Archives for category: Freedom of the Press

Joyce Vance was US Attorney for Northern Alabama and a steady voice of reason. She wonders in this post what it will take to awaken Republicans to Trump’s erosion of the Constitution and our rights.

She writes:

Why doesn’t any of this break through? Why do Republicans still support Trump?

The reporting in The Atlantic on the Signal chain? The voter suppression executive order Trump issued…? The foul-ups in deporting supposed gang members who turn out not to be? Why aren’t Americans out on the streets protesting in massive numbers like we have seen people in other countries doing—Israel, Georgia, Turkey, South Korea, and others? In part, it’s because a large number of people who are Trump supporters just don’t care. Their guy can do anything, and they don’t care. They’ll believe any lie, and they’ll ignore any horrible; they’re all in for Trump for reasons the rest of us still struggle to understand.

The question is, how many of the rest of us are there? By that I mean Americans who, regardless of party affiliation, still care about truth and democracy. Those words are no longer just philosophical notions to be bandied about, an elite construct. They are the reality of what we are fighting a rearguard action to try and save.

Statistics from the last election provide reason for some optimism. Donald Trump won with 49.9% of the popular vote. Although he has claimed he has a mandate for a radical transformation of government, the numbers just don’t back that up. And they don’t suggest there’s a mandate for putting out military information on a Signal chain being used on personal phones, rather than on secured government systems. If there ever truly was a mandate for Trump, the reality is, it’s evaporating day by day as egg prices stay high and people lose their jobs. And now, there’s this, a cavalier disregard for the safety of our troops, lax security with one member of the Signal group apparently in Russia while communications were ongoing, what looks like an effort to do an end run around government records retention procedures.

Will the Atlantic story break through? It should. Trump’s Vice President, his Secretary of Defense, his CIA director, his DNI, all put American pilots in harm’s way. If that’s not enough for Senate Republicans to break ranks with Trump, especially those on subcommittees that have oversight into military and intelligence community operations, it’s hard to imagine what would be.

Why use Signal in the first place when American leaders have some of the most secure communications technology in the world available to them? Is it just for convenience? If so, that’s sloppy, and they should be committing to do better, not arguing over whether the information was classified or not. (But if it looks like a duck…)

The truth is that by going to Signal, they avoided leaving a paper trail. No annoying records that could be unearthed down the road. Remember Trump’s first impeachment? It came about in large part because after the call where he threatened Ukraine’s president with withholding security aid if he wouldn’t announce his country was investigating Joe Biden for financial misconduct, records of the call were buried inside a classified information system where they didn’t belong. That was what got the ball rolling. It was about trying to hide records of an official call that everyone knew was wrong.

As far as we know at this point, there was nothing improper about the attack on the Houthis. So why were high-ranking members of the Trump administration communicating off the books? How pervasive is the practice, and who knows/authorizes it? We are a government of the people. Transparency isn’t optional. There are rules about public records that have to be followed, and this president who likes to operate in secret and at the margins of our laws has frequently tried to skirt them.

It’s hard to imagine that the Signal chain for the Houthi attack was just a one-off, that they only went to Signal for this moment. Is this how this new government is operating routinely—off the books, in a hidden fashion designed to avoid scrutiny and accountability?

It may seem like a minor point with everything else that’s going on, but this is how autocrats work, not how a democracy operates. That’s the danger we are now facing, and this is another marker on the path to tyranny.

Calls are mounting for Hegseth and others to resign. Anyone who would engage in this kind of behavior and then argue that it was not improper rather than apologizing and promising to do better should leave government, whether voluntarily or not. But they should never have been confirmed in the first place. There is a cancer on the heart of the presidency, to quote from the Watergate era, and it’s infecting all of us.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Funding, Injustice, Lies, Republicans, Trump, Tyranny

Dana Milbank: Trump & Musk vs. The U.S. Constitution

By dianeravitch

April 1, 2025 //

In this essay in The Washington Post, columnist Dana Milbank offers to give Elon Musk private lessons about the Constitution. At no extra fee, he will let Donald Trump join the class. Both men are woefully ignorant of the foundational principles of American law. Musk was raised in South Africa, when apartheid was in force, so his ignorance is understandable. Trump has no excuse.

Milbank writes:

The man President Donald Trump put in charge of taking a chain saw to federal agencies showed once again this week that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the government he is dismembering.

“This is a judicial coup,” Elon Musk proclaimed, reacting to the growing list of federal judges who have moved to halt the Trump administration’s headfirst plunge into lawlessness. “We need 60 senators to impeach the judges and restore rule of the people.”

How did this guy pass his citizenship test?

As the framers wrote in the Constitution, it is the House, not the Senate, that has “the sole power of impeachment.” And the Senate needs “the concurrence of two thirds of the members present” — 67, assuming full attendance, not 60 — to convict.

More important, the framers wrote that judges hold their offices for life “during good behavior” — which has been understood to mean they can only be impeached for corruption. That is how it has been since the 1805 impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, when Chief Justice John Marshall, himself a Founding Father, persuaded the Senate to abandon the idea that “a judge giving a legal opinion contrary to the will of the legislature is liable to impeachment.”

Musk, growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, probably wasn’t taught to revere constitutional democracy. But what’s the excuse of his colleagues in the Trump administration?

They have issued scores of executive orders that flatly contradict the Constitution and the laws of the land. Apparently, they are hoping a submissive Supreme Court will reimagine the Constitution to suit Trump’s whims — and federal judges have reacted as they should, by slapping down these lawless power grabs. As such, the administration is on a prodigious losing streak in court. Judges, in preliminary rulings, have already blocked the administration more than 50 times. Over the past week alone, judges:

• Ended Musk’s access to the private Social Security data of millions of Americans for a “fishing expedition.”
• Halted Musk’s continued destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
• Blocked enforcement of Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from military service.
• Stopped the administration from terminating $20 billion in grants from a congressionally approved climate program.
• Ordered the Education Department to restore $600 million in grants to place teachers in struggling schools.
• And, most visibly, required the administration to halt the deportation flights of Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison without any judicial review — an order the administration evidently defied.

There’s an obvious reason Trump is getting swatted down so often: He’s breaking the law. Instead of changing course, the administration is now trying to discredit the courts — and the rule of law. White House adviser Stephen Miller denounced “insane edicts of radical rogue judges” and declared that a judge had “no authority” to stop Trump. Border czar Tom Homan went full-on authoritarian on Fox News: “We’re not stopping,” he said of the deportation flights a judge had temporarily halted. “I don’t care what the judges think.”

Trump called the U.S. district judge in the case, James Boasberg (appointed to the bench by George W. Bush and elevated by Barack Obama) a “radical left lunatic” who, “like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” This drew a quick rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts (in case Musk doesn’t know this, he’s also a Bush appointee), who reminded Trump: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

Trump later told Fox News that he “can’t” defy a court order — welcome news, except he apparently had done exactly that in more than one case — while arguing that something had to be done “when you have a rogue judge.”

Someone has gone rogue here, but it isn’t the judge. Boasberg’s actions are squarely within the best tradition of the judiciary, for they are in defense of principle, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that no person in this country, citizen or alien, may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This is precisely what the Trump administration denied to those it deported and imprisoned.

Violations of due process have been alleged in dozens of the cases against Trump’s executive actions: terminating workers and programs; eliminating grants; violating union contracts; denying care to transgender people; banning the Associated Press from the White House; abolishing civil rights enforcement and everything else the administration calls “DEI”; harassing law firms; and summarily deporting migrants. All of these things were done without notice, without recourse, without adjudication and without clarity about which laws give the president the power to do them.

“Due process” might sound technical, but it was elemental to our founding and remains at the heart of our legal system. Trump’s flagrant denial of due process is so radical that it isn’t only at odds with 200 years of U.S. law — it’s also contrary to another 600 years of English law before that. For the benefit of Musk (who doesn’t seem to know about such things) and his colleagues (who don’t seem to care), perhaps a refresher is in order.

For this, I called Jeffrey Rosen, who runs the nonpartisan National Constitution Center, which finds consensus between conservative and liberal scholars. The concept of due process, he explained, is in the Magna Carta, which in 1215 asserted that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned … except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” Britain’s 1628 Petition of Right, written during parliament’s struggle against the dictatorial Charles I, holds that “no man … should be put out of his land or tenement nor taken nor imprisoned nor disherited nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.” The king, who imposed forced loans on his subjects and imprisoned people without trials, was beheaded during the English civil war.

