Archives for category: History

Today, many of us are following the news about a terror attack at Brown University, where a gunman walked into a large classroom, murdered two students, and wounded at least a dozen more. A suspect is in custody. And we are following the news about a massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, where terrorists fired on a large crowd of Jews celebrating the first day of Chanukah. At least 16 people died, and many more were wounded.

It happens to be the 13th anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. A mentally deranged young man killed his mother, then went to the school, where he killed 20 children–first- and second-grade students–and six staff members, the principal and teachers. Then the murderer killed himself.

The children were babies.

The nation was in a state of shock. I remember being glued to the television as the extent of the horror was revealed. I remember the weeping parents, the shell-shocked survivors, children and teachers.

For many, it seemed that Congress was sure to enact meaningful gun control. Certain to limit access to deadly weapons.

But, not long after the event, the conspiracy theories began to roll out. The vile Alex Jones said that there was no massacre. No one was killed. The parents and students were “crisis actors.” It was all staged to create momentum for gun control. President Obama was in on the hoax. One of this blog’s readers sent me a video created to “prove” that Sandy Hook was a lie. It was shocking and sickening.

Some Newtown parents sued Alex Jones for his lies, which caused them extreme pain and suffering. The parents won their case and were awarded more than $1 billion from Alex Jones. Jones, however, declared bankruptcy and through legal maneuvers has paid little to those he defamed.

Sandy Hook was supposed to be the tragedy that would compel Congress to enact strict control. Needless to say, gun enthusiasts blocked any efforts to strengthen gun control laws. Then, with Trump’s addition to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court decided that guns should not be controlled at all, citing their interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Then there was the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. Nineteen children and two teachers were murdered by an 18-year-old man with an assault weapon. Nearly 400 law officers from local, state, and federal agencies arrived on the scene, where they crowded the hallways and did nothing. They waited 77 minutes before confronting and killing the gunman.

Gun advocates would have you believe that gun control has never happened and can never happen. That’s not true.

During the Clinton administration, Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994. The law, called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, had a 10-year sunset clause for the ban on assault weapons. It expired in September 2004, during the George W. Bush administration, and was not renewed.

The current Supreme Court opposes gun control. So here we are.

Peter Greene wrote today:

You can be forgiven for not having noticed that today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings, the murder of 26 human beings, 20 of them children. There’s not the usual wave of retrospective stories, perhaps because we’re busy catching up on the latest US campus shooting from the weekend.

It makes me angry, every day. Sandy Hook stands out among all our many various mass murders in this country, all our long parade of school shootings, because Sandy Hook was the moment when it finally became clear that we are not going to do anything about this, ever. “If this is not enough to finally do something,” we thought, “then nothing ever will be.”

And it wasn’t.

“No way to prevent this,” says only Nation Where This Regularly Happens is the most bitter, repeated headline The Onion has ever published. We’re just “helpless.”

Today was the 13th anniversary of the shooting that established that we aren’t going to do a damned thing about it, other than blaming the targets for not being hard enough. Need more security. Arm the (marxist untrustworthy) teachers. And somehow Alex Jones and Infowars have not been sued severely enough for them to STFU.

One thing that has happened over the past several years is a huge wave of folks expressing their deep concern about the children.

A whole industry of political activism has been cultivated around the notion that children– our poor, fragile children– must be protected. They must be protected from books that show that LGBTQ persons exist. They must be protected from any sort of reference to sexual action at all. They must be protected from any form of guilt-inducing critical race theory. They must be protected from unpatriotic references to America’s past sins. And central to all this, they must be protected from anyone who might challenge their parents’ complete control over their education and lives.

Well, unless that person is challenging the parents’ rights by shooting a gun at the child.

The Second Amendment issue is the issue that combines so poorly with other issues. We may be pro-life and insist that it be illegal to end a fetus– but if the fetus becomes an outside-the-womb human that gets shot at with a gun, well, nothing we can do about that. Students should be free to choose whatever school they like–but at any of those schools, people still have the right to shoot at them with a gun. We must protect children from all sorts of evil influences–but if someone wants to shoot a gun at them, well, you know, nothing we can do about that.

The other ugly development has been the ever-growing school security industry, peddling an ever-growing array of products that serve no educational purpose but are supposed to make schools safe, harden the target. Lots of surveillance. Lots of stupid mistakes, like the Florida AI reading a clarinet as a weapon. Lots of security layers that now make entering a school building much like entering a prison. It is what NPR correctly called the “school shooting industry,” and it is worth billions.

That’s not counting the boost that gunmakers get after every school shooting. The panic alarm goes off and the weapons industry sells a ton more product as the usual folks holler, “They’ll use this as an excuse to take your guns” even though in the 26 years since Columbine, the government hasn’t done either jack or shit about taking anybody’s guns. I expect that part of that sales bump is also from folks saying, “Now that I’m reminded that the government isn’t going to do anything about keeping guns out of the hands of homicidal idiots, I guess I’d better arm myself.”

Miles of letters have been strung together to unravel the mystery of why this country so loves its guns and why none of the factors used as distraction (mental health, video games, bad tv shows) could possibly explain the prevalence of gun deaths in this country because every other country in the world has the same thing without having our level of gun violence.

We are great at Not facing Problems in this country, and there is no problem we are better at Not facing than gun deaths. Hell, we can’t even agree it’s an actual problem. The “right” to personally possess the capability to kill other human beings is revered, and more beloved than the lives of actual human children.

And if some of our fellow citizens and leaders are unwilling to make a serious effort to reduce gun violence and these folks insist that the occasional dead child is just the cost of liberty (particularly the liberty to conduct profitable business), well, how can we expect them to take seriously other aspects of young humans’ lives, like quality education and health care.

It is a hard thing to know, every day, that we could do better, and we aren’t going to. We have already taken a long hard look at this issue, and we have decided that we are okay with another Sandy Hook or Uvalde. A little security theater, a little profiteering on tech, a few thoughts and prayers just to indicate that we aren’t actually happy that some young humans were shot dead (talk about virtue signaling), and that pivot quickly to defending guns. Send letters, make phone calls, get the usual platitudes back from elected representatives, who will never, ever pay an election price for being on the wrong side of rational gun regulation.

The whole dance is so familiar and well-rehearsed that we barely have to pay attention any more. It’s exhausted and exhausting, and yet I am still angry.

Categories Evil, Extremism, Guns, History

David French: Why the Laws of War Matter

By dianeravitch

December 12, 2025 //

David French was hired by The New York Times to be a conservative opinion writer. He is a lawyer who practiced commercial law, then joined the military during the war in Iraq and served there as a lawyer. After deployment, he was a writer for the conservative National Review.

His explanation of the “laws of war” and the “rules of engagement” was very helpful to my understanding of current events, which is why I share it now.

He wrote:

In their military campaign in South America, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth aren’t just defying the Constitution and breaking the law. They are attacking the very character and identity of the American military.

To make this case, I have to begin in the most boring way possible — by quoting a legal manual. Bear with me.

Specifically, it’s the most recent edition of the Department of Defense Law of War Manual. Tucked away on page 1,088 are two sentences that illustrate the gravity of the crisis in the Pentagon: “The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”

Here’s another key line: “It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given.” A no quarter order is an order directing soldiers to kill every combatant, including prisoners, the sick and the wounded. The manual continues, “Moreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter.”

Before we go any further, it’s important to define our terms. This newsletter is going to focus on the laws of war, not a related concept called rules of engagement. The laws of war reflect the mandatory, minimum level of lawful conduct, and all soldiers are legally obligated to obey them at all times and in all conflicts.

Rules of engagement are rules devised by commanders that are often more restrictive than the laws of war. For example, when I was in Iraq, our rules of engagement sometimes kept us from attacking lawful targets, in part because we wanted to be particularly careful not to inflict civilian casualties.

