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This article appeared in The New York Review of Books. As daily newspapers have shrunk or abandoned their book reviewing, the NYRB stands out as the nation’s leading journal of literature, the arts, and politics. It takes books seriously. This is an essay-review about the history of vouchers. I reviewed Josh Cowen’s outstanding book The Privateers, about the cabal that engineered the expansion of vouchers. I hope you will consider subscribing to the New York Review of Books and reading Josh Cowen’s important book.

Minnijean Brown, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo, three of the first Black students to attend Little Rock Central High School, with Arkansas NAACP president Daisy Bates

For decades, the term “school choice”—and the programs it signifies, which divert public money to private schools—was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. Now it’s the law in thirty-three states.

March 13, 2025 issue

Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos

Minnijean Brown, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo, three of the first Black students to attend Little Rock Central High School, with Arkansas NAACP president Daisy Bates (third from left), 1957

Reviewed:

The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers

by Josh Cowen

Harvard Education Press, 200 pp., $34.00 (paper)

Donald Trump promised that he will make public funds available to private as well as religious schools in every state, and this is what his party wants, too. Over the past quarter-century, Republicans have assailed America’s public schools by supporting vouchers, which divert money from public education systems to subsidize tuition at private and religious schools.

But most voters today do not favor vouchers. In fact, since 1967 no state referendum on vouchers has ever passed. In 2024 three states had referenda on the ballot, and vouchers were again defeated. Voters in two of those three states, Kentucky and Nebraska, cast ballots overwhelmingly for Trump—and in both states public funding for private schools was decisively rejected. The story of how Republican politicians have twisted this widespread popular opposition to vouchers into pervasive education policy across the country is one that requires a deeper historical view.

This opposition to public funding for private schools changed on May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled, in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, that de jure racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The Court’s decision had little to do with school funding, but it set off a frantic search among white elected officials in the South to find, or create, a legal mechanism through which to protect racial segregation. The overwhelming majority of southern whites considered the prospect of racial integration repugnant, and their elected officials were determined to block it.

Until the mid-1950s most Americans believed that the government should not underwrite the cost of private and religious schooling. Catholic organizations had periodically sought public subsidies for their schools on grounds of fairness; as taxpayers, they said their schools were entitled to receive the same funds as public schools. But they were repeatedly rebuffed by Congress, the courts, and state legislatures; most state constitutions explicitly prohibited the use of public funds for religious school tuition.

Southern governors and legislators found the rationale and language they sought in the writings of Milton Friedman, a prominent libertarian economist at the University of Chicago, who in 1955 published an essay called “The Role of Government in Education.” The paper argued in favor of parents’ rights to choose any school they wanted, as well as educational freedom, the right for a child not to attend a neighborhood school—music to the ears of segregationists. Friedman said that the government should finance schools but should not be expected to administer them. He recommended that government distribute money—in the form of what he called vouchers—to parents for each of their school-age children, and that parents should be free to spend this allotment at any institution, whether its operations were for-profit or nonprofit, religious or secular, so long as the school met certain minimum educational standards defined by the local government.

If Black parents wanted their children to attend a segregated Black school, Friedman said, or if white parents wanted their children to attend a segregated white school, or if parents wanted their children to attend an integrated school—all should be equally free to do so. Competitive private enterprise and parental choice, he asserted, would promote a “healthy variety of schools” while making teachers’ salaries “responsive to market forces.” He predicted that private schools would “spring up to meet the demand.”

Southern governors used Friedman’s rhetoric and arguments to fight the implementation of the Brown decision. They adopted his endorsement of “freedom of choice” as well as his belief that private schools would provide a better education than “government schools”; indeed, advocates of vouchers began to refer to “public schools” as “government schools,” a term of derision that continues to appear in our ongoing debates about “school choice” today. As the historian Nancy MacLean demonstrated in “How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education,” a 2021 paper posted by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Friedman taught southern leaders that the best way to protect Jim Crow schools was to use “race-neutral arguments” and to “embrace both an anti-government stance and a positive rubric of liberty, competition, and market choice.” As a result, seven states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—enacted laws to subsidize the private school tuition of families fleeing the prospect of desegregated public schools.

In the following decades, existing private schools for white students expanded, and new private schools opened—“white flight academies” or “segregation academies”—to enroll students whose parents opposed racial integration. Often the enrollment of a single Black student in a previously all-white public school was enough to spur an exodus of white families. This happened in New Orleans in 1960 when six-year-old Ruby Bridges enrolled at the William Frantz Elementary School. She had to be escorted into the school each day by federal marshals, on the direct orders of the federal judge J. Skelly Wright. Each day Ruby withstood the screaming of angry white parents at the schoolhouse doors. And Ruby was the only child in her classroom; only a handful of white students remained in the school.

As late as 1965, less than 3 percent of Black children in the South attended schools with white children. Until then southern states engaged in a strategy of “massive resistance” to school integration, blocking the implementation of the Brown decision by providing “tuition tax credits” (a form of vouchers) so that white students could go to all-white private schools, by intimidating Black students so that they would not apply to attend white public schools, or by closing public schools altogether.

Virginia was at the forefront of this “massive resistance.” In 1959 its general assembly repealed the compulsory school attendance law and allowed localities to close their public schools. Prince Edward County was ordered by two courts to integrate its schools but chose instead to shutter its entire public school system. Officials provided tuition grants (vouchers) for white students to attend all-white private schools but made no such arrangements for Black children. Some Black families organized makeshift schools, but for five years there were no public schools for Black students in Prince Edward County. It wasn’t until 1968 that the Supreme Court outlawed Virginia’s tuition grants to private all-white schools.

After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, which made federal funding available to public schools, the federal government had the legal and financial tools to end resistance to integration. Federal courts across the South struck down laws authorizing public funding for vouchers and private schools, as well as any other state laws intended to block racial desegregation. The US Office of Education informed school districts across the South that they would not receive federal funding unless they desegregated promptly. Because of this well-known history, the term “school choice” was so closely associated with resistance to the Brown decision that it was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. It fell into disrepute for decades.

Now, seventy years after Brown, vouchers have not only been rehabilitated, since the 1990s they have been enacted in various forms in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia. Some of these programs are euphemistically called “education scholarships” or “tuition tax credits” or “education savings accounts,” but the fundamental principle is the same in all of them: public money pays for private school, even—in fact, most often—for religious schools. Republican-controlled legislatures in states such as Florida and Arizona enacted voucher programs that started small (in 1999 and 2011, respectively), intending to “save poor kids trapped in failing public schools” or supposedly only for children with disabilities. Over time these programs expanded, increasing the number of eligible students. Now both states have removed all limits, and every student, regardless of family income, is eligible for a tuition subsidy, at a cost to taxpayers that is expected to rise to $1 billion a year in Arizona and $4 billion in Florida.

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, explains this remarkable turnaround of voucher policy in his superb book The Privateers: How Billiionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. Cowen has researched vouchers for most of his career. He worked with teams of academics who received millions of dollars in federal and philanthropic funds to study the results of voucher programs in different cities and states. Like many of his fellow researchers, he hoped that vouchers would provide better education for low-income students. But three years ago he published an article in The Hechinger Report, a nonpartisan education journal, in which he bluntly declared that vouchers were a failure.

Cowen explained that his initial enthusiasm for vouchers cooled as the evaluations were released. He participated in a study of Milwaukee’s vouchers from 2005 to 2010 that concluded that “there was very little difference on test scores” between students in public schools and carefully matched students in voucher schools. Furthermore, when low-income and Black students left voucher schools and returned to public schools, their academic performance in reading and math improved. At the same time that the Milwaukee study ended, a new report showed “shockingly bad early test score results for students in the Louisiana voucher program in the years following Hurricane Katrina.” Those poor results persisted and were replicated by studies in Ohio and Indiana.

The Privateers tells the story of how and why public policy on funding private and religious schools changed. As the consistent failure of state referenda shows, vouchers were never a popular idea; it was the politicians’ dependence on big campaign donors that made school choice a staple of Republican rhetoric. The widespread adoption of vouchers, Cowen explains, was basically a policy coup staged by billionaires who were libertarians or religious zealots or both. Cowen explains

how a small band of interconnected and insular groups of conservative advocates, tightly networked to some of the wealthiest and most influential players in right-wing US politics, invented a rationale for school privatization largely from nothing and out of nowhere.

He describes the agenda of that “network of scholars, lawyers, donors, and activists” as religious nationalism.

