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The Lever: Who Is Putting Up Dark Money to Eliminate Abortion Rights?

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2023 //
13

The Lever is a site created by investigative journalist David Sirota. Sirota was a speech writer for Senator Bernie Sanders and co-writer of the award-winning film “Don’t Look Up.” In this post, he reveals the Dark Money behind state-level efforts to get rid of abortion rights. Based on what happened in Kansas, anti-abortion forces will try to block referenda in the future; letting voters decide defeats their cause, just as it does with vouchers, which never win state referenda. In Kansas, their deceptive tactic was to confuse voters about whether to vote yes or no. Most women do not want to abandon a right they had for almost fifty years.

The dark money network led by conservative Supreme Court architect Leonard Leo financed the nonprofit that bankrolled a misleading text message campaign pretending a Kansas ballot measure would “give women a choice,” when it actually would have eliminated state abortion protections.

New tax documents hint at how Leo’s network has been quietly working to influence abortion policy in the states utilizing his historic $1.6 billion dark money fund, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade and ending federal protections for abortion rights. As President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser, Leo helped select three of the six justices making up the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority.

Leo’s network donated $1.7 million to CatholicVote Civic Action, a conservative Catholic advocacy group, between July 2021 and June 2022, according to a new tax return obtained by The Lever.

The contribution was made around the time that CatholicVote Civic Action was funding a campaign supporting a Kansas ballot measure designed to eliminate protections for abortion rights in the state constitution. The ballot measure would have affirmed “there is no Kansas constitutional right to abortion” and given state lawmakers “the right to pass laws to regulate abortion.”

Do Right PAC, a political action committee funded by CatholicVote Civic Action, sent text messages to Kansas voters a day before the election last summer giving the false impression that a “yes” vote on the ballot measure would “give women a choice” and “protect women’s health,” when its passage would have ended state protections for abortion rights.

The PAC also paid for TV ads featuring Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, in which he claimed that the amendment would “let Kansas decide what we do on abortion, not judges and not D.C. politicians.”

A spokesperson for Leo did not respond to questions from The Lever.

Former Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), a senior political advisor to CatholicVote Civic Action, led Do Right PAC. CatholicVote Civic Action donated $500,000 of the $556,000 raised by the PAC last year.

Huelskamp did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite these efforts, the Kansas initiative failed decisively, 41 to 59 percent — offering an early preview of how anti-abortion efforts would flounder in the 2022 state elections. While Kansas Republicans recently overrodeDemocratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s vetoes of some anti-abortion measures, abortion remains legal in the state up to 22 weeks.

The Leo network’s donation to CatholicVote Civic Action came via the Concord Fund, the conservative advocacy group that spent tens of millions to confirm the three Supreme Court nominees whom Leo helped select as former Trump’s judicial adviser.

Tax records show the Concord Fund raised $29 million between July 2021 and June 2022. All of that money appears to have come from Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust. As The Lever and ProPublica reported last year, this trust was the recipient of an unprecedented $1.6 billion cash infusion courtesy of Chicago surge protector magnate Barre Seid.

The new tax documents show how Leo is using the Concord Fund to imprint his conservative vision on both politics and policy.

The disclosure shows the Concord Fund donated $3 million to One Nation, the Senate GOP’s dark money arm. One Nation, which supports Republican Senate candidates, aired ads supporting Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation in 2018.

The Concord Fund separately donated nearly $1 million to the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion advocacy group that pressed the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. The organization has actively backed voter suppression laws passed by Republican lawmakers around the country.

Records show the Concord Fund also donated $500,000 to Advancing American Freedom, a dark money group chaired by former Vice President Mike Pence that is serving as his “campaign-in-waiting” in advance of a potential 2024 presidential bid, according to Politico.

In 2021, Advancing American Freedom filed an amicus brief, or friend-of-the-court filing, pressing the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade — warning that “unfettered access to abortion” has led to “declining formation of families with accompanying increases in family instability and single parent households (many living in poverty).”

This year, the organization filed a brief unsuccessfully urging the high court to approve a Texas district court ruling designed to ban a commonly-used abortion pill. The Supreme Court blocked the lower court’s decision in April, allowing an appeals court to consider the case first, though it’s widely expected that the case will eventually end up back at the high court.

The Concord Fund has long been the chief financier of the Republican Attorneys General Association, which elects GOP attorneys general, and donated $6.5 million to the group last election cycle, according to data compiled by CQ Roll Call’s Political Moneyline.

