in which GOP lawmakers do what Trump wants, no matter how extreme or reckless….

We are worried about this baseline assumption that everything is fine until someone alerts us that nothing is fine, that of course our system will hold because it always has. We worry that we are exceptionally good at telling ourselves that shocking things won’t happen, and then when they do happen, we don’t know what to do. We worry that every time we say “the system held” it implies that “holding” equals “winning” as opposed to barely scraping by. We worry that while Trump has armies of surrogates out there arguing that Trump is an all-powerful God proxy, the rule of law has no surrogates out there arguing for anything because nobody ever came to a rally for a Rule 11 motion. The Biden administration has largely taken the position that the felony conviction is irrelevant because it’s proof that the status quo isn’t in danger. But the reality is that Republicans are openly campaigning against judges, juries, and prosecutors. Overt declarations of blowing up our checks and balances and following the blueprints to autocracy set by Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, meanwhile, are treated with shrugs by mainstream journalists and commentators. What’s more, Republicans in Congress have shown a willingness to kowtow to every Trump demand. The signals are flashing red that our fundamental system is in danger.

“The system is holding” is not a plan for a knowable future. It never was.

Please open the link and read the article in full.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Dana Milbank: Trump Plays the Fascist Card

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2024 //
14

Dana Milbank calls out Trump for repeatedly sending fascist signals to his base. When Congress holds hearings on anti-Semitism, they should call Trump to testify.

Dana Milbank writes about Trump in The Washington Post:

As you’ve probably heard, Donald Trump has once again raised a führer.

The former president’s Truth Social account posted a video posing the question “What happens after Donald Trump wins?” and providing a possible answer: In the background was the phrase “unified Reich.”

This follows Trump’s echoing Adolf Hitler in campaign speeches, saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and calling his opponents “vermin.”

And that, in turn, followed Trump’s dining at Mar-a-Lago with high-profile antisemite Ye (Kanye West) and white supremacist leader Nick Fuentes, who likened incinerating Jews to baking cookies.

Under the three-Reichs-and-you’re-out rule, Trump should be on the bench. Yet he keeps swinging — and this week provided a sobering measure of how numb we have become to his undeniably fascist rhetoric.

Almost exactly eight years ago, Trump attacked Gonzalo Curiel, then the district judge in the Trump University fraud case, saying that his “Mexican heritage” posed “an inherent conflict of interest.” In the uproar that followed, even Republican leaders were appalled, and then-House Speaker Paul Ryan said Trump’s statement was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

This week, Trump did almost the same thing when he left court on Tuesday after his defense rested in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. “The judge hates Donald Trump,” he said. “Just take a look. Take a look at him. Take a look at where he comes from.” New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan emigrated from Colombia as a child. But this time there was little outcry from the inured populace, and if Republican leaders had any complaints about Trump’s textbook racism (or on his third Reich moment of this campaign) I must have missed them.

Vilifying migrants is a standard fascist trope. So is the constant claiming of victim status. Trump falsely alleged in a fundraising email this week that his opponent conspired to kill him. “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger” during the FBI’s 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago for missing classified documents, Trump wrote. He separately claimed that Biden’s Justice Department “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.” In reality, the FBI took extra precautions to avoid a confrontation by conducting the search when Trump was away and alerted the Secret Service. Agents were operating under the same standard rules of engagement they used when searching Biden’s home: Lethal force can be used only if in “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury.”

Also this week, Trump, asked by Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV whether he favored restricting Americans’ access to birth control, responded: “We’re looking at that, and I’m going to have a policy on that very shortly.” After the televised interview was broadcast, Trump said the notion that he would advocate restrictions on contraception was “a Democrat fabricated lie.”

That maneuver — floating an outrageous policy and then pretending he had done no such thing — is another tool that Trump routinely uses. After Trump’s Truth Social account shared the video with the slightly-blurred “unified Reich” message during a lunch break in Trump’s trial in New York, his spokeswoman claimed the video had been “created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the president was in court.” The campaign removed the post.

Sound familiar? During the 2016 campaign, Trump tweeted an image that had been used by white supremacists of a Star of David atop a pile of cash. The campaign removed the offending post and Trump said it had been posted by a staffer. He later told a crowd that his aides “shouldn’t have taken it down.”