In my service, we were often frustrated by the rules of engagement. We did not, however, question the laws of war.

There are now good reasons to believe that the U.S. military, under the command of President Trump and Hegseth, his secretary of defense, has blatantly violated the laws of war. On Nov. 28, The Washington Postreported that Hegseth issued a verbal order to “kill everybody” the day that the United States launched its military campaign against suspected drug traffickers.

According to The Post, the first strike on the targeted speedboat left two people alive in the water. The commander of the operation then ordered a second strike to kill the shipwrecked survivors, apparently — according to The Post — “because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” If that reporting is correct, then we have clear evidence of unequivocal war crimes — a no quarter order and a strike on the incapacitated crew of a burning boat.

And if it’s true, those war crimes are the fault not of hotheaded recruits who are fighting for their lives in the terrifying fog and fury of ground combat but rather of two of the highest-ranking people in the American government, Hegseth and Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the head of Special Operations Command — the man the administration has identified as the person who gave the order for the second strike.

My colleagues in the newsroom followed on Monday with a report of their own, one that largely mirrored The Post’s reporting, though it presented more evidence of Hegseth’s and Bradley’s potential defenses. Hegseth, our sources said, did not order the second strike, and the second strike might have been designed to sink the boat, not kill survivors.

But if that’s the explanation, why wasn’t the full video released? The administration released limited video footage of the first strike, which created the impression of the instant, total destruction of the boat and its inhabitants. Now we know there was much more to see.

At the same time, Hegseth and the Pentagon have offered a series of puzzling and contradictory statements. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, told The Post that its “entire narrative was false.”

Hegseth weighed in with a classic version of what you might call a nondenial denial. In a social media post, he said the Post report was “fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory,” but rather than explain what actually happened (and make no mistake, he knows exactly what happened), he followed up with an extraordinary paragraph:

As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be “lethal, kinetic strikes.” The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.

“Biden coddled terrorists,” Hegseth wrote later in the same post. “We kill them.”

We shouldn’t forget that this incident occurred against the backdrop of Hegseth’s obvious disdain for military lawyers. He has called them “jagoffs” and — along with Trump — fired the senior military lawyers in the Navy and Air Force.

We also know that the commander of Southern Command, which is responsible for operations in Central and South America, Adm. Alvin Holsey, announced that he was stepping down after holding the position for less than a year. As our newsroom reported, two sources “said that Admiral Holsey had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.”

He announced his departure in October, weeks after the September strike.

Unlike many wartime incidents, airstrike incidents can be rather easy to investigate. Unless an airstrike is in response to an immediate battlefield emergency, the intelligence justifying the strike and the orders authorizing it are frequently preserved in writing, and the video and audio of the strikes are typically recorded. If this Pentagon, which proudly calls itself the “most transparent” in history, were to release the full attack video and audio, it would help answer many questions.

It’s a mistake, however, to limit our focus to the legality of this specific strike — or even to the important question of the legality of the Caribbean strikes in general. We live in an era in which our nation’s first principles require constant defense.

In other words, as we dig into incidents like this one, we cannot presume that Americans are operating from a shared set of moral and constitutional values or even a basic operating knowledge of history. We will have to teach the basic elements of American character anew, to a population that is losing its grasp on our national ideals.

The laws of war aren’t woke. They’re not virtue signaling. And they’re not a sign that the West has forgotten how to fight. Instead, they provide the American military with a number of concrete benefits.

First, complying with the laws of war can provide a battlefield advantage. This year I read Antony Beevor’s classic history of the end of Nazi Germany, “The Fall of Berlin 1945.” I was struck by a fascinating reality: Hitler’s troops fought fanatically against the Soviets not simply to preserve Hitler’s rule (most knew the cause was lost) but also to slow the Red Army down, to buy more time for civilians and soldiers to escape to American, British and French lines.

In short, because of our humanity and decency, Germans surrendered when they would have fought. The contrast with the brutality of the Soviets saved American lives.

I saw this reality in Iraq. By the end of my deployment in 2008, insurgents started surrendering to us, often without a fight. In one memorable incident, a terrorist walked up to the front gate of our base and turned himself in. But had we treated our prisoners the way that prisoners were treated at Abu Ghraib, I doubt we would have seen the same response.

Men will choose death over torture and humiliation, but many of those men will choose decent treatment in prison over probable death in battle.

Second, the laws of war make war less savage and true peace possible. One of the reasons the war in the Pacific was so unrelentingly grim was that the Japanese military never made the slightest pretense of complying with the laws of war. They would shoot shipwrecked survivors. They would torture prisoners. They would fight to the death even when there was no longer any military point to resistance.

We were hardly perfect, but part of our own fury was directly related to relentless Japanese violations of the laws of war. We became convinced that the Japanese would not surrender until they faced the possibility of total destruction. And when both sides abandon any commitment to decency and humanity, then the object of war changes — from victory to annihilation.

Even if only one side upholds the law of war, it not only makes war less brutal; it preserves the possibility of peace and reconciliation. That’s exactly what happened at the end of World War II. For all of our faults, we never became like the Soviets and thus have a very different relationship with our former foes.

Finally, the laws of war help preserve a soldier’s soul. We are a nation built around the notion of human dignity. Our Declaration of Independence highlights the worth of every person. Our Bill of Rights stands as one of the world’s great statements of human dignity. It is contrary to the notion of virtuous American citizenship to dehumanize people, to brutalize and oppress them.

We are also a quite religious society, and all of the great faiths that are central to American life teach that human beings possess incalculable worth.

If we order soldiers to contradict those values, we can inflict a profound moral injury on them — a moral injury that can last a lifetime. I still think about a 2015 article in The Atlantic by Maggie Puniewska. She described soldiers haunted by the experience of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Some of these soldiers describe experiences in which they, or someone close to them, violated their moral code,” she wrote, “hurting a civilian who turned out to be unarmed, shooting at a child wearing explosives, or losing trust in a commander who became more concerned with collecting decorative pins than protecting the safety of his troops.” Others, she said, citing a clinical psychologist who worked with service members who recently returned from deployments, “are haunted by their own inaction, traumatized by something they witnessed and failed to prevent.”

There are moral injuries that are unavoidable. I’m still haunted by decisions I made in Iraq, even though each one complied with the laws of war. Armed conflict is horrific, and your spirit rebels against the experience. But I can’t imagine the guilt of criminal conduct, of deliberately killing the people I’m supposed to protect.

In fact, when I first read the Washington Post story, I thought of the terrified pair, struggling helplessly in the water before the next missile ended their lives. But I also thought of the men or women who fired those missiles. How does their conscience speak to them now? How will it speak to them in 10 years?

I want to close with two stories — one from Iraq and one from Ukraine. There was a moment in my deployment when our forces were in hot pursuit of a known terrorist. We had caught him attempting to fire mortar rounds into an American outpost. Just when we had him in our sights, he scooped up what looked like a toddler and started running with the kid in his arms.

No one had to give the order to hold fire. There wasn’t one soldier who wanted to shoot and risk the toddler’s life. So we followed him until the combination of heat and exhaustion made him put the child down. Even then we didn’t kill him. We were able to capture him without using lethal force.

I’ll never forget that day — and the unspoken agreement that we would save that child.

Now, let’s contrast that moment of decency with the stories I heard in the town of Bucha, just northwest of Kyiv. It was the site of some of the most intense fighting in the first phases of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As I walked in part of the battlefield, I heard the stories of Russian soldiers looting and murdering their way across northern Ukraine.

One woman told me that the Russians shot a neighbor, a civilian, in his front yard and then threatened his wife when she tried to leave her home to retrieve his body. So he just lay there, day after day, until the Russians were finally driven back. That’s the character of the Russian military, and it’s been the character of the Russian military for generations.

