If Trump follows through with his education proposals, if the Republican-controlled Congress lets him do it, America’s students and teachers are in for a world of hurt.
Mercedes Schneider writes here about what’s at stake. I did not copy and paste the article in full. It is excellent. I urge you to open the link.
I do not believe American education is a top concern for Donald Trump. I do believe that he could well turn it over to the likes of the Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025, so long as nobody outshines him in the press and puts anything (Constitution included) ahead of loyalty to him above all else.
Now that the election is over, Trump allies are openly admitting that Project 2025 was the Trump plan all along.
One featured Project 2025-Trump issue is the proposed dismantling of the US Department of Education (USDOE), which was created during the Carter administration. Talk of getting rid of USDOE began with the Reagan administration(in other words, soon after it was created). It should come as no surprise that in 1980, the “fledgling” Heritage Foundation was in Reagan’s ear and is proud to declare as much in the opening pages of its Project 2025:
page xiii
Several decades later, USDOE still exists, and several decades later, the Heritage Foundation is still trying to kill it.
Heritage et al. has taken great pains to outline its 900+-page wish list of ultra conservatism, including nixing USDOE. However, it would take a lot to achieve the kind of legislative unity required to dissolve a federal department that supports numerous Americans in desired and positive ways, not the least of which is via the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
Brookings offers a concise discussion of the Project 2025 plan for education, including this “sample list” of negative consequences:
Of course, the key is to have legislatures jump onto the choice bandwagon and force choice onto voters whether they want it or not. But some voters do benefit from having access to publicly-subsidized private schools: Those with money. Heritage alludes to Arizona’s “expanded program… available to all families. However, in Arizona, those accessing school voucher cash tend not to be the working class but more affluent families.
Speaking of the affluent and private school vouchers: Billionaire former US Ed secretary Betsy DeVos, who in 2023 could not get private school vouchers over the line in her home state of Michigan, apparently smells opportunity.
On January 07, 2024, DeVos resigned as Trump’s US ed sec. In her resignation letter, DeVos placed the fault of January 06, 2024, chaos squarely on Trump:
In a November 07. 2024, interview with EdWeek about advice for Trump’s next Ed sec, , DeVos is fact checked as she tries to put lack of a school choice “big moment” at the feet of the Democrats. Not so, Betsy:
During Trump’s first term, DeVos’ inability to push private school choice to her liking has to be attributed in part to some Republican resistance to the idea. Heritage and any Heritage-sympathetic ed sec could well face similar issues in Trump’s second term.
I did not copy the entire article. Open the link to finish reading it.
Greg Olear is a novelist, journalist, author, and blogger. He has a long memory and thinks clearly. When I read his work, I hear echoes of what I’m thinking.
We are a few days removed from an orange guillotine slicing through the neck of American democracy. The chicken that is our body politic, already dead but in denial, is running around with its head cut off, and will continue to do so until January 20, when Donald the Conqueror picks up that severed head with his tiny hands and holds it up for all the bewildered world to behold, in triumph. Trump and triumph have the same Latin root word, the English major in me is compelled to point out.
(JD Vance—who I’ve been warning for months is an actual fascist—is among the numerous Dark Enlightenment thought leaders who use the word “regime” to mean the Deep State, so it is not without irony that these same Nazis will be replacing the bureaucracy that is the lifeblood of our country with an actual regime—regime, from rex, for king.)
Already the Trump Reich is licking its chops (literally as well as figuratively, one imagines), preparing to implement its ugly mass deportation program. That this idea polled well with Americans, and was supported enthusiastically by Latino men in particular, boggles the mind. Mass deportation is a quaint euphemism for genocide. If the new regime has its way, this will be more of a pogrom than a program. The suffering will be unimaginable; the effect on the economy Trump voters claim to care so much about, devastating.
And the new regime will seek vengeance upon its enemies. The loyalists who will actually be running the country after the professional civil servants are purged—angry, sadistic men like Mike Davis and Stephen Miller and Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon and Kash Patel—have been promising this for months. Trump’s perceived enemies, everyone from Jack Smith to Adam Schiff to Taylor Swift, are potentially in real danger. The generals who tried to warn us about him, the leaders of the intelligence community who know what he really is, his political rivals—these stalwarts of democracy may well end up at the wrong end of a firing squad. I am not exaggerating. Ivan Raiklin, Flynn’s Renfield, fancies himself the Minister of Retribution. Vengeance, more than anything, is what the new king wants, and vengeance he will have.
President Biden, for all the good he’s done, has failed for four years to fully grasp the dire threat we face from the despotic MAGA forces and their allies in Moscow, Beijing, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and legacy and social media. Putin has been openly waging war on the West since 2014, when he invaded and occupied the Crimea—a violation of the international order President Obama essentially chose to ignore. Like Neville Chamberlain, Obama did not want a war, and like Neville Chamberlain, he did not understand the nature of the psychopath he was up against; unlike Neville Chamberlain, he was not leading a country recently removed from four years of brutal war, and unlike Neville Chamberlain, he had the precedent of Neville Chamberlain to learn from. It’s only gotten worse from there.