During that same campaign, Trump also tweeted an image of an American flag containing an image of what appeared to be Nazi Waffen-SS soldiers. The campaign removed this post, too, and blamed an intern.

The disavowal is part of the game, says Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor who specializes in the rhetoric of fascism. “You do it and then you deny it and it’s just systematic, over and over and over again,” he told me in a phone call. “The people who want to hear it hear it, and it signals the direction you want to go in.” And for those uncomfortable with the extremism, the denial provides “a way of lying to themselves and telling themselves this is not what’s really going on.”

But it is. From Nazi Germany to Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Stanley says, people invariably thought the rhetoric of the rising authoritarian was exaggerated and just for dramatic effect. “Historically, people always, always don’t take it seriously,” he said. Perhaps they don’t realize that Trump is deploying the exact same tropes — against migrants, judges, gender nonconforming people, universities, the media, “Marxists” — now being used by autocrats in Russia, India and Hungary. “If you look at what Trump is saying … everywhere in the world the authoritarians are saying that.”

And yet we drift, placidly, into autocracy. Okay, Trump is unifying the Reich. But Biden is so old!

Trump’s fascist rhetoric is supported by an array of authoritarian polices, which he and his campaign have helpfully divulged.

Trump has said that his (false) election fraud claims justify “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” He said he wouldn’t be a dictator, “other than day one,” when he would use absolute power to seal the border and drill for oil. He has proposed that those shoplifting from stores should “fully expect to be shot.” He said he would round up as many as 20 million illegal immigrants and, perhaps, put them in mass deportation camps, taking money from the military if necessary.

He said he would appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden, his family and “all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders and our country itself.” He said he would order prosecutors to “go down and indict” his political opponents if they are “doing well and beating me” — and he would fire prosecutors who don’t follow such orders. He said he would use the National Guard, and perhaps the regular military, to crack down on protests against him.

He would strip civil service protections so he could replace federal workers with Trump loyalists, and he might take over independent agencies, including the Federal Reserve. He suggested he would change laws to attack what he perceives as “anti-White” bias.

Speaking at the National Rifle Association on Saturday, Trump asked the crowd whether he should “be considered three term or two term?” Several in the crowd shouted out: “Three!”

Earlier this spring, the American Conservative published an article titled “Trump 2028” that argued the 22nd Amendment, which limits a president to two terms, “is an arbitrary restraint on presidents who serve nonconsecutive terms.” The group is part of Project 2025, to which the Trump campaign has informally outsourced its policy planning.

Trump has hinted that he would pardon those sentenced for attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He included in his courtroom entourage this week two convicted felons, Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner he pardoned, and Chuck Zito, a former Hells Angels leader. During testimony, defense witness Robert Costello showed the same sort of contempt for the judge as Trump did outside the courtroom. He rolled his eyes, talked under his breath, called the proceedings “ridiculous” and complained with a “jeez” when he disagreed with Merchan’s ruling.

Trump has promised “retribution” against his political opponents, and outside Trump’s trial this week, his allies amplified the threat. “They fear Donald Trump and they fear what’s going to happen if he becomes president again — and, I tell you, they should fear,” said Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.).

“Yes,” agreed Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.), at his side, wearing a necktie with Trump’s face printed on it.

Trump had one final thing to say before he left the courthouse this week. Just a day after his post about the “unified Reich,” he offered a message for “Jewish people that vote for Biden and the Democrats: They should have their head examined.”

Well, I have had my head examined, and it was found to contain the following memories of things Trump has said and done:

He told his White House chief of staff John Kelly that “Hitler did some good things” and complained that U.S. generals weren’t “totally loyal” to him the way Nazi generals were to Hitler. He spoke of the “very fine people” marching among the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. He closed out his 2016 campaign with an ad that singled out three prominent Jews with suggestions that they manipulate a “global power structure.” He was reluctant to disavow David Duke or supporters of his who harassed and threatened Jewish journalists. He has shared innumerable messages on social media from white supremacists. He has repeatedly questioned the loyalty of American Jews.

Long ago, Vanity Fair reported that Trump’s ex-wife Ivana said he read from a book of Hitler’s speeches, which he kept in a cabinet by his bed. Trump confirmed that he had the book but denied that he read it. By coincidence or design, there has been a startling overlap in their language of late.

Trump speaks of immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” and “coming in with disease.” Hitler said that great civilizations died “as a result of contamination of the blood,” and he called Jews “the worst kind of germ-carriers in poisoning human souls.”