“That example completely inspired the American Revolution,” Rosen explained. “They compared the tyranny of George III to the arbitrary rule of Charles I, saying George III was violating due process of law by insisting that patriots are tried in England rather than in local courts, that they can be put in jail without trial, and their liberty is at the whim of the king.” During the revolution, due-process provisions appeared in the constitutions of Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, North Carolina and Vermont. Similar language was included in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, then eventually repeated in the 14th Amendment to apply to all states.
“The very foundation of constitutionalism, which means a government according to law rather than autocratic whim, is the due process of law,” Rosen told me. “What distinguishes a constitutional officeholder from an absolute monarch or a tyrant is that he is bound by the Constitution and by laws.” Without due process, there is no free market, because private property can be taken without justification or explanation. Without due process, there are no civil liberties, for a person’s freedom can be taken for any reason, or none at all.

Without due process, you have what we see today: a leader using a wartime statute in peacetime to declare certain people to be dangerous gang members without providing any evidence, then imprisoning them without charges and finally denying the authority of the courts and defying a court order requiring the leader to obey the laws as written. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the road to despotism.

The Trump administration’s attempt to upend 800 years of settled law is staggering, but it is easily lost in all the other chaos the president is spreading. The Federal Reserve this week said that it expects slower growth and higher inflation than it did before Trump took office, in large part because of his tariffs, while falling confidence among consumers and businesses has raised the danger of recession.

In foreign affairs, Israel has restarted the war in Gaza, and Trump has launched a military campaign to see the Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen “completely annihilated.”

Trump failed to get Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine, despite Trump’s bullying of Kyiv and his termination of efforts to document Russian war crimes — including the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.

Trump silenced the Voice of America, to the benefit and delight of China, Russia and Iran. Even the annual visit of the Irish prime minister to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day became mired in controversy when MMA fighter Conor McGregor, given the podium in the White House briefing room, proclaimed that “Ireland is at the cusp of potentially losing its Irishness” because illegal migrants are “running ravage on the country.” Responded the prime minister: “Conor McGregor’s remarks are wrong, and do not reflect the spirit of St Patrick’s Day, or the views of the people of Ireland.”

The new administration’s bows to white nationalism continue apace. It removed, at least temporarily, thousands of pages from the Pentagon website and others that celebrated the integration of the armed forces and the contributions of people of color: a Native American who helped hoist the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima, the Navajo code talkers of World War II, the Native American who drafted the Confederacy’s terms of surrender, baseball great Jackie Robinson, and a Black Vietnam veteran, on whose page the URL was changed to “deimedal-of-honor.” Trump, meanwhile, reiterated his offer to give “safe refuge” to White South Africans, while at the same time expelling the South African ambassador. The administration has restored the names of Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, which honored Confederates — getting around a law prohibiting this by technically renaming the bases for other people with the surnames “Benning” and “Bragg.”

The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, reported this week that the head of Trump’s antisemitism task force shared a post on X on March 14 from a white-supremacist leader asserting that “Trump has the ability to revoke someone’s Jew card.” (The aide apparently later unshared the post, whose author led a group that called on Trump supporters to become “racially aware and Jew Wise.”)

The sabotage of the federal government continues, as recklessly as before: dramatically cutting Social Security staff, offices and phone support while simultaneously requiring millions more of the elderly and disabled to apply for benefits in person rather than online; slashing the taxpayer help staff at the IRS and calling off audits; scaling back scientific research at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health. Paul Dans, the former chief of Project 2025, told Politico that there “is almost no difference between Project 2025 and what Trump was planning all along and is now implementing.”

Trump appointed conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn, Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon’s daughter and the former White House valet to boards overseeing the U.S. military academies. He took time to visit the Kennedy Center, where he has fired the leadership — and used the visit to share “personal stories and anecdotes, including about the first time he saw ‘Cats’ and which members of the cast he found attractive,” as The Post’s Travis Andrews reported. The administration ordered the release of files on the John F. Kennedy assassination before bothering to remove the Social Security numbers of some people who are still alive.

Trump and his cronies continue to use the federal government for personal gain. Following last week’s promotional event for Musk’s Tesla at the White House, the commerce secretary recommended people buy Tesla stock, and the White House has installed Musk’s Starlink service despite security concerns. At the same time, Trump’s crypto project released a second crypto coin, raising $250 million to bring its total to $550 million — and 75 percent of the earnings go into the Trump family’s pockets. All of this is about as on the level as Trump’s golf game. “I just won the Golf Club Championship … at Trump International Golf Club,” he announced on Sunday, as storms and tornadoes ravaged a swath of the country. “Such a great honor!”

The most ominous development, though, is Trump’s expanding abuse of power to silence critics and disable political opponents. He went to the Justice Department last week and delivered a speech attacking lawyers who opposed him, such as Jack Smith, Andrew Weissmann, Norman Eisen and Marc Elias, as “scum” and “bad people” — and the administration has revoked the security clearances of many such lawyers. After issuing executive orders seeking to destroy three law firms because of their ties to Trump’s opponents, the administration has gone after 20 more law firms over their supposed DEI programs.

In the case of the alleged Venezuelan gang members, administration officials and allies are celebrating their defiance of the court. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, which the Trump administration is paying to jail deported migrants at its infamous 40,000-inmate prison, responded on X to Judge Boasberg’s order by saying “Oopsie … too late,” with a laugh-cry emoji. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted it, and Musk added his own laughing emoji. And Attorney General Pam Bondi outrageously claimed “a DC trial judge supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans” — even though the migrants would not have been released under the court order, which only delayed their deportation.

After a reporter asked the president whether he would cut off Secret Service protection for former president Joe Biden’s children, Trump did exactly that. Trump’s acting head of the Social Security Administration admitted that he had canceled contracts with the state of Maine because he was “upset” at Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, for not being “respectful” of Trump during a public exchange they had. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have asked Trump’s FBI to probe the main Democratic fundraising platform, saying it “has advanced the financial interests of terror.”

Trump cut off $175 million of government funds going to the University of Pennsylvania because of its policy on trans athletes, following the White House’s suspension of $400 million of funds to Columbia University over Gaza protests there and its demand that the school change its discipline and admissions policies. More than 50 other universities are under investigation. Trump’s acting U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, has threatened to punish Georgetown Law School if it doesn’t change its curriculum, calling it “unacceptable” for the school to “teach DEI.”

Trump, in his appearance at DOJ, said negative coverage of him on CNN and MSNBC “has to be illegal.” He proclaimed that Biden’s use of the pardon, a constitutional power, to preemptively protect members of the House Jan. 6 committee from Trump’s harassment was “null and void.”

He fired the two Democratic commissioners from the Federal Trade Commission, his latest defiance of federal statutes protecting independent commissions. His administration fired the board of the independent U.S. Institute of Peace and seized control of its building, physically removing its president and threatening prosecution.

Then there are the summary deportations of people Trump finds undesirable. The administration has arrested and is seeking to deport a Columbia graduate student who is a green-card holder with no criminal record because of his role in Gaza protests. It deported a Brown University doctor even though a judge had issued an order requiring 48 hours’ notice before her deportation.

In the House, Trump’s allies raced to obey his instructions, filing impeachment articles against Boasberg on Tuesday. Freshman Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) submitted the articles, joined by five others. House Republicans have also moved to impeach four other federal judges over disagreements with their rulings.

Thus are Trump and his allies ignoring 215 years of precedent, going back to Samuel Chase, that objections to courts’ opinions are to be resolved through the appeals process, not impeachment.
Thus are Trump and his allies turning their backs on 810 years of precedent, going back to the Magna Carta, in which we protect ourselves from tyranny through the due process of law.

But this is where we are. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a delectable Freudian slip, proclaimed in a briefing this week that “we want to restore the Department of Justice to an institution that focuses on fighting law and order.”

If that is the goal, the Trump administration is to be congratulated on a job well done.

Categories Civics, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, History, Ignorance, Justice, Musk, Elon, Trump

Three Prominent Professors Leave Yale for Canada

By dianeravitch

March 28, 2025 //

Three noted scholars of history, philosophy, and fascism at Yale University announced that they are moving to a university in Canada. One, Jason Stanley, made clear that he was leaving because of his fear that the U.S. was dangerously close to becoming fascist under Trump.

The Yale Daily News reported:

Three prominent critics of President Donald Trump are leaving Yale’s faculty — and the United States — amid attacks on higher education to take up positions at the University of Toronto in fall 2025.