The main organizations in this movement to break down the wall of separation between church and state were two right-wing philanthropies, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which funded both the Harvard professor of government Paul Peterson and the libertarian lawyer Clint Bolick. The Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, supported the creation of the nation’s first publicly funded voucher program in that city in 1990 and played a crucial part in funding the three pillars of the voucher movement: research, policy advocacy, and litigation. Peterson became the point person for voucher research and advocacy; he also mentored a cohort of graduate students at Harvard who became the nation’s most prominent evaluators of voucher projects.

Bolick, who ran the libertarian Institute for Justice (funded by the billionaire Koch brothers), oversaw litigation and appeared on behalf of the Milwaukee and Cleveland voucher programs in state and federal courts. When more money was needed for research or litigation, members of a secretive right-wing group called the Council for National Policy were available to help; the CNPincluded the Koch brothers and the DeVos family, who used their fortune from the multilevel marketing company Amway to fund conservative candidates and think tanks and deployed their philanthropy to advance public funding of religious schools. Reviewing the players and their strategy, Cowen concludes that “there is nothing in education policymaking today that comes close to the conservative political apparatus accessed by and…even driving, at times, the creation of evidence on behalf of school vouchers.”

In 1990 the political scientists John Chubb and Terry Moe published Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, in which they asserted that school choice would heal American education; the book was funded by the Olin and Bradley Foundations. Many seemed to have forgotten the racist origins of school choice. Chubb and Moe argued that small-d democratic politics was a handicap for public schools because it kept them in the grip of vested interests, like teachers’ unions and associations of school superintendents. The result of this stasis, they claimed, was poor academic performance. They maintained that “reformers would do well to entertain the notion that choice is a panacea.” School choice “all by itself,” they claimed, could transform American education. The book was a sensation in the education world because it offered a simple solution to complex problems and, of course, gave ideological and scholarly weight to the growing movement for charter schools and vouchers.

That same year, the Milwaukee voucher program started at the behest of the local Black leaders Howard Fuller, a militant social worker who became Milwaukee’s school superintendent, and Polly Williams, a state legislator. Fuller and Williams were disappointed by the academic performance of Black students in public schools. The Bradley Foundation, which was eager to see a demonstration of the success of vouchers in its hometown, quickly provided funding. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program began as a project that enrolled 341 low-income students in seven private schools. By 1994 it had increased to 830 students in twelve schools.

The legislation authorizing the voucher program required that the students take a state test and that the results be evaluated by an independent researcher. The state superintendent, who opposed vouchers, appointed John Witte, a professor from the University of Wisconsin, to conduct the evaluation. When Witte eventually concluded that the program had minimal impact on students’ academic outcomes or attendance and that voucher recipients returned to public schools at high rates, voucher advocates denounced him as biased. Cowen says that Witte was fair and that his study was accurate.

The loudest voice deploring the negative evaluation of the Milwaukee voucher program was that of Peterson, who wrote a letter to TheNew York Times eviscerating the Witte study for minimizing the academic gains of the students and the importance of parental satisfaction. Cowen points out that Peterson was a political scientist with minimal experience in statistical evaluation. Peterson worked with his then graduate student Jay P. Greene on a study, funded by the Bradley and Olin Foundations, of the Milwaukee program. They concluded that, contrary to the state evaluation, vouchers produced significant academic benefits. The voucher system produced these positive results, they wrote, despite legislative burdens such as income limitations and the exclusion of religious schools.

Peterson and Greene’s favorable review persuaded the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature to renew and expand the voucher program in 1995 by including religious schools and increasing the number of participants to 15,000. The inclusion of religious schools led to a court battle that voucher advocates eventually won, litigated by Bolick and the high-powered lawyer Kenneth Starr, who later became famous for his part in the investigation of President Bill Clinton. The Bradley Foundation underwrote his firm’s fee of $300,000 for one month of work, Cowen writes.

Meanwhile the voucher push shifted to Ohio, where the Republican governor wanted Cleveland to be a model for the nation. The program was designed for low-income students, but—unlike in Milwaukee—it did not exclude religious schools; nearly all of the fifty-two participating schools were Catholic. The official evaluator, the Indiana University professor Kim Metcalf, found “few overall differences in student achievement,” but once again Peterson and Greene dismissed the official evaluation and produced their own report—this time funded by the Walton Family Foundation in addition to the Olin Foundation—which showed “large gains” for voucher students. Cowen notes that Peterson’s work was typically reported in newspaper editorials (usually the pro-voucher Wall Street Journal), not in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

Cowen points out that Peterson’s research findings were more clearly directed toward the Supreme Court than toward other scholars: he filed an affidavit on behalf of the Cleveland program in the crucial 2002 case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which concerned the legality of public funding of religious schools. The Court decided 5–4 in favor of including religious schools in the voucher program—a significant reversal of numerous decisions upholding the separation of church and state. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cited Peterson and Greene’s work in her concurring opinion.

Since that Supreme Court decision, vouchers have been sold to the public as a way to “save poor kids from failing schools.” School choice has been described as “the civil rights issue of our time” by Betsy DeVos, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump. Republican elected officials adopted school choice as party dogma, and state after state enacted laws authorizing vouchers, despite a distinct lack of public support. Voters in Utah rejected vouchers in 2007, voters in Florida rejected vouchers in 2012, and voters in Arizona rejected vouchers in 2018, but the Republican leaders in all three states ignored the referenda and continued to expand voucher programs. Republican legislatures and state courts have also ignored explicit provisions in state constitutions that forbid the public funding of religious schools, claiming that the voucher goes to the parents, not to the religious schools where they pay for tuition. Where there’s a will, partisans find a way.

Voucher advocates continually promised academic gains, especially for the poorest students, but after 2010, as the voucher programs grew in scale, the academic results turned sharply negative. Cowen realized that poor kids were actually harmed by using them. Low-income students did not use vouchers to enroll in elite private schools, which mostly did not accept these students—either because they were behind academically or because the voucher was worth far less than the school’s tuition—but to enroll in religious schools whose teachers were uncertified or in pop-up private schools created to capture the government money. When the outcomes were disappointing, the right-wing foundations and Republican officials promoting vouchers moved the goalposts: test scores didn’t matter, they said, but graduation rates and parental satisfaction did. When the test scores and the graduation rates were surpassed by local public schools, the pro-voucher foundations, elected officials, and researchers shifted to a different rationale, one that was “always the underlying goal,” Cowen argues: to satisfy the “values” of parents. Just as segregationists in the 1950s invoked “the right of parents” to avoid integration, voucher advocates in the twenty-first century believe that parents “have the express right to use public dollars to self-segregate.” And these advocates claim that parents have the right to receive taxpayer support for their children to attend religious schools; denying them that “right,” they argue, infringes on religious freedom.

Cowen describes how he came to this understanding. From 2013 to 2016 two teams of researchers—one from MIT and another from the Walton-funded Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas—reached the same dire conclusions about vouchers in Louisiana: they “caused unprecedented large, negative impacts on student achievement.” The Louisiana voucher students were mostly Black and low-income. They entered voucher schools at the fiftieth percentile in math; after a year in private school, they dropped to the twenty-sixth percentile. They improved in the second year but remained behind their peers in public schools. This was solid evidence from two separate groups of researchers “that voucher interventions actually caused damage” to the poor students they were supposed to help. Voucher advocates insisted that the experiment needed more time and that it was overregulated by the state.

The bad results kept rolling in: from Indiana, where independent evaluators documented negative outcomes in 2015; from Ohio in 2016, in a study funded by a conservative think tank; and from Washington, D.C., where evaluators found poor results in 2017 and 2018. Cowen concludes that

no explanation then or now has fully explained the learning loss displayed in locations so different as Louisiana, Indiana, Washington, and Ohio as does the simplest one: that for all of Milton Friedman’s purported brilliance, and for all the millions of dollars pumped into the effort by Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, and the Bradley Foundation, the idea simply did not work. The bigger and more recent the voucher program is, the worse the results have been.

Republican-led states simply ignored the evidence that low-income students who used vouchers fell behind their peers in public schools, and they continued to enact the policies, thanks to large contributions from right-wing billionaires to the campaigns of like-minded state officials. Furthermore, several of the Republican-dominated states removed income restrictions and other limitations, thus abandoning the rhetoric of “saving poor kids from failing schools.” A dozen states currently have “universal” voucher programs, meaning that any family may apply for a voucher, without regard to their income. Tennessee enacted universal vouchers only weeks ago. Other states are likely to follow their lead.

Cowen reports that, with or without income restrictions, the majority of applicants to voucher programs were not trying to leave public schools; they were already attending private schools. This is the case in every state with vouchers. Right now between 65 and 80 percent of students who claim vouchers are using them to pay the tuition of private schools where they were already enrolled. Vouchers are also used in many states to pay the expenses of parents who teach their children at home. In Arizona, according to reports in The Arizona Republic and ProPublica, parents have used their “education savings accounts” to buy trampolines, swing sets, expensive Lego sets, horseback riding lessons, kayaks, trips to Disney World, chicken coops, skiing trips, cowboy roping lessons, and ice-skating lessons. Republican governor Doug Ducey led the campaign to make public funds available to all students in the state. His successor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, predicted in 2023 that the state’s voucher program could cost nearly $1 billion, with over 53 percent of all new funding paying for 8 percent of Arizona’s students.