The real tragedy is: We didn’t need to send in troops to beat the Russians. All we needed to do was treat the information war Moscow was waging on us as an actual front in an actual war, and give Ukraine as many weapons as it needed to do the dirty work for us. Biden did neither, and his entire legacy, all the good work he’s done, may wind up meaningless because of these failures.
Unless he’s working behind the scenes with the DOJ to clean up the mess—and nothing the somnambulant Merrick Garland has done, or rather not done, these past four years gives me any confidence that he is—Biden has already waved the white flag.
“Yesterday, I spoke with President-elect Trump to congratulate him on his victory,” Biden said yesterday. “And I assured him that I would direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition. That’s what the American people deserve.” That’s what we deserve, you see—our elected officials to lead us into the abattoir while assuring us, as Biden also did, that “[t]he American experiment endures, and we’re going to be okay” as long as we “keep going” and “keep the faith.”
Even worse is this: “Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable. We all get knocked down, but the measure of our character, as my dad would say, is how quickly we get back up. Remember, a defeat does not mean we are defeated. We lost this battle.” A transition to permanent Nazi rule looms, and Biden wants us to jam to “Tubthumping.”
Jim Stewartson, who has been shouting from the rooftops about the threat of Trump’s muscle for years now—and who is certainly in the crosshairs of Flynn and Raiklin—articulated this perfectly, in his open letter to Biden:
You had the power to fix this. You should have had the information to understand the threat that we were facing. Instead you treated it like just another Democratic presidency, hoping that if the economy were good enough it would fix the problem with all the “MAGA extremists.”
You were wrong. You didn’t listen to those of us who told you who tried to steal the election from you in 2020. You let your DOJ and FBI drag their feet with the perfect timing to let Donald Trump and his co-conspirators go free. You prosecuted all the foot soldiers and never went after the “generals.” You prioritized “norms” and the “independence” of the DOJ over us. You failed to lead, to demand accountability — from Merrick Garland, Chris Wray and the others who let this happen on your watch.
I hear you talking now about “all that we accomplished” in your “historic administration” as if that will have any impact on the psychopaths who will destroy everything that you have done. You could have been the inflection point to preserve our world and make it better, instead you presided over a transition into an authoritarian global nightmare.
Sadly, Biden did not, as Stewartson laments, understand the threat we were, and are, facing—even though he is old enough that he was alive during World War II, and thus should be able to recognize Nazis when he sees them. What was done to counter Russian propaganda? To stop Elon Musk, Putin’s buddy and an enemy of democracy, from buying and destroying Twitter? From eradicating the cancer that is Fox News from its position of journalistic authority?
The historian Heather Cox Richardson had this to say about the election in her own post-partem piece:
But my own conclusion is that both of those things [inflation and racism/sexism] were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Trump admires Hitler, but he’s not Hitler—not even America’s Hitler, as the VP-Elect once called him. He is more Marshal Pétain or Vidkun Quisling: the nominal head of a Nazi puppet regime. As I explained a month before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin is Hitler. Trump’s return to the White House is, among other things, the end of American exceptionalism, the end of American hegemony, the end of the Pax Americana. You know—setbacks.
Cue up the “U-S-A” chants, we are soon to become a Kremlin vassal state! Maybe the idea that the United States is better than everyone else, that the moral arc of the American universe always bends towards justice, is an obvious myth we choose to believe in despite ample evidence to the contrary—kind of like how the media doesn’t dispute that the woman who went to the polls with Trump on Election Day wearing dark oversized sunglasses was the real Melania.
Are Americans inherently good, freedom-loving, devoted to free speech and free worship, committed to all people being created equal? That’s our founding myth, and isn’t it pretty to think so? But a glance at history shows it’s not true. Bodies in graves and jails across America disprove it. We’re freedom-loving when times are easy, devoted to speech and worship we like with lip service to the rest, and divided about our differences since our inception. That doesn’t make us worse than any other nation. It’s all very human. But faith in the inherent goodness of Americans has failed us. Too many people saw it as a self-evident truth that the despicable rhetoric and policy of Trump and his acolytes was un-American. But to win elections you still have to talk people out of evil things. You can’t just trust them to reject evil. You must persuade. You must work. You have to keep making the same arguments about the same values over and over again, defend the same ground every time. Sometimes, when people are afraid or suffering and more vulnerable to lies, it’s very hard. Trump came wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross (upside down, but still) and too many people assumed their fellow Americans would see how hollow that was. That assumption was fatal.
Not a setback, you see. Fatal. Fatal. Nazis are destroyers, and the new regime is here to destroy, just like their Uncle Ted wanted:
It will be objected that the French and Russian Revolutions were failures. But most revolutions have two goals. One is to destroy an old form of society and the other is to set up the new form of society envisioned by the revolutionaries. The French and Russian revolutionaries failed (fortunately!) to create the new kind of society of which they dreamed, but they were quite successful in destroying the old society.
That’s Ted as in Ted Kaczynski. These people worship at the altar of the Unabomber!