Philosophy professor Jason Stanley announced this week that he will leave Yale, while history professors Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, who are married, decided to leave around the November elections. The three professors will work at Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Stanley wrote to the Daily Nous that his decision to leave was “entirely because of the political climate in the United States.” On Wednesday, he told the Guardian that he chose to move after seeing how Columbia University handled political attacks from Trump.

After the Trump administration threatened to deport two student protesters at Columbia and revoked $400 million in research funding from the school, Columbia agreed on Friday to concede to a series of demands from the Trump administration that included overhauling its protest policies and imposing external oversight on the school’s Middle Eastern studies department.

“When I saw Columbia completely capitulate, and I saw this vocabulary of, well, we’re going to work behind the scenes because we’re not going to get targeted — that whole way of thinking presupposes that some universities will get targeted, and you don’t want to be one of those universities, and that’s just a losing strategy,” Stanley told the Guardian…

Yale has not released a statement addressing the revocation of Columbia’s funding. Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis has told the News that he does not anticipate any changes in Yale’s free expression and protest policies. University President Maurie McInnis previously said that she is prioritizing lobbying for Yale’s interests in Washington over issuing public pronouncements.

Shore wrote that the Munk School had long attempted to recruit her and Snyder and that the couple had seriously considered the offers “for the past two years.” Shore wrote that the couple decided to take the positions after the November 2024 elections. However, a spokesperson for Snyder told Inside Higher Ed that Snyder’s decision was made before the elections, was largely personal and came amid “difficult family matters.” The spokesperson also said that he had “no desire” to leave the United States.

Shore wrote that her and Snyder’s children were factors in the couple’s decision.

Snyder and Shore both specialize in Eastern European history and each has drawn parallels between the fascist regimes they have studied and the current Trump administration. Stanley, a philosopher, has also published books on fascism and propaganda, including the popular book “How Fascism Works.”

In 2021, Stanley and Snyder co-taught a course at Yale titled “Mass Incarceration in the Soviet Union and the United States.” Earlier this week, Stanley and Shore joined nearly 3,000 Jewish faculty across the U.S. to sign a letter denouncing the arrest of a Columbia student protester and urging their respective institutions to resist the Trump administration’s policies targeting colleges.

The Daily Nous wrote about Jason Stanley’s decision:

In an email, he writes that “the decision was entirely because of the political climate in the United States.” He had had an offer from Toronto, and decided to accept it last Friday night after Columbia’s capitulation to the Trump administration’s demands…

Stanley writes that he has been “very happy at Yale, with the department and the university,” but that he wants “to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship.”

Jason Stanley was even more outspoken in an interview with The Guardian:

A Yale professor who studies fascism is leaving the US to work at a Canadian university because of the current US political climate, which he worries is putting the US at risk of becoming a “fascist dictatorship…”

He said in an interview that Columbia University’s recent actions moved him to accept the offer. Last Friday, Columbia gave in to the Trump administration by agreeing to a series of demands in order to restore $400m in federal funding. These changes include crackdowns on protests, increased security power and “internal reviews” of some academic programs, like the Middle Eastern studies department.

“When I saw Columbia completely capitulate, and I saw this vocabulary of, well, we’re going to work behind the scenes because we’re not going to get targeted – that whole way of thinking pre-supposes that some universities will get targeted, and you don’t want to be one of those universities, and that’s just a losing strategy,” he said.

Stanley added: “You’ve got to just band together and say an attack on one university is an attack on all universities. And maybe you lose that fight, but you’re certainly going to lose this one if you give up before you fight.

“Columbia was just such a warning,” he said. “I just became very worried because I didn’t see a strong enough reaction in other universities to side with Columbia. I see Yale trying not to be a target. And as I said, that’s a losing strategy.”

Stanley said he wasn’t concerned about his ability to continue his scholarship at Yale, but the broader climate against universities played a role. He praised other faculty at Yale for standing up against the attacks on their profession and said he wished he could stay and fight with them.

“But how could you speak out loudly if you’re not an American citizen?” he questioned. “And if you can’t speak out loudly if you’re not an American citizen, when will they come for the American citizens? It’s inevitable.”

Social media posts spread on Wednesday, noting the alarm sounded by a scholar of fascism leaving the country over its political climate. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist and creator of the 1619 Project, wrote on the social media platform Bluesky: “When scholars of authoritarianism and fascism leave US universities because of the deteriorating political situation here, we should really worry.”

In a statement, Yale said it remains a “home to world-class faculty members who are dedicated to excellence in scholarship and teaching”.

“Yale is proud of its global faculty community which includes faculty who may no longer work at the institution, or whose contributions to academia may continue at a different home institution,” the university said. “Faculty members make decisions about their careers for a variety of reasons and the university respects all such decisions.”skip past newsletter promotion

He said he considered leaving the US in 2017, but that the second Trump administration has “definitely” proved worse than the first. Stanley’s profile has also risen since then after the publication of several books on propaganda and fascism. The Munk school is building a program with the view that there’s an “international struggle against democracy” and provides a “very exciting intellectual opportunity”, he said.

“I don’t see it as fleeing at all,” he said. “I see it as joining Canada, which is a target of Trump, just like Yale is a target of Trump.”

What does it say that a scholar of fascism is leaving the US right now? Said Stanley: “Part of it is you’re leaving because ultimately, it is like leaving Germany in 1932, 33, 34. There’s resonance: my grandmother left Berlin with my father in 1939. So it’s a family tradition.”

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Higher Education, Trump

Why So Much Trump on This Blog?

By dianeravitch

March 25, 2025 //

I am a historian of education. I started the blog in 2012 to draw attention to the nefarious push for privatization. The privatization movement was and is well-funded by billionaires and highly coordinated. Its leaders attacked public schools as “failing,” they railed against teachers, and they advocated for charter schools. And of course, they hate unions. They pushed the idea that “school choice” would inevitably lead to better education, as parents would of course choose the best schools. Competition would produce better schools.

But the idea they really pushed was that schools are a consumer choice, not a public good. Charter schools were a step on the road to vouchers. Vouchers completely destroy the fundamental idea that public schools are a civic responsibility that all of us pay for because all of us benefit, whether or not we have children in public schools.

I wrote three books to spread the word about the hoax of the privatization movement. It directed public money to Walmart-style chains, grifters and entrepreneurs.

But since the re-election of grifter Trump, I have written far more about Trump than about education.

You deserve an explanation.

Trump is a threat to our democracy.

He has turned control of the government over to Elon Musk, a man lacking in understanding of government and lacking in empathy. Musk is ransacking every part of the federal government, ruthlessly firing civil servants and cutting contracts but leaving untouched the billions he receives every year.

Trump has upended the world by insulting our allies and praising authoritarians.

He attacks NATO and the EU. He scorns Ukraine, which was ruthlessly invaded by Russia. He sides with Putin. He opens a tariff war with our neighbors.

I have lived a long life and I have never been more afraid for the survival of the country I love than I am now. We are led by fools and scoundrels.

Trump and Musk are trying to dismantle the federal government. The damage they are inflicting will take years to repair. Valuable agencies like USAID and the Department of Education have been closed without bothering to get approval from Congress. Thousands of civil servants have been fired with no due process or evaluation of their significance.

And we are only two months into his term.

The survival of our public schools depends on the survival of our society.

Trump hates public schools. He wants to fund vouchers everywhere so that children may be indoctrinated in religious schools, so that parents can be paid for home schooling, so that rich parents can be subsidized.

We are in a terrible place.

Trump is a puppet of Putin. He has never said anything critical of Putin, although he is fast to insult everyone else. Why? What does Putin have over Trump?

He has appointed the least qualified people to head every department, with the possible exception of Marco Rubio, who has abandoned his core beliefs to serve Trump.

Of course, I am worried about the survival of public schools.

I’m even more concerned about the survival of our democracy.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Privatization, Trump

Dana Milbank: Trump’s War on Freedom of the Press

By dianeravitch

March 24, 2025 //

Dana Milbank warns about Trump’s determination to stamp out a free press. The most salient fact about Trump is his narcissism. He demands obeisance, praise, respect, admiration, even groveling. He despises criticism. That’s why he is determined to intimidate journalists and media moguls.