Those attorneys general regularly bring cases and file briefs urging the Supreme Court to issue precedent-shattering decisions. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, for instance, led the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case at the Supreme Court, by which justices overturned federal protections for abortion rights.

The Concord Fund additionally reported donating $750,000 to the lobbying arm of the Foundation for Government Accountability, which has led the fight to institute new and expanded work requirements for a range of social safety net programs.

President Joe Biden’s recent debt ceiling deal with House Republicans includes some of those expanded work requirements, at the urging of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Fraud, Gender, Kansas

Dan Rather: CNN Was Wrong to Let Trump Spew Lies on Air

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2023 //
25

Dan Rather has had an illustrious career as a journalist. He is now blogging at Steady. He was annoyed that CNN gave Donald Trump a platform to repeat his lies, to bulldoze the interviewer, and to play his usual demagogic role. After Trump was elected in 2016, CNN was widely criticized for giving Trump so much air time, more than any other network or cable station did. CNN sometimes covered his rallies live and at length, a courtesy not extended to other candidates. By some estimates, CNN gave Trump $2 billion of free on-air time.

He writes:

Donald Trump is a liar. He is a bigot, a misogynist, and a deadbeat. He has just been found by a jury to be a sexual abuser. He faces multiple other serious criminal investigations. He spurred a violent insurrection. He has repeatedly demonstrated complete disdain for the foundations of American democracy. The list of traits that makes this man unfit for the presidency fills pages.

And yet despite these debased qualities, or maybe (depressingly) because of them, he is immensely popular with many Americans. They cheer on his worst impulses. They bask in his hatred. They are fueled by the danger he poses to this nation. They have propelled him once again to be the favorite for the Republican presidential nomination.

And although many Americans don’t want to believe it, at this moment, he is a real threat to return to the presidency.

Among other things, Trump is and always has been a performer, and performers, no matter how vile their message, crave and thrive in the spotlight.

Last night, CNN gave Trump not only a spotlight, but a platform and a rabid crowd of cheering supporters. He made the most of it, as chiling and distressing as that might be.

Those who have made up their minds on Trump — those who love him and hate him — undoubtedly found plenty of justification for their opinions watching, ignoring, or doom scrolling his performance.

But what about the casual observer, the disaffected, the persuadable? Trump knows how to command a stage. He knows how to go on the attack. And the format CNN gift-wrapped for him allowed him to score a mark.

There is a school of thought that Trump is so toxic that the more America sees of him, the less they like him. And there were moments last night that could easily be plugged into effective attack ads against him. But what we should have learned from 2016 and the years that followed is that people as shameless as Trump do not measure their success by metrics of civility. It’s about demonstrating primal dominance, and that instinct delivered him the presidency once before. And even though he lost reelection, he remade American politics in ways with which we are still contending.

Trump played the part CNN surely knew he would play. What did they hope to get from normalizing this demeaning and dangerous demagogue? Ratings? Relevance? A tack to the mythic “middle” in line with new ownership and direction? Trying to become some new version of Fox News? Is any of this worth endangering the health and security of our country?

When CNN announced that they would give Donald Trump more than an hour of free prime time for a “town hall” (more like a town maul), it was clear what was going to happen.

Trump would lie, and bully, and insult, and lie, and lie, and lie some more. That is who he is. It is who he has always been.

There is no moderating a discussion with Trump. It is nearly impossible to engage in dialogue by asking probing follow-up questions. Because he will just ignore them. And lie and lie and lie. And this is especially true when he has an audience that seemed hand-picked to double as a campaign rally — hooting and hollering with approval the more he launched into his mendacious invective.

The press will have to figure out how to cover Trump as he stomps his way toward renomination. Liars should not be given open mics in formats where they can filibuster falsehoods unchallenged. Edit what he says with context. Do not sugarcoat how untrue many of his rantings are.

America rejected Trump in 2020. He is further weakened by the court cases he faces. But he remains a potent force. He will get his message out. Let us hope the press will analyze it, not amplify it.

The future of not only American journalism, but of America itself, will be shaped by how Trump is covered going forward.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Trump

Justin Parmenter: Will North Carolina Adopt the Hillsdale 1776 “Patriotic” Curriculum?