Just as troubling to Cowen as the academic results of the voucher project is the publicly funded discrimination that these schools make possible. Right-wing rage in response to the pandemic enabled the eruption of the so-called culture wars over masking, vaccines, and teaching about race and sexuality in schools, as well as the presence of these topics in library books. In 2022 Christopher Rufo, the right-wing provocateur who first raised an alarm about “critical race theory” in public schools (few public school teachers had ever heard of the term; it refers to a course usually taught in law schools, if at all), called on conservatives in a speech at Hillsdale College to promote universal distrust in public schools in order to arrive at “universal school choice.” This distrust was fueled by right-wing groups, which made wild accusations about teachers allegedly “grooming” their students to be gay or Marxist, and about the curriculum allegedly turning students against their own country.

Vouchers appeal to those who want to escape lessons about racism, diversity, or gender equality. Religious and private schools that receive publicly funded vouchers are not bound by civil rights laws, and many openly bar the admission of LGBTQ+ students and the hiring of LGBTQ+ staff. Some bar students with disabilities. Some religious schools accept only students who are members of their own religion.

Trump issued an executive order on January 29 titled “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunities for Families,” which called for the diversion of federal funds to underwrite tuition at private and religious schools. He claimed that “rigorous research demonstrates that well-designed education-freedom programs improve student achievement and cause nearby public schools to improve their performance,” which according to Josh Cowen’s book The Privateers is not true. Trump issued the order on the same day as the release of the latest national test scores by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Florida, which has a robust voucher program, experienced a sharp decline in its scores, the state’s lowest in twenty years on this test.

Cowen considers the manipulation of culture-war issues like race and gender to be a feature of vouchers, not a bug. Groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Freedom use the clarion call of “parents’ rights” to condemn the discussion of race and LGBTQ+ issues, as well as access to books about these subjects, in public schools. Such groups want to censor what is taught to all children, even those whose parents disagree with them and want their children to learn about race, gender, and sexuality. Imagine teachers in a segregated Black school being told by the state that they cannot teach accurate Black history. Why should those parents have no rights?

Cowen writes that the learning loss of poor children who used vouchers was larger than the learning loss caused by the pandemic, and at this point the evidence against their efficacy is overwhelming. Yet more states adopted vouchers in 2022 and 2023 than in any previous legislative sessions. Texas is the only large Republican-controlled state that has not enacted legislation to implement them, owing to the combined opposition of parent groups, Democrats, religious leaders who believe in the separation of church and state, and rural Republicans defending their district’s only public school. Yet Governor Greg Abbott has said that vouchers are his highest priority. He received millions of dollars from billionaires to defeat many of the rural Republicans who opposed vouchers. The issue will soon come to a vote in the legislature.

The reality is that when states offer charter schools and vouchers, public schools lose. Each time students leave for private alternatives, public schools must reduce their teaching staff, increase class sizes, and cut back on curricular offerings. States cannot afford to pay for three different school systems. Is the goal to eliminate public schools? That argument seems inherent to some who share Friedman-style thinking.

What does Cowen recommend?

Fund public schools. It really is that simple…. The more money we spend on schools, the better off children are, not simply academically, but in later-life outcomes like higher wages and fewer encounters with the criminal justice system.

Wealthy parents spend amply to educate their children—to make sure that they have certified teachers, small classes, a well-supplied library, and a curriculum that includes the arts and sciences as well as physical education and time for play. And, of course, wealthy children never go without food or medical care. We should give the same to all children.

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Community Schools, Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, History, Lies, Privatization, Race, Racism, Segregation, Trump, Vouchers

Timothy Snyder: Trump Unleashes Chaos on the World by Defending Russia

By dianeravitch

March 3, 2025 //

Where Trump goes, chaos follows. That’s a fact of life, as we see both in his upending of every federal agency and his disruption of foreign policy.

Timothy Snyder, Professor of European History at Yale university, and one of the leading scholars of Eastern Europe, has been clear-eyed from the start about Putin’s murderous designs on Ukraine.

He writes on his blog “Thinking About…”:

The Americans claim that their attempt to humiliate the Ukrainian president in the White House yesterday was about peace. On that premise, nothing they said makes any sense.

The attempted mugging of a visiting president was about the world war that Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and JD Vance have chosen. If we attend to what Vance and Trump said yesterday, we can work our way to the unreason of American policy, and to the chaos that will follow.

JD Vance opened hostilities against Volodymr Zelens’kyi with a claim about negotiations with Russia, treating them as a formula that will magically end the war. Zelens’kyi had said, calmly and correctly, that negotiations with Russia have been tried before and have not worked. The Russians have betrayed every truce and every ceasefire since their first invasion in 2014. And that first invasion of course violated a number of treaties between Ukraine and Russia, as well as the basic principles of international law. Zelens’kyi ran for president in 2019 as the peace candidate, promising to negotiate with Putin to end what was then a war that had been ongoing for five years. Russia did not respond to these overtures, except with contempt, and then with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

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During and after the Oval Office meeting yesterday, Americans suggested that all that had happen was a unilateral Ukrainian ceasefire, and that then the end of the war would automatically follow. Americans indicated that Zelens’kyi was too stupid to understand this. Zelens’kyi’s quite reasonable point was that a ceasefire would have to be followed by efforts to strengthen Ukraine, or the war would simply start again. The evidence is on his side. Even during Trump’s ostensible peace campaign these last six weeks, Russian authorities have never said that they would end the war. The Russians keep committing war crimes every day. Yesterday Russia was attacking hospitals in Kharkiv. The Russians have only said that they would talk to Americans, which is not the same thing as agreeing to take part in a peace process. From the Russian perspective, a ceasefire is an opportunity to halt external support for Ukraine and demobilize the Ukrainian army, preparatory to the next attack. Even were this not obvious from Russian statements and actions, no responsible Ukrainian leader could simply accept the American premise that a ceasefire itself is all that is necessary, or simply take Americans at their word that all would be well afterwards.

After yesterday’s confrontation in the Oval Office, Trump made clear just how unstrategic the American approach had been. He claimed that the real problem had been that Zelens’kyi had wanted to speak about Putin. Russia, of course, is the aggressor. It does not make sense to demand that the country under attack cease to defend itself, and to pretend that this in itself will bring peace. Had the United States under Trump been interested in peace in Ukraine, American power would have been engaged to deter Russia from continuing the war. There was never any meaningful sign of a willingness to do this, and certainly no new American policy, under Trump, to do this. On the contrary, the United States lifted Russia from its international isolation and accepted in advance most Russian demands. But even had that not been the case, the American position would have been illogical. During an ongoing war of aggression, the aggressor cannot simply be humored, as Trump proposes, during a process that aims at peace.

In the emotion of the White House, however, it was evident that the situation was psychological rather than strategic. In Zelens’kyi’s presence, Trump confessed his fundamental sympathy for Putin. In Trump’s view, he and Putin “had gone through a lot together.” The grievance on display here was so capacious that not everyone could grasp what Trump meant. Trump said that he had been the victim of a “hoax,” because people thought that Putin assisted Trump’s presidential campaigns. But Putin, Trump claimed, rather extraordinarily, was also the victim of the “hoax.” And indeed, according to Trump, this had been a very meaningful bonding experience between the two men. This casts some light on the one of the regular conversations between Putin and Trump these last few years. It reflects, though, an emotional commitment based upon a carefully curated unreality. There was, of course, no hoax. Putin supported Trump in all three of his presidential campaigns, right down to Russian bomb threats against predominantly Democratic districts last election day. But the emotional connection between the two men, as Trump revealed, real. For Trump, the imagined wound of ego to his friend Putin was the pertinent reality. The real wounds that real Russians have inflicted on real Ukrainians are not.

In the White House, Zelens’kyi asked Vance whether he had ever been to Ukraine, which is a reasonable question. Vance had issued one of his typically ex cathedra pronouncements. He speaks with great confidence about the war, telling security experts and Ukrainians alike that he is “right” and they are “wrong.” Indeed, one of the most striking moments yesterday was Vance yelling at Zelens’kyi that Zelens’kyi is “wrong.” Vance makes judgements on the basis of numbers, without any knowledge of how the battlefield looks or works. He also ignores the human factor, treating war as a math problem in which big numbers always win — which, as a historical matter, is mistaken. Did the numerically stronger side win the Revolutionary War? Since 1945, it has been normal for the smaller, colonized country to defeat the larger, colonizing power. Vance’s analysis also evades responsibility, as though it does not matter which side the United States took. Where his arrogance leads is the path he has in fact taken: the country that he personally thinks is stronger should win the war because that is what he thinks; if this is not happening, American power should be added to the side that he believes should be winning: Russia. His actions yesterday certainly furthered such a goal.