If he can’t intimidate them, he sues them, expecting to intimidate them with financial disaster (he sued CBS for $10 billion for allegedly editing an interview on “60 Minutes”to help Kamala Harris in the election, even though he can’t demonstrate any harm he suffered since he won the election). Milbank does not mention his publisher Jeff Bezos’ obsequious attempts to please Trump by spiking the Washington Post’s editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris and by clamping down on the content of opinion columns, limiting them to praise of “personal liberties” and “free markets.”

The appearance of Milbank’s column is proof that Milbank has not kowtowed to Bezos’ edict, although he does fail to mention that Amazon, also owned by Bezos, paid Melania Trump $40 million to produce a film about her life.

Maybe his last line is a pleas to his boss Bezos, the second richest man in the world.

Milbank writes:

President Donald Trump’s Oval Office ambush of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky last week was rightly seen as a disaster for freedom in the world. But it also showcased a disaster for freedom at home: the administration’s attempts to extinguish the free press.

Barred by the White House from entering the room that day were the Associated Press and Reuters, venerable news agencies that have covered American presidents for decades. In their place: a correspondent from Russian state media, Tass’s Dmitry Kirsanov. The White House removed Kirsanov from the event in progress, claiming he was not “approved” to be there — asking us to believe that, in an astonishing security lapse, a Russian government propagandist had infiltrated the Oval Office without its knowledge.

Also brought into the room by the White House (which reversed more than a century of practice by seizing from journalists the authority to decide which reporters will be in the press “pool” that has access to Trump): Brian Glenn, correspondent for the MAGA outlet Real America’s Voice and boyfriend of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia). He accused Zelensky of “not respecting the office,” asking: “Why don’t you wear a suit?”

Then there was the correspondent from another MAGA outlet, One America News. He told Trump that foreign leaders had “praised your courage and conviction” and asked him “what gave you the moral courage” to start talks with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin about Ukraine, “something that previous leaders lacked the conviction to do.”

“I love this guy,” Trump replied. Upon learning he was from One America News, Trump said: “Well, that’s why I like him. One America News does a great job. That’s very — I like the question. I think it’s a very good question.”

This is the result when the government decides who can cover the president: a sycophantic circus.

The First Amendment tells us that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

But Trump tells us otherwise. “Who knows, maybe we will create some NICE NEW LAW!!!” he posted on Truth Social last week, suggesting he wanted to make it illegal for journalists to use anonymous or off-the-record sources, an essential part of newsgathering because it protects people from retaliation. “They are made up, defamatory fiction, and a big price should be paid for this blatant dishonesty,” Trump wrote.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” But Trump has launched a multipronged attack on our most essential freedom, with precious little pushback:

• His ferociously partisan chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has launched or threatened investigations into ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, a website that rates media credibility and radio stations with ties to progressive billionaire George Soros.
• Trump’s acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia has threatened to prosecute “anyone who impedes” the work of Elon Musk and his team — a threat widely understood to include journalists.
• Trump himself has kept up a barrage of lawsuits against ABC, CBS, the Des Moines Register (over an inaccurate poll), the Pulitzer Prize board and others, and corporate owners have felt pressured to settle lawsuits they would otherwise win to avoid Trump’s retribution.
• The administration has cut off funds to pro-democracy media outlets in places such as Cuba, Iran and Ukraine, and it is cutting off the editorial independence of Voice of America.
• The president has spread lies about American news organizations, such as Politico and the New York Times receiving USAID funds as a “‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS” in “THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL,” and he has ordered government agencies to cancel subscriptions to news outlets.
• Trump on Feb. 23 called NBC and “MSDNC” “an illegal arm of the Democrat Party” that “should be forced to pay vast sums of money for the damage they’ve done to our Country.” He also called for my colleague Eugene Robinson to be “fired immediately” because he didn’t like one of Robinson’s columns that was critical of Republicans.
• Musk last month called for journalists at “60 Minutes” to be given “a long prison sentence” because of their (routine) editing of a Kamala Harris interview during the election. He also said a Wall Street Journal reporter who exposed racist rants by one of Musk’s employees should be “fired immediately.”
• And, of course, there’s the aforementioned White House takeover of the press pool and its banishment of the AP from the Oval Office, Air Force One and similar settings because it still refers to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico. Trump wants to call it the Gulf of America, but the gulf doesn’t belong exclusively, or even mostly, to the United States, and the rest of the world still uses its traditional name — which is why the AP (and The Post) still uses its traditional name. Posters in the White House briefing room declared “VICTORY” over the AP, which Musk now calls “Associated Propaganda.”

As Rebecca Hamilton, an American University law professor, put it in Just Security last month, it all amounts to “a wholesale effort by Trump and his allies to eviscerate the free press in order to construct an information ecosystem dominated and controlled by those who espouse his views.”

Among Trump’s possible next steps: prosecuting journalists, as some in the administration have threatened. “It is essential that we understand how serious this threat is, because it is much harder to bring things back after they’ve already been finished,” Hamilton tells me. “And so it is worth fighting every single attack on press freedom, even if each attack individually seems like it could be a minor issue.”

The systematic assault on the press is part of a broader crackdown on the civil liberties of those who disagree with Trump. FBI Director Kash Patel has vowed to prosecute Trump’s opponents and critics, and Ed Martin, the D.C. prosecutor, has sent “letters of inquiry” to Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, suggesting they were “threatening” Musk (in Garcia’s case) and Supreme Court justices (in Schumer’s case, based on five-year-old remarks he said at the time were not intended as threats). Trump’s border adviser, Tom Homan, has asked the Justice Department to investigate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) over her advice to migrants.

More broadly, the administration’s attempts to ban anything that it considers to be “diversity, equity and inclusion” were blocked by a federal judge on First Amendment grounds, because the executive orders force grant recipients to certify that they do not promote DEI. Other agencies have cracked down on expression, including the Pentagon and Veterans Affairs, where the display of gay pride flags has been banned in offices and cubicles.

The efforts are at times clumsy: The day after Wired published an article titled “The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover,” Martin sent a public letter to Musk that read like a phishing email from a non-native English speaker. “Anyone imperiling others violating our laws,” proclaimed one sentence in its entirety. “Any threats, confrontations, or other actions in any way that impact their work may break numerous laws,” read another. “We will not act like the previous administration who looked the other way as the Antifa and BLM rioters as well as thugs with guns trashed our capital city. We will protect DOGE and other workers no matter what.”

That’s not the sort of language one typically sees coming from the Justice Department — but these are not normal times. ABC News’s parent company, Disney, paid $15 million to Trump in December to settle a defamation lawsuit — a decision that appeared to be based not on the legal merits but on fear of Trump’s vengeance. Meta in January agreed to pay Trump $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit over Trump’s suspended Facebook and Instagram accounts. CBS News parent Paramount Global is now in settlement talks over the “60 Minutes” editing. Even so, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Project 2025 author, joined the attack on CBS, demanding that it hand over the “full, unedited transcript and camera feeds.” Hanging over Paramount if it doesn’t settle Trump’s (frivolous) lawsuit: The FCC could block its planned merger with Skydance.

This is on top of Carr’s probes of NBC parent Comcast (for its supposed DEI practices) and NPR and PBS (for their underwriting practices). Upon arriving, he reinstated complaints of political bias against ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates while declining to reinstate a similar complaint against a Fox affiliate. And he’s probing KCBS radio in San Francisco for its coverage of an immigration enforcement operation. (Not to be outdone, Georgia’s Greene is using her House Oversight subcommittee chairmanship to call the head of NPR to testify about its “blatantly ideological and partisan coverage.”)

Trump’s choice to run Voice of America, failed Arizona gubernatorial and Senate candidate Kari Lake, has vowed to purge the organization of “Trump derangement syndrome.” Last week, VOA suspended veteran journalist Steven Herman over his social media activity, the New York Times reported. A few weeks ago, Trump adviser Richard Grenell called Herman “treasonous” for quoting on social media the president of a democracy advocacy group saying the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development “makes Americans less safe at home and abroad.”

The attempted elimination of USAID by the administration has unquestionably hurt efforts to establish a free press in repressive countries. Reporters Without Borders said the sudden freeze of foreign aid programs “has left media organizations around the world in chaos, gravely hampering access to reliable news in zones of serious interest to the United States.” For example, Cubanet, a thorn in the side of Cuba’s regime and an ally of dissidents, was informed that its $1.8 million, three-year grant had been canceled.