Something else happened when I first read the Washington Post story; I instinctively rejected it. The account was completely at odds with my experience. There is not an officer I served with who would issue a no quarter order. There is not an officer I served with who would have given the order to kill survivors struggling in the water.

But I also knew that Hegseth is trying to transform the military. As The Wall Street Journal reported, he has been on a “decades-long quest” to rid the military of “stupid rules of engagement” — even to the point of becoming a champion of soldiers convicted of war crimes. In one of his books, he wrote that he told soldiers who served under his command in Iraq to disregard legal adviceabout the use of lethal force.

I don’t think that all of our rules of engagement are wise. I have expressed profound doubts about many of the rules that were imposed in Iraq and Afghanistan that went far beyond the requirements of the laws of war. Not every soldier accused of crimes is guilty of crimes.

But there is a difference between reforming the rules and abandoning the law — or, even worse, viewing the law as fundamentally hostile to the military mission. There is a difference between defending soldiers against false accusations and rationalizing and excusing serious crimes.

The pride of an American soldier isn’t just rooted in our lethality. It’s rooted in our sense of honor. It’s rooted in our compassion. We believe ourselves to be different because we so often behave differently.

Hegseth, however, has a different vision, one of unrestrained violence divorced from congressional and legal accountability. If that vision becomes reality, he won’t reform the military; he’ll wreck it. And he’ll wreck it in the worst way possible, by destroying its integrity, by stripping its honor and by rejecting the hard-earned lessons and vital values that have made the American military one of the most-trusted institutions in the United States.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Discipline, Ethics, Failure, History, Justice

John Thompson: A Stellar Review of AN EDUCATION

By dianeravitch

December 12, 2025 //

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, wrote this thoughtful review of my memoirs, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.

He writes:

Diane Ravitch’s An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else is dedicated to her wife Mary; her sons, Joe, Michael, and Steven; her grandsons Nico, Aidan, Elijah, and Asher; and her ex-husband Richard. An Education intertwines deeply emotional personal and family experiences with the history of how she became such a transformative education leader. Although Diane denies it, I believe she’s the most influential education advocate of the last century.

I’ve been reading Diane Ravitch’s work for decades, but An Education is my favorite book. And my favorite passage started with Diane’s citation of Robert Hutchins who said, “We have to learn to live with those whose opinions differ from our own. After all, they may turn out to be right.”

Then she wrote about Hutchins statement, “for three decades I didn’t realize that it was intended for me.”

Being from Oklahoma, I was captured by the first part of her book, about growing up in Texas. I especially loved her story about meeting Roy Rogers at the Rodeo when she was 9 years old. After Rogers slapped her hand, Diane said, “I determined on the spot that I would never wash that hand again!”

Diane was a tomboy who loved horses and dogs. But she experienced sexism and trauma. She said she “did not have an idyllic adolescence. No one ever does.” But her teenage years were “destroyed by my father abusing me.”

During the middle of her book, she recalled her complicated marriage to Richard Ravitch and, then, her wonderful wife, Mary. Mary worked with the progressive educator Deborah Meier and opened a progressive small school in New York City.

I was especially impressed by Diane’s communication with Al Shanker. He sought to allow teachers to start schools within schools to turnaround kids “in the back of the classroom with their heads on their desks.” Back in the late 1980s, it seemed like he might be able to bring diverse factions together. But, by 1994, charters had been high-jacked by corporate reformers and their winners and losers ideology.

In the middle of An Education. Diane revealed in so much detail the inside stories of her years as a conservative. Back then, when I was an academic historian, I learned the most about Diane when reading her 1983 book, “The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945 – 1980.” Although I couldn’t yet read her work through the eyes of a teacher, I was exceptionally taken by her calls for teaching background knowledge so students could develop reading comprehension skills so they could “read to learn,” and her placing education pedagogies in a broad historical context.

Diane recalls her support for meritocratic, standardized testing, and color-blind policies, when she questioned bilingual education, and even the benefit of the Equal Rights Amendment. This was the time when she made friends with Bill Bennett, President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, and Chester Finn, and Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander. I knew she had ties to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but I too thought that progressives’ criticism of him was too politically correct. And, until I read An Education, I knew little about the two sides of James Coleman’s research, whose earlier research had seemed persuasive to me.

Neither would I have thought that Chester Finn was like a “sibling” to Diane.

When explaining her then-conservative beliefs, I sometimes felt that Diane was too hard on herself. For instance, she was far, far from alone in failing to understand the wisdom of Gov. Ann Richards, who said, “If there ever is school choice in Texas, the hard-right Christians will get the money to indoctrinate children.”

Moreover, as An Education schooled me on the propaganda behind the so-called “Texas Miracle” it did more than foreshadow the “New York City Miracle,” the “Harlem Miracle,” and the “Mississippi Miracle.” It brought me back to the decades-long Oklahoma reality when our curriculum and policies were based on Texas’ accountability systems. During most of my career, our policies were informed by one Texas trick after another to jack up accountability metrics.

Diane served as member of the National Assessment Governing Board from 1997 to 2004, and she would dig deeply into the numbers and the methodologies behind NAEP. But, as she explained, few journalists read the fine print of the research and they wrote “breathlessly” about supposedly dismal results in traditional public schools. They certainly didn’t report properly about the way that students’ outcomes were linked to family income.

When serving in the Education Department, Diane took a lead in establishing national standards for every school subject. Drawing upon excellent historians, multicultural History standards were set. She hoped standards like those would remain voluntary and “unify their respective fields and establish a common ground for a curriculum without telling teachers how to teach.”

But the conservative Lynne Cheney “published a scathing denunciation of them.” Cheney said the History standards focused too much on people like Joe McCarthy and the Ku Klux Klan, and not enough on Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee. This launched the modern wars over curriculum that have become especially destructive under President Trump.

Even so, in 2002, Diane hoped that Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein (who knew nothing about education) would succeed in improving New York City Schools. Klein reorganized schools from top to bottom, with multiple schools per building drawing on funding by the Gates Foundation. (By the way, I saw the chaos Klein created when visiting dozens of hurriedly opened school, especially in Bedford–Stuyvesant. Usually, leaders of the new schools didn’t even know how many new schools were being opened in their building.)

And, even worse, Jack Welch CEO of General Electric pushed 20-70-10 “stack ranking,” meaning 70% of teachers would be in the middle in terms of effectiveness, and 10% should be “removed,” even if it took the use of invalid and unreliable metrics to evaluate all teachers.

Especially after Diane engaged in a seven-year debate with Deborah Meier, which further “broadened her perspectives,” she became an invaluable leader of the grass-roots opposition to corporate school reforms. She objected to top-down mandates on teaching reading. Diane was among the first to explicitly link in a detailed manner the reforms to the wider privatization movement. And she nailed it when identifying them as the “Billionaires Boys Club.”

Diane analyzed the public relations campaigns which sold “reforms” as the “New York City Miracle.” Drawing upon her insights from serving on the National Assessment Governing Board, she clearly explained why NYC schools flipped back and forth between A and F grades. Then, she linked President Obama’s flawed $5 billion RTTT experiment with the problems with Common Core curriculum and tests that were years above students’ reading levels.

Diane then quotes John Maynard Keynes who said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Today, Diane changes minds by clearly explaining the interconnections between Free Market ideology, and profits, and the mindsets of elites that push privatization. She also reports daily on the interconnected attacks on schools throughout the nation. And now she’s sharing the same wisdom when spreading the word about Trumpism and today’s attacks on democracy.