The best time to defeat Nazis is before they gain any power, as any cursory glance at the history of 20th century Europe makes clear. From Warsaw, in a country that was ravaged by the Third Reich like no other, Dustin Du Cane points out an awful truth in his piece today, “Four Wasted Years”: “Hitler wasn’t defeated by voting, ground roots campaigning, sanctions or sending Poland a tank a week,” he writes. “He was defeated by propaganda, curtailing the free speech of Nazis, by a war machine and by millions of men in boots with rifles, tanks and bombers.”
And as I’m not the first to point out—someone else tweeted this, and I can’t remember who—the Germans at least had the good sense to put Hitler in jail after his failed coup attempt, before handing him the keys to the kingdom. Us? We threw the book at some Proud Boys and let Trump, Flynn, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and the rest of the coup plotters continue to strut around broadcasting their hate, rubbing our noses in their stinky MAGA shit. As documented indefatigably by Stewartson, my friend Gal Suburban, and very few members of the legacy media, the coup plotters spent four years telling us what they planned to do, like the bad Bond villains they are, while the DOJ basically ignored them. But hey, at least Merrick Garland went after Ticketmaster.
In terms of analyzing why Kamala Harris lost, Noah Berlatsky wrote the best post-mortem piece I came across, for Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice. There was a lot in his piece to be optimistic about—if not for the fact that we are capitulating to a vengeful sexual predator who has been granted full immunity by his fellow fascists on the Supreme Court for any “official act,” up to and including siccing the military on civilians and executing his perceived enemies. Berlatsky says:
Democrats hoped to stave off fascism in the Trump era by never losing elections. That was never feasible, and now that it has failed, we are all facing the miserable consequences of not prosecuting Trump immediately, and vigorously, after January 6.
Those consequences will be real, devastating, and long lasting. But it’s important to realize that the Republicans have not established a permanent or even solid mandate for all of Trump’s ugly orange dreams. As they won, so they can lose — which is why one of MAGA’s core goals going forward will be to subvert free and fair elections. Fighting for democracy, as well as helping each other survive the coming fascist assault, will be key in the years ahead.
To have a free election, candidates have to be free to run without fear of reprisal from the ruling party. Even if the Orange Grover Cleveland vouchsafes us midterm elections in 2026—and we cannot assume that he will—how comfortable will the opposition party be in exercising its free speech as it campaigns against him?
If we continue on this path, and Biden sits back and watches as Trump dismantles the federal regulatory agencies, and the FBI, and the CIA, we do have a few things working in our favor:
First, unlike Russia and other states where dictatorships have arisen, the United States has a long history of democratic rule (aspirational democratic rule, but still). We have that to fall back on.
Second, Trump is old and uninterested in governance and unlikely to last long in office, because of retirement, death, or the 25th Amendment. Vance is worse, because he’s younger and smarter and more ideological, but he lacks the political “rizz” necessary to maintain a cult of personality. This is a guy who plausibly fucks couches. Even when enabled by Peter Thiel and Musk, can he really hold onto power?
Third, most Americans—not many; most—will hate the stuff the new regime will roll out, including the mass deportations they once cheered on. As my friend Nina Burleigh, whom no one ever accused of peddling “hopium,” wrote on Wednesday, we Americans
are also fickle. After four more years of the right running amok, when Trump 2.0 kleptocrats have not delivered the fantasies Orange has peddled of prosperity for all, it will dawn on enough Americans that this regime will never fill the deep and endless yearning for our birthright—HAPPINESS. Because: Who can? And then, angry again, we will give this claque of oafs, orcs, rapists, misogynists, fake Christians, racists, neo-Nazis, and liars the boot they deserved last night.
The question is whether enough Americans will rise up to do so, or if they will just blame all the failures on Biden, as Fox News and Facebook will instruct them to do, and go back to watching football. Me, I like to think even the gun-toting MAGA won’t like it when the jackboots come for their friends and family members.
For me, the real glimmer of hope is that the leaders of the Blue States seem prepared for the fight ahead, and, unlike Biden, willing to take it on. Kathy Hochul and Leticia James, the governor and attorney general of my state of New York, were particularly reassuring about this. The latter, no fan of Trump, said this:
As Attorney General, I will always stand up to protect New Yorkers and fight for our rights and values. My office has been preparing for a potential second Trump Administration, and I am ready to do everything in my power to ensure our state and nation do not go backwards. During his first term, we stood up for the rule of law and defended against abuses of power and federal efforts to harm New Yorkers. Together with Governor Hochul, our partners in state and local government, and my colleague attorneys general from throughout the nation, we will work each and every day to defend Americans, no matter what this new administration throws at us. We are ready to fight back again.”
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom called lawmakers on Thursday into a legislative special session next month “to safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration.”
In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker said on Thursday he would ask his state’s legislators, possibly as soon as next week, to address potential threats from a second Trump term. “You come for my people,” Mr. Pritzker said at a news conference, “you come through me.”
That is the kind of leadership we need—not platitudes about setbacks and “we’ll get ‘em next time.”
