Robert Hubbell writes a thoughtful, informative blog. I’m posting this as part of my personal project to understand the new face of white supremacy. White supremacy has always been there, simmering below the surface. Trump invited them to show their faces and step into the daylight. They did, and DeSantis is sending them signals that he wants to be their champion.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has set his anti-education sites on Florida’s state colleges. Through a series of political and legal maneuvers, he has ceded control over Florida’s state colleges to ultra-conservative culture warriors like Christopher Rufo. In short order, DeSantis has announced that he will rid Florida state colleges and universities of curricula not “rooted in Western tradition” or that “compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality.”
Amid the torrent of reporting on Ron DeSantis’s attack on critical race theory and intersectionality, the quiet part is often left unsaid. So let me say it: DeSantis’s educational agenda is code for racism and white supremacy. (Other parts of his agenda seek to erase the dignity and humanity of LGBTQ people.) DeSantis’s invocation of “Western tradition” is meant to suppress knowledge regarding the people (and contributions) of Asia, Africa, South America, Oceania, and the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. See Talking Points Memo, DeSantis Makes 2024 Ambitions Clear As He Pours Gasoline On His ‘Woke’ Education Fire.
Given DeSantis’s generalized ignorance, his call to focus on “Western tradition” is a slippery slope that will inevitably lead to the discussion of unpleasant truths about America. For example, the enslavement of Black people was a “tradition” in North America for 246 years—and the abolition of that evil practice is relatively recent (155 years ago). So, a college course that honestly addresses the Western “traditions” of North America should include an examination that the role of slavery played in the economic, social, and political development of America.
But DeSantis isn’t stopping at converting Florida’s colleges and universities into re-education camps in the worst traditions of the USSR. He is seeking to up-end centuries of “Western tradition” embodied in the Constitution and the English common law: the requirement of a unanimous jury to impose capital punishment. DeSantis has floated the idea that a less-than-unanimous jury verdict can impose a sentence of death—an unconstitutional proposal designed to inflict the death penalty on more Black and Latino Americans. See Vox, Ron DeSantis wants to make it much easier for the state to kill people.
DeSantis is willing to do all this because he wants to capture Trump’s loyal base—which is the only hope that DeSantis has of becoming a credible candidate. As Trump becomes mired in criminal prosecutions, DeSantis will become emboldened and radicalized beyond his already extremist views. Doing so ignores the lessons of the 2022 midterms: persuadable Americans are done with Trump and his MAGA extremism. Like all military generals, Ron DeSantis is fighting the last war (the presidential election of 2020) and has failed to heed the tectonic shift that occurred in the midterms.
Charlie Sykes used to be a conservative Republican. Then Trump became President, and Sykes became a Never Trumper (maybe before the election, I’m not sure). Charlie and other Never Trumpers and their friends created a website called The Bulwark. It is consistently interesting. Charlie wrote the following post.
He wrote:
When Twitter banned neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes back in December 2021, the site’s Head of Safety and Integrity, Yoel Roth said, “Hateful conduct has no place here.”
But Roth is gone, Elon Musk is in charge, and the Nazis are back.
Fuentes, last seen here as Donald Trump’s dinner guest, was reinstated just hours after another actual Nazi, Andrew Anglin— who once described his approach as “Non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism” — asked Musk to bring his friend back on Twitter.
Anglin tweeted Musk that the Holocaust-denying, Jew-baiting Fuentes is “a very nice person and I can vouch that he’ll never say anything mean.”
Anglin is an ideological descendant of men such as George Lincoln Rockwell, who created the American Nazi Party in the late 1950s, and William Luther Pierce, who founded the National Alliance, a powerful white-nationalist group, in the 1970s. Anglin admires these predecessors, who saw themselves as revolutionaries at the vanguard of a movement to take back the country. He dreams of a violent insurrection.
But where Rockwell and Pierce relied on pamphlets, the radio, newsletters, and in-person organizing to advance their aims, Anglin has the internet. His reach is exponentially greater, his ability to connect with like-minded young men unprecedented.
Since then, Anglin has tried to rebrand himself as just a garden-variety American Nationalist, but this is mostly eye-wash for clueless billionaires. Notes the Anti-Defamation League:
In an effort to validate their leap from neo-Nazis to flag-waving American patriots, he and his followers equate American nationalism to white nationalism by claiming America was founded on anti-Semitic and racist principles.