So it goes across the Gulf of America, as Trump has decreed it must be called. Unlike, say, restoring the name Mount McKinley in Denali National Park, this is not something Trump can do on his own. Yet the White House said the AP was “lying” by using the name the rest of the world uses. The AP, in its lawsuit seeking reinstatement at the White House, argued that “the Constitution does not allow the government to control speech” and that Americans “have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government.” But so far, a judge has rejected the AP’s request.

The gulf tempest may be just an excuse to punish news organizations. The White House is moving to evict some outlets from their seats in the briefing room to make room for MAGA-friendly ones. The Pentagon seized office space that had gone to outlets such as the Times, NPR, NBC and Politico, giving the space to right-wing outlets such as Breitbart, One America News and the New York Post. (It also gave space to liberal HuffPost, which had not requested it.)

This comes on top of the White House’s more egregious move to take control of the press pool, the rotating group of reporters allowed to be in the room with the president. As the White House Correspondents’ Association protested, this means “the government will choose the journalists who cover the president.”

Much of this was proposed in the Project 2025 blueprint, which, despite Trump’s denials during the campaign, has turned out to be a road map for the new administration. It suggested the White House find an “alternative” to the WHCA, take away some of the media’s space in the White House, seize editorial control over VOA and defund public broadcasting, among other things — and variations of all of these policies are underway.

Ominously, Project 2025 also called for rescinding guidance issued by the Biden administration that prevented prosecutors from seizing journalists’ records during leak investigations. The Justice Department “should use all of the tools at its disposal to investigate leaks,” Project 2025 proposed. This, First Amendment advocates fear, implies use of the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute reporters if they don’t reveal their sources — in effect criminalizing journalism.

Complicating the response by the press to these assaults: Much of American media is owned by corporations and billionaires whose interests are not always aligned with those of a free press. Hamilton, the law professor, calls for “strategic litigation” by media outlets against the administration to push back against the assaults. She says journalists need to “continue to write without self-censoring.” And she says “the public also needs to understand the true value to democracy of having a free press, because if you lose that, then you lose one of the key foundations of accountability in a democracy.”

That’s a lot to ask. But it’s going to take all three — courageous media ownership, fearless journalism and an engaged readership — if the free press is going to survive the Trump presidency.

Categories Censorship, Freedom of the Press, Media, Trump

Carol Kocivar: It’s Time to Talk to Your Child About Threats to Democracy

By dianeravitch

March 24, 2025 //

Carol Kocivar is former President of the California State PTA. She has worked as an attorney, journalist, and ombudsperson and is the parent to two children who graduated from the San Francisco public schools

She posts on Substack, where this appeared.

She writes:

Scary as this may seem, it is time to talk with your children about how our democracy is threatened.

I know. I know. Those are strong words. I certainly am not suggesting that we ask first graders whether the president should have more power than the Congress or the Supreme Court.
But I am looking at this through the lens of history– with the knowledge that Hitler and Mussolini strengthened their hold through the indoctrination of youth.

Our children are not born with democracy in their DNA. It is our responsibility to ensure that each generation has the knowledge and skills to support and preserve our democracy.

Political outreach to children is already underway. Below is an example of a Kid’s Guide on the internet.

“With the triumphant return of President Trump to the White House, Americans everywhere are celebrating his return and what it means for our nation. And, as our kids are the future of our country, it’s important for them to understand how Trump will make America great again. That’s why we created The Kids Guide to President Trump, and right now we’re giving it away for FREE!”

Kids are taught about the Constitution in school
In elementary school, students should already have some basic knowledge about how our government is supposed to work. By the time they have completed the 8th grade, they should know the basics of our constitutional democracy.
For example, the California History/ Social Science frameworks provides that 8th graders should be taught about separation of powers, checks and balances, the nature and purpose of majority rule, and the ways in which the American idea of constitutionalism preserves individual rights.

They should know, for example, that the president is not a king.

They should know that the Congress passes laws, not the president.

They should know that the President and his staff cannot refuse to follow court orders.
They should know the president does not have the right to refuse to implement spending decisions of Congress.
They should know their rights include freedom of speech.

What can parents do?

In age appropriate language, discuss current events with them. I was going to say discuss it at the dinner table but you probably have a better shot at their attention as you drive to and from sports events.

Seek out incidents that challenge the basic principles of our democracy and discuss them.

What do they think? How does that square with what they know about the constitution?

Explain why you think it is important that they understand what is happening in the country.

Discuss money for schools. Does their public school need more or less money? What do they think about cutting funding for their school?

Talk about the importance of voting. Can voting change public policy?

Ask what would help them become more involved in issues that affect their school? Their community? Their country?

It’s up to us to preserve democracy for our children.

Categories Civics, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Parents, Students, Trump

Olga Lautman: Trump’s War on Dissent

By dianeravitch

March 21, 2025 //

Olga Lautman is a fearless defender of democracy. She keeps close tabs on authoritarian regimes and has had many reasons to should the alarm since the return of Trump. Now that Trump controls the executive branch, Congress, and usually the Supreme Court (where he occasionally loses when Barrett and Roberts dissent), he is on a path to tyranny.

She warns that his crackdown on dissent is a decisive step towards full-fledged authoritarianism. Let me add as a personal that not all forms of dissent are legal, even by the most liberal definition. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, you can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater. While I support student protests, there are reasonable limits defined by time, place, and manner. If students prevent others from learning by disrupting their classrooms or closing the library, that’s out of line, in my view. You are free to disagree. That’s your right, as it is mine.

Lautman writes:

Trump’s Crackdown: Silencing Dissent and Censoring the Press

While Trump floods the zone with chaos, I am watching a deeply disturbing pattern emerge. Recently, he has targeted universities under the guise of combating antisemitism, threatening to cut funding, open investigations, and deport foreign students involved in what he deems “illegal protests.” This move to silence student voices is part of a broader strategy—Trump is systematically laying the groundwork to criminalize dissent. Concurrently, he has continued to invoke emergency powers over immigration, granting himself sweeping authority with minimal oversight.

Adding to this concerning trend, Trump is weaponizing the Federal Communications Commission to suppress media freedom. Under his regime, the FCC has initiated investigations into major news organizations like NPR and PBS, scrutinizing their content and funding. The White House has also barred Associated Press reporters from covering presidential events, citing disagreements over “terminology.” Furthermore, the regime has taken control of the White House press pool, deciding which journalists can cover presidential activities, effectively beginning the process of sidelining independent media voices.

Today, the targets are “antisemitism” and “immigration.” Tomorrow, it could be any form of resistance to the regime. This pattern mirrors tactics employed by autocratic governments, where laws and regulations are manipulated to suppress opposition and control public discourse. It is imperative to recognize and challenge these encroachments on our democratic freedoms before dissent becomes a criminal act, and that is why I felt it was important to bring it to everyone’s attention.

The Playbook of Repression

Trump’s attacks on universities have nothing to do with stopping antisemitism. If they did, there would be a serious, balanced approach to addressing hate across the board. Instead, he’s selectively using it as a pretext to punish colleges, strip funding, launch investigations, and lay the groundwork for broader crackdowns on protests. These moves, along with the threat to deport foreign students who participate in protests, are a classic authoritarian tactic—silencing youth movements before they become a real threat.

In Russia, we have seen this exact strategy play out. Putin started by using the language of “public order” to justify suppressing protests. Then, he expanded it to clamp down on journalists, opposition figures, and universities. Today, any form of public dissent in Russia is met with immediate arrests, long prison sentences, or exile.

Trump is following the same playbook. First, redefine what qualifies as a legal protest. Then, frame all opposition as a national security threat. Finally, implement policies that criminalize resistance. Let’s not forget—during his first term, Trump wanted the military to shoot protesters, but guardrails stopped him. Now, with those guardrails gone and loyalists installed in key positions, he is laying the groundwork to justify an all-out assault on free speech and assembly, using the rhetoric of “law and order” to disguise repression as a “necessary” security measure.

The Danger of Emergency Powers

Trump’s continuing invocation of emergency powers on immigration is another red flag. Emergency powers are not inherently undemocratic, but in the wrong hands, they are a tool for consolidating unchecked authority. In Russia, Putin used emergencies—terrorist attacks, economic crises, and foreign threats—to justify expanding his power. Each crisis became an excuse to centralize control and dismantle any resistance to the regime.

Trump is testing the limits of emergency powers to override legal norms. He has already deployed the military on U.S. soil for immigration enforcement—what stops him from escalating further? With the Insurrection Act looming in the background, he is laying the groundwork to use military force against civilians under the pretense of a “national emergency.”