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2023 //
13

The blog of the Network for Public Education posted Justin Parmenter’s concern about the latest meddling into education by the state’s Republican-dominated General Assembly. The NPE blog is curated by the estimable Peter Greene. Justin Parmenter is an NBCT high school teacher in North Carolina.

Teacher Justin Parmenter monitors anti-public ed shenanigans in North Carolina. He explains in a recent post a bill to force adoption of Hillsdale College’s “patriotic” curriculum.

Parmenter writes:

Legislation filed in the North Carolina General Assembly last week would authorize Beaufort County Public Schools to ignore the state’s standard course of study and instead teach a controversial social studies curriculum developed by a conservative Michigan college with close ties to former President Donald Trump.

The bill was filed by Rep. Keith Kidwell, who represents Beaufort, Dare, Pamlico and Hyde counties.

The curriculum Kidwell is proposing be used in Beaufort County’s public schools was created by Michigan-based Hillsdale College after white fragility over Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project prompted former president Donald Trump to issue an executive order setting up what he called a “patriotic education” commission.

Trump said at the time that the commission was intended to counter “hateful lies” being taught to children in American schools which he said constituted “a form of child abuse.”

Trump appointed Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn to chair the 1776 Commission near the end of his presidency in 2020.

The commission’s report, published on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January 2021, was widely criticized by actual historians as a whitewashed take on American history for its downplaying of Founding Fathers’ support for slavery and quoting Dr. Martin Luther King out of context in order to create a falsely rosy view of race in the United States, among other reasons.

Hillsdale College released the “1776 curriculum” in July 2021. In its “Note to Teachers,” the curriculum reminds anyone who will be using the curriculum to teach children that “America is an exceptionally good country” and ends with the exhortation to “Learn it, wonder at it, love it, and teach so your students will, too.”

In North Carolina, current state law gives the State Board of Education the authority to develop a standard course of study which each school district is required to follow. The state’s current social studies standards were adopted in 2021 over objections of Republican state board members who said the standards portrayed America in a negative light and amounted to critical race theory.

Kidwell’s bill comes just days after Representative Tricia Cotham’s party switch handed North Carolina Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the legislature. That means there’s a good chance this Trump-inspired, whitewashed version of American history will end up on desks in Beaufort County, and there’s no reason to think other counties won’t follow suit.

According to DPI’s Statistical Profile, more than half of Beaufort County’s 5,821 public school students are students of color. Those students deserve to have their stories and their ancestors’ stories told. Those students and all students deserve to learn real American history, warts and all, not a watered-down, Donald Trump-conceived version designed to make white people feel comfortable.

Read the full post here.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Curriculum, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Lies, North Carolina, Racism, Republicans

Philadelphia: Charter School Rigged Admissions by Zip Code

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2023 //
9

Privatizers have boasted for years that charter schools are superior to public schools because students should not be confined to schools by their zip code (I.e. their neighborhood). But a charter school in Philadelphia used student zip codes to exclude kids from their “lottery.” The lottery was rigged to keep out kids from certain neighborhoods.

Each of the 800-plus Philadelphia families who applied for seats at a nationally recognized charter school thought their children had a fair shot at a spot in this year’s upcoming freshman class. Pennsylvania law guarantees it.

But some had no chance at all.

A top executive at Franklin Towne Charter High School said this year’s lottery was fixed, with students from certain zip codes shut out, and others eliminated because they — or their older siblings — exhibited academic or behavioral problems. Some children were also excluded because Franklin Towne’s chief executive didn’t want to take anyone from a particular charter elementary school, in the event he might have to pay for their transportation.

Patrick Field, Franklin Towne’s chief academic officer and an administrator at the school for 17 years, said the lottery tampering was ordered by Joseph Venditti, the longtime former CEO. Venditti abruptly resigned Feb. 27, citing health reasons, after Field alerted the charter’s board chair about the lottery issues…

The Inquirer reviewed a summary of the January lottery results showing that 205 students of 813 who applied were offered seats. The accepted students came from 22 zip codes; in 17 other city zip codes, none of the students who applied got in.

It is astronomically unlikely — with odds of 1,296 trillion — that no students would be selected from those zip codes if Franklin Towne conducted a random lottery as is required, an Inquirer analysis found.

Field, who is still employed by Franklin Towne, said he chose to alert authorities and come forward to The Inquirer because children are being cheated, and becausetaxpayers are footing the bill. Charters are independently run but publicly funded.

