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Slate: Silicon Valley Loves J.D.Vance

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
12

Nitish Pahwa writes in Slate about Silicon Valley’s devotion to J.D. Vance, although women are not so happy in light of Vance’s misogyny.

Pahwa writes:

Who was happiest about Donald Trump’s Monday decision to pick Ohio Sen. and former ivory-tower Appalachia whisperer J.D. Vance as his vice presidential hopeful? It wasn’t rural America, swing-state independents, or women voters. It wasn’t the conservative intelligentsia or the Catholic hard-liners, despite Vance’s self-pronounced conversion. It certainly wasn’t the traditional Republican donors currently opening up their checkbooks for Trump, or even Vance’s own Senate colleagues.

In actuality, it was the Big Tech and venture capital ambassadors who were the happiest of all. Trump had been the target of a heated effort from Silicon Valley types of all strata (well, mostly billionaires) to get Vance to the VP slot. Or, as Axios reported Monday, “a secret lobbying campaign continued into yesterday morning, with Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and tech investor David Sacks all calling Trump to try to lock in Vance.”

Musk, of course, has struck up a close relationship with Trump in recent months, regularly chatting on the phone with the former president and helping to organize executives who desire to oust President Joe Biden over his pro-worker, pro-tax, and pro-regulation agenda. “Excellent decision by @realDonaldTrump,” Musk tweeted to the ex-president, who still hasn’t returned to posting on the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Longtime VC, podcast host, and political influencer Sacks gave a Monday night speech at the Republican National Convention that, like many of his other screeds, mostly made the case against Biden instead of one for Trump. He did, however, tweet his satisfaction with Vance, praising his military service and subsequent critiques of forever wars, calling him “an American patriot, with the courage to fight America’s wars but the wisdom to know when to avoid them.” (Sacks’ tweet also erroneously implied that Vance had enlisted “when the Twin Towers came down,” even though he couldn’t join and serve until a few years after 9/11.)

It’s not just them. The burgeoning (and amply funded) corpus of anti-regulation, anti-“woke,” pro-crypto, and A.I.–enchanted “effective accelerationists” are fully taken in with Vance. On X, Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey celebrated the coming matchup of “Tech Bro vs Kamala Harris,” while Chamath Palihapitiya—a now-right-leaning VC who co-hosts the megapopular All-In podcast with Sacks—reveled in the potential for “a Bestie adjacent as the VP.” (Besties refers to the four All-In hosts, who recently interviewed Trump on their show.)

Why the obsession with Vance? By the time his star began to rise with the 2016 publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he had pivoted from a career in law to a Silicon Valley gig at Mithril Capital, one of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firms. At that time, Thiel—who’d co-authored an anti-“multiculturalism” bookwith Sacks in the 1990s—was one of Trump’s few outspoken tech-world surrogates, a position that had earned him a speaking slot at the RNC that first nominated Trump for president.

The conservative Vance wasn’t fully aligned with his boss, though: He frequently criticized Trump even while attempting to explain the candidate’s appeal to rural Americans. He also disparaged Silicon Valley in an interview with Slate as “more of a bubble than D.C.” and New York, full of Richie Riches with “no real sense of how frustrated and how destitute a lot of people outside of Silicon Valley are.” In an early-2017 New York Times op-ed, he expressed some admiration for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama while also “hop[ing] for better policy from the new administration, a health reform package closer to my ideological preferences, and a new approach to foreign policy.” Just two months later, he wrote another Times piece about why the “optimism [that] blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country” had spurred him to move back to Ohio from California.

Although Vance may have left the Bay Area, he hadn’t left his position with Thiel’s company and remained a “friend and big fan” of him. He got more involved in the VC arena, joining Steve Case’s Revolution firm as a partner in managing a fund that aimed to support more startups based outside the coasts. As reporting from Business Insider has indicated, it is unclear how successful he really was at that mission.

It was clear that Vance’s return home was less about uplifting the “hillbillies” he had whitesplained to the liberal bubble with his memoir and more about seeking higher power. He teased a run for office as far back as late 2016, in a Washington Post interview about his moving plans, and floated the possibilityagain two years later, while joining a conservative influence group chaired by Federalist Society maven Leonard Leo. When that run for office flamed out, he dug deeper into the VC realm, starting a Cincinnati-based fund backed by Thiel and Marc Andreessen in 2020.