This is Just the Beginning

We are witnessing the early stages of a full-blown authoritarian shift. The selective targeting of student protesters, the abuse of emergency powers, and the push to redefine “illegal protests” are all interconnected. Today, it’s about silencing students. Tomorrow, it will be about crushing unions, blacklisting journalists, or jailing political opponents.

This is not alarmism—it’s a pattern seen time and again in authoritarian regimes. And it’s why we must sound the alarm now.

What Can We Do?

Expose and Document – Share information, track developments, and call out every attempt to silence dissent. Authoritarians thrive on people looking the other way.

Support Targeted Groups – Defend students, journalists, unions, and activists under attack. Legal funds, advocacy groups, and independent media need resources to fight back.

Pressure Lawmakers – Demand that Congress and state governments put up real resistance. Emergency powers must be challenged, and unconstitutional crackdowns must be met with legal action.

Mobilize and Protest – Peaceful mass protests and civil resistance are essential. Authoritarianism collapses when people refuse to comply.

Prepare for Escalation – The time to organize networks and alternative platforms is now and will be critical to keeping resistance alive.

The question is not whether Trump will attempt to consolidate power—it’s whether Americans will resist before it’s too late.

Categories Academic Freedom, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Students, Trump, Tyranny

Sherrilyn Ifill: Do Not Be Silent!

By dianeravitch

March 18, 2025 //

Sherrilyn Ifill is a law professor at Howard University and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She writes a blog called Sherrilyn’s Newsletter, where this post appeared. Open the link to see her footnotes.

“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment. The time is always now.”

-James Baldwin

Illustration by Nick Liu

The past week has shown us in stark terms what it means to fight – to actually fight – to protect against the rise of authoritarians. This week we also saw that somehow, despite years of preparation, some of the leaders of our most powerful institutions seem unprepared for the particular nature of this fight. Others appear just…. unwilling to engage.

Last week the Trump Administration took its most bold actions yet. Through the actions of either Trump himself, Elon Musk or members of Trump’s cabinet, this Administration has:

· Unleashed an unprecedented attack on higher education, the centerpiece of which was a targeted attack on Columbia University. In a letter sent to the University, the Administration[i]demanded that university essentially turn over its decision-making to the Trump Administration, insisting that the University close the Middle Eastern Studies Dept, ban mask-wearing, expel students involved in pro-Palestine protests, and announced the withholding of $400 million in federal dollars until the University accedes to Trump’s demands, unless the University took these actions to address “antisemitism on campus.” The Administration underscored its intentions by entering student dormitories and arresting a Palestinian student who is a legal permanent resident of the U.S. As his 8-month-pregnant wife looked on helplessly, ICE officers arrested Mr. Khalil and then disappeared him, moving him from facility to facility, and offering only vague and unsubstantiated justifications for his arrest. His central “crime” appears to be “advancing positions that are contrary to the foreign policy of this Administration,”[ii]– a concept so staggeringly outrageous it can scarcely be absorbed.

· Fired half the staff of the Department of Education[iii] – as a down-payment on the Administration’s vow to close the agency.

· Indicated its intention to “eliminate Social Security;”[iv]

· Continued firing government workers and removing funding from government agencies including NIH[v] and shuttering offices like the Voice of America.

· Intensified tariffs against Canada and rhetoric suggesting that the sovereign nation of Canada should be annexed to the U.S.;[vi] declared that the European Union was created to “screw the U.S.”; declared that the South African Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome,[vii] continuing the Administration’s Musk-inspired determination to recognize racist white settlers as victims of Black rule.

· Issued Executive Orders targeting law firms who have litigated cases against Trump in the classified documents cases and who provided pro bono counsel to Special Counsel Jack Smith, removing security clearances and blocking government connected work.

· Argued in court that transgender soldiers should be removed from the military.[viii]

· Removed information about Black, Asian American and women military heroes from the Arlington National cemetery website,[ix]disappearing the accomplishments of people of color and women from official recognition.

And that’s just part of it.

But the resistance to Trump’s authoritarian rule has been busy as well:

· Protests across the country have demanded the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian student taken into custody.[x]

· “Tesla Take Down” protests at Tesla dealerships across the country in protest against Elon Musk’s takeover of our government have been so effective in tanking the brand and its stock price,[xi] that President Trump turned the White House into a car lot and personally embodied the used car salesman he was destined to be (if not for his father’s money) in an attempt to gin up Tesla sales.

· Protests nationwide continue to demand an end to government worker firings.

· Voters have shown up at town halls across the country to express anger about proposed plans to cut Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security[xii].

· Lawsuits filed by parents,[xiii] and by a score of states[xiv] have challenged the closing of the Education Department.

· Perkins Coie, the law firm targeted by Trump boldly challenged the Trump administration’s effort to blackball the firm and imperil its business;[xv]

· Federal courts have required Trump to rehire thousands of federal employees fired by DOGE[xvi]

· Federal courts have enjoined Trump’s efforts to freeze spending on governments grants and other funding.[xvii]

· Federal courts enjoined the Administration from removing migrants targeted under Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act – a decision the Trump Administration has defied.[xviii]

But the big stories last week were less about those who have protested and sued, and more about those among the most powerful institutional actors who appear to have lost the plot. Political scientists Steve Levitsky and Ryan Enos offered a blistering and spot-on condemnation of universities that have remained silent in the face of Trump’s authoritarian challenge to the freedom of universities.[xix]Calling out Harvard University specifically (where both scholars teach) for its silence in the face of the hideous attacks on Columbia University, Levitsky and Enos condemned the inaction of universities that have chosen a strategy of “lying low, avoiding public debate (and sometimes cooperating with the administration) in the hope of mitigating the coming assault.”[xx]

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has faced a wave of outrage and demands for resignation after his decision to vote in favor of cloture to avert a government shutdown. To be sure, the Democrats have few options for stopping the Republicans, who are firmly in the majority in the House and Senate from torching our government. But as many of us have been reminded ad nauseum during the years when Democrats controlled the Senate, the filibuster is one of the few procedural rules the party in the minority in the Senate has to counter being overrun by the majority.

But frustratingly, although Democrats were unwilling to abolish the filibuster in 2022 to advance their agenda, last week they were unwilling to use the filibuster to defy the Republican power grab. Heads the Republicans win. Tails the Democrats lose.

It was hard to understand the point of Democrats affixing their signature to a continuing resolution to fund a government that is being cut to the bone every day by Elon Musk – an unelected billionaire with no official government position – who has been permitted to usurp the appropriation power of Congress. When Trump and Musk lawlessly gut agencies and fire government workers, and Speaker Mike Johnson and his caucus cede the power of Congress to the President, we are in a constitutional crisis.

Trump and Musk’s anti-constitutional usurpation of congressional power with the complicity of the Republicans in Congress is an emergency. It demands an emergency response. Minority Leader Schumer and 7 other Democratic Senators (and I suspect more who were covered by the Leader’s unpopular action) were unprepared to meet the moment in a way that would have upped the stakes. Sometimes when the game is fixed, you have to overturn the tables.

I will concede a serious point Schumer later offered that got lost in the Comms disaster of his Wednesday night statement that suggested there would be a shutdown, and then his Thursday morning announcement that he would vote to avert one. If the government shutdown happened, there would be little chance of obtaining judicial orders enjoining decisions by Trump/Musk to eliminate programs, because legally during a government closure, the President enjoys unfettered power to determine which functions of government are “essential” – standard to which the courts would likely defer. By contrast, with the government open, challenges to DOGE firings and closures continue to do fairly well in the courts and have slowed down the force of Musk’s chainsaw.

In any case, Schumer’s decision and perhaps moreso the clumsy comms that accompanied it have resulted in boiling outrage within the base of the party, including calls for him to step down from leadership.

Of course, none of this compares to the perfidy of the Republican Party. We must never forget the unconscionable and dastardly conduct of Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republicans in the House and Senate – men and women who have abdicated their allegiance to this country and to democracy itself. Their cowardice and complicity in the destruction of this country must never be forgotten or whitewashed. Their betrayal is singular and historic.