I always read Diane’s daily blog posts. And I so very much appreciate An Education, even if it briefly pulled me away from reading everything in the Diane Ravitch Blog.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, History, Klein, Joel, New York City, Privatization, Racism, Ravitch, Diane, Research, School Choice, Segregation, Texas, U.S. Department of Education

Heather Cox Richardson: Winning with Racism and Culture Wars

By dianeravitch

December 10, 2025 //

Historian Heather Cox Richardson explains the GOP formula for winning elections. It is columns like this that have caused 3,000,000 people to subscribe to her Substack.

She writes:

When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”

“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”

But of course, Morris’s statements were not “factual impossibilities.” In the United States of America under President Donald J. Trump, they are true.

Trump has always been a salesman with an instinctive understanding of the power of media. That sense helped him to rise to power in 2016 by leveraging an image Republicans had embraced since the 1980s: that the reason certain white Americans were being left behind in the modern world was not that Republican policies had transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, but that lazy and undeserving Black and Brown Americans and women were taking handouts from the government rather than working.

When he got his disheartening fact-check from ChatGPT, Morris was preparing an article, published today, exploring “how cable news fueled the culture war and broke U.S. politics.” The article notes that most people care about and interact with the government through economic or affordability issues—prices, jobs, health care, social programs, and taxes—and that most laws are also about these issues. But, he points out, political rhetoric overwhelmingly focuses on issues like race, crime, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and guns: the so-called culture war.

Morris highlights a new academic paper by Shakked Noy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Aakaash Rao of Harvard that links America’s culture war to changes in the media in the 1980s. Their research shows that “a distinctive business strategy” in cable news led it to emphasize culture over economic issues. Noy and Rao found that cable emphasizes culture because it “attracts viewers who would otherwise not watch news,” and attracts more viewers than an outlet can find by poaching viewers from other networks that emphasize economic issues. Cable channels have an incentive to produce culture war content, which in turn influences politics, as “constituencies more exposed to cable news assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians respond by supplying more cultural ads.”

“In other words,” Morris writes, “when cable news producers decide to cover an issue more, voters subsequently say it is more important to them, and that issue is more predictive of how they’ll vote. TV news coverage, and cable in particular, has the power to choose which issues are most ‘salient’ for upcoming elections.” He notes that “this effect is almost entirely, or maybe even entirely, driven by Fox News,” and that right-wing politicians benefit most from it. Democrats get their highest marks from voters on issues not covered by cable news.

Morris concludes that “more than the Republicans or Democrats, left or right, it’s the companies that abuse our attention for profit that are the real winners of American politics.”

This conclusion echoes a 2006 conversation a reporter for Financial Times held with Fox News Channel founder Rupert Murdoch and chief executive officer Roger Ailes. In that conversation, when asked if running the Fox News Channel was “like running a political campaign,” Ailes responded: “No more than running a Dairy Queen. You have a customer, you have to market it to help them get to your product, the product has to be good, you can’t drop too many on the floor or in the sprinkles or you’ll lose money. All business is basically about customers and marketing and making money and capitalism and winning and promoting it and having something someone really wants.”

Ailes came to the Fox News Channel from his work packaging presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968. One Nixon media advisor explained how they could put their candidate over the top by transforming him into a media celebrity. “Voters are basically lazy,” the advisor told reporter Joe McGinnis. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

Ailes presented Nixon in carefully curated televised “town halls” geared to different audiences, in which he arranged the set, Nixon’s answers to carefully staged questions, Nixon’s makeup, and the crowd’s applause. “Let’s face it,” he said, “a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But, carefully managed, television could “make them forget all that.”

Ailes found his stride working for right-wing candidates, selling the narrative that Democrats were socialists who wanted to transfer wealth from hardworking white Americans to undeserving minorities and women. He produced the racist “Willie Horton” ad for Republican candidate George H.W. Bush in 1988, and a short-lived television show hosted by right-wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh in 1992. It was from there that he went on to shape the Fox News Channel after its launch in 1996.

Ailes sold his narrative with what he called the “orchestra pit theory.” He explained: “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”

This is a theory Trump has always embraced, and one that drives his second term in office. He has placed television personalities throughout his administration—to the apparent disbelief of ChatGPT—and has turned the White House into, as media ally Steve Bannon put it, a “major information content provider.” What Trump does “is the action, and we just happen to be one of the distributors,” Bannon told Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post. The administration has replaced traditional media outlets with right-wing loyalists and floods the social media space with a Trump narrative that is untethered from reality. Communications director Steven Cheung says their goal is to create “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”

Their attempt to convince Americans to accept their version of reality is showing now in Trump’s repeated extreme version of the old Republican storyline that the economy under him is great and that the country’s problems are due to Democrats, minorities, and women.

Since voters in November elections turned against the Republicans, citing their concerns about the economy, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the idea of “affordability” is a “Democrat con job.” In an interview yesterday with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump said he would grade his economy “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” Any problems with it, he and his loyalists say, stem from former president Joe Biden’s having left them an economy in shambles. But in fact, in October 2024, The Economist called the American economy “the envy of the world.”

As news cycles have turned against his administration on the economy—as well as the Epstein files, immigration sweeps, strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, and his mental acuity—Trump has tried to regain control of the narrative by diving into the orchestra pit. He has turned to an extreme version of the racism, sexism, and attacks on Americans who use the social safety net that have been part of Republican rhetoric for decades. He has gone out of his way to attack Somali Americans as “garbage,” to attack female reporters, and to use an ableist slur against Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose son has a nonverbal learning disability, prompting imitators to drive by the Walz home shouting the slur.

The fight to control the media narrative is on display this week in a fight over a media merger. As Josh Marshall explained in Talking Points Memo yesterday, the media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which used to be called Time Warner and includes news division CNN, had agreed to be acquired by Netflix. But, as the deal was moving forward, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover to get Warner Bros. Discovery for itself.

David Ellison, son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, who co-founded software giant Oracle, bought Paramount over the summer and appears to be creating a right-wing media ecosystem dominated by the Trumps. Part of the financing for his purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery would come from the investment company of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as from Saudi and Qatari sovereign wealth funds. Paramount told Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders they should accept its offer because Trump would never allow the Netflix deal to happen, and as Marshall notes, Trump appeared yesterday to agree with that suggestion.

The Paramount merger gave Ellison control of CBS, which promptly turned rightward. At stake now is CNN, which Netflix doesn’t particularly want but Paramount does, either to neuter it or turn it into another version of Fox News. Joe Flint, Brian Schwartz, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison told Trump he would make “sweeping changes” to CNN if Paramount acquires Warner Bros. Discovery. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that “Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.”

During the Gilded Age, a similar moment of media consolidation around right-wing politics, a magazine that celebrated ordinary Americans launched a new form of journalism. S.S. McClure, a former coffee pot salesman in the Midwest, recognized that people in small towns and on farms were interested in the same questions of reform as people in the cities. He and a partner started McClure’s Magazine in 1893 and in 1903 published a famous issue that contained Ida Tarbell’s exposé of the Standard Oil Company, Lincoln Steffens’s exposé of the corruption of the Minneapolis municipal government, and Ray Stannard Baker’s exposé of workers’ violence during a coal strike.

Their carefully detailed studies of the machinations of a single trust, a single city, and a single union personalized the larger struggles of people in the new industrial economy. Their stories electrified readers and galvanized a movement to reform the government that had bred such abuses. McClure wrote that all three articles might have been titled “The American Contempt of Law.” It was the public that paid for such lawlessness, he wrote, and it was high time the public demanded that justice be enforced.

“Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it?” McClure asked. “The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in the country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some ‘error’ or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand.”

“There is no one left,” McClure wrote, “none but all of us.”