“As an administrator in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I don’t have a choice,” Field said. “As an ethical person, I’m just heartbroken that we’re doing this at a school that I’ve given so much of my life to.”

A high school of 1,300 in Bridesburg, Franklin Towne boasts strong academics, with a 97% graduation rate in 2021. It previously was named a National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education.

The charter also has fielded allegations over its enrollment practices. Though it’s required to admit students from across the city, Franklin Towne’s enrollment is primarily white — a demographic mismatch in a primarily Black school district — a concern raised in 2018 at a School Reform Commission meeting. It has previously been accused of discriminating against special-education students.

Mercedes Schneider reviewed the story and found that it sounded “fishy.” A mostly-white school in a mostly-black district? And no one knew? The selection process at this charter school has been funny for a long time.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Cheating, Corruption, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

The “Godfather of AI” Is Afraid of His Creation

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2023 //
37

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, widely credited as the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” quit his job at Google and let the world know that he regrets what he launched. where once he thought that AI had great potential to improve our lives, he now worries that it might be a grave danger to human civilization.

The New York Times reports:

Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technologythat became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.

On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.

Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than a decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work…

Dr. Hinton’s journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades. Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education.

But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity…

After the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT in March, more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers signed an open lettercalling for a six-month moratorium on the development of new systems because A.I. technologies pose “profound risks to society and humanity.”

Several days later, 19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society, released their own letter warning of the risks of A.I. That group included Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft, which has deployed OpenAI’s technology across a wide range of products, including its Bing search engine.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Evil, Failure, Fake, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, Technology

Politico: Rightwing Candidates Trounced in School Board Elections in Illinois and Wisconsin

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2023 //
12

Politico reported that rightwing cultural warriors lost most school board elections, despite their big-money backers. Voters in Illinois and Wisconsin were not swayed by fear-mongering about critical race theory, LGBT issues, and other spurious claims of the extremists. These results should encourage the Democratic Party to challenge the attacks on public schools in the 2024 elections. An aggressive defense of public schools is good politics.

Amid all the attention on this month’s elections in Wisconsin and Illinois, one outcome with major implications for 2024 flew under the national radar: School board candidates who ran culture-war campaigns flamed out.

Democrats and teachers’ unions boasted candidates they backed in Midwestern suburbs trounced their opponents in the once-sleepy races. The winning record, they said, was particularly noticeable in elections where conservative candidates emphasized agendas packed with race, gender identity and parental involvement in classrooms.

While there’s no official overall tally of school board results in states that held an array of elections on April 4, two conservative national education groups did not dispute that their candidates posted a losing record. Liberals are now making the case that their winning bids for school board seats in Illinois and Wisconsin show they can beat back Republican attacks on divisive education issues.

The results could also serve as a renewed warning to Republican presidential hopefuls like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis: General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe.

“Where culture war issues were being waged by some school board candidates, those issues fell flat with voters,” said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association labor union. “The takeaway for us is that parents and community members and voters want candidates who are focused on strengthening our public schools, not abandoning them.”

The results from the Milwaukee and Chicago areas are hardly the last word on the matter. Thousands more local school elections are set for later this year in some two dozen states. They are often low turnout, low profile, and officially nonpartisan affairs, and conservatives say they are competing aggressively.

“We lost more than we won” earlier this month, said Ryan Girdusky, founder of the conservative 1776 Project political action committee, which has ties to GOP megadonor and billionaire Richard Uihlein and endorsed an array of school board candidates this spring and during the 2022 midterms.

“But we didn’t lose everything. We didn’t get obliterated,” Girdusky told POLITICO of his group’s performance. “We still pulled our weight through, and we just have to keep on pushing forward on this.”

Labor groups and Democratic operatives are nevertheless flexing over the defeat of candidates they opposed during races that took place near Chicago, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from state Democrats and the attention of Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, and in Wisconsin. Conservative board hopefuls also saw mixed results in Missouri and Oklahoma.

Democrats hope the spring school election season validates their playbook: Coordinate with local party officials, educator unions and allied community members to identify and support candidates who wield an affirming pro-public education message — and depict competitors as hard-right extremists.

Yet despite victories in one reliably blue state and one notorious battleground, liberals are still confronting Republican momentum this year that could resemble November’s stalemated midterm results for schools and keep the state of education divided along partisan lines.