**
Anglin is also one of the most vicious trolls on the far-right. I wrote about him in my book, “How the Right Lost Its Mind,” describing the explosion of harassment aimed at Jewish critics of Donald Trump at the time.
Many of the worst instances of harassment were connected to a website known as the Daily Stormer and its founder, a neo-Nazi activist named Andrew Anglin.
I first became aware of the site when I received, via email, a photoshopped image of my picture inside a gas chamber. A smiling Donald Trump wearing a German military uniform is poised to press the red “gas” button. The photoshopping tool had been created by the website and was widely used to troll both Jewish and non-Jewish critics of the Trump campaign.
The site takes its name from the German Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer,which was notorious for the viciousness of its anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews. After World War II, Der Stürmer’s publisher, Julius Streicher, was executed for crimes against humanity.
Anglin created the site in 2013 as an updated version of his previous website, which he called Total Fascism. As of this writing, the new website features pictures of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump and the slogan “Daily Stormer— The World’s Most Goal-Oriented Republican Website.”
It is important to emphasize again that the Alt Right is a mansion with many rooms and some very real divisions. Anglin, for example, is not a fan of Milo Yiannopoulos, who is depicted on the Daily Stormer with a cartoon of the Jewish nose superimposed on his face and is referred to as “Filthy Rat Kike Milo.”
But Anglin is also interested in emphasizing the common ground among the various disparate groups and interests that make up the white nationalist movement. In his own guide to the Alt Right, Anglin notes that the movement included various factions, but that they had all been led “toward this center-point where we have all met. The campaign of Donald Trump is effectively the nexus of that centerpoint.”
Impressed by Trump’s rhetoric on illegal immigrants, Anglin endorsed Trump in 2015 and urged the readers of the Daily Stormer to “vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.”
After Trump called for barring Muslims from the country, the site declared: “Heil Donald Trump— The Ultimate Savior.” But Anglin’s greatest accomplishment was the creation of what he calls his “Troll Army,” which he uses to attack political opponents, deployed to great effect in early 2016.
After GQ magazine published a profile of Melania Trump by writer Julia Ioffe, the future First Lady took to Facebook to denounce the piece as “yet another example of the dishonest media and their disingenuous reporting.” Anglin quickly mobilized his Troll Army, posting an article headlined: “Empress Melania Attacked by Filthy Russian Kike Julia Ioffe in GQ!”
The post featured a picture of Ioffe wearing a Nazi-era yellow star with the word “Jude” and a call to action from Anglin:
“Please go ahead and send her a tweet and let her know what you think of her dirty kike trickery. Make sure to identify her as a Jew working against White interests, or send her the picture with the Jude star from the top of this article.”
The result was a torrent of abuse, including death threats against the journalist.
On Twitter, she was sent pictures of Jews being shot in the head and pictures of her wearing concentration camp stripes. When she answered her phone, a caller began playing a recording of a speech by Adolf Hitler.
“The irony of this is that today,” Ioffe told the British newspaper the Guardian, “I was reminded that 26 years ago today my family came to the US from Russia. We left Russia because we were fleeing antisemitism. It’s been a rude shock for everyone.”
The response from the GOP nominee was also troubling. When Trump was asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the anti-Semitic attacks and death threats, the future president pointedly refused to condemn them, pleading ignorance and saying, “I don’t have a message to the fans. A woman wrote an article that was inaccurate.”
Trump’s refusal to denounce the Troll Army was greeted with delight by Anglin, who immediately posted: “Glorious Leader Donald Trump Refuses to Denounce Stormer Troll Army.” He exulted:
“Asked by the disgusting and evil Jewish parasite Wolf Blitzer to denounce the Stormer Troll Army, The Glorious Leader declined. The Jew Wolf was attempting to Stump the Trump, bringing up Stormer attacks on Jew terrorist Julia Ioffe. Trump responded to the request with “I have no message to the fans” which might as well have been “Hail Victory, Comrades!””
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issued a statement about his higher education agenda. He intends to expunge all references to or studies of diversity, equity, inclusion and “critical race theory,” the study of institutionalized racism from the curriculum of the state’s colleges and universities. He also wants to place the hiring of new faculty in the hands of college presidents and boards of trustees, whom he controls. The hiring of new faculty typically is in the hands of the faculty, not the president or the board of trustees.
DeSantis claims that he is furthering “civil discourse and intellectual freedom” by suppressing the ideas he disagrees with. He believes that the only studies that belong on a college campus are the achievements and thoughts of white men.