Categories Elections, Gender, Republicans, Trump

Jennifer Rubin: The He-Man Woman-Haters’ Ticket

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2024 //
14

Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post described Donald Trump and JD Vance as a ticket whose common bond is misogyny. They have done a first-rate job of portraying their disdain for the rights of women. Apparently, they think the role of women is to be barefoot and pregnant or in Trump’s case, willing and grateful recipients of his sexual escapades. In a recent interview on MSNBC, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota referred to Vance as “President of the He-Man Woman-Haters Club,” a reference to a 1994 comical film called The Little Rascals, where a group of pre-adolescent boys swear their eternal enmity towards women.

Rubin wrote

If you wanted to design a presidential ticket most likely to offend women voters, you would pick as the presidential nominee an adjudicated rapist, someone caught bragging about sexually assaulting women and who comes with a history of demeaning and insulting women. You would make it someone who mused about punishing women for having an abortion and who boasts about taking away women’s bodily integrity.

Then, for vice president, you would find someone who has implied women should stay in abusive relationships (he denies that’s what he meant but listen for yourself), wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest, favors a “federal response” to prevent women from traveling to states where abortion is legal, accuses single women (“childless cat ladies”) of lacking a stake in America’s future, votes against protection for in vitro fertilization and wants higher taxes for childless people. (He later said he had not meant to offend cats.)

Well, that’s the MAGA Republican Party ticket of convicted felon and former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Trump, having normalized overtly racist speech and demonization of immigrants during his campaigns and presidency, now seems bent on making misogyny acceptable, as well.

Indeed, the MAGA movement’s anti-woman outlook relies on a whole pseudo-academic underpinning to justify relegating women to the home as baby-making machines. “Vance, along with his New Right fellow-travelers, is about to introduce voters to a more conceptual take on sexism — one which many women, and indeed many men, might find even more alarming,” Laura K. Field wrote last week for Politico. Field detailed the right-wing groups that have concocted a philosophical framework to propound “a deep skepticism about modern feminism and gender equality”; its aim is “to roll back much of feminism’s gains.”

Their declaration for a “revival of faith, family, and fertility” comes straight from the fascism playbook, which historically has sought to domesticate women and put them under the thumb of their fathers and husbands. “Control over female bodies in the name of population growth is a throughline of authoritarianism, as are persecutions of LGBTQ+ individuals,” writes historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat. “In Europe and America, the century-long focus of the far right on demographic emergencies supposedly created by declines of White births and upticks in non-White immigration have created support for controls on female bodies.” She continues: “These controls are predicated on negating the personhood of women and consigning them to roles as vessels of population growth.”

From the “great replacement theory” to abortion bans, the Make America Great Again movement echoes past demographic freakouts and accompanying efforts to dominate women. As Ben-Ghiat puts it, the MAGA crew, like its intellectual ancestors, insists that for “White Christian civilization to continue, women must be deprived of reproductive rights and demeaned, disciplined, and criminalized if they resist.”

But you don’t have to rely on historians. Project 2025, which Vance has championed and many close Trump advisers put together, explicitly commits to restore the centrality of a male-headed, heterosexual family with children. (“Families composed of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”) Running through every policy recommendation, the plan gives preference to the “traditional family,” (often called “healthy family”), deeming all other family units as “unnatural.”

Please open the link to finish reading the column.

How smart is it for two men to run for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency by promising to reduce the rights of women and restore them to their traditional role as baby-makers? Some women may like their ideas but most won’t, including a significant number of Republican and independent women. Women are half the population. Women vote.

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Gender, Trump, Vance, J.D.

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Can’t Escape Project 2025

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2024 //
30

Ever since the general public began hearing Project 2025, the document scared those who listened. Although it was described by its authors as the agenda for Trump’s second term and it was written by veterans of the Trump administration, Trump pretended he knew nothing about it. Who wrote it? What does it say? Never heard of it.