Trump calls his political opponents “radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Hitler called Jews “an inferior race that multiplies like vermin.”

Trump says that “the enemies from within are more dangerous, to me, than the enemies of the outside. Russia and China, we can handle.” Hitler spoke of “the greater inner enemy” and said that when “the internal enemy was not recognized … all efforts to resist the external enemy were bound to be in vain.”

Trump complains that “fake news is all you get, and they are indeed the enemy of the people.” Hitler complained of “the lying Marxist press” and said “the function of the so-called liberal press was to dig the grave for the German people.”

Trump claims that “we’ve never done worse than we’ve done now. … We’re so disrespected. The whole world is laughing at us.” And he warns: “If we don’t win this election, I believe we will no longer have a country.” Hitler claimed that “the Reich had fallen from a height which can hardly be imagined in these days of misery and humiliation.” He warned that “one year of Bolshevism would destroy Germany” and transform it “into chaos and a heap of ruins.”

Trump, at the end of his speeches, likes to say: “We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.” Hitler spoke of a “world conspiracy” made up of “Jews and democrats, Bolshevists and reactionaries” and motivated by a “hatred” of Germans.

No, Trump isn’t Hitler, and the 21st century United States isn’t Weimar Germany. But Trump’s words, so obviously ripped from history’s darkest pages, lead no place good. The only thing poisoning the blood of our country is his copycat fascism.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

NYC Prosecutors Seek to Extend Trump Gag Order Because Of Death Threats

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2024 //
17

Anyone who stands up to Trump puts their life at risk. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has received hundreds of death threats since his prosecution began. Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies because of his rigging the election by paying off porn star Stormy Daniels to keep his sexual encounter with her out of the news before the vote in 2016. While he throws around claims that Democrats “would rig the election” in 2016 and claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen,” it was he who rigged the election by paying Daniels for her silence.

Trump claims that his inability to attack the jurors and prosecutors violates his First Amendment rights. He is vile.

The New York Times reported today:

Prosecutors in Manhattan said on Friday that a judge should keep in place major elements of a gag order that was imposed on Donald J. Trump, citing dozens of threats that have been made against officials connected to the case.

The order, issued before Mr. Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial began in mid-April, bars him from attacking witnesses, jurors, court staff and relatives of the judge who presided over the trial, Juan M. Merchan.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have sought to have the order lifted since Mr. Trump’s conviction in late May. But in a 19-page filing on Friday, prosecutors argued that while Justice Merchan no longer needed to enforce the portion of the gag order relating to trial witnesses, he should keep in place the provisions protecting jurors, prosecutors, court staff and their families.

The New York Police Department has logged 56 “actionable threats” since the beginning of April directed against Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who brought the case, and against his family and employees, according to an affidavit provided with the filing.

Such threats, evidently made by supporters of Mr. Trump, included a post disclosing the home address of an employee at the district attorney’s office, and bomb threats made on the first day of the trial directed at two people involved in the case.

The 56 threats that were logged, prosecutors said, did not include the hundreds of “threatening emails and phone calls” that were received by Mr. Bragg’s office in recent months, which the police are “not tracking as threat cases.”

Mr. Trump was convicted on May 30 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payoff made to the porn star Stormy Daniels. The money was meant to cover up a sexual tryst she says she had with Mr. Trump in 2006, a decade before he was elected president. (Mr. Trump, 78, has continued to deny ever having had sex with Ms. Daniels.)

If he didn’t have sex with Daniels, why did he pay her $130,000?

Categories Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Safety, Trump

Thom Hartmann: The 50-Year Trump MAGA Reich?

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2024 //
26

Thom Hartmann says that Trump fans are dreaming of a 50-year MAGA reich:

Horrified critics blast Fox’s Ingraham for suggesting a 50-year MAGA reich is possible. If Trump wins, this will be referred to as the age of Trump,” Laura Ingraham told her Fox viewers, dreaming of a repeat of the kind of consequential presidency that stamps political eras. “He dominates the policy debate in ways that no one has done since Reagan. And if he picks a strong VP… this coalition could be in power for 50 years.” Ingraham — who I also once debated, at a Heritage Foundation event — could be right. If Trump becomes president this fall, he and his Project 2025 allies will transform America in ways that go far beyond FDR’s New Deal or Reagan’s war on working people. The Christian Taliban that has surrounded him will take over public school instruction and birth control policy, racist militias and skinheads will be running elections and immigration policy, the media will be finally and fully seized by rightwing oligarchs like in Russia and Hungary, unions and equality movements will be functionally outlawed, and Trump’s “enemies” (including reporters and commentators like yours truly) will end up in prison. Each of those things are already promised explicitly by Trump himself or part of the Project 2025 program for the next Republican presidency.