He has flipped the script, accusing those who defend the freedom to teach and learn of “suppressing” free thought. It is he who is suppressing intellectual freedom.
In Florida, faculty are free to express Governor DeSantis’ views. They are not free to express dissent from the party line. That is not freedom.
Ron DeSantis is the ultimate arbiter of truth in Florida. None dare challenge him if they teach in a public school, college, or university. There’s a word for this ideology: fascism.
“Today, Governor Ron DeSantis announced legislation for the 2023 Session to further elevate civil discourse and intellectual freedom in higher education, further pushing back against the tactics of liberal elites who suppress free thought in the name of identity politics and indoctrination. Among its many provisions, the legislation will ensure Florida’s public universities and colleges are grounded in the history and philosophy of Western Civilization; prohibit DEI, CRT (CRITICAL RACE THEORY), and other discriminatory programs and barriers to learning; and course correct universities’ missions to align education for citizenship of the constitutional republic and Florida’s existing and emerging workforce needs.”
“In Florida, we will build off of our higher education reforms by aligning core curriculum to the values of liberty and the Western tradition, eliminating politicized bureaucracies like DEI, increasing the amount of research dollars for programs that will feed key industries with talented Florida students, and empowering presidents and boards of trustees to recruit and hire new faculty, including by dedicating record resources for faculty salaries,” said Governor Ron DeSantis.
“This 2023 legislative proposal builds on reforms made during the 2022 Legislative Session through Senate Bill 7044 to dismantle accreditation agency monopolies, increase tenured faculty accountability, and make the transition between a Florida state college and university more seamless. Specifically, the 2023 proposal raises the standards of learning and civil discourse of public higher education in Florida by:
Requiring the State University System Board of Governors (BOG) and State Board of Education (SBOE) to review and realign general education core courses to make sure they provide historically accurate, foundational and career relevant education, not suppress or distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics;
Prohibiting higher education institutions from using any funding, regardless of source, to support DEI, CRT, and other discriminatory initiatives;
Requiring institutions’ presidents and boards of trustees to take ownership of hiring and retention decisions, without interference from unions and faculty committees;
Allowing institutions’ presidents and boards of trustees to conduct a post-tenure review of a faculty member at any time with cause;
Prohibiting postsecondary institutions from using discriminatory political filters, including political loyalty oaths and DEI statements, in the hiring process.”
“Requiring preeminent state research universities to include annual research expenditures of $50 million or more for STEM-related occupations, businesses, or industry partners in Florida that are employing Florida residents;
Requiring the Board of Governors (BOG) to align universities’ missions to education for citizenship of the constitutional republic and Florida’s existing and emerging workforce needs;
Providing additional responsibilities and clarifications for FSU’s Florida Institute of Politics, including renaming it the Florida Institute for Governance and Civics; and Providing additional responsibilities and clarifications for FIU’s Adam Smith Center for the Study of Economic Freedom.”
The New York Times reported on DeSantis’s aggressive attack on higher education as part of his cynical use of culture war tactics, which build his base nationally.
The DeSantis-controlled board of New College fired its president, English professor Patricia Okker, who was appointed in 2021.
While expressing her love for both the college and its students, Dr. Okker called the move a hostile takeover. “I do not believe that students are being indoctrinated here at New College,” she said. “They are taught, they read Marx and they argue with Marx. They take world religions, they do not become Buddhists in February and turn into Christians in March.”
Governor DeSantis also announced on Tuesday that he had asked the Legislature to immediately free up $15 million to recruit new faculty and provide scholarships for New College….
The shake-up of New College, which also included the election of a new board chairwoman, may be ongoing and dramatic, given the new six board members appointed by Mr. DeSantis.
They include Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at Manhattan Institute who is known for his vigorous attacks on “critical race theory,” an academic concept that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions.
At the time of his appointment, Mr. Rufo, who lives and works in Washington State, tweeted that he was “recapturing” higher education.
Another new board member is Eddie Speir, who runs a Christian private school in Florida. He had recommended in a Substack posting before the meeting that the contracts of all the school’s faculty and staff be canceled.
The other new appointees include Matthew Spalding, dean of the Washington, D.C., campus of Hillsdale College, a private college in Michigan known for its conservative and Christian orientations. An aide to the governor has said that Hillsdale, which says it offers a classical education, is widely regarded as the governor’s model for remaking New College.