For sure, very few people have read its 900+ pages. I read the section on education. Eliminate the Department of Education. Voucherize programs like Title 1, Headstart, special education funding, with no federal regulations attached to the money. Promote funding for religious and private schools. Ditch separation of church and state.

It also calls for a national ban on abortion and for eliminating the Civil Service and replacing career government employees with people loyal to Trump. It is the document that describes—department by department, agency by agency—how to destroy “the administrative state.”

There’s a saying that comes to mind: “When an authoritarian tells you what he plans to do, believe him.”

Heather Cox Richardson wrote about Trump’s clumsy efforts to distance himself from an agenda written by senior officials in his administration:

On Friday, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump begged the members of the audience to “vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine…. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

The comment drew a lot of attention, and on Monday, Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham gave him a chance to walk the statement back. Instead, he said: “I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true.” “Don’t worry about the future. You have to vote on November 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore, because frankly we will have such love, if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”

Trump’s refusal to disavow the idea that putting him back into power will mean the end of a need for elections is chilling and must be viewed against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024, decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States. In that decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s right-wing majority said that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties” and that presidents should have a presumption of immunity for other presidential actions. 

John Roberts defends the idea of a strong executive and has fought against the expansion of voting rights made possible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The idea that it is dangerous to permit minorities and women to vote suggests that there are certain people who should run the country. That tracks with a recently unearthed video in which Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance calls childless people “psychotic” and “deranged,” and refers unselfconsciously to “America’s leadership class.” 

The idea that democracy must be overturned in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation is at the center of the “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” championed by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán’s imposition of an authoritarian Christian nationalism on a former democracy, in turn, has inspired the far-right figures that are currently in charge of the Republican Party. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Kevin Roberts has called for “institutionalizing Trumpism” and pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term. Those who created Project 2025 are closely connected to the Trump team, and Trump praised its creators and its ideas. 

Today, The New Republic published the foreword Vance wrote for Kevin Roberts’s forthcoming book. Vance makes it clear he sees Kevin Roberts and himself as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.” Like others on the Christian right, Vance argues that “the Left” has captured the country’s institutions and that those institutions must be uprooted and those in them replaced with right-wing Christians in order to restore what they see—inaccurately—as traditional America.  

That determination to disrupt American institutions fits neatly with the technology entrepreneurs who seem to believe that they are the ones who should control the nation’s future. Vance is backed by Silicon Valley libertarian Peter Thiel, who put more than $10 million behind Vance’s election to the Senate. In 2009, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” 

“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” he wrote. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” 

Thiel set Vance up to invest in companies that made him wealthy and touted Vance for the vice presidential slot, and in turn, the Silicon Valley set are expecting Vance to help get rid of the regulation imposed by the Biden administration and to push cryptocurrency. Trump appears to be getting on board with comments about how the tech donors are “geniuses,” praising investor Elon Musk and saying, “We have to make life good for our smart people.” In a piece that came out Sunday, Washington Post reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku, and Josh Dawsey credited the influence of Thiel and other tech leaders for turning Vance from a Never-Trumper to a MAGA Republican. 

Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that the cryptocurrency industry is investing heavily in the 2024 election, with its main super PAC raising $202 million in this cycle. Three large cryptocurrency companies are investing about $150 million in pro-crypto congressional candidates. 

On Saturday, Trump said he would make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.” He promised to end regulations on cryptocurrency, which, because it is not overseen by governments, is prone to use by criminals and rogue states. That regulation is “a part of a much larger pattern that’s being carried out by the same left-wing fascists to weaponize government against any threat to their power,” Trump said. “They’ve done it to me.”

But the problem that those trying to get rid of the modern administrative state continue to run up against is that voters actually like a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights. In recent days, Minnesota governor Tim Walz has been articulating how popular that government is as he makes the television rounds.

On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper listed some of Walz’s policies—he passed background checks for guns, expanded LGBTQ protections, instituted free breakfast and lunch for school kids—and asked if they made Walz vulnerable to Trump calling him a “big government liberal.” Walz joked that he was, indeed, a “monster.” 

“Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health care decisions, and we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness…. The fact of the matter is,” where Democratic policies are implemented, “quality of life is higher, the economies are better…educational attainment is better. So yeah, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we’re working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance. So if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.” 

The extremes of Project 2025 have made it clear that the Republicans intend to destroy the kind of government Walz is defending and replace it with an authoritarian president imposing Christian nationalism. And when Americans hear what’s in Project 2025, they overwhelmingly oppose it. Trump has tried without success to distance himself from the document. 

He and his team have also hammered on the Heritage Foundation for their public revelations of their plans, and today the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, stepped down. The Trump campaign issued a statement reiterating—in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary—that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025 and adding: “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should service as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.” 

The Harris campaign responded to the news by saying that “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country. Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real—in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.” 

The reasoning behind the idea of a strong executive, or a “leadership class” that does not have to answer to voters, is that an extremist minority needs to take control of the American government away from the American people because the majority doesn’t like the policies the extremists want. 

When Trump begs right-wing Christians to turn out for just one more election, he is promising that if only we will put him into the White House once and for all, we will never again have to worry about having a say in our government. As Trump put it: “The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Gender, Trump

Louisiana Criminalizes Abortion Pills

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2024 //
21

The Governor and Legislature want to make sure that women in their state cannot obtain an abortion so they passed a law reclassifying abortion drugs as controlled dangerous substances. Most abortions occur by use of the pills, which the Federal Drug Administration has declared to be safe and effective. Currently they are available by mail, but obtaining them without a prescription will soon be illegal. The new law takes effect October 1.

Louisiana lawmakers have added two drugs commonly used in pregnancy and reproductive health care to the state’s list of controlled dangerous substances, a move that has alarmed doctors in the state.

Mifepristone and misoprostol have many clinical uses, and one use approved by the FDA is to take the pills to induce an abortion at up to 10 weeks of gestation.

The bill that moved through the Louisiana Legislature this spring lists both medications as Schedule IV drugs under the state’s Uniform Controlled Dangerous Substances Law, creating penalties of up to 10 years in prison for anyone caught with the drugs without a valid prescription. Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, signed the bill into law in May. It takes effect Oct. 1.

The new law is the latest move by anti-abortion advocates trying to control access to abortion medications in states with near-total abortion bans, such as Louisiana. The law is the first of its kind, opening a new front in the state-by-state battle over reproductive medicine.

Categories Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Freedom, Gender, Louisiana

Thom Hartmann: J.D. Vance on Kamala Harris. He Is a Misogynist

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2024 //
33

Thom Hartmann explains in J.D. Vance’s words why he thinks Kamala Harris is unfit to be President. Her basic deficit is that she’s a woman. Like his mentor Peter Thiel, Vance doesn’t think women are fit to lead.

Vance is an unabashed misogynist who thinks women belong in the home; their role in life is to have babies. He has ridiculed people like Kamala who are childless. Never, never should they have abortions. And if they are in an abusive marriage, they should not get a divorce. An article by Jessica Winter in the current New Yorker [“J.D. Vance’s Sad, Strange Politics of Family”] suggests that these were the lessons he learned from his own family history.

Hartmann writes:

Yesterday at a campaign stop in Ohio, JD Vance said that Kamala Harris shouldn’t lead America because she isn’t “grateful for it.” Vance told his nearly-all-white crowd:

“You know, what I see? Want to take bets here? Want to start a betting pool just in this auditorium? If you want to lead this country, you should feel grateful for it, a sense of gratitude. I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Kamala Harris.”

The white myth of America, which Vance echoed at his RNC speech, is that our nation was “built” by white men, ignoring the Black, Asian, and Hispanic labor, and that of women of all races, that built much of this nation.

For the record, one of Harris’ standard stump speeches has, for years, been about how her parents were both immigrants and discovered in America a “land of opportunity” that let her rise to the positions she’s held. She’s damn grateful for America.

But, apparently, she’s not sufficiently grateful to the white men who Vance believes created that opportunity for Harris and her family. When Vance says “grateful,” what he apparently really means is “deferential.”