Also telling was the way Vance responded to Zelens’kyi’s question. Vance took the position that it was better to look at the internet than to learn things in person. He started with the weird idea that Zelens’kyi was to blame for Vance’s failure to visit Ukraine, because Zelens’kyi just took people on “propaganda tours.” This is very illogical. It is true that Ukrainian governments accompany foreign visitors to killing sites, especially Bucha. No doubt those visits have an effect on people. But the mass killing at Bucha did in fact take place. When Vance attaches “propaganda” to the custom of visiting it, he falls painfully close to the Russian claim that the mass killing did not happen at all, and that the signs of it were staged. Because Bucha is a Kyiv suburb, and so relatively accessible for foreign delegations, it serves as a representative example of what are, sadly, many similar cases of the mass shootings of civilians. And that war crime, the mass killing of civilians, has in its turn to stand for many others, including torture, rape, and the kidnaping of children. Had Vance decided to go to Ukraine, he could have visited Bucha with or without Ukrainians, as he preferred. He could also have talked to people in Kyiv, or indeed ventured beyond, to other cities. He could have spoken to soldiers and officers in the Ukrainian armed forces. Nothing stopped him from doing so. He was, after all, a United States Senator, and then the Vice-President of the United States. He could have planned the journey as he liked, and others would have made the arrangements for him.

There is a reason that Vance will not go to Ukraine. He is an online person. Last year at the Munich Security Conference, he refused to meet Zelens’kyi, on the justification that he knew everything he needed to know already. Then he spent time on the internet in his hotel room and posted about certain adolescent concerns. This year at the Munich Security Conference it was made known that Vance would only see Zelens’kyi if the Ukrainians first signed a deed ceding much of the Ukrainian economy to the United States in exchange for nothing. When did meet Zelens’kyi, he did so surrounded by others. In the White House, yesterday, he broadcast the same fear of confronting something real. Yelling across the room to a visiting guest that “you’re wrong, you’re wrong” is not a sign of confidence or wisdom. Vance takes the safe course of dismissing other people rather than admitting that he might have something to learn. More important than visiting Ukraine, said Vance in the White House, was “seeing stories.” It is better to take in information, as he has said, from his own “sources,” those that confirm what he already thinks, than actually engaging with another country or with its people. Vance’s “sources” have led him to repeat claims that originated very specifically as Russian propaganda and have been documented as such, for example the an entirely untrue claim that American aid goes to pay for yachts. Vance helped to spread this lie.

Kharkiv under Russian bombing, March 2022.

Perhaps sensing the awkwardness of his position, Vance then shifted to yelling at Zelens’kyi that he needed to thank President Trump. Zelens’kyi obsessively thanks American and other foreign leaders for their support of Ukraine. He did so during this visit to the United States as well. What Vance seemed to mean is that Zelens’kyi needed to express his thanks then and there, whenever Vance wanted, indeed right at the moment when Vance was yelling at him, and because Vance was yelling at him. Vance was demanding that Zelens’kyi thank Trump for aid that the Biden administration gave to Ukraine, and which the Trump people were threatening to take away — and indeed at that point had almost certainly already decided to take away. The Trump policy to Ukraine, as of yesterday, was something like the following: meet with Russia without Ukraine; concede to every significant Russian demand in advance of any Russian concession and without asking Ukrainians; claim that Russia and Ukraine were jointly responsible for the war; refer to Zelens’kyi as a dictator without condemning Putin; vastly overstate the extend of previous American aid; claim Ukrainian resources as compensation for that aid. In this setting, the compulsive demand for ceaseless gratitude on demand is not only unreasonable: it shifts into the abuser’s need to be portrayed by the victim as the great benefactor.

Even the press mockery of Zelens’kyi’s clothing, perhaps the depths of yesterday’s grotesquerie, reveals a similar disconnect from what is actually happening in the world. The implicit notion is that the people who wear suits and ties are the real heroes, because heroism consists, somehow, in always knowing how to adapt to the larger power structure and to blend it. But in history there do arrive moments when unexpected things happen and behaviors, including symbolic ones, must be adjusted. Zelens’kyi decided three years ago not to wear suits not, as was insultingly suggested yesterday, because he does not own one; and not, as was ridiculously suggested, because he does not understand protocol. Three years ago he decided that he would dress as appropriate to register solidarity with a people at war, his own people at war. This is, frankly, something that Americans should already know, rather than an appropriate subject for a question at the White House, let alone a mocking one. But it is the mockery itself that reveals an American illogic, or worse. Some Americans want to think that the most important thing is conformity, that sneering at human difference shows our own courage. Once we knew better. When Ben Franklin went to the French to ask for support during the Revolutionary War, he wore a coonskin cap, which was not comme il fallait. When Winston Churchill visited the White House during the Second World War, he wore a wartime outfit that not unlike the one that Zelens’kyi wore yesterday.

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Trump similarly derided human courage when he demanded that Zelens’kyi accept that Ukraine would have immediately collapsed without American arms. That makes the Americans the heroes and Ukrainians the ones who must thank Americans on demand. It is true, of course, that American weapons have been very important, and that Ukrainians will now suffer from Trump’s decision to shift American power to the Russian side of the war. But all the weapons that had been delivered by February 2022, by both the first Trump and then the Biden administrations, were obviously insufficient for the kind of full-scale land invasion that Russia mounted. The Ukrainians got weapons after February 2022 precisely because they resisted anyway.

Almost all Americans believed when the full-scale invasion began that Ukraine would immediately collapse under Russian might, and that Zelens’kyi would flee the country. But he did not. His physical courage in remaining in Kyiv, an echo of the physical courage shown by millions of Ukrainians, changed the overall situation. Because Ukrainians resisted, western arms began to flow. The courage of Ukrainians made possible an American and European policy to hold back Russian aggression. That same Zelens’kyi, the man who was brave enough to stay and lead his country when the Russians were approaching the capital and the assassination squads were already there, was yesterday made the subject of a public attempt at humiliation by Americans. No doubt Ukrainians should express their thanks to Americans. As they do. But it is illogical, to say the least, for Americans not to thank Ukrainians, or to treat their courageous president as an object of contempt. The coercive ritual of gratitude hides from Americans the basic reality of what has happened these last three years.

During this war, Ukraine has delivered to the United States strategic gains that the United States could not have achieved on its own. Ukrainian resistance gave hope to people defending democracies around the world. Ukrainian soldiers were defending the basic principle of international law, which is that states are sovereign and that borders should not be changed by aggression. Ukraine in effect fulfilled the entire NATO mission, absorbing a full-scale Russian attack essentially on its own. It has deterred Chinese aggression over Taiwan, by showing how difficult offensive operations can be. It has slowed the spread of nuclear weapons, by proving that a conventional power can resist a nuclear power in a conventional war. Throughout the war, Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, and the Ukrainians have resisted the nuclear bluff. Should they be allowed to be defeated, nuclear weapons will spread around the world, both to those who wish to bluff with them, and those who will need them to resist the bluff.

Yesterday Vance and Trump repeated familiar Russian propaganda. One example was Trump’s claim that it was the Ukrainians who, by resisting Russia, were risking “World War Three.” The truth is exactly the opposite. By abandoning Ukraine, Trump is risking a terrible escalation and, indeed, a world war. Everything that Ukraine has done these last three years can be reversed. Now that the Trump administration has chosen to throw American power to Russia’s side, Russia could indeed win the war. (This was always Russia’s only chance, as the Russians themselves well knew, and openly said.) In this scenario of an American-backed Russian victory, opened yesterday by American choices in the American capital, the horrible losses extend far beyond Ukraine. Zelens’kyi quite sensibly made the point that the consequences of the war could extend to Americans. This was, in a sense, overly modest: Ukrainian resistance has thus far spared Americans such consequences. He said so very gently, and was yelled at for it — which is itself quite telling. The Americans have a sense of what they are unleashing upon the world by allying with Russia, and they made noise to disguise that.

The expansion of Russian power in Ukraine would mean more killing, more rape, more torture, more kidnaping of children inside Ukraine. But it would also mean that all of the strategic gains become strategic losses. Russia, rather than being prevented by Ukraine from fighting other wars, is encouraged to start new ones. China, rather than seeing an effective coalition to halt aggression, is emboldened to start wars. American endorsement of wars of aggression leads to global chaos. And everyone who can builds nuclear weapons. That is an actual scenario for a third world war, authored by the people who scripted yesterday’s attempted mugging in the White House.