The time to take on the Kremlin was four years ago. Unless Biden does something unexpected in the next 70-whatever days—a Jayden Daniels “Hail Maryland” completion to save democracy—that moment has passed. Putin will soon have his puppet back in the White House, this time with the backing of the Supreme Court, the Senate, probably the House, and a staff of bloodthirsty fascist true believers; that is a far bigger victory for Moscow than the U.S. making like the USSR and disbanding. Sorry, Abe Lincoln, but I would rather live in a smaller democracy than a Trump dictatorship.
And as much as I’d like to think otherwise—and I assure you, I’ve spent the last few days trying—it’s foolhardy to believe that the immediate future will be anything but a Trump-branded sneaker stomping on a human face. Nazis don’t stop being Nazis because you show them decency and respect, as Biden and Harris have both stupidly chosen to do. We cannot expect that Trump or anyone in his regime will be anything other than what they are, or will do anything other than what they’ve told us they plan to do.
Again this week, I quote the German poet Kurt Tucholsky: “My life is too precious to put myself under an apple tree and ask it to produce pears.”
Sarah Longwell is publisher of The Bulwark, executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump, and host of “The Focus Group” podcast.
In this article, she appeals to fellow Republicans to stand up and speak out about Trump. I hope her article is read by George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Lamar Alexander. They know how dangerous Trump is. They know he is destroying the Republican Party.
She writes:
I HAVE A QUESTION FOR FORMER Trump administration officials, Republican electeds (and former electeds), business leaders, and conservative writers and pundits who recognize Donald Trump for the threat he is. Actually, it’s a question for anyone on the right who knows what Trump’s re-election could mean for the country, for liberal democracy, and for the world—and, who, in the face of this threat, has decided to maintain either a posture of silence or both-sides-are-bad neutrality.
My question is this:
How are you going to feel if Trump wins on Tuesday by an extremely narrow margin?
I suspect you’ll spend the next four years holding your breath.
Because if Donald Trump does a tenth of what he has promised—pulls the United States out of NATO, abandons Ukraine and sides with Vladimir Putin, puts RFK Jr. and Elon Musk in charge of serious parts of the American government, rounds up 15 million undocumented immigrants into camps and deports them, seeks political retribution against those who opposed his candidacy—I suspect you’ll come to regret your silence when you could have made a difference.
I can see you holding up your hands to show us how clean they are. Saying, “But I said Donald Trump was a threat! I said I wouldn’t vote for him! What more do you want from me?”
And I get that. I do. The problem is that this moment demands more from all of us.
It demands clarity. And it demands your leadership.
Over the course of your career you’ve asked people to trust you. Either by voting for you, or listening to your advice, or relying on your judgment and analysis.
So why is it suddenly a bridge too far for you to tell everyone what you really believe?
I understand that this moment is hard. Trump could win. Even if he doesn’t win, coming off the sidelines could alienate you from career networks, business opportunities, or even friends and family.
But being a leader means standing up and telling the truth even when it’s hard, or costly, or scary. Especially when it’s hard, or costly, or scary.
It’s still not too late. Every day, more people are speaking out—people with reputations, and reservations, but whose consciences won’t let them sit this one out.
You shouldn’t sit this one out, either. You should not decide, after a career in leadership, that this time you’d rather just be a spectator.
Maybe you think that adding your voice wouldn’t matter to voters. After all, so few things seem to move the needle. Well, I’m here to tell you that it matters. It all matters. Every little bit. You do not know who’s listening as the moment approaches to cast their vote. You do not know who you might persuade at the eleventh hour. And you do not know what the margin will be. If this election is decided by 9,000 votes in Pennsylvania—which is absolutely a real thing that could happen—then every single input could be the tipping point.
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I can’t see the future. I don’t know if your endorsement would be the difference maker. Just like I don’t know what price you would pay for speaking out more clearly.
What I do know is this: If you abdicate the obligations of leadership in this moment and the thing you fear comes to pass, you will regret having stood down when the country needed you to stand up. You will regret it for all of your days.
MAYBE YOU ARE A RETIRED FOUR-STAR GENERAL, or cabinet secretary, or someone who took a job as a political appointee in the Trump administration and saw things that shocked your conscience. And maybe you’ve told reporters about what you saw, or written about it in a book. That’s not enough because books have a relatively small reach, and your words are mediated through paper. What’s needed is for you to look voters in the eye and give them a direct warning about what a second Trump term might mean. Especially now that you won’t be on the inside to try to protect the country from him.
Maybe you’re a former Republican president or presidential nominee. Maybe you were once the leader of the party Donald Trump has destroyed. I am sorry, but the unpleasant fact is that you cannot preserve your influence for some future GOP. This is actually the last moment in which you have a chance to influence it. Your party, every bit as much as your country, needs you. Right now.
Maybe you’ve led venerable conservative publications. You’ve acted as a thought leader. Someone shaping our political culture. But today you want to keep your hands clean by writing in Edmund Burke on your ballot or some other nonsense protest candidate—as a sign that youkept your purity. I understand this impulse. But it’s wrong. You know that if yours was the single deciding vote, you’d vote for Harris. So just say so. This isn’t an academic exercise, and it’s not about you.