—

Notes:

https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/

Click to access rao-jmp.pdf

Categories Elections, Ethics, History

Steve Schmidt: The Hegseth Ethos

By dianeravitch

December 10, 2025 //

Steve Schmidt is a veteran political strategist who worked for Republicans, most recently for John McCain in 2008. When Trump was elected, Schmidt was a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. In 2020, he registered as a Democrat. He currently writes a blog at Substack.

This one is brilliant. Pete Hegseth is the embodiment of the moral and spiritual and intellectual rot at the core of the Republican Party today.

Schmidt writes:

There is no “Secretary of War” or “War Department” in the United States of America under US law.

Each time a news organization uses Pete Hegseth’s concocted title, and submits to his “War Department” fantasy, it is an act of corruption.

It is a direct and specific choice that immolates journalistic ethics by embracing fantasy at the demand of power.

Journalism confronts power.

Journalism doesn’t obey it, heed it, submit to it, appease it, or accept the premise that make-believe is real if the leader believes it so, regardless of reality.

This was posted by a man in the chain of command for the release of nuclear weapons after the commission of a war crime on his orders, which was followed by evasions, deflections of responsibility, and an attempt to stab a US Navy admiral in the back:

[Diane’s note: This is juvenile and not funny.]

When General of the Army George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the US Army Secretary of State and Defense died, President Harry Truman said the following in remembrance of his titanic life. He made an unfortunate reference to the traitorous Robert E. Lee, who was exceeded in every way by Ulysses Grant, a man who bested him, yet was smeared into oblivion over 100 years time by the the same type of white nationalists and Christian Taliban who slither around Mar-a-Lago. That is, until one day, the truth escaped its dungeon and a foremost savior of the Union was seen clearly again.

[Truman said:]

General Marshall was an honorable man, a truthful man, a man of ability.

Honor has no modifying adjectives — a man has it, or he hasn’t. General Marshall had it.

Truth has no qualifying words to be attached to it. A man either tells the truth, or he doesn’t. General Marshall was the exemplification of the man of truth.

Ability can be qualified. Some of us have little of it, some may have moderate ability, and some men have it to the extreme.

General Marshall was a man of the greatest ability.

He was the greatest general since Robert E. Lee.

He was the greatest administrator since Thomas Jefferson.

He was the man of honor, the man of truth, the man of greatest ability.

He was the greatest of the great in our time.

I sincerely hope that when it comes my time to cross the great river that General Marshall will place me on his staff, so that I may try to do for him what he did for me.

*******************

Perhaps one reason that Pete Hegseth fetishizes the “War Department” is that, when it existed, it commanded a segregated force. The Defense Department has always commanded a desegregated force.

Before the US Army was desegregated a young Army Lieutenant named Jackie Robinson faced trumped up charges at a kangaroo court martial.
Here is Jackie Robinson’s legacy perfectly preserved for all time in the magnificent eulogy he received from Reverend Jesse Jackson, to whom I hope we can all send good wishes and prayers this holiday season, as he struggles through the ravages of the burdens handed him with dignity and grace:

[Jackie Robinson’s eulogy by Reverend Jesse Jackson.]

Powerful men have a long tradition of sending powerless young men to die in unworthy causes in far away lands.

There should be an extremely low tolerance for such men in 2025 America, but they are not only tolerated, but indulged.

The hypocrisy of the US Congress on the matter of Pete “Kill them all!” Hegseth is bottomless and dangerous. Their faithlessness to the American soldier, sailor, airmen and marine is obscene.

The man who jumped up on a table screaming, “Kill all Muslims!” was exactly who the Congress was warned about. Yet, the warnings were unheeded because the Congress cared more about pleasing Trump than the institutions of the US Army, Navy, and Marine Corps that predate the independence of the United States. They cared more about sating a stirred-up Fox News mob than a 19-year-old private.

Shameful doesn’t begin to describe it.

It is a dereliction of duty, and the most profound type of moral betrayal.

The 119th MAGA Congress is an abomination, led by a religious nutter and weakling who is neither bright, decent, funny, nor wise.

In other words, he is a perfect MAGA puppet who thinks he is a ventriloquist. In truth, the hand inserted into his most sacred space, the one he hides his bespectacled head within, is smeared with orange hand paint.

Faithless, treacherous and disloyal are the Hegseth ethos. They are a perfect mirror of the only reflection of equal rottenness in America: the crazed MAGA Congress, filled from bottom to top with corrupt loons, belligerent liars, sexual deviants, conspiracists, fraudsters, women beaters, and insider traders, who worship Trump together.

Pete Hegseth is the leader of a military that is unready and unprepared to fight a necessary war. He is a performance artist, a late-stage mid-tier Fox News star who is a herald of disaster to a population filled with indifference. It is about to find out the hard way how much damage a small group of evil men and women can do to a nation.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, History, Ignorance, Republicans, Scandals, Shame, Trump, Wall of Shame

Heather Cox Richardson on Pearl Harbor and Its Message for Today

By dianeravitch

December 8, 2025 //

Yesterday, December 7, was the 84th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said it was a day that will live in infamy. After the passage of so much time, Heather Cox Richardson sees that Pearl Harbor shines a light on our current political morass.

She writes:

On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.

In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.

Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

The next day, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America, and on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.

The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.

Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.

The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany’s Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.

America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were Black American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Indigenous Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied Indigenous men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.

The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.

Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?

Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.

But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.

President Donald J. Trump and his cronies have abandoned the principles of democracy and openly embraced the hierarchical society the U.S. fought against in World War II. They have fired women, Black Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ Americans from positions in the government and the military and erased them from official histories. They have seized, incarcerated and deported immigrants— or rendered them to third countries to be tortured— and have sent federal agents and federal troops into Democratic-led cities to terrorize the people living there.

They have traded the rule of law for the rule of Trump, weaponizing the Department of Justice against those they perceive as enemies, pardoning loyalists convicted of crimes, and now, executing those they declare are members of drug cartels without evidence, charges, or trials. They have openly rejected the world based on shared values of equality and democracy for which Americans fought in World War II. In its place, they are building a world dominated by a small group of elites close to Trump, who are raking in vast amounts of money from their machinations.

Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?

When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.

We hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the radical right will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.

Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.

Categories Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, History

Tom Ultican Reviews My New Book, with Some Personal Reflections

By dianeravitch

December 2, 2025 //

Tom Ultican had a successful career in the private sector when he made a decision that changed his life: He became a teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California. After he retired, he became blogging about education. He became one of the most perceptive investigators of the powerful people and dark money behind the organized attacks on public schools.

I am delighted to present his review of my just-published memoir, titled AN EDUCATION: HOW I CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT SCHOOLS AND ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE (Columbia University Press).

I am posting a portion of his review here. I encourage you to open the link and finish his fine commentary.

He wrote:

An Education; How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else, is highly recommended especially for the thousands of us who consider her a friend. Diane is a very generous person with both her time and resources. I first met Diane through her blog in 2014, then in person at the 2015 NPE conference in Chicago. It was in this time period that she started posting some of my articles on her blog while simultaneously informing me about who was working to destroy public education. At the time, I did not realize what a privilege this was. Her latest book is an intimate memoir that introduces us to Diane Rose Silverstein of Houston, Texas born July 1, 1938. It tells the story of a Jewish Texan from of large struggling family becoming politically influential and a national treasure.

On a page following the dedication page, she quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and devines.”

I knew that Diane had made a big change and reversed herself on test based accountability and other school reform agendas driven by conservatives and neoliberals. However, the courage this change took and the depth of her reversal were profoundly illuminated by reading this book.

Although growing up in a Roosevelt supporting family and being a registered Democrat, she became deeply conservative. Diane served on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham foundation, contributed to the Manhattan Institute and was a member of the Koret Task Force with the likes of Eric Hanushek and E. D. Hirsch Jr. Her best friends personally and politically all supported the ideas she abandoned. By reversing herself, she walked away from professional security and long held personal friendships. It was courageously principled but must have been a personally daunting move.