Conservative states are already carrying out sharp restrictions on classroom lessons, LGBTQ students, and library books. And they are beginning to refine their message to appeal to moderates.

Trump, DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and other Republican presidential hopefuls are leaning on school-based wedge issues to court primary voters in a crowded White House campaign.

Open the link. The wedge issues are working against the Republicans. Most people know and like their tearchers and their public schools.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Democrats, Disruption, Education Reform, Elections, Equity, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Freedom to Read, Gender, Hope, Lies, Propaganda, Race, Racism, Republicans, Supporting public schools

Secretary Cardona, NAEP Proficient Is NOT Grade Level!

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2023 //
45

For the past dozen years, since the attack on public schools went into high gear, the same lie has been trotted out again and again to defame public schools. The slanderers say that 2/3 of American students are reading “below grade level.”

At Congressional hearings on the education budget on Tuesday April 18, the same ridiculous claim was made by U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. He said that only 33% are reading at proficiency. He said this is “appalling and not acceptable for the United States. 33% of our students are reading on Grade level.” (At about 45:00).

This is nonsense. Its’s frankly appalling to hear Secretary Cardona repeating the lie spread by rightwing public school haters. He really should be briefed by officials from the National Assessment Governing Board before he testifies again.

On the NAEP (National Assessment of Educationsl Progress) tests, “proficient” does not represent grade level. Proficient is a high bar. Although the federal testing agency does not equate its achievement levels to letter grades, I would estimate (based on my seven years of experience as a member of the NAEP Governing Board) that “proficient” is about the same as an A or an A-. Do we really expect that every student merits an A? I don’t think so.

The website of the National Center on Education Statistics states clearly:

Achievement Levels

NAEP student achievement levels are performance standards that describe what students should know and be able to do. Results are reported as percentages of students performing at or above three NAEP achievement levels (NAEP Basic, NAEP Proficient, and NAEP Advanced). Students performing at or above the NAEP Proficient level on NAEP assessments demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter. It should be noted that the NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments).

Could it be any plainer? Students who score at or above NAEP Proficent “demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” Furthermore, the NAEP Proficient level “does not represent grade level proficiency.”

Would someone please tell Secretary Cardona? When he repeats the lies of the rightwing propagandists, he maligns every teacher and student in the nation.

Someone should also inform Secretary Cardona that the NAEP achievement levels are set by panels of educators and non-educators; as such, they are subjective judgments. They have been used on a trial basis for 30 years without getting definitive clearance by testing experts commissioned by Congress to review their validity. “The latest evaluation of the NAEP achievement levels was conducted by a committee convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2016. The evaluation concluded that further evidence should be gathered to determine whether the NAEP achievement levels are reasonable, valid, and informative. Accordingly, the NCES commissioner determined that the trial status of the NAEP achievement levels should be maintained at this time.”

Please, Secretary Cardona, stop saying that “only 33% of American students can read proficiently” and that “only 33% are reading at grade level.”

It’s not true.

When asked about vouchers, Secretary Cardona said he opposes them because they take money away from public schools. That’s true, but far from the whole truth. 75-80% of vouchers subsidize students who already attend private schools. They are a transfer from the public to the affluent. Kids who leave public schools to use vouchers lose academic ground, and most return to their public school within two-three years in need of help catching up. Vouchers fund religious schools that may discriminate against students, families, and staff who do not share their religion or who are gay or who have disabilities. They choose the students they want.


Furthermore, religious schools indoctrinate. Some religious schools teach fake science and history. Religious schools force taxpayers to pay for religious views they do not share.

There are many reasons to oppose vouchers but Secretary Cardona seems unaware of them. I recommend that he invite veteran voucher researcher Joshua Cowen of Michigan State University to brief him on why vouchers for religious and private schools are a pernicious and ineffective policy.

Categories Data, Education Reform, Fake News, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, NAEP, Propaganda, Rhee, Michelle, Standardized Testing

Paul Waldman: FOX “News” Is Controlled by the Monster It Created

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2023 //
3

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post shows how the FOX “personalities” lied to their audience because they were afraid the audience would go to other sites that fed the audience’s hunger for conspiracy theories. The FOX talking heads created the monster, and now they are owned by the monster. All of this is especially interesting because Dominion Voting Systems is suing FOX and others for libel, and the FOX statements show that they knew their on-air statements were lies.