In other words, she’s not sufficiently humble in the face of white wealth and power. Instead of gratefully deferring to the white men who are born to rule, she’s a pretender to the role of president, an usurper of the power and privilege that should never be in the hands of a woman, particularly a woman of color.

This is, after all, the JD Vance who, along with eight other Republican senators (including Ted Cruz), wrote to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra demanding that his proposed new rule preventing law enforcement agencies from forcing doctors to turn over women’s and girls’ menstrual and reproductive health records must be withdrawn “immediately.”

Vance, Cruz, et al want police to have access to these menstrual and other health records so prosecutors and police in Red states can pursue and prosecute women who go out-of-state to get abortions or order abortion medications through the mail against state law. 

Vance and Cruz, like the Republicans on the Supreme Court, are big fans of the idea of a menstrual police force.

After all, when women can’t control their own reproductive capacity, they can hardly reliably participate in the business or political world. Which, of course, is the goal of today’s MAGA GOP.

Given this, Harris’ lack of a submissive attitude of “gratitude” to morbidly rich white men like Trump, Vance, and the billionaires who own the GOP is the logical result of the white men then on the Supreme Court in 1965 (Griswold) and 1973 (Roe) having “let her” and other ungrateful American women defer having children while they pursued a career.

Those men back in the day gave Harris an exception from the childbearing role Vance and Trump today believe God and biology assigned to her, and she’s not sufficiently appreciative.

In 2022, when running for the US Senate (his first elected office of any sort), Vance was explicit: he supports a “minimum national standard,” also known as a national ban, on abortion. He further argued that exceptions for rape and incest — like the raped 10-year-old girl who had to flee his state of Ohio to get an abortion — should not be allowed.

This wasn’t a gray area for Vance; he laid out his position clearly, saying:

“Two wrongs [rape followed by abortion] don’t make a right.”

He added in that same statement that the fetus or zygote should have primacy over the woman:

“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.”

Noting that women today regard children “as inconveniences to be discarded instead of blessings to cherish,” 2019 zealous Catholic-convert Vance added in an interview with the The Catholic Current that:

“There’s something comparable between abortion and slavery … and that while the people who obviously suffer the most are those subjected to it, I think it has this morally distorting effect on the entire society.”

Vance went so far as to argue that the Comstock Act, which would ban the shipping of any drug or device that can be used for an abortion (including surgical instruments to hospitals and clinics) be enforced, ending all abortions in America. The Act is, as Clarence Thomas recently pointed out, still on the books, even though it hasn’t been enforced in decades. 

That’ll shut up those ungrateful, uppity women.

Vance is apparently offended that ungrateful American women like Kamala Harris demand not just birth control and abortion but also the right to divorce. He argued forcefully that no-fault divorce is a mistake; the option should be removed from women, even those in violent, abusive marriages:

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so, getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”

Vance attacked Vice President Kamala Harris by name in 2021 as a “childless cat lady,” bitterly complaining that women who don’t produce children themselves (Harris is the proud mother of two step-children from her husband’s first marriage) don’t have a “physical commitment to the future of this country”:

“We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via the corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too…

“It’s just a basic fact: You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people that don’t have a direct stake in it.”

As Sam Alito might as well have written in his Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade, Republicans like Vance believe a woman’s place is in the bedroom, the kitchen, and nowhere else. Remember how Mike Pence refused to dine alonewith any woman other than his wife? How very patriarchal; classic GOP Christian Nationalist. 

And, Vance and Cruz will tell you (and told Secretary Becerra), the job of men is to police women’s menstrual periods and travel so they don’t do anything ungrateful like getting birth control, an abortion, or visiting a lawyer to get a divorce.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Gender, Vance, J.D.

Randi Weingarten: The Moment We Are In

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2024 //
3

The American Federation of Teachers held its annual convention in Houston. Its president, Randi Weingarten, delivered this speech about the perils of the present time and the importance of unions.

Read the pdf of the speech here:

RWSpeech 1Download

She began:

These are unprecedented times. First and foremost, I want to thank President Biden. He’s been a great president, a great public servant and an incredible patriot. We owe him a debt of gratitude.


Of course I’m starting with a primary source. I don’t think they’ve banned Charles Dickens—yet. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. …” Those words were written more than 165 years ago, but today they feel very Dickensian.