Me and Diane

The best part of “An Education” for me was Diane’s recounting growing up in Houston and going to a segregated public school. Her experience was just so relatable. She liked all the music my oldest sister liked. Cheating was rampant in her school just like mine and like her; I let my classmates copy my work. My rural Idaho school was kind of segregated but that was because only white people and a few Mexican families lived in the community. The Mexican kids were very popular in our school. I never met a Black person until I was a senior in high school and had only seen a few through a car window when vacationing in Kansas City. It was wonderful to find some commonalities.

I had studied engineering, worked in Silicon Valley and pretty much ignored education. But I did hear from Diane and her friends about what a failure public education had become. By 1999, I became tired of hearing about people becoming rich off their stock options, working on the next greatest hard drive or dealing with the atrocious San Jose traffic. I decided to return to San Diego and do something to help public education by enlisting in a master of education program at the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

The UCSD program was oriented toward constructivist education which I really liked. I read books by Alfie Kohn and papers by Lisa Delpit and was ready to revolutionize public education. Then I got to my first job at Bell Jr. High School and discovered that the teachers there were well informed pros with lots of experience. By comparison, I was not nearly as competent as most of them.

It was then that I started to see that I had been bamboozled about how bad public schools were and started looking for like minded people. Two books, David Berliner’s and Eugene Glass’s “50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America’s Public Schools” and Diane Ravitch’s “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” were like water for the thirsty. Soon after that, I found Diane’s blog and joined the Network for Public Education (NPE) along with many other public school advocates.

I saw Diane at the 2015 NPE conference in Chicago’s Drake Hotel. It was an absolutely inspiring event with a keynote by the amazing Yong Zhao. Although we started communicating a little by email, I did not meet Diane personally until NPE 2016 in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was there that the Reverend William Barber gave a truly inspiring speech.

Tom Ultican and Diane Ravitch in Raleigh (by Ultican)

Please open the link and keep reading this excellent review!

Categories Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ethics, History, Network for Public Education, Personal, Ravitch, Diane, Supporting public schools

Norman Rockwell Family Protests Trump’s Misuse of His Work to Promote Racist Agenda

By dianeravitch

November 10, 2025 //

Descendants of the celebrated painter Norman Rockwell wrote an article in USA Today protesting the Trump administration’s selective use of his work to portray an all-white America. The Department of Homeland Security has issued propaganda that includes Rockwell paintings to illustrate that the U.S. has no racial diversity. Whites only.

His children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren wrote this article.

If Norman Rockwell were alive today, he would be devastated to see that his own work has been marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.

The Rockwell family

A group of mostly White Americans stands beneath a billowing national flag, right hands to their hearts. Construction workers crawl ant-like over a close-up of the upraised torch in the hand of the Statue of Liberty. A craggy Daniel Boone in raccoon-skin cap gazes off into the distance against a purple background, cradling his rifle.

These are three Norman Rockwell paintings that recently appeared without authorization in social media posts by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. They bore these labels: “Protect our American way of life,” “Manifest Heroism” and a quote from Calvin Coolidge, “Those who do not want to be partakers of the American spirit ought not to settle in America.”

Norman Rockwell – our father, grandfather and great-grandfather – painted more than 4,000 works during his career, many of them depicting what are considered classic scenes from 20th century American life: Boy Scouts, doctor visits, squabbling couples, soda shops, soldiers returning from war, linemen and so much more.

From 1916 to 1963, he regularly painted covers for the Saturday Evening Post, which by and large depicted only White people. The scarcity of people of color in Rockwell’s paintings has led those who are not familiar with his entire oeuvre to draw the conclusion that his vision was of a White America, free of immigrants and people of color. But nothing could have been further from the truth.

Norman Rockwell used art to confront racism, injustice in America

Rockwell was profoundly shaken by the injusticestoward Black Americans that were brought to the forefront during the Civil Rights Movement. He felt an urgent need to raise his voice against the racism and injustice he witnessed all around him.Need a news break? Check out the all new PLAY hub with puzzles, games and more!

In January of 1964, just one month shy of his 70th birthday, his iconic painting “The Problem We All Live With” appeared in Look magazine. The painting was inspired by the experiences of Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old girl who had been escorted by U.S. Marshals to desegregate her New Orleans school in 1960.

“The Problem We All Live With”–Norman Rockwell

The painting focuses on a young Black girl in a white dress walking to school surrounded by unmistakable signs of racism and violence. A horrifying epithet scrawled across a wall dotted by rotten tomatoes recently hurled and the burly bodies of the four U.S. Marshalls accompanying her all point to the horrifying historical moment depicted in the scene. But perhaps most haunting of all is that title: “The Problem We All Live With,” an eternal present tense, inviting us to engage with the ravages of racism in our society, to open our eyes to the injustice and violence.

“I was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,” Rockwell said in an interview in 1962. “I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.”

His efforts to eradicate prejudices both within himself and others led him to explore issues of racism, violence and segregation well into his 70s: “Golden Rule” (1961), “Murder in Mississippi” (1965) and “New Kids in the Neighborhood (Negro in the Suburbs)” (1967) all demonstrate his deep commitment to equality and anti-racism.

“New Kids in the Neighborhood” Norman Rockwell

If Norman Rockwell were alive today, he would be devastated to see that not only does the problem Ruby Bridges confronted 65 years ago still plague us as a society, but that his own work has been marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.

We ‒ as his eldest son, grandchildren and great-grandchildren ‒ believe that now is the time to follow in his footsteps and stand for the values he truly wished to share with us and all Americans: compassion, inclusiveness and justice for all.

***********************************

In addition to the contested use of Rockwell’s paintings, the Trump administration’s Department of Labor has used the retro images below as part of its recruitment/branding campaign (slogans like “Make America Skilled Again,” “Build America’s Future,” “American Workers First,” “Your Nation Needs You”). The DOL ran them on social media (USDOL posts on X/Twitter, Facebook and Instagram). The posters present America as an all-white nation of male workers. No diversity. Broad shoulders. Blonde hair. Open-collar. He-men. Red-blooded white American men. No Rosie the Riveter.

Categories Art, Bigotry, Corruption, Democracy, Evil, History, Immigration, Lies, Propaganda, Trump

Jamelle Bouie: The Constitution Prohibits a Third Term for Presidents

By dianeravitch

November 4, 2025 //

Jamelle Bouie is a columnist for The New York Times. He is my favorite. He has a broad and deep knowledge of politics and history. He writes about what he’s reading and what he’s cooking.

In this column, he explains that the Constitution prohibits any President from serving a third term. Since Trump loves to scoff at the Constitution, he’s been dropping hints that he will run again or maybe be president for life.

The polls are not encouraging. He currently is at 42% approval, and 52% disapproval. Polls can change, of course. But Trump is as impulsive, arrogant, and vengeful as ever.

Jamelle Bouie reminds us that it was Republicans who insisted on a two-term limit for the Presdency:

It does not come as a great surprise to see that less than a year into his second term in office, President Trump is already thinking about a third.

“I would love to do it,” he told reporters on Air Force One this week.

He has, in fact, been thinking about a third term for years.

“We’re going to win four more years in the White House,” he said in 2020. “And then after that, we’ll negotiate, right? Because we’re probably — based on the way we were treated — we are probably entitled to another four after that.”

And earlier this year, he told NBC News that he wasn’t “joking” about serving a third term. “There are methods which you could do it,” he said.

The obvious response to Trump’s musings is that the Constitution limits each president to two full terms. “No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice, and no person who has held the office of president, or acted as president, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected president shall be elected to the office of the president more than once,” reads the 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951.