In addition to the governor’s six new appointees, the university system’s board of governors recently named a seventh member, Ryan T. Anderson, the head of a conservative think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which applies the Judeo-Christian tradition to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics. His selection was viewed as giving Mr. DeSantis a majority vote on the 13-member board.
The plan seems clear: Fire faculty who teach “identity” courses or anything “woke,” drive away the students, who wanted the progressive approach that New College offered, and turn the college into the Florida branch of Hillsdale College.
Governor Ron DeSantis hates the fact that there is a progressive public college called New College that openly teaches diversity, equity, inclusion, feminist studies, ethnic studies, and gay studies. That’s WOKE, and he vowed to crush anything WOKE.
He named 6 conservatives to the 13-member board, and the board of the state university system added another, meaning that Rightwingers are in charge. A hard-right board needs a hard-right president, and they got one.
DeSantis is showing how to stamp out ideas he doesn’t like, with power, not subtlety. Is he a fascist or is he pretending?
A new board of trustees at New College of Florida intends to name Richard Corcoran as its next President.
Corcoran, a former House Speaker, served as Gov. Ron DeSantis’ first Education Commissioner.
Carlos Trujillo, president and founder of Continental Strategy, revealed the plans in a letter to clients and colleges.
“We are beyond excited to announce that one of our Partners, former Department of Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, will be returning to higher education to serve as the Interim — and hopeful permanent — President of the New College of Florida, in Sarasota,” Trujillo wrote.
“This move comes as part of Gov. DeSantis ongoing work to refocus the university on providing the most value to its students and their parents.”
The news comes hours before the first board meeting since DeSantis appointed six new trustees on the 13-member board. The State University System Board of Governors also appointed a new trustee with a similar conservative think tank background.
Of note, work of Corcoran’s apparent hire comes before any news of current President Patricia Okker’s future with the school. Eddie Speir, co-founder of Inspiration Academy, wrote a blog post this weekend promising to call for Okker to be renamed as interim President and to terminate all faculty and staff before deciding who still fit in the new vision for the college.
While Florida’s Sunshine Law requires all decisions by the board to be made in publicly noticed meetings, Trujillo treats the matter like a done deal.
“The selection of Richard distinguishes our firm as a leader in innovation and strategic solutions for the clients we serve. We look forward to finding new synergies that can better serve our current clients and ensure their goals are made a reality,” his letter reads.
Christopher Mathias wrote at Huffington Post about a group called Dissident Homeschool that provides resources for parents who want to teach their children to be Nazis. Through research and inquiry, he found the names of the couple who administer the site. Many of the states enacting voucher plans include payments for homeschooling. If you live in one of those states, your tax dollars might be subsidizing the training of Nazis.
Please read the entire article. It’s too long to repost in its entirety. It is awful that parents would do this, and worse that it is subsidized by public funds in many state voucher plans.
Mathias writes:
On Nov. 5, 2021, a married couple calling themselves “Mr. and Mrs. Saxon” appeared on the neo-Nazi podcast “Achtung Amerikaner” to plug a new project: a social media channel dedicated to helping American parents home-school their children.
“We are so deeply invested into making sure that that child becomes a wonderful Nazi,” Mrs. Saxon told the podcast’s host. “And by home-schooling, we’re going to get that done.”
The Saxons said they launched the “Dissident Homeschool” channel on Telegram after years of searching for and developing “Nazi-approved material” for their own home-schooled children — material they were eager to share.
The Dissident Homeschool channel — which now has nearly 2,500 subscribers — is replete with this material, including ready-made lesson plans authored by the Saxons on various subjects, like Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee (a “grand role model for young, white men”) and Martin Luther King Jr. (“the antithesis of our civilization and our people”).
There are copywork assignments available for parents to print out, so that their children can learn cursive by writing out quotes from Adolf Hitler. There are recommended reading lists with bits of advice like “do not give them Jewish media content,” and there are tips for ensuring that home-schooling parents are in “full compliance with the law” so that “the state” doesn’t interfere.
The Saxons also frequently update their followers on their progress home-schooling their own children. In one since-deleted post to Telegram, they posted an audio message of their kids shouting “Sieg Heil” — the German phrase for “hail victory” that was used by the Nazis.
Over the past year, the Dissident Homeschool channel has become a community for like-minded fascists who see home schooling as integral to whites wresting control of America. The Saxons created this community while hiding behind a fake last name, but HuffPost has reviewed evidence indicating they are Logan and Katja Lawrence of Upper Sandusky, Ohio. Logan, until earlier this week, worked for his family’s insurance company while Katja taught the kids at home.