But there’s another group that is failing to meet this moment. America’s corporate leadership has been nearly silent during one of the most volatile economic periods in years. Last week the stock market took a nosedive – entering “correction” status as a result of Trump’s manic and unhinged tariff announcements. [xxi] Trump’s erratic tariffs – up one day, down the next, up again two weeks later – are lunacy. Every rational business leader knows that.[xxii] The predictable market response to Trump’s irrationality threatens the retirement plans of older Americans hoping to retire and the American economy. America’s leadership in the world has been compromised by Trump’s saber-rattling, and his insistence on imperialist moves towards Canada, the Panama Canal and Greenland, is destabilizing the integrity of perception of American stability. Combined with the massive government lawyers, Trump’s policies are bad for America and bad for business.

As Trump literally tanks the American economy and the trust of the international business community, where are the voices of America’s business leaders? Are they all hoping that Trump will do a commercial on the White House lawn hawking their products too? Are the leaders of the Business Roundtable (200 CEOs of the nation’s leading corporations) agnostic about the President’s stubborn insistence on policies that are wrecking the U.S. economy and our standing in the world?

These same business leaders enabled the lie that Trump is a “successful businessperson” – knowing full well that Trump does not seem to know what he’s talking about when he wades into economics, knowing of his six bankruptcies, knowing of his refusal to pay contractors, his false representations, and knowing that no responsible Fortune 500 CEO would ever have gone into business with Trump before he was elected President, or even after. Being wealthy is not the same as being a successful businessperson and they all know it.

In an interview on CNBC, even host Maria Bartiromo – a Trump sycophant – felt compelled to remind Trump that successful business leaders need predictability to make coherent decisions about investments, infrastructure, expansion, and product development for markets. She noted that the up-and-down tariff mania undermines predictability. Trump responded, “well they say that. It sounds good to say.” Really? Is that it? Or is it a fundamental tenet of business that even a first year MBA student would know? At other times last week he has repeated with “we’re gonna have so much money from the tariffs” with a desperate insistence that suggested mental instability.

American corporations have either tried to placate Trump by paying tribute,[xxiii] or have “crawled into a protective shell” like the university officials called out by Levitsky and Enos. In either case, it is utterly irresponsible. Their voices and influence – presented collectively and forcefully – are critical to protecting the economic interests of this country, and our democracy. Their failure to act is a betrayal of their responsibility as citizens.

Media owners have shamed themselves – whitewashing their teams,[xxiv] surrendering the independence and diversity of their editorial pages,[xxv] and taking a knee before Trump’s demands rather than standing firm in the face of the challenge to our democracy.[xxvi]

In the week ahead, there will be many additional opportunities for leaders from our most powerful democratic institutions to meet this moment. Already it appears that the Trump Administration has defied a federal court order to turn around planes taking Venezuelan migrants accused of being to El Salvador.[xxvii] The Administration announced that the first 250 migrants arrived in El Salvador.[xxviii] What does that mean? Two hundred-fifty Venezuelan nationals have been disappeared into the one of the world’s most notoriously abusive prisons in El Salvador, without judicially approved trials or due process.

What will judges do as Trump appears to defy judicial orders? This week will test the readiness of our judiciary to defend the rule of law.

Meanwhile ordinary people have been showing tremendous leadership, protesting, launching and participating in boycotts, conducting teach-ins, calling their elected representatives every week, sometimes several times a week, visiting district offices, participating in “die-ins,” writing letters and petitions, and building support for opposition candidates in special elections. A “mass march” has been announced by the organization Hands/Off for April 5th, although information is still spotty [please drop info in the comments]. Black churches have launched a 40-day Lenten boycott of Target for its obsequious abandonment of its DEI commitments.[xxix]

Every day we are called upon to meet the moment. As we see our neighbors seized by plainclothes agents without judicial warrants, and see our workplaces “obey in advance” – removing from websites, official policies and even mission statements expressing their commitment to equality and to inclusion, and as we see law firms crouch before this Administration’s threats, and media outlets silence voices that write the truth about this Administration, we have to decide how we will respond.

All over America ordinary people are looking into their toolboxes of non-violent actions and determining which ones they will use. It’s been beautiful to see.

But we must not absolve the leaders of our most powerful institutions – those who have the money and power, and influence to insulate themselves from the worst consequences of this Administration’s excesses – from their obligation to act and to meet the moment.

To those who are business leaders, captains of industry, university leaders, and media owners, decide who you will be at this moment. If we fully lose democracy in this country, it will be because the most privileged among us refused to accept the responsibility to speak out, to say “no more,” and to lead. History will not kindly remember those who left it to Americans with considerably less power and protection, to do the hard work of saving this country. Your tax cuts will not be large enough to cover your shame. And we will remember.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Lies, Musk, Elon, Racism, Resistance, Trump

Timothy Snyder: A Critique of Jeff Bezos’ Editorial Limits at The Washington Post

By dianeravitch

March 12, 2025 //

Timothy Snyder is Professor of European History at Yale University and a bestselling author. See his book “On Tyranny.”

He writes here about Jeff Bezos’ attempt to limit editorial expression at The Washington Post. When Bezos, the world’s second richest man–after Elon Musk–bought the newspaper, he insisted that he would not interfere in its editorial content. Many assumed that his vast wealth would insulate him from political pressure.

But the prospective return of Trump changed his views about editorial independence. He has other businesses (Amazon, Blue Origin) that made him a billionaire and that have government contracts. He blocked the publication of an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. After Trump’s election, he gave $1 million to his inauguration fund. Then his company Amazon–source of his riches–paid $49 million to Melania for producing a film about her life; a tidy sum for a person with no experience as a film producer.

Bezos’ ham-handed efforts to mute criticism of Trump has hurt the reputation of the Washington Post. It has suffered a huge loss of readers–more than 300,000–and an exodus of some of its best writers. Just this week, Deputy Editor Ruth Marcus quit after Bezos or his henchman Will Lewis killed her latest column.

Snyder here takes issue with Bezos’ intervention into the Post’s editorial space:

On February 26th the Washington Post announced a new editorial line that refers to freedom while restraining it. I submitted a proposal to them on the question of what it would meant to support freedom in a newspaper. I have waited two weeks for a response. I would still happily write that opinion piece! In the essay below, I explain how the Post’seditorial line is nonsensical and authoritarian.

Jeff Bezos, who owns Washington Post, has announced its editorial line: “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” The use of these terms in this way demeans the concept of freedom and pushes the country in the direction of tyranny.

I will start from some arguments that are more conventional and that others have rightly made. But I want here, in ten steps, to push the point to the end. On February 27th, the day after the new editorial lines was announced, I enjoyed myself and did this as parody. Today I ask for your patience as I do so as philosophy.

1. “Liberty” is self-contradictory as an editorial code. To use liberty as a demarcation of what is and what is not to be published shows a deep misunderstanding of what liberty means. Liberty is an open meadow, not a fence. An editor who believes in liberty helps writers to make their own arguments well, because their freedom has to do with them. Liberty has to mean that people have the right to say what they want, including (for example) that liberty doesn’t need to be qualified by the adjective “personal,” that liberty is an infinite concept and not one that can be listed as specific “liberties,” that the concept is in tension with the fiction of the “free market”, or that the word is being put to pernicious, Orwellian purposes by American libertarian billionaires.

2. Editors who take “personal liberties” as a restriction on what contributors write would need protocols of measurement and control. Can we accept that a certain someone knows, for certain, whether a given article trends in favor or against personal liberty? What could this mean? To grant such authority is absurd, and also tyrannical. The whole point of freedom is that it extends beyond the boundaries of any one mind at any one moment. James Baldwin called truth “freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.” And surely this is all the more true of the truth about freedom! Treating the issue as impersonal makes matters no better. Imagine an official list of “personal liberties” hanging on the walls of the Posteditorial offices, each with a definition. Who decides what that says, though? And such a list would not be enough. There would then have to be some set of rules (algorithms?) by which to establish whether an article met the definition. Very quickly (on day 1? has this perhaps already happened?) we get to the Kafkaesque situation of a Post editor submitting a proposed opinion essay to an AI and asking whether it “supports and defends personal liberties and free markets.” Freedom is what distinguishes us from machines. It has to do with affirming values over the course of a limited time on earth, with taking risks, with building character. No machine can capture that. None of these practice that could be used to enforce the editorial line can possible affirm “personal liberties.” Enforcement means either human arbitrariness or mechanized abasement.