Maybe you’re a billionaire to whom this country has given everything. Your wealth insulates you from the consequences of the worst-case Trump scenarios. And yet, you see Trump’s transactional nature, his willingness to provide favor if you provide obedience, and instead of standing up to Trump, you cower. This might seem like wisdom, but it’s not actual safety. There will be more demands. The only way to actually protect your business is for the rule of law to be victorious and democracy to be stable.
FOR MONTHS, YOUR COUNTRYMEN have been waiting for you to tell them the full, unvarnished truth about the danger you believe Donald Trump presents. To tell everyday Americans the same words you say in green rooms, at dinners, and in off-the-record conversations. You haven’t gotten there yet, but you still can. Before you make your final decision, think about Liz Cheney’s warning that some day Donald Trump will be gone, but the choices we make today will be with us forever.
Choose honor. It’s the choice you’ve made again and again in your professional lives. It would be a sin to stop choosing it because of a mountebank like Donald Trump.
I want to tell you about some Republicans who are already putting themselves on the line for democracy. They don’t have security details, or staff, or budgets. They’re just regular people who voted for Trump before, but refuse to support him again. They joined Republican Voters Against Trump to get the word out to their friends and neighbors. A few of them have lost jobs. Some of them have lost family. All of them have lost friends. None of them regrets it.
They’ve put their faces on billboards across the country. They’ve appeared in millions of dollars’ worth of paid ads running in their own communities. They’ve taken part in text campaigns, spoken to the media, knocked on doors, and traveled to swing states in the hopes of making a difference.
THE REASON I BELIEVE THAT every little bit counts is because conservative-leaning voters say that to me all the time.
In Republican focus groups, one thing I hear again and again is that voters are open to hearing from the leaders who served under Trump, who were in the room with him. The messenger is as important as the message, and these people are ready to believe the words of a lifelong Republican or flag officer much more readily than they’ll believe a Democrat telling them the same things.
So if you’re one of the small number of people who can make a difference in this moment, the question is: What are you going to do?
Courage is contagious. And I have one last piece of advice: No one ever regrets doing the right thing.
You won’t regret it, either. So stand up and join us. It’s our last chance.
I have been puzzling over this question since the Democratic National Convention.
Like most people, I didn’t know much about Kamala Harris when she became Vice President. Now that I have seen her speak, now that I saw her debate Trump, I feel very energized to support her campaign for the Presidency.
She is smart, well informed, experienced, committed to the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law. She is thoughtful and composed. She laughs, she smiles, she seems like a kind and thoughtful person. She is well prepared for the presidency, having won election as the District Attorney of San Francisco, as Attorney General of the State of California, as U.S. Senator from California, and as Vice-President of the United States since Joe Biden and she were elected in 2020.
Her opponent is a bundle of equal parts narcissism and hatred. He likes men. He likes white men. He likes to play tough guy. He looks on women as sex objects and feather heads. He doesn’t respect women.
He is crude, vulgar, without a shred of the dignity we expect from a president. The language he uses to ridicule and insult others is vile.
He is a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, and a Christian nationalist (without being a practicing Christian).
He is a sexual predator. He is known for not paying people to whom he owes money for services rendered. He has gone through six bankruptcies.
He is ignorant. His former aides say he has never read the Constitution. He is driven by his massive ego. He wants everyone to say he’s the best, the greatest, and there’s never been anyone as great as him.
He is a convicted felon, convicted on 34 counts of business fraud in New York. He was found guilty by a jury in New York of defaming E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of sexually assaulting her many years ago. He was ordered to pay her more than $90 million for continuing to defame her. That judgment is on appeal.
Other trials are pending.
When he lost the 2020 election, he refused to accept his defeat. He schemed to overturn the election by various ploys. He summoned a mob of his fans to Washington on January 6, 2021, the day that Congress gathered for the ceremonial certification of the election. Trump encouraged them to march on the U.S. Capitol, “peaceably….(but) fight like hell.” They did fight like hell. They battered their way into the Capitol, smashing windows and doors, beating law officers, vandalizing the building and its offices, while hunting for Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The outnumbered law officers held them off to protect the members of Congress. Many of them were brutally beaten. Some later died. What if the mob had reached the members of Congress? What if they had captured Pence and Pelosi?
It was the most shameful day of our national history. A President encouraging a mob to sack the Capitol and overturn the Constitution.
Ever since that disgraceful day, Trump has reiterated that the election was stolen from him, even though it wasn’t close. He has undermined faith in the electoral process, faith in the judiciary, faith in the law.
These are the two candidates: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Last night, I read the hundreds of letters to the editor of the Washington Post about Bezos’ decision not to endorse. By now, there are probably thousands. Almost all of them said: I have canceled my subscription.”
Good for them.
I am NOT canceling my subscription.
I enjoy reading Dana Milbank, Jennifer Rubin, Eugene Robinson, Alexander Petri, and other columnists.
I applaud them for dissenting from Bezos’ mandate.
They will vent their rage for the next 10 days. At Bezos and especially at Trump.
And of course there will continue to be hard-hitting investigations.
In an opinion piece in Scientific American, Cecilia Menjívar of UCLA and Deisy Del Real of the University of Southern California contend that the United States and other nations are sliding toward autocracy. They believe we can learn from the experience of other nations.