If one starts from the premise that the United States was engaged in a peace process, then what we saw Americans do yesterday makes no sense. The same goes if we begin from the assumption that present American leadership is concerned about peace generally, or cares about American interests as such. But it is not hard to see another logic in which yesterday’s outrages do come into focus.

It would go like this: It has been the policy of Musk-Trump from the beginning to build an alliance with Russia. The notion that there should be a peace process regarding Ukraine was simply a pretext to begin relations with Russia. That would be consistent with all of the publicly available facts. Blaming Ukraine for the failure of a process that never existed then becomes the pretext to extend the American relationship with Russia. The Trump administration, in other words, ukrainewashed a rapprochement with Russia that was always its main goal. It climbed over the backs of a bloodied but hopeful people to reach the man that ordered their suffering. Yelling at the Ukrainian president was most likely the theatrical climax to a Putinist maneuver that was in the works all along.

This, of course, might also seem illogical, and at an even higher level. The current American alliance system is based upon eighty years of trust and a network of reliable relationships, including friendships. Supporting Russia against Ukraine is an element of trading those alliances for an alliance with Russia. The main way that Russia engages the United States is through constant attempts to destabilize American society, for example through unceasing cyberwar. (It is telling that yesterday the news also broke that the United States has lowered its guard against Russian cyber attacks.) Russian television is full of fantasies of the destruction of the United States. Why would one turn friends into rivals and pretend that a rival is a friend? The economies of American’s present allies are at least twenty times larger than the Russian economy. And Russian trade was never very important to the United States. Why would one fight trade wars with the prosperous friends in exchange for access to an essentially irrelevant market? The answer might be that the alliance with Russia is preferred for reasons that have nothing to do with American interests.

In the White House yesterday, those who wished to be seen as strong tried to intimidate those they regarded as weak. Human courage in defense of freedom was demeaned in the service of a Russian fascist regime. American state power was shifted from the defense of the victim to the support of the aggressor. All of this took place in a climate of unreason, in which actual people and their experiences were cast aside, in favor of a world in which he who attacks is always right. Knowledge of war was replaced by internet tropes, internalized to the point that they feel like knowledge, a feeling that has to be reinforced by yelling at those who have actually lived a life beyond social media. A friendship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, a masculine bond of insecurity arising from things that never happened, became more important than the lives of Ukrainians or the stature of America.

There was a logic to what happened yesterday, but it was the logic of throwing away all reason, yielding to all impulse, betraying all decency, and embracing the worst in oneself on order to bring out the worst in the world. Perhaps Musk, Trump, and Vance will personally feel better amidst American decline, Russian violence, and global chaos. Perhaps they will find it profitable. This is not much consolation for the rest of us.

Thinking about… is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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If you are thinking today about how to help Ukrainians, here are some possibilities: Come Back Alive, a Ukrainian NGO that supports soldiers on the battlefield and veterans; United 24, the Ukrainian state platform for donations, with many excellent projects); RAZOM, an American NGO, tax-deductible for US citizens, which cooperates with Ukrainian NGOS to support civilians; and BlueCheck Ukraine, which aims for efficient cooperation with Ukrainian groups and is also tax-deductible.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, History, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Why Does the Media Ignore Nazi Symbolism at Trump-Musk Events?

By dianeravitch

March 2, 2025 //

Thom Hartmann, independent journalist, finds it curious that the Republican Party so frequently displays Nazi symbolism. And why does the major media ignore usually overlook the fondness for Nazi iconography by Trump, Musk, and their allies? Is it their youth? Their historical ignorance? Their caution?

He writes:

Is it a shout-out to the hardcore racists and haters that make up the GOP’s base, all just a performance to get enough votes to win elections? Or a proclamation that the end-goal of Republican governance is the destruction of American democracy, perhaps in deference to Vladimir Putin? How about it’s being a bizarre attempt at trolling people old or well-educated enough to remember or know what Nazism inevitably leads to?

One of the enduring mysteries in today’s American political life is why so many Republican politicians and their friends are adopting or promoting openly Nazi symbols, iconography, and slogans.

And why are America’s mainstream media so unwilling to even report on, much less discuss, all the Nazi and neo-Nazi references surrounding Trump and today’s captive Republicans?

Elon Musk, Trump’s #1 campaign donor and co-president, threw two Nazi “Sieg Heil” salutes following Trump’s inauguration, causing the media to fall all over itself trying to make excuses for his behavior. Actual, declared Nazis and white supremacists were thrown into an ecstatic tizzy, however, with the Ohio Proud Boys posting the clip with the words, “Heil Trump!”

The neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe posted the Musk clip with the Waffen SS lightning-bolt emoji; their leader, Christopher Pohlhaus, wrote: “I don’t care if this was a mistake. I’m going to enjoy the tears over it.” Other neo-Nazi, Nazi, and white supremacist groups across the web jumped in to celebrate the salute, as Rolling Stone extensively documented.

It all seems to have really picked up steam after young neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville in 2017, chanting Nazi slogans, murdering a young woman protestor, and giving Hitler salutes.

Our media completely failed to identify them as Nazis, even though they were proclaiming that themselves.

Since Trump’s endorsement of their behavior with his “good people on both sides” comment, which he continues to defend, such behavior has been emulated across the nation.

Poke anything associated with Trump and odds are Nazi memes will pop out.

The “America First” slogan was the name of an openly pro-Nazi movement in America in the 1930s, a fact that seems to have been lost down the memory hole. And Trump told his former Chief of Staff, Marine General John Kelly, that “Hitler did some good things…” along with referring to American soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.”

And then there are Trump’s attacks on the media, echoing Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler with their “enemy of the people” rhetoric. He’s suing media outlets left and right, just like Putin and Orbán did in their early years to intimidate reporters and bankrupt opposition publications and websites.

Elon Musk just called for reporters for CBS’s 60 Minutes program — “the biggest liars in the world” — to receive “a long prison sentence.”

In an echo of Hitler’s “denunciations,” his “border czar” is even calling for the police at the Department of Justice to investigate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for telling immigrants about their constitutional rights.

After pointing out at a rally that Hitler said that Jews were “poisoning the blood” of Germany (yes, he pointed it out himself), Trump then said of nonwhites in America:

“It’s true. They’re destroying the blood of the country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country, and we’re going to have to get them out.”

The 2021 CPAC meeting featured a stage resembling the Odal Rune, a potent Nazi symbol, that drew a rebuke from the hotel hosting the conference.

In 2022, Trump dined with Nick Fuentes, a prominent and out Holocaust denier. Trump later posted a 30-second video that twice references a “unified Reich.” Trump’s buddy Steve Bannon has repeatedly endorsed the notoriously antisemitic and racist novel The Camp of the Saints” which characterizes Black Americans, “dirty Arabs,” and “feces-eating Hindu rapists” as engaging in a conspiracy to destroy white people and civilization.

His son, Don Jr., retweeted a message by a white supremacist who attacks interracial dating and queer people, “liked” tweets by another account that postspictures of Jews with exaggerated noses, made a “joke” about gas chambers and our media, and participated in an interview with a talk show host who said slavery was the best thing to have ever happened to Black people.

When Vice President Vance visited Germany this past week, instead of meeting with that nation’s chancellor or his peer, he hung out with the leader of the Nazi-adjacent AfD party, while giving a speech in which he extensively quoted Putin’s sentiments. Proud to be known by the company he keeps…

And then there’s DOGE, the official title of the iron-fisted, massively rich oligarchs who ruled Venice for ten centuries that’s been reclaimed by billionaire Musk for himself and his work. The logo is arguably explicit, as Jim Stewartson points out at his excellent mind-war.com newsletter/website:

“On the DOGE logo there are 8 stars above the cartoon, and 8 stars on the flag inside the gear. This is another National Socialist signal. It means Heil Hitler. Musk has used this signal numerous times, in addition to quite literally doing two Hitler salutes at the inauguration.”

There are also 14 teeth on the gear that makes up the O in DOGE in the logo, a direct rip-off from Hitler’s Nazi labor movement of the 1930s, reflecting the famous “14 words” memorized by every white supremacist: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children….”

Following that theme, Trump, Vance, and multiple Republican politicians and media figures have, for years, promoted the Naziesque “Great Replacement Theory” that posits American Jews are paying their agents in business, government, and society to hire Black, brown, and queer people and women to replace white men.