Today, our union has never been stronger, and a revival of labor activism is sweeping the nation. Wages are up, inflation has cooled, the Biden-Harris administration has created more jobs than any other in history, and America’s economy is the strongest in the world—powered by America’s workers.


Yet…


Fear, anxiety and despair have taken hold across our country, driven by disinformation, shifting demographics, loneliness and a pervasive feeling that the American dream is slipping further and further out of reach. Our students and our patients are coming to us with greater and greater needs. Academic freedom and the right to peacefully protest have come under attack. From floods to famines to fires, climate catastrophes are worsening. Hate crimes, particularly anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate, are climbing. And gun violence still haunts us.


Let’s be clear: Political violence is never justified; not on Jan. 6 and not against political candidates. And while the calls to condemn political violence were encouraging, billionaires and demagogues are still capitalizing on fear to stoke division, defund public education and public services, decimate healthcare and dismantle our democracy—all to cement their power. And the Supreme Court’s extremist majority is aiding and abetting them, rewriting the Constitution in terrifying ways.

Operatives like Christopher Rufo, who work on behalf of billionaires like Betsy DeVos, openly admit their scheme—to create distrust in public education and in their political enemies so they can enact their extremist agenda.


These aren’t the first unscrupulous operatives we’ve faced. We’ve been outspent, been bet against, and had our union’s obituary written more times than we can count. Michelle Rhee tried to sweep us away. Scott Walker tried to legislate us out of existence. Billionaires backed the Janus case to try to bankrupt us. A red wave was supposed to crest in 2022 and wash us away.
Mike Pompeo tried to vilify us, first claiming that America’s school teachers teach “filth,” and then calling me the most dangerous person in the world—more dangerous than Vladimir Putin.

Why? Because I am your elected leader.


But we’re still here. In fact, we’re thriving. I guess that old saying IS true—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And, in our case, bigger.
The AFT had 1.4 million members when I became president in 2008. Since then, we’ve been through two recessions, a pandemic and all the crap I just described.


Despite everything that has been thrown at us, since our last convention, the AFT has added 185 new units and more than 80,000 new members.
And today, the AFT is 1.8 million members strong!


Who are the newest members of the AFT? Four airport ground crew workers in Bangor, Maine—and 450 teaching assistants at Brown University. Nine licensed practical nurses at PeaceHealth in Oregon, and 910 diagnostic imaging techs in Michigan. Bus drivers in Farmington, Ill., and faculty and staff at universities in Kansas and Hawaii. Healthcare workers at Planned Parenthood in Wisconsin. Librarians in Ohio, doctors in Maryland, charter school educators in Massachusetts, paraprofessionals in Minnesota. And thousands more who just want a better life, including—after a 50-year fight—the 27,000 educators and school staff in Fairfax County, Va.
Why do they join the AFT? Because the AFT believes in improving people’s lives. Because the AFT believes in our communities and our country. And because the AFT believes in you.


This growth is essential. America’s middle class has risen and fallen as union membership has risen and fallen. That’s why we—indeed, the entire AFL-CIO—are working to grow.


Our unions help us win better wages and benefits. Our unions give us real voice at work. It’s how the United Federation of Teachers negotiated groundbreaking paid parental leave and lower class sizes. It’s how Cleveland got their new policy prohibiting students from using cell phones during the school day. United Teachers Los Angeles won sustainable community schools. And the Chicago Teachers Union is negotiating for healthy, safe, green schools.

It’s about the value of belonging.

Please open the PDF and finish reading this terrific speech.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Gender, Harris, Kamala, Teachers, Trump

Mercedes Schneider: Politicking for Jesus

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2024 //
26

Mercedes Schneider read Project 2025 and concluded that its unifying goal is to turn the American people into white evangelical Christians. This “conservative” vision of a different America doesn’t give much thought to those who are neither white nor evangelical not Christian.

She writes in summary:

Free the churches, imprison the librarians.

Roberts was in the news for stating that an “ongoing American Revolution” will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” According to The Hill, that comment caused “blowback” for Roberts and the Heritage Foundation.