They write:
An autocratic wave has crept up on us in the U.S. and over the world in the last decade. Democracy and autocracy were once seen as two separate and distant worlds with little in common, and that the triumph of one weakened the other. Now, however, autocrats across the globe, in poor and wealthy nations, in established and nascent democracies, and from the right and left, are using the same tactics to dismantle democracies from within.
With the upcoming U.S. presidential election in November, questions about the future of American democracy take on urgency. As the American public seems increasingly receptive to autocratic tactics, these questions become even more pressing. Will the U.S. slide into autocracy, faced with a presidential candidate in Donald Trump who promises to be a dictator on his first day in office? Can lessons from autocracies elsewhere help us detect democratic backsliding in the U.S.?
To answer these questions, we first need to identify how the new breed of autocrats attains and retains power: their hallmark strategy is deception. How does a roll call of modern autocrats, and wannabe autocrats, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro implement this modus operandi for the latest model of autocracy? They twist information and create confusion within a façade of democracy as they seize power. They do not overthrow democracy through military coups d’état but by undoing core democratic principles, weakening the rule of law, and eliminating checks and balances between branches of government.
Rather than eradicating democratic institutions as leaders like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko did in the past, today’s established and emergent autocrats (as is the case of Maduro or Orbán, for instance) corrupt the courts, sabotage elections and distort information to attain and remain in power. They are elected through ostensibly free elections and connect with a public already primed to be fearful of a fabricated enemy. Critically, they use these democratic tools to attain power; once there, they dismantle those processes. Autocratic tactics creep into the political life of a country slowly and embed themselves deeply in the democratic apparatus they corrupt. Modern autocracy, one may say, is a tyranny of gaslighting.
We gathered a group of scholars who have looked at successful and failed autocracies worldwide in a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, to identify common denominators of autocratic rulers worldwide. This research shows that modern autocrats uniformly apply key building blocks to cement their illiberal agenda and undermine democracies before taking them over. Those include manipulating the legal system, rewriting electoral laws and constitutions, and dividing the population into “us” versus “them” blocs. Autocrats routinely present themselves as the only presumed savior of the country while silencing, criminalizing and disparaging critics or any oppositional voice. They distort information and fabricate “facts” through the media, claim fraud if they lose an election, persuade the population that they can “cleanse” the country of crime and, finally, empower a repressive nationalistic diaspora and fund satellite political movements and hate groups that amplify the autocrats’ illiberal agenda to distort democracy.
In February, Bukele, the popular Salvadoran autocrat and self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” spoke at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual convention for U.S. right-wing elected officials and activists. There he received a standing ovation after he flaunted his crackdown on crime in his country and suggested the U.S. should follow his tactics. His speech demonstrates how, regardless of political history and ideology, or their nation’s wealth and place on the global stage, autocrats today deploy a similar “toolbox of tricks” aimed at legalizing their rule. That’s because they copy from one another and learn from one another’s successes and failures. Vast interconnected networks enable autocrats to cooperate, share strategies and know-how, and visit one another in public shows of friendship and solidarity to create an international united front. Just ask Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister and autocrat, who received a warm reception when he spoke at the CPAC in 2022, reminding the crowd of the reason for his visit: “I’m here to tell you that we should unite our forces.”
Global networks of autocratic regimes also provide economic resources to other autocrats and invest in their economies, share security services to squash popular dissent, and sometimes interfere in each other’s elections.
Modern autocrats do not act alone; their connections with one another are complemented and sustained by a varied cadre of legal specialists, political strategists and academics who tend to be economically secure, well-educated and cosmopolitan. These individuals, like Michael Anton and those tied to the Trump-defending Claremont Institute, the over 400 scholars and policy experts who collaborated on Project 2025— the extreme-right game plan for a Trump presidency—and Stephen K. Bannon, who called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” by filling government jobs with partisans and loyalists, move in and out of government positions and the limelight. They are nimble and, moreover, fundamental to the autocrats’ strategies, as they create videos and podcasts and write books to fabricate good images of the autocrats, write detailed blueprints for an autocratic form of government, and consult aspiring autocrats on best practices.
Evidence indicates that we are in a critical moment in U.S. democracy. Will the U.S. inevitably descend into autocracy? No, not with an alert and well-informed electorate. Recognizing the strategies that autocrats use and share, veiled behind a façade of democratic elections and wrapped in fearmongering, equips us to understand the harmful consequences of these strategies for democracy, and perhaps to stop the wave in time.
Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a Nicaraguan opposition politician and prospective presidential candidate, was accused of treason, arrested and banished simply for running as an opposition candidate by the regime of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo (who is also first lady). In exile, Chamorro has described a danger countries face: autocrats who come to power through democratic systems are “like a silent disease—the early symptoms of this silent disease are usually dismissed, but once it begins to consume the body, it is usually too late to stop it.”
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Media Matters has done a thorough review of the contents of Project 2025, which was written as a playbook for the next Trump administration. It was released and posted on the web in 2023, without fanfare. As more people read it and expressed their indignation, Trump claimed he knew nothing about it. Ever heard of it. Didn’t know who wrote it.