But allies of the president insist that there is a plan — a loophole — that might allow Trump to circumvent the Constitution and serve another four years or more.

“Trump is going to be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that,” said Steve Bannon last week. “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is.”

This sounds plausible, but it is wrong. First, it treats the Constitution as a language game whose meaning depends less on the text, structure, history and purpose of the document and more on whether you can use the fundamental indeterminacy of language to brute-force your preferred outcome.

But that is not how you should read the Constitution, which isn’t a rigid set of instructions to be gamed by clever lawyers, but a political document meant to structure the rules of self-government in the United States. The 22nd Amendment was written to change one of those rules and limit the president’s term of office, regardless of the circumstances. Any apparent “loophole” is a mirage produced by a basic misunderstanding of what it is that the Constitution set out to accomplish. A quick look at the history and debate behind the amendment makes this clear.

Two terms in office had been the norm for American presidents since George Washington declined to stand for a third in 1796, instead handing the reins to his vice president, John Adams. In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt became the first president to run for and win a third term of office. He continued the streak in 1944, winning another term but dying in office just a few months after he delivered his fourth Inaugural Address.

In the following midterm elections, Republicans won a House and a Senate majority for the first time since the early 1930s. And at the top of the agenda for the 80th Congress was a constitutional amendment to make the two-term tradition a formal rule of American politics. Although this was a clear response to Roosevelt, congressional arguments in favor of the two-term limit emphasized the vast scope of presidential power and the threat it might pose to American democracy if left in the hands of one man over an extended period of time.

“If long tenure of office of the president was a threat to our republican form of government as stated by President Jefferson nearly 140 years ago, with his limited powers, small disbursements, small Army and Navy and a small number of appointees, how much greater must that threat be to our republican form of government and to the liberties of the American people today?” asked Representative John Marshall Robsion of Kentucky during floor debates over the amendment in 1947.

“I favor this proposed amendment,” said Representative John Jennings Jr. of Tennessee. “Only by its adoption can the people be assured that we shall never have a dictator in this land. Without such a limit on the number of terms a man may serve in the presidency, the time may come when a man of vaulting ambition becomes president.” Backed by a “subservient Congress,” continued Jennings, such a man “could well name to the Supreme Court of the United States men of his political faith and economic thinking” who could “sweep aside and overthrow the safeguards of the Constitution” and “overrule the settled states of law that have been declared and recognized for a hundred years.”

“Almost all of the rest of the world has slipped away from the foundations of freedom and skidded dangerously close to the shoals of executive domination, one-man rule, dictatorship and ruthless tyranny,” declared Representative Karl Earl Mundt of South Dakota. “Let us consolidate our gains in self-government by passing this resolution to prevent any president hereafter — Republican or Democratic — from perpetuating himself in office.”

The overriding concern among congressional supporters of the 22nd Amendment was to limit the president’s overall tenure of office. They did not parse the difference between service and election; they did not intend to create some special scenario by which, if a president followed the right steps, he could circumvent the restriction. They meant, simply, to restrict the president to two full terms for fear of what might be if presidential power fell into the wrong hands.

“To grant extended power to any one man would be a definite step in the direction of autocracy, regardless of the name given the office, whether it be president, king, dictator, emperor or whatever title the office may carry,” Senator Chapman Revercomb of West Virginia said during his chamber’s debate over the proposed amendment. “It would be a definite step toward the destruction of real freedom of the people.”

Categories Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Trump

President Ronald Reagan on the Benefits of Immigration

By dianeravitch

October 31, 2025 //

Trump just announced the lowest immigration target in U.S. history. Only 7,500 immigrants will be admitted, and most will be White South Africans.

Ronald Reagan did not share Trump’s hatred of immigrants. In 1986, he offered amnesty to immigrants who had been in this country for at least four years. Almost 3 million undocumented immigrants gained a path to citizenship.

The last speech that Ronald Reagan gave during his presidency was on January 19, 1989.

He used that farewell speech to praise immigrants and their contribution to the success of America.

Here is the speech in full, as well as President Reagan’s presentation of the Medal of Freedom to two distinguished public servants, one was was a Republican, another to a prominent Democrat. Trump gives that honor only to people known for their allegiance to him.

Here is a video, containing the core of Reagan’s speech.

Please note that President Reagan did not lash out at his critics, of whom there were many; did not belittle the Democrats who preceded him in the Presidency: Jimmy Carter, Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy; did not engage in partisan insults; did not ever say that he “hates Democrats.” Even in his dotage, even after the onset of Alzheimer’s, he had more class, more dignity than the current occupant of that office.

The President. When we finish this luncheon, I hope you’ll stick around a little while. We’re having a tag sale upstairs, and everything must go. [Laughter] But, really, thank you all for coming to be with us here today.

Truly, one of the privileges of this office which I’ve found greatest joy in exercising has been the opportunity to present our nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom. To stand, as I have had the honor of doing, with the recipients of this award has been to stand with the flesh and blood and spirit that is the greatness of America, men and women who have so greatly served our nation and helped keep her free. The contribution of each recipient has been unique and noteworthy, and today is no exception, as we honor two remarkable Americans: Mike Mansfield and George Shultz.

Mike Mansfield has dedicated the entirety of a very long and productive lifetime to public service. He served in both Houses of Congress, spanning seven Presidents, and held the post of Senate majority leader longer than any other person. A former professor of Far Eastern history, he played an important part in shaping America’s Asian policy, serving on both the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then as our Ambassador to Japan. For a sizable portion of America’s history as a nation, Mike Mansfield has been in service to his country.*

George Shultz — why did my voice crack just as I got to you — [laughter] — George Shultz has been a marine, an academic, and a businessman, and a public servant. He has held four Cabinet-level posts, distinguishing himself as a Secretary of Labor, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Treasury Secretary, and finally as one of America’s great Secretaries of State. Over the last 6\1/2\ years, in managing our foreign policy, he has served wisely and met great challenges and great opportunities. George Shultz has helped to make the world a freer and more peaceful place.

And there’s nothing so precious and irreplaceable as America’s freedom. In a speech I gave 25 years ago, I told a story that I think bears repeating. Two friends of mine were talking to a refugee from Communist Cuba. He had escaped from Castro, and as he told the story of his horrible experiences, one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.”

Well, no, America’s freedom does not belong to just one nation. We’re custodians of freedom for the world. In Philadelphia, two centuries ago, James Allen wrote in his diary that “If we fail, liberty no longer continues an inhabitant of this globe.” Well, we didn’t fail. And still, we must not fail. For freedom is not the property of one generation; it’s the obligation of this and every generation. It’s our duty to protect it and expand it and pass it undiminished to those still unborn.

Now, tomorrow is a special day for me. I’m going to receive my gold watch. And since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it’s fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world. For it’s the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America’s triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond. Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close.

This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.

A number of years ago, an American student traveling in Europe took an East German ship across the Baltic Sea. One of the ship’s crewmembers from East Germany, a man in his sixties, struck up a conversation with the American student. After a while the student asked the man how he had learned such good English. And the man explained that he had once lived in America. He said that for over a year he had worked as a farmer in Oklahoma and California, that he had planted tomatoes and picked ripe melons. It was, the man said, the happiest time of his life. Well, the student, who had seen the awful conditions behind the Iron Curtain, blurted out the question, “Well, why did you ever leave?” “I had to,” he said, “the war ended.” The man had been in America as a German prisoner of war.

Now, I don’t tell this story to make the case for former POW’s. Instead, I tell this story just to remind you of the magical, intoxicating power of America. We may sometimes forget it, but others do not. Even a man from a country at war with the United States, while held here as a prisoner, could fall in love with us. Those who become American citizens love this country even more. And that’s why the Statue of Liberty lifts her lamp to welcome them to the golden door.