Additionally, when Trump tweeted out his Anders Breivik quote about saving the country and thus violating no laws, Musk retweeted it with 14 American flag emojis. These guys aren’t subtle because they don’t have to be; they know any American media that calls them out will either be attacked as paranoid or they’ll simply say it was a joke or misunderstanding.

But their followers know exactly what they’re saying, and why. Just like they understood that Trump’s birther crap was really his way of saying, “Hey, white people, have you noticed that guy in the White House is Black? We can’t tolerate that!”

And they also clearly heard the dog whistle when he came down the escalator and attacked brown-skinned immigrants. Or when he claimed the Potomac crash was because the helicopter pilot was a woman hired “because of DEI.”

Or when Trump offered refugee status to white South Africans, but not to Black or Indian South Africans.

There’s so much evidence of Trump’s and Musk’s apartheid leanings, it’s pretty much impossible to deny any longer. Which raises the question: Is our media in with the Nazis, or just committed to Not-Seeing them?

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Immigration, Lies, Media, Musk, Elon, Republicans, Trump

Our Allies Speak Up in Support of Ukraine

By dianeravitch

March 1, 2025 //

Trump’s MAGA base was happy with his beatdown of Zelensky, and Russia too was thrilled. His Cabinet members each dutifully thanked him for offending Zelensky and “putting America First.” ((I doubt they realized that the “America First” crowd in the 1930s was opposed to helping Europe fight Hitler.)

With the exception of the Fascist leader of Hungary, who consolidated power by undermining the press and the judiciary and demonizing LGBT people, our allies cheered on Zelensky.

One hopes that Europe will unify to protect their border from Putin. Maybe the U.S. will be ejected from NATO.

The New York Times reported:

European leaders quickly pledged their continued support for Ukraine on Friday after President Trump’s blistering criticism of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in a meeting at the White House.

Leaders lined up behind Ukraine and praised its embattled president, the statements coming one after the other: from France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Norway, Finland, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Belgium, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Ireland. Canadian, Australian and New Zealand leaders added their voices to the Europeans’.

Even as Western leaders generally shied away from explicitly criticizing Mr. Trump, who had told Mr. Zelensky he was “not in a good position” and angrily threatened to pull American support for Ukraine unless he agreed to a cease-fire deal with Russia, many in Europe addressed their statements of encouragement directly to Mr. Zelensky.

“Your dignity honors the bravery of the Ukrainian people,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said on social media, referring to Mr. Zelensky. “Be strong, be brave, be fearless. You are never alone, dear President.”

President Emmanuel Macron of France, who had put on a display of friendship with Mr. Trump during a chummy visit to the White House on Monday, said the United States and Europe had been justified in aiding Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.

In a statement, Mr. Macron urged America to remain on the side of the Ukrainians, who he said were “fighting for their dignity, their independence, their children, and the security of Europe.”

Friedrich Merz, who is on track to become Germany’s next chancellor after the country’s election this week, said in a statement addressed to “Dear Volodymyr” that his country would stand behind Ukraine “in good and in testing times.”

“We must never confuse aggressor and victim in this terrible war,” Mr. Merz added, apparently referring to Mr. Trump, who has called Mr. Zelensky a dictator and blamed him for the invasion. The departing German leader, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said that Ukraine could rely on Germany and the rest of Europe.

Daniel Fried, a career diplomat under American presidents of both parties who had just returned from a trip to Brussels, said the Oval Office clash had jolted Europe’s capitals, generated a wave of sympathy for Mr. Zelensky and upended a peace process that appeared to be gaining traction.

“The Europeans are horrified and dismayed,” Mr. Fried said, adding that Europeans see the United States shifting to a great-power strategy in which large countries carve up the world. “They’re watching the America they know and respect change in a matter of a couple of weeks.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, a center-left leader who carefully avoided any major disagreements with Mr. Trump during a visit to the White House on Thursday, spoke with Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky on Friday, according to the prime minister’s office. Mr. Starmer “retains his unwavering support for Ukraine and is playing his part to find a path forward to a lasting peace,” the office said in a statement.

Mr. Starmer is scheduled to host in London an international meeting on Ukraine on Sunday with Mr. Zelensky and other leaders from across Europe.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, a right-wing nationalist who has long been at odds with much of Europe, appeared to side with Mr. Trump, saying on social media, “Strong men make peace, weak men make war.” He did not mention Ukraine or Mr. Zelensky in his post.

Mr. Trump’s upbraiding of Mr. Zelensky also predictably won praise in Russia. Dmitri Medvedev, a former Russian president who is deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said on Telegram that Mr. Trump had told “the truth.”

The Canadian foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, joined the European leaders in offering words of support for Ukraine, telling reporters that Ukrainians were “fighting for their own freedoms, but also fighting for ours.”

Ms. Joly, whose country’s relationship with Mr. Trump has been deeply strained by the American president’s threats to annex Canada and plans to impose tariffs, stressed the importance of maintaining Western unity over the war in Ukraine. She said that the Russians were watching.

On Saturday morning in Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese echoed the messages of support from Europe. Mr. Albanese said his country was proud to help Ukraine defend itself against “the brutality of Russian aggression.”

Mr. Zelensky responded to each European leader on social media, writing, “Thank you for your support.”

But he offered his most ample statement of gratitude to Mr. Trump, who had said in the Oval Office earlier on Friday that Mr. Zelensky was not “acting at all thankful” for American aid.

“Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank you for this visit,” wrote Mr. Zelensky, also thanking Mr. Trump, and adding, “Ukraine needs just and lasting peace, and we are working exactly for that.”

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, History, Republicans, Shame, Trump, Vance, J.D.

The Trump-Putin New World Order

By dianeravitch

March 1, 2025 //

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

He wrote:

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

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

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

Then Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago.

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

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

Is this what Trump voters wanted?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump immediately crowed about his strength and power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ProPublica: Mike Johnson Shares Home with a Far-Right Pastor Who Has a Political Agenda

By dianeravitch

February 28, 2025 //

ProPublica reported that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson lives in the home of a far-right evangelical who lobbies for his extremist views.

How is this different from being roommates with a lobbyist for Big Pharma or the Tobacco Industry?

It’s not, but it may be more dangerous because this pastor is one of those wing nuts who knows nothing about the Founding Fsthers or the Constitutuion.

ProPublica reports:

In 2021, Steve Berger, an evangelical pastor who has attacked the separation of church and state as “a delusional lie” and called multinational institutions “demonic,” set off on an ambitious project. His stated goal: minister to members of Congress so that what “they learn is then translated into policy.” His base of operations would be a six-bedroom, $3.7 million townhouse blocks from the U.S. Capitol.

Recently, the pastor scored a remarkable coup for a political influence project that has until now managed to avoid public scrutiny. He got a new roommate.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has been staying at the home since around the beginning of this year, according to interviews and videos obtained by ProPublica.

The house is owned by a major Republican donor and Tennessee car magnate who has joined Berger in advocating for and against multiple bills before Congress.

Over the past four years, Berger and his wife, Sarah Berger, have dedicated themselves to what they call their D.C. “ministry center.” In addition to Johnson, who is an evangelical conservative, the pastor has built close relationships with several other influential conservative politicians. Dan Bishop, now nominated for a powerful post in the Trump White House, seems to have also lived in the home last year while he was still a congressman, according to three people.

A spokesperson for Johnson said that the speaker “pays fair market value in monthly rent for the portion of the Washington, D.C. townhome that he occupies.” He did not answer a question about how much Johnson is paying. House ethics rules allow members of Congress to live anywhere, as long as they are paying fair-market rent.

The spokesperson added that Johnson “has never once spoken to Mr. Berger about any piece of legislation or any matter of public policy.” Berger and Bishop did not respond to requests for comment.

If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

Please read the rest of the article.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Read, History, Religion, Separation of church and state

I Sound Off on the GOP Campaign to Destroy Public Schools

By dianeravitch

February 21, 2025 //

Before the inauguration of Trump, The New York Review of Books invited me to write about his education agenda. I read three important documents in which his views and goal were spelled out: the education chapter in Project 2025; Agenda 47, Trump’s campaign document; and the website of the America First Policy Institute, the organization led by Linda McMahon, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education. The three documents overlap, of course. Trump intends to privatize education; he despises public schools. He wants to eliminate the Department of Education. He and his supporters are obsessed with “radical gender ideology,” and they blame public schools for the very existence of transgender students. The election of Trump, it was clear, would mean the end of civil rights protections for LGBT students and a determined effort to defund and destroy public schools.

I posted the article yesterday.

The NYRB invited me to participate in an interview.

This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review’s contributors; read past entries here and sign up for our e-mail newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.

In “‘Their Kind of Indoctrination,’” published on the NYR Online shortly before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Diane Ravitch writes about the troubling future of American public education. Referring to the president’s infamous remark from his first campaign—“I love the poorly educated”—Ravitch warns that his second term is likely to lead to “more of them to love.”