On screen, Fox News personalities paint a world of clear heroes and villains, where conservatives are always strong and right and liberals are weak and wrong. But the extraordinary private communications revealed in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox show who they really are. Panicked over Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, those same hosts, and the executives who run the network, cowered in abject terror.

They feared the same monster that keeps House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) up at night, the monster that conservative media and Republican politicians created: base voters who are deluded, angry and vengeful.

McCarthy has sought to appease the beast by granting exclusive access to 44,000 hours of surveillance footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to Fox News host Tucker Carlson. But with each capitulation, McCarthy and Fox News only make the monster stronger.

To see how, begin with the Dominion lawsuit. The company, which makes election software and voting machines, alleges that Fox defamed its business by repeatedly claiming that its systems were used to steal the 2020 presidential election. To win this kind of case against a news organization, a plaintiff must show that the organization acted with “actual malice” — that it said things it knew were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. Mistakes alone are not enough.

Emails and texts sent in the days after the election appear to show exactly that. On air, Fox was spreading lies about supposed election fraud and bringing on guests without concern for their credibility, including Rudy Giuliani and GOP lawyer Sidney Powell. Meanwhile, Fox’s stars and executives privately belittled those same people and the claims they were making.

“Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson wrote in one email. Giuliani was “acting like an insane person,” host Sean Hannity declared.

At the same time, Fox News tried to suppress the truth. Reporters for the organization who corrected false claims were reprimanded and threatened. One reporter who fact-checked Powell and Giuliani was told by her boss that executives were not happy about it and that she should do a better job of “respecting our audience.” When Fox truthfully reported Joe Biden’s victory, Carlson texted his producer: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real.” When another reporter fact-checked a Trump tweet spreading lies about stolen votes, Carlson demanded that the reporter be fired.

These documents make clear not only that Fox News stars and executives think their audience is a bunch of half-wits but also that they live in fear that the audience will turn on them unless they tell viewers exactly what they want to hear regardless of the facts.

Who taught that audience to believe conspiracy theories and to assume that any unwelcome information must be a sinister lie? Fox News, of course.

Now consider Jan. 6. McCarthy knows the facts. The Capitol insurrection wasn’t a false-flag operation by antifa or the FBI. Indeed, McCarthy initially blasted Trump for his role in stirring the rioters and dismissed conspiracy theories. So why has he given exclusive access to surveillance footage to Carlson, the constant purveyor of conspiracy theories?

There’s no mystery. Carlson’s producers will comb through endless pixels to find images with which to mislead viewers: to convince them that the riot wasn’t so bad or that Trump’s supporters weren’t to blame or that the whole thing was a setup.

That will only further convince Carlson’s audience to deny the truth about Jan. 6, and punish any Republican officeholder who disagrees. As for McCarthy, will this exercise help him by making it more likely that Republicans will reinforce his thin House majority in the next election — or take the Senate or the White House? Quite the opposite. It only makes it more likely that voters will view his party as extremists and loons who are far more interested in the obsessions of a spectacularly unpopular ex-president than in the genuine problems the country faces.

Like the trembling dissemblers of Fox News, McCarthy must feel that he has no choice: Feed the beast or be eaten by it. Winning the future is an idea they cannot latch on to because they are so frantic to survive one more day.

Republican elites are not powerless. They helped make this mess and could nudge their base back toward reality if they chose. But they’re too afraid to try.

Categories Censorship, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fake News, For-Profit, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, Media, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump

Clarence Thomas, the Billionaire, and the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2023 //
19

The blog called “Misinformation Kills” usually focuses on COVID Lies and misinformation and their perpetrators. In this post, however, Dr. Alison Neitzel takes a different perspective on the money men who are undermining our democracy by capturing the courts.

She shows the outlines of a “vast rightwing conspiracy,” as described years ago by Hillary Clinton in 1998. At the time, people thought she was exaggerating. Now we know it exists.

It involves not only Harlan Crowe, the very generous benefactor of Justice Clarence Thomas, but Charles Koch and the mysterious Council on National Policy, where rightwing zealots meet and greet and plan their strategy.

Leonard Leo, the Catholic and deeply conservative leader of the Federalist society, planned the successful conquest of the U.S. Supreme Court. Donald Trump was his useful idiot.

Koch is all in for deregulation. But not when women’s reproductive rights are at issue.