The Anonymous Comrades Collective, a group of anti-fascist researchers, first uncovered evidence suggesting the Lawrences are behind Dissident Homeschool. HuffPost has verified the collective’s research.
The Lawrences did not respond to repeated requests for comment made via phone calls, text messages and emails. A HuffPost reporter also left a message in the Dissident Homeschool channel asking Mr. and Mrs. Saxon for comment about the Anonymous Comrades Collective’s research. That message was immediately deleted by the channel’s administrators, who then disabled the channel’s comment and chat functions.
A short time later, Katja Lawrence deleted her Facebook page.
Although the Lawrences will now surely face some public scorn and accountability, it’s likely their neo-Nazi curriculum is legal. A concerted, decades-long campaign by right-wing Christian groups to deregulate home schooling has afforded parents wide latitude in how they teach their kids — even if that means indoctrinating them with explicit fascism.
Meanwhile major right-wing figures are increasingly promoting home schooling as a way to save children from alleged “wokeness” — or liberal ideas about race and gender — in public and private schools. As extreme as the Dissident Homeschool channel is, the propaganda it shares targeting the American education system is just a more explicit and crass articulation of talking points made by Fox News hosts or by major figures in the Republican Party.
“Without homeschooling our children,” Mrs. Saxon once wrote, “our children are left defenseless to the schools and the Gay Afro Zionist scum that run them….”
Nazi Groomers
Mr. and Mrs. Saxon appeared to be thrilled to see their Dissident Homeschool channel gain a larger following. When the channel reached 1,000 subscribers, Mrs. Saxon posted a Nazi-era photo from Germany of uniformed schoolchildren throwing up fascist salutes. “It fills my heart with joy to know there is such a strong base of homeschoolers and homeschool-interested national socialists,” she wrote to mark the occasion. “Hail victory.”
Mrs. Saxon does the bulk of the posting in Dissident Homeschool, and developed extensive lesson plans that other neo-Nazi parents could use for their children. These lesson plans — about Christopher Columbus, the history of Thanksgiving and German Appreciation Day, as well as a “math assignment” about “crime statistics” that is meant to teach kids which “demographics to be cautious around” — are deeply racist.
One lesson plan about Martin Luther King Jr. tells parents to teach their kids that the revered civil rights leader was “a degenerate anti-white criminal whose life’s work was to make it impossible for white communities to protect their own way of life and keep their people safe from black crime.”
“Typically speaking,” Mrs. Saxon wrote in a post, “whites build societies whereas blacks destroy them.”
Included in the lesson plan is a copywork assignment for parents to print out, so that their kids can practice cursive while writing out a racist quote by George Lincoln Rockwell, the infamous American neo-Nazi.
NBC reports that North Dakota may impose a ban on sexually explicit books, especially those that refer to gender identity, on public libraries. Librarians who ignore the proposed ban will be subject to 30 days in jail. Since the bill was introduced by the House Majority Leader, it may pass.
Books containing “sexually explicit” content — including depictions of sexual or gender identity — would be banned from North Dakota public libraries under legislation that state lawmakers began considering Tuesday.
The GOP-dominated state House Judiciary Committee heard arguments but did not take a vote on the measure, which applies to visual depictions of “sexually explicit” content and proposes up to 30 days imprisonment for librarians who refuse to remove the offending books….
Library Director Christine Kujawa at Bismarck Veterans Memorial Public Library said the library has a book with two little hamsters on the cover. At the end of the book, the hamsters get married, and they are both male.
“It’s a cute book,” Kujawa said — but it would be considered pornography under the bill because the book includes gender identity.
Facing criminal charges for keeping books on shelves is “something I never thought I would have to consider during my career as a librarian,” Kujawa added.
In addition to banning depictions of “sexual identity” and “gender identity,” the measure specifies 10 other things that library books cannot visually depict, including “sexual intercourse,” “sexual preference” and “sexual perversion,” — though it does not define any of those terms. The proposal does not apply to books that have “serious artistic significance” or “materials used in science courses,” among other exceptions.
Thanks to Christine Langhoff for suggesting this article.
What’s going on in Florida? Governor DeSantis thinks that he should control what is taught in all public schools and in public higher education. He wants to make sure that everyone is exposed only to approved thoughts, his thoughts. He told all the state colleges and universities to report what they are spending on diversity, of which he disapproves. He has made it illegal to teach about racism, which he thinks is synonymous with critical race theory.