None of Jesus’ ministry involved any political agenda, much less the government-driven denigration of “other” or the imposing of His will on any human being.

Yet here we are.

It behooves every literate American to read this extremist document before casting a vote in November.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Economics, Elections, Environment, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Gender, Librarians, Privatization, Propaganda, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Trump

Dean Obeidiallah: Trump’s Worst Nightmare

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2024 //
38

Dean Obeidallah blogs at “The Dean’s Report.” Here he describes Kamala Harris’s secret weapon. She terrifies Donald Trump. Can’t wait to see them debate. Trump will probably cancel.

Nothing triggers Donald Trump (and MAGA) more than strong Black women. Period. Black women are at the intersection of the racism and sexism that so fuels Trump and his MAGA movement.

We’ve seen this for years with Trump’s demonization of visible Black female leaders from repeatedly calling Rep. Maxine Waters “low IQ” to vile attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar including calling for her to “go back” to where she came from and worse. And in 2020, after Kamala Harris was named Joe Biden’s running mate, Trump lashed out by playing on the angry Black women trope by calling her a “mad woman,” “so angry” and even a “monster.”

But now with President Biden stepping aside and the Democratic party rallying around Harris, Trump will for be the first time called to go head-to-head with Harris—and he must be petrified.   Harris is the manifestation of all that scares Trump: She is a powerful, successful, smart Black woman.

Harris is also a former prosecutor who was elected in 2004 as District Attorney for San Francisco and in 2010 she was victorious statewide when she won the race to be Attorney General for the State of California. The contrast between prosecutor Harris and convicted felon Trump is perfect. And Harris has been the administration’s point person on reproductive freedom, which again is a powerful contrast to Trump who has bragged, “I’m the one that got rid of Roe v. Wade.”

Trump knows Harris could beat him. We all saw how Trump’s frail ego reacted when Biden beat him in 2020—he attempted a coup and incited the Jan 6 terrorist attack.  The prospect of now losing to a Black woman has to shake Trump to the core—as does the prospect of ending up in prison.

That means we can expect Trump, his right-wing allies in Congress and the media to smear Harris non-stop with lies and bigotry. Mika Brzezinski shared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday that, “I’ve heard from inside Republican circles and right-wing media that the hate campaign against Kamala Harris has begun.”

In reality, though, the racist right wing smears of Harris began two weeks ago when GOP member of Congress Chip Roy, former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka and a NY Post columnist Charles Gasparino all labeled Harris a “DEI” hire meaning she only got her job because of diversity mandates, not because she earned it. Gorka—while on national TV–even despicably referred to Harris as “colored.”

Gasparino went even further to say if Biden ended up stepping down as President, then, “Harris becomes the nation’s first DEI president by default.”

To the white right, it doesn’t matter that Harris has been a public servant for more than 20 years, winning election after election from DA, to California AG to the US Senate, where she distinguished herself with her service on the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.  And of course, winning the 2020 election as VP.

Let’s be clear: Calling a person of color a DEI hire is what racism looks like.  It springs from the white supremacist myth that people of color are inherently inferior to white people, hence, we can only achieve success and visible positions with the help of a program. (I was called a “quota hire” years ago on social media by a Fox News frequent guest because at the time I was the first Muslim hired to host a national radio show.)

When these people say “DEI hire,” in reality they are speaking in coded language to other bigots as the Mayor of Baltimore, Brandon Scott, who is Black, explained earlier this year.  Scott, who some on the right have called a “DEI hire,” declared, “We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor,” adding bluntly, “They really want to say the N-word.” Mayor Johnson later gloriously trolled the bigots, saying on MSNBC that “DEI,” actually means “duly elected incumbent.”

The vitriol and bigotry that will be directed at Harris over the next 100 plus days until the Nov 5 election will likely far eclipse what we’ve seen to date. It will likely be worse than what was directed at Barack Obama given Harris is a woman. 