Will Justice Thomas be held accountable for his unethical behavior? His benefactors will protect him. His dear personal friendship with Mr. Crowe began after Justice Thomas joined the Supreme Court. What a coincidence!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Deregulation, Education Industry, Elections, For-Profit, Fraud, Freedom, Funding

Jan Resseger: Consumerism Is Destroying the Commons

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2023 //
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Jan Resseger spent her waking years as a warrior for social justice in her church. Now she writes a brilliant and thoughtful blog.

Her recent post made me reflect on the fact that groups like “Moms for Liberty” and “Parents Defending Education” create turmoil and chaos over the issue of the day (masking, vaccines, school closings, trans kids, books about race or gender identity), then use the issues and conflict they created to demand vouchers to send their kids to schools with like-minded parents.

These Astroturf groups are funded handsomely by the Walton Family Foundation, Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, and other billionaires to act as shock troops for their paymasters.

Jan Resseger wrote recently:

I cannot even keep track of all the press coverage I have seen in the past couple of weeks about school privatization proposals under discussion in the state legislatures. And in almost all of the articles I read, the move to privatize schools is accompanied by descriptions of culture war fights about book banning, interference with curricular standards, and elimination of programs that encourage “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in public schools and public universities. I have a stack of very recent articles about Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and New Hampshire, and I am sure I have missed others.

What is the cause of today’s attack on public schools and the kind of programming that many of us believe is essential to help our children live well in our diverse society?

In her Washington Post piece about a battle between two parent groups, Concerned Taxpayersand Support Education, in Mentor, Ohio——Hannah Natanson blames COVID for the controversy: COVID Changed Parents’ View of Schools—and Ignited the Education Culture Wars.

And in a powerful report from the Network for Public Education, Merchants of Deception, political scientist Maurice Cunningham identifies the role of Astroturf parents’ groups that present themselves as though they are a spontaneous welling up of parent outrage. Even though financial support for these groups is untraceable dark money, here is how Cunningham tracks evidence that these supposedly local groups are well connected from place to place and supported by powerful, far-right political interests: “First we should watch for groups that have “grown at a pace that only a corporation’s monetary resources could manage.” Then we should identify the group’s allies to “get a better idea of the real powers behind” the organization. Additionally: “We’ll use another tool to draw telling inferences about these fronts: identification of their key vendors, such as law firms, pollsters, and public relations firms, which we’ll see are often instruments of conservative… networks… Another recurring clue… is the ‘creation story.’ A new non-profit group bursts forth with some version of claiming that two or three moms began talking over what they see as problems in schools and resolve to start a nonprofit to take on the teachers’ unions, administration, or school board. By some form of miracle, they almost immediately receive hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in funding from billionaires. Next, they find themselves gaining favorable coverage on right-wing media—Daily Caller, Breitbart, and Fox News…. ”

Of course both the disruption COVID thrust upon our communities and the use of parents by far-right groups trying to ban “WOKE” policies represent what many of us have been watching in the past couple of years. But on a deeper level, it is not a coincidence that the outrageous school board disruptions and the attempts by the far right to scrub the textbooks, and the legislatures considering parents’ bill of rights legislation also seem to be happening in places where slate lawmakers are also pushing vouchers, and not merely the old-fashioned tuition vouchers for private schools, but the new Education Savings Account universal programs to provide wider parental “freedom” and lack of oversight of the public dollars being diverted to these plans. These new vouchers are being designed to give parents the ultimate latitude in school choice—homeschooling and micro-schools where parents put their vouchers together to pay for a teacher for several families. Lack of regulation is a key ingredient in most of these plans. In every case the worldview underneath the proposals involves extreme individualism along with marketplace consumerism.

In her new book, The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession, Alexandra Robbins describes parents who view themselves and their children as the customers teachers must please: “At a candidate forum during the COVID pandemic, a Maryland school board member called students the ‘customers in our school system,’ as if teachers existed to satisfy students rather than to educate them… On a broader level, the student-as-customer attitude has contributed to a growing politicized movement pushing for parents to have authority over what is taught in schools.” (pp. 66-67) Believing your child is the client who must be pleased by services rendered is a very different conception of the parent-teacher relationship than believing that the teacher is a professional whose expertise and cooperation you can and should consult for guidance about your child’s education.

Please open the link and read the remainder of this very important post.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Corruption, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, For-Profit, Fraud, Hoax, Koch Brothers, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Teachers, Vouchers, Walton Foundation
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