To understand Ron DeSantis and his ideology, you should first study critical race theory.
The presidents of Florida’s 28 state and community colleges said in a statement on Wednesday that they would identify and eliminate, by February 1, any academic requirement or program “that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality.”
The unusual statement comes on the heels of a request by the office of the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, for public colleges and universities to submit comprehensive lists of their spending related to diversity initiatives and critical race theory. It’s unclear if Wednesday’s announcement is directly related to that request.
The presidents’ joint statement is unclear. Read into it what you will.
What is disturbing is the stench of thought control. I am gobsmacked by DeSantis’ total disregard for academic freedom and the First Amendment. Day after day, he chips away at norms, seeking the power to censor ideas he doesn’t like. Of course he goes after public schools and public higher education. But as he showed in his smack down of Disney, he’s quite willing to give orders to private corporations as well.
He appears to be growing into nativism, fascism, authoritarianism. It comes naturally to him.
Just in case there was any doubt about what Governor DeSantis and Florida legislature banned when they outlawed any discussion of “critical race theory,” that doubt has been resolved. They do not want schools and teachers to acknowledge race, racism, or the very existence of people of color in the United States. Sight unseen, the DOE has banned an AP course on African American studies. The Department claimed that the content of the course is historically inaccurate and violates state law, even though the Department has never seen the course syllabus.
The Miami Herald reported today:
Without a detailed explanation, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has rejected a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies for high school students, broadly claiming it violates state law and that it “lacks educational value.”
When asked for specifics on the content, the Florida Department of Education did not respond, making it unclear what items the state believes are unlawful or objectionable.
“In the future, should College Board be willing to come back to the table with lawful, historically accurate content, FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion,” the state wrote in a letter to the College Board, the company that administers the course as well as other interdisciplinary courses and the SAT exam.
The Advanced Placement program is the first course in African American studies to be offered by the College Board. It would allow high school students to earn credits and advanced placement at many colleges across the country.
The course has been in development for more than a decade, and it focuses not just in history, but explores the “vital contributions and experiences of African Americans” in literature, the arts, political science, geography and science, according to the College Board. A syllabus is not yet publicly available.
Ellie Honig and friends have a podcast called Cafe Insider. It offers insights into current politics. In this free edition, the question is why Attorney General Merrick Garland is moving so slowly to prosecute the planners of the 1/6 insurrection, one of the biggest federal crimes in U.S. history.
Note From Elie: DOJ and The Cost of Getting There Second
Cassidy Hutchinson is sworn in by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol on June 28, 2022. (Photo by Stefani Reynolds / AFP)
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Cassidy Hutchinson is the perfect witness for a potential prosecution of Donald Trump. She had insider access as an aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; she was inside the West Wing during the frantic days leading up to January 6, and then as the Capitol attack went down that fateful afternoon, two years ago today. Her testimony is damning to Trump and others, and is corroborated in key respects by independent evidence. She is a compelling figure, at once likable, sympathetic, and believable. She is a prosecutor’s dream.
Also: Cassidy Hutchinson lied to federal investigators, under penalty of perjury.
This is not a matter of opinion or debate. It is a fact, openly admitted now by Hutchinson herself. And it’s not even Hutchinson’s fault, not entirely. I place much of the blame on Justice Department prosecutors who twiddled their thumbs for far too long and let themselves get beaten to the punch by the January 6 Committee. This is the cost of DOJ’s dilatory, meandering, hand-wringing approach to its investigation of the real power sources behind the coup attempt. This is the cost of getting there second.
During the first year-and-a-half or so after January 6, the Justice Department focused its prosecutorial efforts on the people who physically stormed the Capitol. Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed at his February 2021 confirmation hearing to “begin with the people on the ground and we work our way up.”
Of course, DOJ had to prosecute those who breached the Capitol and, for the most part, the feds have done an admirable job on these 900-plus cases.
The problem, however, was with Garland’s bureaucratic, bottom-up approach. Yes, prosecutors sometimes do start at ground level and work up the chain of command – but aggressive prosecutors know you don’t have to do it that way. In fact, circumstances sometimes give prosecutors a direct shot at the upper echelons of power, and there’s no reason to refrain from going after the bosses until after you’re done with the riff-raff. To put it in concrete terms: DOJ absolutely could have identified and talked to Hutchinson, Pat Cipollone, Marc Short, and other key White House insiders back in, say, mid-2021. The Justice Department has now spoken with all these folks, and other well-situated witnesses, but it didn’t get around to them until mid- to late-2022.