But the authors of the plan included 140 people who had worked in the Trump administration. The plan was developed by the rightwing Heriage Foundation, whose president is Kevin Roberts, a friend of Trump’s.
He knew.
It’s the roadmap for the second Trump term in office.
For education, the main feature of Project 2025 is its strong support for school choice, especially vouchers. It is a formula for directing federal funds to public funding of private and religious schools, as well as home schooling. It’s the Betsy DeVos model. Its purpose is to end public schools.
We need to be talking more, not less, about the threat Donald Trump poses to our democracy. The former president and his understudy, JD Vance, have been trying to convince voters, with no evidence and a head-spinning level of hypocrisy, that violence against the former president was caused by rhetoric from Democrats.
Trump has upended the political script, saying, “[The Democrats’] rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country.” Followed closely by JD Vance’s incendiary quip: “The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence. The left needs to tone down the rhetoric. It needs to cut this crap out.”
And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Among the media and the campaigns, the “threat to democracy” line has apparently become old hat. When he was running for reelection, President Joe Biden often used it in an effort to differentiate himself. Unfortunately, this idea apparently doesn’t poll all that well. While it is true and terrifying, it is also a bit abstract — and for some, hard to believe. Lowering the price of milk is concrete and plausible.
So the Harris campaign hasn’t been talking about democracy much, instead concentrating on tangible policies to help the middle class. While this makes sense politically — and I hope it works — I’m here to say we cannot lose sight of the fact that a second Trump presidency would threaten our way of government and our way of life.
Trump’s term as president was just a precursor to what we can expect the second time around, but it bears repeating to remind us what he is capable of. In case anyone has forgotten, here is a partial list of how he has jeopardized democracy:
Attempted to overturn a free and fair election, a number of times in a number of ways.
Tried to block the peaceful transfer of power by inciting a mob to attack the United States Capitol.
Undermined the independence of the Justice Department, while claiming our legal system was rigged.
Botched the federal government’s response to the pandemic, resulting in a massive loss of life, because he doesn’t believe in inconvenient truths.
Cozied up to dictators and autocrats, even asking one to investigate a baseless claim against his political rival.
Selected Supreme Court justices who curtailed reproductive rights, to the point where women are being denied care and dying.
Lied. All the time. The leader of the free world must be credible.
Is sowing seeds of doubt that the 2024 election will be legitimate.
There is every indication that a second Trump trip to the White House would be even more harmful than the first.
This time around he is angrier and thirstier for vengeful retribution. He has said he will weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies. Full stop.
His loyal cronies have had more time to plan. We know they are vetting and training a legion of sycophants to displace career bureaucrats across the executive branch. The guardrails we had last time, whistleblowers and “adults in the room,” will be gone.
After nine years of Trump at the top of the Republican Party, his cult-like reach has created an army of MAGA-elected officials at the state and local levels who are more than happy to do his bidding, even if it’s illegal.
He is more gullible than ever — wanting, needing to believe his own hype. Believing his own bluster has had dangerous consequences. See: January 6, 2021. He spends his time searching social media for confirmation of his over-inflated self-importance. He surrounds himself with yes-men and women falling all over themselves to prove their fealty. No one will tell him the truth, for fear of retribution. It is a modern spin on the children’s fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — only this horror story would be titled, “The Politician’s Stupefying Greatness.”
The coup de grace is that Trump has carte blanche to do whatever he wants. That terrifying reality is brought to you by none other than the Supreme Court with its ruling in Trump v. United States. In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee following that decision, representatives from 75 legal organizations said it “poses a significant threat to our democracy by effectively providing the president with sweeping legal immunity for criminal acts.”
We tend to memorialize significant dates in our nation’s history. In my lifetime, there was Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. More recently, September 11, 2001, and January 6, 2021, have been etched into our psyche. But I would argue November 5, 2024, could be as or even more significant. It will test the strength of our country’s democratic infrastructure. That infrastructure and the American voter can save democracy by sending Kamala Harris to the Oval Office.
John Thompson, historian and former teacher, describes in this post the latest trampling of the rights of students and teachers by Ryan Walters, the state’s Secretary of Education. Secretary Walters wants to eject “indoctrination” from the schools but replace it with his own brand of introdoctrination. True MAGA!
Thompson:
Somethings Happening Here; What Is, Never Is Clear.
In July, State Superintendent Ryan Walters announced that an executive committee would overhaul Oklahoma’s standards in order to eliminate DEI and “indoctrination,” and highlight “American exceptionalism.” It would feature prominent conservatives, including Dennis Prager of PragerU, David Barton of the Christian Nationalist organization, Wallbuilders, and the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts.”
In an interview with NBC News, Walters then threatened, “Oklahoma educators who refuse to teach students about the Bible could lose their teaching license.”
And Roberts, a sponsor of Project 2025, has further explained, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Roberts also told the New York Times that “he views Heritage’s role today as ‘institutionalizing Trumpism.’”
According to FOX 25, in early September, the entire Social Studies Standards Committee met “to discuss what they thought would be a final review.” Instead, an undisclosed draft of their standards, was presented by the executive committee. Moreover FOX News was told that committee members “had to sign non-disclosure agreements not to share what was being discussed and were reminded of the NDAs at the end of the session.”