3. The qualification of the noun “liberties” by the adjective “personal” is unfounded. Any qualification is unfounded. This particular one suggests that we can become free people without society, which is absolutely not true. We all begin life as helpless infants. Whether we can become free or not depends on circumstances beyond our control. No amount of declaiming “personal liberty” will create the conditions in which a baby grows up with the capacities and structures needed to be a free person. That effort to create a person must be social, beginning with the parents, and extending to friends, teachers, child-care workers, and others. A child needs a special kind of time at a special time of life, and that time will only exist if we recognize that the entire situation is about freedom and that freedom requires cooperation. If we want liberty, in other words, we cannot limit ourselves to the personal. The example of the newborn is important, because it is what we all share, but also because it suggests a truth that continues throughout life. In one way or other, we are always vulnerable, and our ability to be free will always depend on cooperation.

4. The pairing of the phrase “personal liberties” with the phrase “free markets” suggests an understanding of freedom that is negative: freedom as just an absence of oppression, or an absence of government. The editorial line implies a world in which there is nothing more than isolated individuals and a government that might or might not oppress them, with nothing in between. To be sure, the government should not oppress people. But to ensure that governments are not oppressive, people need freedoms that go beyond the personal: that we can all vote, for example. Voting is not just a personal freedom: if you think about it that way, you will be unconcerned about equal voting rights for others, and your democracy will soon become something else. And the government is not, as negative freedom indicates, the only possible instrument of oppression. Companies and oligarchs can also oppress. And when they do, democratic governments are the only institution that can defend freedom. But for governments to be democratic, people have to be able to act together. They need a freedom that goes beyond the personal: not only to vote in fair elections, but to protest in groups, to join labor unions, to assemble and cooperate.

5. The use of the plural “liberties” (rather than “liberty” or “freedom” in the singular) is not an extension but an unwelcome qualification, in fact a limitation. The use of the plural suggests that there is a finite list of specific liberties, rather than freedom for all people as such. This indicates that liberty is constrained for people. Interestingly, no such constraint is placed upon the inhuman abstraction that also figures in Jeff Bezos’s editorial line, “the free market.” What has unqualified freedom, according to Bezos? Not people. The market. And this, as we shall see, is not only incoherent but authoritarian.

6. The two parts of the editorial line would be contradictory in practice. The “free market” and “personal liberties” would have to contradict one another in editorial decision-making, to the point that they could not be enforced together (even leaving aside the inherent problem, discussed already, of defining and “personal liberties”). If “personal liberties” include anything meaningful, they would have to include the freedom of expression — which would include the freedom to debate what markets should be like and how they should work. Otherwise the (nonsensical) orthodoxy of the “free market” functions as a restriction on freedom of speech, and “personal liberties” just turns out to mean repeating an unquestioned political orthodoxy.

7. The two parts of the editorial line are also contradictory in principle. The assumption that “free markets” and “personal liberties” work together as “pillars” is mistaken. These two concepts are not the same, and very often point in opposing directions. A “free market,” for example, would mean that companies can pollute as much as they like. But if the atmosphere poisons me and I die of cancer, I am not enjoying “personal liberties” of any sort.

8. Any reasonable concept of “personal liberties,” of freedom, will in fact constrain the market. Consider the market in human organs, which of course exists. Should there be a “free market” in human kidneys? Should rich people have the right to hunt you down on the street, tranquilize you, and harvest your organs to sell them? If not, why not? The answer has something to do with the freedom of human beings, the autonomy of their bodies, their right not to have them violated. There is no way to get to that answer, however, from the starting point of the “free market.” A “free market” includes your kidneys.

9. The editorial code requires writers to affirm the non-existent. Americans say “free market” all the time, so it sounds like something that exists, but it does not and cannot. There is no such thing as a “free market,” in the sense of a market that functions unconstrained, without government. The basis of a market is the right to property, which is of course enforced by a government. A government decides that there is such a right, and whether or not it extends to organs (or people, for that matter). Property rights are thus “government intervention,” in the jargon of the people who like to talk about “free markets.” Once this undeniable fact is recognized, we are simply in a conversation about which government action we advocate and which we oppose. Once we understand that we need governments for markets to work, and that we are inevitably making choices about how markets work, we can have a reasonable conversation about what sort of markets we want and how we want them to function. We can ask, for example, whether monopoly capitalism is the best sort of capitalism. If editors insist on calling markets “free,” they are insisting that writers connive in political fiction. And a very dangerous one, especially right now.

10. The language of “free markets” is authoritarian. Freedom belongs only to people. It does not belong to institutions or abstractions — and least of all to non-existent institutions or abstractions. The moment that we yield the word “free” to something besides a person, we are yielding our freedom. And we should be aware that others who abuse the word by taking it from us intend to oppress us. When we endorse the fiction of “free markets,” we are entering a story told by others than ourselves, in which we are the objects, the tools, the non-player characters. We are accepting that we people owe duties to those markets. By way of an unreal concept we pass into real submission. We are accepting that we have the duty to oppose “government intervention,” which is to say that we must oppose political actions that would help us to be more free: safety for workers, protection for consumers, insurance for banks, funding for schools, legality for unions, leave for parents, and all the rest. We must accept whatever the market brings us, to go wherever the billionaires take us, to surrender our words, our minds, ourselves.

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Freedom of the Press, Media, Trump

The Trump-Putin New World Order

By dianeravitch

March 1, 2025 //

James Pintell of The Boston Globe wrote yesterday, after the fractious meeting in the Oval Office in which Vance and Trump insulted Zelensky, as the beginning of a “new world order.”

He wrote:

The blow-up set the stage for an entirely new world order, should future presidents choose to accept its premise. Or they could, of course, go in a different direction.

Following World War II, the global order was clear. There were two major powers, two teams, and nearly every event was viewed through the lens of which side it benefited or which it cost.

Then the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the United States as the world’s sole superpower…

Then Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago.

The early international response to that war fell into three broad camps. At first, Russia was isolated, sanctioned by developed nations that also provided support to Ukraine. Eventually, Russia found allies: China gave it money, Iran gave it drones, and North Korea gave it troops. Meanwhile, much of the Global South remained neutral, sitting out the conflict altogether.

But the Oval Office meeting Friday may have formalized something that has been brewing since Trump’s reelection in November: a new era of neocolonialism, where a handful of powerful nations dictate global affairs.

Is this what Trump voters wanted?

Did Americans realize when they voted last November that they were voting to abandon NATO and our European allies? Did they realize that they were voting for an alliance with Putin and Russia? Did they know they were voting to abandon Ukraine in its fight to be free of Russian domination?

The two big issues were immigration (“out of control,” said Trump) and inflation (Trump said inflation would fall as soon as he was insulated.

I don’t recall any promises to create a new world order in which we voted with Russia, North Korea, and Iran against condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I don’t remember Trump promising to create chaos in every federal agency. Or pledging to stop all foreign aid. Or making Elon Musk the co-President.

Yet the meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump and Vance berated Zelensky clarified that the U.S. position in the world has changed.

We are now in Putin’s camp. we do not defend democracy, freedom, and Western values. We do not defend nations that are struggling against authoritarian regimes. If it were 1939, we would be allied with Hitler.

The meeting was a set-up. Zelensky undertook an arduous journey from his war-torn country, assuming that he was going to sign a deal to give the U.S. half of Ukraine’s natural resources, in exchange for our continued support. The deal was written.

But Trump wanted Zelensky to agree that Putin could keep all the Ukrainian land he had seized.

Zelensky wanted security assurances to guarantee that Putin would not invade Ukraine again.

The meeting began with Zelensky thanking Trump for inviting him to the White House. Almost immediately, Vance attacked Zelensky for not showing sufficient gratitude. Note that as a Senator from Ohio, Vance voted against every aid to Ukraine bill.

Vance and Trump insulted Zelensky repeatedly. Zelensky didn’t show enough respect to Trump, Zelensky was not sufficiently grateful.

Zelensky left or was thrown out, I’m not sure which.

Trump immediately crowed about his strength and power.

Every single cabinet member tweeted how proud they were of Trump for “putting America first.” So did MAGA members of Congress.

Dimitri Medvedev, the Prime Mjnister of Russia, tweeted that he was pleased that “the insolent pig” (Zelensky) was ousted from the White House.

This is not the country I grew up in. This is not the country to which I recited the Pledge of Allegiance every school day.

All of those wonderful songs I sang about liberty, freedom, justice, equality. All the stories about standing up against tyranny so that people could live in freedom. All dashed.

We must have the courage, the strength, the fortitude to recover our country, its values, its ideals.

Friends with a murderous tyrant? This is not who we are. Or were.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, History, International

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