A historian of education, Ravitch worked on education policy in both George H. W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s administrations. She has spent her career analyzing the national and state policies that reshape public schools, like laws that implement high-stakes testing or that divert taxpayer money to charter schools. In addition to writing nearly two dozen books—including The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (1983), Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (2013), and, most recently, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools (2020)—Ravitch posts regularly about American education policy on her widely read blog. Her memoirs will be published later this year by Columbia University Press.

I reached out to Ravitch to discuss the current state of American education, the forces threatening it, and her vision for how public schools can better fulfill their democratic promise.

Regina Martinez: How did you start writing about education? Were you influenced by your time in public schools in the South?

Diane Ravitch: I started writing about education when I was in college. The first paper I ever wrote was for a political science class in my freshman year at Wellesley in 1956. It was about the politics of the Houston public school system in the early 1950s, when I was a student there. Voters elected a new school board every two years, and control went back and forth between a group of far-right extremists, who saw Communists lurking everywhere, and moderates who just wanted to make sure that the schools were running well. At one point, books about Russia were removed from the high school library’s shelves. Under the moderates, we heard assembly speakers who spoke of racial and religious tolerance; under the Minute Women, the female wing of the John Birch Society, we were warned to beware of Communist influence. Also, while I was attending them, the schools were racially segregated.

In “Their Kind of Indoctrination,” you write, “One can only imagine the opprobrium that will be visited upon teachers who are not certified as patriots.” How do you imagine this will impact the teaching profession? What might it mean for teacher recruitment in the future?

The threat of political surveillance is chilling, as it would be in every profession. In many states, especially “red” states, teachers have to be careful about what they teach, what reading they assign, and how they handle topics related to race and gender. Trump recently issued an executive order stating that he would cut off the funding of schools that “indoctrinate” their students by teaching about “radical gender ideology” and racism. His effort to impose thought control is illegal but that hasn’t stopped him from trying.

This sort of political censorship is happening in K–12 schools but also in higher education. The number of people choosing to prepare to be teachers plummeted in the wake of the Bush-Obama emphasis on standardized testing. The threat of political loyalty screening can only make matters worse.

One of President Trump’s recent executive orders reauthorized federal agents to detain children at schools. What actions if any can schools, families, and students take to resist the incursion of the security state into schools?

The determination of the Trump administration to raid schools is terrifying for children and for their teachers, whose job it is to protect their students. Imagine a child being arrested in his or her classroom. It is indeed frightening. Many districts have urged teachers to get legal advice from the district legal officers. At the very least, educators should demand to see a warrant. If ICE agents are armed, resistance may be futile. Elected leaders will have to develop contingency plans, if they have not done so already.

You worked on education policy under both President George H. W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. What, if anything, was different about your work between a Republican and a Democratic administration? How do you think the Department of Education—and federal education policy more generally—has changed since the early 1990s?

I served as assistant secretary for education research and improvement under President Bush. Then President Clinton appointed me to the national testing board, known as the National Assessment Governing Board. There was a continuity of policy from the first President Bush to Clinton, and then from Clinton to the second President Bush to President Obama.

The first President Bush wanted to reform American education through voluntary measures. He convened a meeting of the nation’s governors in 1989, and they agreed on a set of six goals for the year 2000. He thought that the goals could be reached by exhortation, at no cost. The goals were indeed aspirational (they hoped, for example, that American students would be first in the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000), but no one had a plan for how to reach them, nor was there any new funding. President Clinton got credit for drafting them, so he and Bush shared that commitment. He was willing to spend real money to help states improve their schools, and added two more goals (one about teacher training, another about parent participation). He also believed that the nation should have national standards and tests. None of the goals was reached by the year 2000, except for having 90 percent of students graduate from high school. But that goal was a matter of definition. If it meant that 90 percent should graduate high school in four years, we did not meet that goal. If you counted the students who graduated in five or even six years, we surpassed it.

Since you launched your education blog in 2012, it has become a popular forum for discussions about education and democracy. Looking back, are there any positions you’ve shared on the blog that you would reconsider or approach differently today? Are there positions you took or predictions you made that you’re particularly proud of?

I started blogging two years after publication of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Have Undermined Education. In that book, I renounced views that I had advocated for decades: competition between schools, relying on standardized testing as the measure of students, merit pay, and many other policies connected to accountability and standardization.

What I have learned in the past fifteen years has made me even more alarmed than I was then about the organized efforts to destroy public education. That book has a chapter about “The Billionaire Boys Club.” I focused on the venture philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. These billionaires used their philanthropy strategically to fund privately managed charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing, and a system that evaluates teachers by the test scores of their students and closes schools where students got low scores. I opposed all of these measures, which were endorsed by both the second Bush administration and the Obama administration. I demonstrated in that book and subsequent books that these strategies have been failures and are enormously demoralizing to teachers. They also turned schools into testing factories, crushing creative thinking and the joy of teaching and learning.

In the years since, I have learned that “the Billionaire Boys Club” is far larger than the three families that I mentioned. In my last book, Slaying Goliath, I tried to make a list of all the billionaires and the foundations that support charter schools and vouchers, and it was long indeed. Even now, I continue to come across billionaires and foundations that should be added to the list. What I suspected was that charter schools paved the way for vouchers by treating schooling as a consumer good, not a civic responsibility. What I did not realize was that the voucher movement is even more powerful than the charter movement. Its constituency is not just right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family, but Christian nationalists, white supremacists, extremist organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Legislative Executive Council, affluent parents who want the state to subsidize their private school tuition, and Catholic leaders who have always believed that the state should underwrite Catholic schools.

There has been a lot of discourse recently about declining rates of literacy due to AI, the pandemic, phones, or a host of other causes. How significant do you think this risk is? What might be done to reverse the trend?

I too am concerned about declining rates of literacy, as well as declining interest in literature. In my field of study, I believe that standardized testing has been a culprit in shortening the attention span of children of all ages. Students are expected to read short snippets, then to answer questions about those limited passages. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the College Board sponsored college entrance examinations in which students were assigned works of literature in advance, then asked to write about what they had read. Teachers and professors read their essays and graded them. Now the exam answers may be read by a machine or by a person hired off Craigslist to read swiftly, giving only a minute or two to each written answer.

In my dreams, I would change expectations and ask high school teachers to assign books that are worth reading, then require students to write three or four pages about why they did or did not like the book.

While I welcome the expansion of the canon to include works by women and by people of color, I would also welcome a revival of interest in the great works that were once considered the classics of Western literature. In too many high schools, the classics have not just been marginalized, they have been ousted. That is as grave an error as ignoring the works of those who are not white men.

Given the increasing momentum behind the privatization of education, how do you envision the next generation advancing public school advocacy? What do you anticipate will be their greatest challenge?

Public schools are one of the most important democratic institutions of our society. In many states, they enroll 90 percent of all students. They have always enabled children and adolescents to learn together with others who come from backgrounds different from their own. There is a major movement today, funded by right-wing billionaires, to destroy public schools and to replace them with religious schools, private schools, and homeschooling. It is called “school choice,” but the schools choose, not the students or families. Private schools are allowed to discriminate on any grounds and are not bound by federal laws that prohibit discrimination and that protect those with disabilities. Racial and religious segregation will increase. More students will attend schools whose purpose is indoctrination, not building a democratic society.

The greatest challenge facing those who believe in the value of public education is that the money behind privatization is enormous, and it is spent strategically to win political allies. To my knowledge, there is no billionaire funder for public education as there are for privatization. In the world of public education advocacy, there are no equivalents to the Koch money, the DeVos money, the Walton money, the Texas evangelical billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, the Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass. I have been president of an organization called the Network for Public Education since 2013, and our annual budget is a pittance compared to the privatizers’ organizations. One pro–school choice organization spent as much on their annual dinner party as our entire annual budget.

The other side of this struggle to save public education is the reality that important Democrats still believe that school choice helps poor Black and Hispanic kids, despite overwhelming evidence that this claim is not true and is in fact part of the hustle. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Cory Booker, Governor Jared Polis, and Senator Michael Bennett are a few of the Democrats who have dampened the interest of their party in fighting for public schools.

What makes me hopeful is that the reality is becoming clearer with every passing day: those who are concerned for the common good must support public schools, not undertake to pay the tuition of every student who chooses not to attend public schools. Privatization benefits some, not all, not even most. Public money should pay for public schools. Private money should pay for private schools.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Equity, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, History, Lies, Obama, Philanthropy, Privatization, Racism, Republicans, School Choice, Segregation, Teachers, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Vouchers

What You Need to Know about Trump’s Plan to Close the Department of Education

By dianeravitch

February 18, 2025 //

Trump wants to close the U.S. Department of Education. He thinks the Department of Education has been indoctrinating Americans to accept DEI and “radical gender ideology.” He’s wrong.