These expected smears are designed to both delegitimize Harris as well as excite Trump’s bigoted, primarily white base. As Brittney Cooper, a professor at Rutgers University, said in 2020 in response to Trump’s calling Harris “angry,” “nasty” and a “monster,” these attacks are intended to undermine Harris as a leader and as a person. Cooper explained, “White supremacy is lazy and unoriginal and doesn’t feel the need to ascribe humanity to Black women.”

And Kelly Dittmar, with the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, in 2020 addressed the politics of Trump’s smears of Harris, saying, Trump is “speaking to a contingent of voters, particularly white male voters, who support him and who are key to his base.” She added, “We know from multiple studies done on the last election that their levels of both sexism and racial resentment were actually pretty strong indicators of their support for Trump.”

Trump never made a person a bigot. He only emboldens bigots to feel comfortable being the worst version of themselves. That means we can expect to see an ugliness over the next 100 days that will be revolting. 

But we have the power to win this election. And by doing so, these right-wing bigots now calling Harris a “DEI hire” and other racist names–come January 20, 2025– will be forced to watch America call her, “Madame President.”

Categories Character, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Gender

Arkansas Officials Disqualify Petition for Abortion Referendum

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2024 //
15

How naive some citizens of Arkansas were! They thought they could get a referendum on the state ballot to change the state’s draconian abortion ban which allows no exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the woman.

They gathered enough signatures to qualify for the ballot but the Secretary of State, no doubt acting with Governor Sarah Huckabee Sansers’ support, found reasons to throw the referendum proposal out. No democracy for Arkansas!

Axios reported:

Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston on Wednesday rejected petitions for a proposed amendment to make abortion legal in the state again under certain circumstances.

Why it matters: The proposed amendment would allow abortion through the first 18 weeks of pregnancy, and also in cases of rape, incest, fatal fetal anomaly or to save the pregnant person’s life.

State of play: In a letter to Arkansans for Limited Government, which is spearheading the effort, Thurston said the group failed to submit a statement identifying all paid canvassers by name.

  • He said it also didn’t provide a statement confirming it had provided each canvasser with proper documentation and training about the state’s law before they started gathering signatures.

“By contrast, other sponsors of initiative petitions complied with this requirement. Therefore I must reject your submission,” Thurston wrote.

Between the lines: “Even if your failure to comply with [the law] did not require me to reject your submission outright, it would certainly mean that signatures gathered by paid canvassers in your submission could not be counted for any reason,” the letter reads.

  • Thurston claims 14,143 of the 101,525 submitted signatures were collected by paid canvassers.
  • The remaining 87,382 signatures collected by volunteers fall short of the required 90,704 for a proposed constitutional amendment.

What they’re saying: “At multiple junctures — including on July 5 inside of the Capitol Building — we discussed signature submission requirements with the Secretary of State’s staff,” Arkansans for Limited Government (AFLG) said in a statement emailed late Wednesday.

  • The secretary of state’s office supplied the organization with all paperwork to submit the petitions, AFLG said, adding that the group had no reason to suspect it was incomplete.

AFLG says it supplied a list of paid canvassers to the state, and that’s known because it was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Secretary of State’s office and “released by our opposition in an attempt to intimidate our supporters.”

  • More than 101,000 Arkansans participated in this heroic act of direct democracy and stood up to loudly proclaim their support for access to healthcare. They deserve better than a state government that seeks to silence them.”

The other side: “Today the far left pro-abortion crowd in Arkansas showed they are both immoral and incompetent,” Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted on X.

What we’re watching: It’s unclear what legal recourse Arkansans for Limited Government can take; however its statement concluded: “We will fight this ridiculous disqualification attempt with everything we have. We will not back down.”

Categories Arkansas, Cheating, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Gender, Health

Chris Hayes: What Is Project 2025? A Frightening Plan for Trump’s Next Term: LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2024 //
50

It occasionally happens that I forget to add a link. I forgot to add the link for this great segment by Chris Hayes. I was embroiled in a computer glitch all day (my computer and printer are not communicating). Please watch the segment to learn what horrors Trump has in store for us.

Chris Hayes has a regular evening news program on MSNBC.

In this short video, he explains Project 2025, which spells out plans for major changes in the government and in our freedoms.

It’s a short video. Please watch.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Civil Rights, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Privatization, Shame, Trump
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