In the meantime, while DOJ was focused exclusively on the guys in face paint and rhino horns, the January 6 Committee – armed with less powerful investigative tools and resources– got to Hutchinson first. In February 2022 – before she gave her blockbuster, nationally broadcast testimony in June 2022 – she testified behind closed doors. The Committee asked Hutchinson whether she knew anything about a dispute on January 6 between Trump and Secret Service agents, who refused his command to take him to the Capitol. Hutchinson testified that she had heard of no such thing. At this point, Hutchinson was represented by a lawyer named Stefan Passantino, a former Trump White House ethics lawyer (yes: ethics) who was being paid by Trump’s “Save America” political action committee. (Put a pin in this; we’ll get back to Passantino in a bit).
This testimony by Hutchinson, given under penalty of perjury, was false. Months later, in June 2022, she testified publicly that she had heard that Trump had lashed out physically and verbally at Secret Service agents, at one point physically lunging for the steering wheel of the presidential SUV. In a subsequent deposition in September 2022, Hutchinson admitted that she had lied to the Committee the first time around. After her original false testimony, Hutchinson was racked with worry; she said to Passantino, “Stefan, I’m f****d. I just lied… I lied. I lied, I lied, I lied.” (That’s four “I lieds,” for those keeping count.)
There are perfectly understandable and defensible reasons why Hutchinson lied in her first deposition. As she later explained to the Committee, she was under enormous personal and financial pressure to hew to the party line and avoid testifying in any way that might harm Trump. According to Hutchinson, Passantino reinforced that perception, telling her that, “We just want to focus on protecting the President.” Worse, Hutchinson testified that when she told Passantino during prep sessions about the incident between Trump and the Secret Service, Passantino told her, “No, no, no, no, no… We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to talk about that.” (That’s five “nos,” for those keeping count.) Passantino said she could simply claim she did not recall, and there’s no way the Committee could know what she did or did not remember. Passantino contests Hutchinson’s account and starkly denies any wrongdoing.
While this was all going down, Garland was asleep at the wheel. When Hutchinson testified publicly in June 2022, federal prosecutors reportedly were “astonished” as they sat on their couches, watching on television along with the rest of us in the general public.
So here’s the problem now for DOJ (and the Fulton County DA). Hutchinson, as vital a witness as she is, is also damaged goods. She’s probably not fatally undermined but, make no mistake, defense lawyers will have a field day cross-examining her:
You lied to the Committee, didn’t you? (Yes)
You knew you were testifying to the United States House of Representatives, right? (I knew that)
And you knew you were testifying under penalty of perjury, right? (That’s right)
Just like you’re under penalty of perjury now at this trial? (Yes).
But you lied. (Correct)
You knew you could get prosecuted and go to federal prison if you lied, didn’t you? (I did)
Yet you lied, anyway. (Yes)
“I lied, I lied, I lied, I lied.” Those were your words. (Right)
By the way: you haven’t been prosecuted for perjury, have you? Even though you lied? (No, I haven’t)
These prosecutors did you a favor. They could have thrown you in prison, but they gave you a free pass, didn’t they? (Well, I guess I haven’t been charged with anything)
But you did commit perjury. (I suppose so)
Again: I find Hutchinson, on the whole, to be remarkably credible. I believe the substance of her testimony, and I believe that she lied only because of pressure applied by Passantino and others in Trumpworld. But there’s no denying it: this line of cross-examination will hurt.
Yes, Hutchinson has a plausible explanation why she originally lied to the Committee. I’ve seen plenty of witnesses in her situation, and it’s common and understandable for a person who feels financial or political or personal pressure to shade the truth. Prosecutors will surely make this argument if they ever call Hutchinson as a witness and need to rehabilitate her. But it’s an unforced error by DOJ. The Justice Department got beat to the punch, and now they needlessly have to fight a battle over Hutchinson’s credibility. By their inaction, Justice Department prosecutors have handed defense lawyers a gift.
Garland boosters sometimes argue: oh, but he is the humble tortoise, the slow but steady technician who lacks flash but wins the race in the end. Sounds reassuring, but this is apologist pablum. Speed absolutely matters. There’s a reason why prosecutors fight like mad to get to key witnesses first, and then protect them against having to testify in other settings: to prevent a Hutchinson-like scenario where, through no real fault of the witness herself, she winds up giving testimony that undermines her credibility down the line.