FOX’s sources also said, “what happened Tuesday left them ‘disheartened.’” One source said, “I want to throw up.”
Moreover, State Rep. Forrest Bennett described the meeting as, “essentially getting them into a room today and saying ‘Thanks for all your work. We don’t care. We’re deleting, copy-pasting … [and imposing] right-wing, out-of-state, out-of-touch, standards.'”
In 2023, “an administrative law judge found [that] the Education Department failed to prove that Boismier’s conduct justified revocation of her teaching certificate.” But in August of 2024, Board of Education issued their revocation order without revealing what it said. We now know that Boismier was accused of “’circumventing’ HB 1775, but not of teaching any of its banned concepts.”
And now Boismier’s attorney says, “It should be an easy call for the courts to overturn it, since Walters chose to throw out the actual facts and law in the case to get the results he wanted and campaigned on.”
In other cases during that week, Edmond teacher, Regan Killackey, is fighting in court against Walters’ effort to revoke his teaching license for “goofing around with his son and daughter in a party supply store in September 2019, snapping photos. His daughter put on a mask of Donald Trump. His son held up a silver plastic sword, and Killackey grimaced.”
That the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency (LOFT) would begin an investigation into spending concerns regarding the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE). This investigation, approved by Speaker Charles McCall, R-Atoka, and spearheaded by Wallace in his capacity as Chairman of LOFT, will focus on issues raised by both legislators and private citizens regarding alleged OSDE funding disbursement issues.
Moreover, all relevant information will be shared “with Attorney General Gentner Drummond regarding any potential violations of the Open Records or Open Meeting Acts by OSDE.”
So, what’s happening here in Oklahoma “ain’t exactly clear,” but we know that more Republican legislators are resisting Walters and it seems unlikely that Walters’ overreach will hold up in court. What I hear from legislators is that the effort to impose Project 2025 on history standards has prompted a serious tumult behind closed doors. It’s also clear that Walters and the Heritage Foundation will continue their assaults on public education. But, I’m confident that Walters, at least, his heading for a fall.
Most people would promptly respond to the question that is the title of this post: NO! the First Amendment was written to protect the people against government over-reach. The very question is absurd on its face. Yet Republican Attorneys General have argued that the First Amendment protects their right to ban books. No, no, no, a million times NO!
Book banners in Llano County and Florida’s attorney general will try to convince a federal appeals court Tuesday that the First Amendment grants elected officials the unlimited right to remove books from public libraries.
Conservatives will turn freedom of speech on its head by arguing that politicians are expressing themselves when they ban books, and therefore, the Constitution protects book bans. In a perverse twist, they will make this argument during Banned Books Week, the time of year when writers defend the right to share ideas.
The Little v. Llano case will undoubtedly go to the U.S. Supreme Court. Seventeen Republican state attorneys general have joined Ken Paxton in defending the Llano County Commissioners Court’s order to remove 17 books from the public library. Not the school library, mind you, but the library system for all residents.
Historically, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment severely limits the power of government to control speech and other forms of expression. Governments are not allowed to ban books based solely on their viewpoint; there must be a public safety issue.
Llano County residents sued in federal court last year to have the books returned. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman found that Llano officials only banned the books because they disagreed with the content and determined the commissioners had no compelling government interest to remove them. He ordered all the books restored to library shelves.
The 18 Republican attorneys general who have joined the case want the judges to accept a new interpretation of the First Amendment, one first pushed in Florida. They argue government officials have free speech rights, and the court must protect them as much as a librarian’s, a writer’s or a reader’s civil liberties.
“The county’s decisions over which books to offer its patrons in its public libraries, at its own expense, are its own speech,” the states argued in a court filing last month. “The government does not violate anyone’s free speech rights merely by speaking — no matter what it chooses to say or not to say.”
If Little v. Llano makes it to the Supreme Court, and the justices agree with this argument, they will hobble the foundation of our democracy: the free exchange of ideas. The flip side of the freedom to write is the freedom to read. One is useless without the other.
Libraries play a crucial role in a free society. They are repositories not only of history and entertainment but of accumulated knowledge and new ideas. Books are expensive, and libraries make them available to the entire community.
Public libraries are, by definition, government entities financed with taxpayer dollars. In a free society, they must be nonpartisan and contain a wide range of content absent political litmus tests. A conservative victory for Llano would turn politicians into thought police.
Krause was among the state lawmakers who limited how teachers can discuss slavery and discrimination against African Americans because it might make descendants of slaveholders uncomfortable. Possessing “The 1619 Project” is now a firing offense at Texas public schools.
Where does it end if politicians have a free speech right to ban books? We know politicians try to outdo each other with ideological purity tests. Activists on the left and right will draft lists of authorized and prohibited books, and libraries will have to restock their shelves after every election.
As for those who argue libraries are full of pornography, I say poppycock. The American Library Association and professional librarians follow well-considered procedures in choosing what titles to carry, and one person’s taste should not determine what a library buys.
If politicians do end up determining what we can find at the library, you’ll have fellow Texans to thank.
Diane Ravitch's blog 