Categories Elections, Fascism, Trump

Texas: School District Votes to Delete Textbook Chapters on Climate Change, Cultural Diversity, Vaccines

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2024 //
37

The school board of the Cypress-Fairbanks district (Cy-Fair) in Texas voted to delete chapters they didn’t like from textbooks in science. Science teachers in the district were taken aback.

Cy-Fair is located in the Houston suburbs and is one of the largest districts in the state.

Elizabeth Sander of The Houston Chronicle wrote:

The former science coordinator at Cypress-Fairbanks ISD was “appalled” as she watched the conservative stronghold on the school board vote to remove 13 chapters from science, health and education textbooks last month, scrapping in just minutes countless hours of work done by both state and local textbook review committees.

“Chapters are not independent entities. They’re put in an order purposefully, and they build off of prior knowledge, and they reference information in prior areas,” said Debra Hill, who has 40 years of experience in science education. “It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to take off the chapter on adding and subtracting, and we’ll just skip ahead to multiplication.’”

The material that was deleted will be covered by state tests.

One Cy Falls High School teacher, who served on the review committee for the earth systems course materials, has filed a grievance with the board that will be discussed at Thursday’s board workshop, according to information shared on social media by Trustee Julie Hinaman, the lone opposing vote on removing the chapters. Critics question whether students will get all the information the state intends — and will test for — in a last-minute effort to replace the materials. 

The earth science textbook had three entire chapters removed, titled, “Earth Systems and Cycles,” “Mineral and Energy Resources” and “Climate and Climate Change.”

Other content removed from the textbooks included chapters on cultural diversity, vaccines, COVID-19 and climate change. Courses impacted include education, health science, biology and environmental science.

Cy-Fair ISD’s Chief Academic Officer Linda Macias assured board members when they made the vote in May that it would be possible for their curriculum staff to make these changes, even as the staff has been slashed in budget cuts for the 2024-2025 school year. 

But Hill isn’t so sure it will actually be possible for Cy-Fair teachers to teach the required Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills next year, she said. 

Creating a new curriculum is hard enough, and the district must also provide students with materials that pertain to every single science TEK, she said. Cy-Fair’s curriculum staff and other educators may be responsible for creating their own textbook pages to replace the ones that were deleted, a process that could take countless hours outside of instruction that could drive teachers from the profession altogether, she said.

Plus, Hill hasn’t seen any clarity on who would approve the new instructional materials. The board could theoretically reject new chapters created by the district if it included too much of the type of climate change material that the deleted textbook chapters covered, Hill worried.

“If you want to drive teachers out of education, this is what you should do to them,” she said. “I am just very afraid that students are not going to get access to accurate, TEKS-aligned content.”

Last month, the school board voted to eliminate discussions of vaccines and other topics, while cutting the budget and eliminating 600 positions.

More than a dozen chapters including content on vaccines, cultural diversity, climate change, depopulation and other topics deemed controversial by conservative Cypress-Fairbanks ISD trustees will be removed from textbooks in the state’s third largest school system for the 2024-2025 school year.

Trustees voted 6-1 late Monday to omit the material, after an hourslong discussion about a $138 million budget deficit that is forcing the district to eliminate 600 positions, including 42 curriculum coaches, dozens of librarians and 278 teaching positions.

What were the school board members thinking? Did they think if you don’t teach about climate change, it doesn’t exist?

Who will remove the chapters? Will the publisher? Will teachers cut them out of the textbooks? Will they paste the pages together?

A big thank-you to Trustee Julie Hinaman, who believes in education, not censorship or indoctrination.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Environment, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, History, Ignorance, Stupid, Texas

Mary Trump: Uncle Sam or the Crazy Convicted Felon Uncle?