It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed. And often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world — the last, best hope of man on Earth.

The Medal of Freedom represents the reverence the American people have for liberty, and it honors the men and women who through their lives do greatest honor to that freedom. The lives of the two men we honor here today tell a story about freedom and all its possibilities and responsibilities, and, well, both those that inhere in each free man and woman and those that fall upon a great and free nation. Our honorees have dedicated their lives to preserving and protecting America’s freedom. They have engaged themselves in the larger cause, that of humanity and of the world, to help extend freedom to people of other lands. There is no task more fitting for Americans than that.

So, I will now read the citations for our two very distinguished award recipients and present to them their medals. Perhaps I should mention that our first recipient today — the one who calls me kid — [laughter] — is the son of immigrants, from a country called Ireland.

And now, if Michael Mansfield and George Shultz would please come forward. George, you’re due here.

“During World War I, Mike Mansfield, not yet 15, enlisted in the United States Navy, crossing the Atlantic seven times before he was discharged. His service to country would span seven decades and would help shape America’s destiny as a Pacific power. Through 34 years in Congress — including 16 as Senate majority leader — and with more than a decade as U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Mike Mansfield has set his indelible mark upon American foreign policy and distinguished himself as a dedicated public servant and loyal American.”

Ambassador Mansfield. Mr. President, First Lady, Mr. Secretary of State and Mrs. Shultz, Ambassador Matsunaga and Mrs. Matsunaga, my former colleagues from both the House and the Senate, our distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, I can’t begin to express in words, Mr. President, my deep appreciation for what you’ve said about me and the encouragement which you’ve given me in my post as your Ambassador, your personal representative, our country’s Ambassador to Japan.

However, I think that much of the credit should go to Maureen, my wife, who down through the years has been such a wonderful helpmate; whose advice, counsel, and understanding I appreciated; who worked harder at any job I’ve had and received little credit in the process. So, I want to say how much I owe to her, how much I’m indebted to her; how much I appreciate what the President has said — who has laid out a sound policy for our future in the Pacific and East Asia. I appreciate the advice and counsel that George Shultz has given to me from time to time. And I appreciate the fact that, for the first time in memory, that we have both a President of the United States and a Secretary of State who are actively interested in the Pacific, in Japan, and in East Asia. I anticipate that the policies these men have laid down will be continued.

In conclusion, we may recall that Robert Sandburg [Frost], one of our poets, said on a certain occasion, there are things to do, miles to go, and promises to keep before we sleep. Well, Maureen and I have traveled many miles. We have had and still have things to do. And we still have the promises we made over half a century ago when we were joined together. So, to her I want to give special thanks for all that she has been able to do with me. And to the President and Nancy, my thanks, my appreciation for their thoughtfulness and consideration. Thank you very much.

The President. “Unyieldingly dedicated to the protection of the American national interest, the advancement of freedom and human rights, the battle against tyranny, and reductions in nuclear arms, George P. Shultz has presided over the Department of State during one of the most critical periods in the history of this nation’s foreign policy. For years of public service and his vital part in inaugurating a new era of hope in foreign policy, his countrymen honor him.”

Secretary Shultz. Mr. President, you know, Obie [Helena Shultz] has been traveling a million miles around the world with me. So, it’s been a great partnership. But, Mr. President, I feel very special about receiving this award from you, and let me explain why. There’s a phrase that’s catching on — “the Reagan years.” There’s a ring to it. And, Mr. President, it is the ring of freedom. You have advocated it, fought for it. You have known that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. You have known this is a matter of principle on which you don’t compromise. You have known that there are times when it requires action — sometimes, at least initially, not necessarily popular action — but you have to do it.

You have also known — and I’ve heard you say many times — that the strength comes from “We the People,” that we get our legitimacy and you get your legitimacy as President from the people. And you’ve never been in any doubt, and none of us have, about who we came here to serve: the American people.

And I see you there with your arm around Nancy. I had the privilege of going with Nancy a couple of months ago to the United Nations where she spoke about drugs. And she had the courage to say that one of the root causes of this worldwide problem is use of drugs in the United States. And we have to say no. So Nancy, too, has been a fighter for freedom — freedom from drugs. And we love you for it and revere you for it, Nancy.

So, all of these things make me especially proud to have served with you, to have been your Secretary of State. And to receive a medal from you called the Medal of Freedom has a significance for my life and Obie’s life and my children that we will never forget.

Thank you, Mr. President.

The President. Thank you. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have been privileged to participate in this recognition of the service of these two gentlemen to this great country of ours. I’m glad that all of you could be here. And now my clock tells me that — like the letter I got the first week I was here from the little 11-year-old girl who told me all the things that I had to do and then said, “Now, get over to the Oval Office and go to work.” I see I’ve still got a few more hours of work ahead of me, and we’re a little behind schedule. And so, we’ll bid you all farewell, and thank you again for all being here and participating.

Note: The President spoke at 1:22 p.m. in the State Dining Room at the White House.

*Mike Mansfield’s life was even more remarkable than President Reagan described.

Michael Joseph (Mike) Mansfield was born on March 16, 1903, in New York City the first of three children of Irish immigrants Patrick and Josephine O’Brien Mansfield. Mike’s mother died in 1910, the same year that his father was seriously injured on a construction job. Because Patrick had no way to care for his motherless children, they were sent to live with Patrick’s Uncle Richard, a Great Falls, Montana, grocer. Mike’s childhood was troubled. Shuttled between public, parochial and reform schools, Mike dropped out by grade seven. In 1917, at age 14, Mike enlisted in the United States Navy. He crossed the sea seven times before officials discovered that he lied about his age. He was summarily discharged.

From 1919 to 1920 he served as a private in the Army, stationed in San Francisco. From 1920 to 1922, Mike enlisted in the United States Marine Corps where as a private first class he served in China, the Philippines and Siberia. At the conclusion of his service, Mansfield returned to Montana and worked in the Butte mines from 1922 to 1930.In 1927 Mike met Maureen Hayes, a teacher, who encouraged him to return to school. In 1932 the two married and were parents of one daughter, Anne. Mansfield first attended the Montana School of Mines in 1927 and 1928. In 1933 he graduated from Montana State University in Missoula (now the University of Montana) and worked as a graduate assistant. In 1934 he earned his Masters and became an instructor. During the summers of 1936 and 1937, Mike attended the University of California in Los Angeles. He was full professor of history and political science until 1942, specializing in Latin America and the Far East.In the early 1940’s Mansfield developed an interest in politics. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives as a Democrat and served with distinction from 1943 to 1953. In 1952 Mansfield was elected to the Senate and served continuously until 1977. He believed, in retrospect, that his most significant achievements were initiating the Watergate Committee leading to Richard Nixon’s resignation; extending voting rights to eighteen year olds; and creating a committee to investigate the abuses of the CIA. He was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.From 1977 to 1988 Mansfield served as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Japan. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Mike Mansfield died on October 5, 2001, in Washington, D.C. His wife, Maureen, preceded him in death in 2000. Anne Mansfield Marris and one granddaughter survive him.

Categories History, Hope, Immigration

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Me and Diane

Norman Rockwell Family Protests Trump’s Misuse of His Work to Promote Racist Agenda

If Norman Rockwell were alive today, he would be devastated to see that his own work has been marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.

Norman Rockwell used art to confront racism, injustice in America

Jamelle Bouie: The Constitution Prohibits a Third Term for Presidents

President Ronald Reagan on the Benefits of Immigration

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Me and Diane

If Norman Rockwell were alive today, he would be devastated to see that his own work has been marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.

Norman Rockwell used art to confront racism, injustice in America

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