As I’ve noted many times in this space, prosecutors may still indict Trump, someday. But Garland’s own delay will make the ultimate job – securing a conviction – even more difficult than it needed to be.
Michelle Goldberg, a columnist for the New York Times, writes here about Governor Ron DeSantis’s bold move to crush a progressive public college in Florida by naming right wingers to its board. DeSantis boasts that Florida is the state where “woke” goes to die, so of course he must take control of this “woke” college and destroy it. He’s showing his fascistic instincts. Whatever he can’t control, whatever dissents from his hardline views must die.
She writes:
New College of Florida has a reputation for being the most progressive public college in the state. X González — a survivor of the Parkland school shooting who, as Emma González, became a prominent gun control activist — recently wrote of their alma mater, “In the queer space of New College, changing your pronouns, name or presentation is a nonevent.” In The Princeton Review’s ranking of the best public colleges and universities for “making an impact” — measured by things like student engagement, community service and sustainability efforts — New College comes in third.
Naturally, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida wants to demolish it, at least as it currently exists. On Friday, he announced six new appointments to New College’s 13-member board of trustees, including Chris Rufo, who orchestrated the right’s attack on critical race theory, and Matthew Spalding, a professor and dean at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school in Michigan with close ties to Donald Trump. (A seventh member will soon be appointed by Florida’s Board of Governors, which is full of DeSantis allies.)
The new majority’s plan, Rufo told me just after his appointment was announced, is to transform New College into a public version of Hillsdale. “We want to provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values,” he said.
The fight over the future of New College is about more than just the fate of this small school in Sarasota. For DeSantis, it’s part of a broader quest to crush any hint of progressivism in public education, a quest he’d likely take national if he ever became president. For Rufo, a reconstructed New College would serve as a model for conservatives to copy all over the country. “If we can take this high-risk, high-reward gambit and turn it into a victory, we’re going to see conservative state legislators starting to reconquer public institutions all over the United States,” he said. Should he prevail, it will set the stage for an even broader assault on the academic freedom of every instructor whose worldview is at odds with the Republican Party.
Rufo often talks about the “long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by the German socialist Rudi Dutschke in 1967 but frequently attributed to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Thwarted in their hope of imminent revolution, the new left of Dutschke’s generation sought instead to bore into political and cultural institutions, working within the system to change the basic assumptions of Western society. Rufo’s trying, he said, to “steal the strategies and the principles of the Gramscian left, and then to organize a kind of counterrevolutionary response to the long march through the institutions.”
This grandiose project has several parts. Rufo has been unparalleled in fanning public education culture wars, whipping up anger first against critical race theory and then against teaching on L.G.B.T.Q. issues. This year, he is turning his attention to diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and, with his colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, will soon unveil model legislation to abolish such programs at state schools. In New College, he sees a chance to create a new type of educational institution to replace those he’s trying to destroy. When we spoke, he compared his plans to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
Later this month, Rufo said, he’ll travel to New College with a “landing team” of board members, lawyers, consultants and political allies. “We’re going to be conducting a top-down restructuring,” he said, with plans to “design a new core curriculum from scratch” and “encode it in a new academic master plan.” Given that Hillsdale, the template for this reimagined New College, worked closely with the Trump administration to create a “patriotic education” curriculum, this master plan will likely be heavy on American triumphalism. Rufo hopes to move fast, saying that the school’s academic departments “are going to look very different in the next 120 days.”
The values of the people who are already at New College are of little concern to Rufo, who, like several other new trustees, doesn’t live in Florida. Speaking of current New College students who chose it precisely for its progressive culture, Rufo said: “We’re happy to work with them to make New College a great place to continue their education. Or we’d be happy to work with them to help them find something that suits them better.”
Of course, as both leftist revolutionaries and colonialists have learned over the years, replacing one culture with another can be harder than anticipated. New College students may not go quietly. Steve Shipman, a professor of physical chemistry and president of the faculty union, points out that tenured professors are covered by a collective bargaining agreement, which makes it hard to fire them unless there’s cause. People like Rufo “are making statements to make impact,” Shipman said. “And I really don’t know how viable some of those statements are on the ground.”
We’ll soon find out. “We anticipate that this is going to be a process that involves conflict,” said Rufo.
Diane Ravitch's blog 