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2024 //
30

Mary Trump, the niece of Donald Trump, has repeatedly warned about the dangerous character of her uncle. She wrote the national bestseller Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

She wrote on her blog today:

In the wake of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, I’m reminded just how stark the choice before us is—on the one hand, a man who understands sacrifice and honors service, on the other one who, after strenuously avoiding his own service calls those who died fighting for democracy “suckers” and “losers” and then turns around, as he did last Saturday, and says, telling the truth for once, “unless you are a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person, who would say that, anyway?”

Well, Donald, according to your former Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, you would—and you did.

Last Saturday also marked 150 days until Election Day, which means we now have 145 days to save this country. Just as in 2020, we are on a knife’s edge in the choice between democracy and what we can now clearly say is fascism. (Back in the more innocent days of the fall of 2020, we were still calling it autocracy.) The difference now, of course, is that the edge of the knife is even thinner, the stakes higher, and the electorate by turns more misinformed, more checked out, and more demoralized than we were almost four years ago. And all of us continue to be traumatized to one degree or another, a fact that is barely acknowledged. 

So, what do we do? I think the first thing we must do, is to make clear to Americans exactly what they’re choosing between — Uncle Sam or the crazy uncle who wants to burn it all down.

Uncle Sam, representative of the best of what America aspires to, was well-represented last weekend in Normandy, France, where President Biden traveled to pay his, and our, respects to the original Antifa activists — the brave allied soldiers who stormed the beaches to liberate a continent and save the world from the dark forces of fascism which the other uncle is currently stoking. 

While in France, President Joe Biden visited the Aisne-Marne, the American cemetery in France where many of our heroes are buried. Five years ago, my convicted felon uncle refused to go to Aisne-Marne because it was raining. He didn’t want to mess up his hair. Seriously. But, much worse, he didn’t see the point in wasting his time going to see the aforementioned “suckers” and “losers”—those whose bravery helped turn the tide against the Third Reich.

Joe Biden reminded the world what American leadership and courage look like. He reminded the world of the power of alliances. He reminded the world what is best about America. Every day, my convicted felon uncle holds up a mirror to the worst of us, and it’s long past time people start looking—really looking—at what is reflected there.

While President Biden stood with our allies and argued that the United States should continue to lead the fight against fascism, my convicted felon uncle was being interviewed by “Dr.” Phil McGraw and Sean Hannity, altogether three of the greatest examples of white men failing up in American, and he made it clear that one of the driving forces behind his wanting to be president again is “revenge.” He wants to be free and clear to go after his political enemies. Although the two sycophants tried mightily to steer Donald away from the subject, he could not be dissuaded—and he couldn’t have been more clear:

“Sometimes revenge can be justified,” he told McGraw

“I would have every right to go after them,” he told Hannity.

We are reminded every day that convicted felon Donald Trump hates America — he hates its people, its ideals, its democracy, its judicial system, its leaders, its rule of law. He even hates his own followers. At Saturday’s rally, he came right out and admitted it: “I don’t care about you. I just want your vote.” That he openly courts and aligns himself with the same forces we defeated in Europe 80 years ago makes it all so much worse.

Joe Biden has pulled us out of the hole we were in thanks to the Trump administration’s horrific and willful mishandling of the pandemic and the economic collapse that ensued; he has restored our standing in the world; he honors the memories of those who sacrificed everything so that our democracy might endure. My uncle, the convicted felon, honors nothing and he will continue to rally the darkest forces—that he himself has lifted from their hiding places—to erase those memories and render those sacrifices meaningless. 

This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a normal election. In 146 days, Americans are going to choose what kind of country we want to be going forward. Will it be the same country that fought on those beaches against the evil of tyranny and fascism? Or will we choose to align the most powerful country in history with the malicious designs of the enemies we risked so much to vanquish?

There is a palpable sense of fear among the good guys these days. In Europe, our allies wonder who we are. At home, we wonder the same. Are we the good guys or the bad guys? Are we aligned with Uncle Sam or the uncle who can’t seem to speak without lying or act without committing crimes against our country and our Constitution? In just a few months, we will know. 

I believe in the America Joe Biden and his party represents. I believe our best chance forward is to make sure the administration stays in Democratic hands, we increase the Democrat’s Senate majority, and make sure we take over the House. Overall, we are a good people, striving to do better. I believe we are better than my convicted felon uncle and the hatred he espouses and inspires.

America has won this fight before. In 146 days, we can win it again.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Trump
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