Trump’s education goals were laid out in Project 2025. During the campaign, Trump pretended he knew nothing about Project 2025, but he was lying. Of course. The organizer of Project 2025, Russell Vought, was recently confirmed as Trump’s Budget Director (Office of Management and Budget).

Trump and his Secretary of Education-designate Linda McMahon think that the Department of Education is a hotbed of DEI and that it is imposing “woke” policies on the nation’s schools.

As someone who served in the Department of Education in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, I can state without qualification that they are wrong.

The career civil servants at the Department of Education are not educators, although there might be a few exceptions. They review and process grants and contracts. They organize peer reviews. They supervise authorized activities. They have multiple responsibilities, but writing curriculum is not one of them.

The Department of Education does not tell schools what to teach. It is illegal for any officer of the government to attempt to influence the curriculum of the nation’s schools. It has been illegal to do so since 1970.

The law states: “No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, employee, of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, [or] administration…of any educational institution…or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials.“

The law is P.L. 103-33, General Education Provisions Act, section 438.

The ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion are generally and broadly accepted by the public. They were not hatched by the Department of Education. They are baked into our American ideals of fairness and justice and opportunity for all.

The fact is that our nation is diverse. Banning the word doesn’t change the reality. We are a nation whose population includes people of every race, religion, and ethnicity. We are a nation of men and women, as well as people who are LGBT. Yes, we do have transgender men and women, and not even Trump can erase them.

Equity is a necessity if we are serious about reducing the vast economic and social gaps in our society. Here is one definition of equity, as compared to equality, as offered by the Annie E. Casey Foundation:

Well-meaning people often use the terms “equity” and “equality” interchangeably when discussing matters related to race and social justice. While both terms have to do with “fairness,” there are key differences as the application of one over the other may lead to drastically different outcomes. Equality requires that everyone receives the same resources and opportunities, regardless of circumstances and despite any inherent advantages or disadvantages that apply to certain groups. Equity, on the other hand, considers the specific needs or circumstances of a person or group and provides the types of resources needed to be successful.

Equality assumes that everybody is operating at the same starting point and will face the same circumstances and challenges. Equity recognizes the shortcomings of this “one-size-fits-all” approach and understands that different levels of support must be provided to achieve fairness in outcomes.

A highly circulated image seeks to provide a visual illustration of the differences between equality and equity. The image depicts three people standing behind a fence, watching a baseball game. The three individuals are all different heights, with the tallest of the three being able to see over the fence without any help. The other two are not tall enough to see over. Equality provides each of these people with identical boxes to stand on to peer over the fence. The tallest person, who didn’t need the box in the first place, now stands even higher, continuing to enjoy a perfect view of the game. The second person can now see over the fence, and the third person, even with the help of the box, is still too short to see over.

The image also depicts what equity would look like in this same scenario. In the equity version, the tallest person does not receive a box and is still able to enjoy the game. The second person is given one box to stand on, and the third person is given two boxes to stand on. Now, all three can enjoy the same view of the game.

The most classic definition of equity in my lifetime was contained in a speech that President Lyndon B. Johnson gave at Howard University in 1965.

He said:

Freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities–physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness.

To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough. Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in–by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man.

The speech was written by LBJ’s White House aide, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A brilliant Harvard professor, he later was Ambassador to the UN and elected to the US Senate in New York.

As for “inclusion,” it’s a word that means nothing more nor less than all. We commonly speak of equal opportunity for all, not for some. The Pledge of Allegiance refers to “liberty and justice for all,” not for some. All means all. All means inclusion.

Pete Hegseth recently said, “Diversity is not our strength.” What a stupid thing for the Secretary of Defense to say in light of the diversity of our military. Does he want to oust everyone from the military except white nen?

When the U.S. team walks into the Olympic Stadium, it is the most diverse team in the world. I feel proud when I see them.

The fact is, my friends, we are led by a team of idiots. They are simpletons who want to turn the clock back many decades, at least to the 1950s, when the country was run by straight white men. Many barriers have fallen, allowing the rise of people who are not straight white men. (Trump actually has an out gay man in his Cabinet, the Secretary of the Treasury, but he is most certainly an outlier). Trump wants to restore the barriers that kept women and nonwhites out of leadership roles.

We have to push back every day. Don’t let Trump’s seething hatred and bigotry become normalized. Don’t let him wipe out 60 years of civil rights legislation.

At a reader’s suggestion, here is an even better graphic to define “equity.”

Categories History, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

MMA Fighter Praises Hitler, Denies Holocaust as Mass Stupidity Epidemic Spreads

By dianeravitch

February 8, 2025 //

Here is what Trump has wrought: He has made it acceptable for people to be as bigoted and stupid in public as they want, with no sense of shame attached to their bigotry or their stupidity. When Trump attacks DEI, he is openly avowing his racism and misogny. When he rants about immigrants, he doesn’t mean white immigrants, he means nonwhite immigrants.

Thanks to Trump’s malign influence, we get a story like the following, which appeared in the New York Daily News. Bryce Mitchell is a mixed martial arts “star” who flaunts his bigotry and ignorance and belittles the schools that tried to educate him and inculcate a sense of human decency.

MMA star Bryce Mitchell praised Adolf Hitler as a “good guy” and denied the Holocaust happened in a rant on his new podcast, “ArkanSanity.”

“I honestly think Hitler was a good guy, based upon my own research, not my public education and indoctrination,” the 30-year-old fighter said in the first episode.

“He fought for his country, he wanted to purify it by kicking the greedy Jews out who were destroying his country and turning them all into gays,” he added. “Was Hitler perfect? No, but he was fighting for his people. He wanted a pure nation.”

After co-host Roli Delgado countered that genocide was bad, Mitchell then denied the Holocaust.

“That’s what your public education will tell you Roli, because you believe your public education because you haven’t done your own research. When you realize there’s no possible way they could’ve burned and cremated 6 million bodies, you’re gonna realize the Holocaust ain’t real,” he said.

Mitchell, who competes in UFC’s featherweight division, was roundly denounced by others in the fighting community following his comments.

“Each and every day MMA finds a way to reach a new low,” broadcaster Ariel Helwani wrote on social mediaThursday. “A new way of embarrassing itself and those who are fans of it.”

“It just continues to baffle me at how unbelievably stupid — not to mention bigoted — some of the people in the sport or associated with the sport can be,” Helwani concluded.

Mitchell is no stranger to saying divisive things aloud. Last year, he said he planned to home school his children to prevent them from “turning gay.”

“That’s the reason I’m going to home-school Tucker, because I don’t want him to be a communist,” he said in an Instagram video while holding up his son. “I don’t want him to worship Satan. I don’t want him to be gay.”

Categories Bigotry, Evil, Fascism, History, Ignorance, Stupid, Trump

Bill Kristol: This Coup is Worse Than Nixon’s Watergate

By dianeravitch

February 4, 2025 //

It’s time to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s reputation. True, he had a bunch of inept burglars break into the Denocratic National Committee’s headquarters. True, he had an enemies’ list. True, he appointed an ally to lead the Justice Department.

Nixon resigned before he could be impeached. Republicans in Congress were as angry as Democrats.

Nixon had a sense of shame. He resigned rather than be impeached. Trump has no sense of shame.

But all that pales compared to what is happening now. Trump has nominated a long list of completely unqualified people to run major Departments of the federal government. He has started a purge of the FBI, intending to oust anyone who participated in investigating him or the January 6 insurrection.

He has given free access to Elon Musk to enter every Department, copy its files, and fire any career employee who stands in his way.

Bill Kristol, once a conservative stalwart and editor of The Weekly Standard, now writes for The Bulwark, which sees Trump as the sociopath he is.

Kristol writes:

by William Kristol

In disregard of the rule of law, he knowingly misused the executive power by interfering with agencies of the executive branch, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation . . . in violation of his duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.

Article II, section 5, of the Articles of Impeachment Adopted by the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, July 27, 1974

Half a century ago Congress, the courts, other key institutions within and outside of the government, and the American public, faced an assault launched by President Richard Nixon and his henchmen to the constitutional order and the rule of law.

They defeated it.

Today, we face a crisis greater than Watergate.

Are we up to dealing with it?

We’re going to find out.

The crisis is multi-faceted and fast-moving. President Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk—nominated for no federal office, employed by no federal agency, accountable to no one—are racing on several fronts to undermine laws, procedures, and norms that would constrain their arbitrary exercise of power. But the assault on the rule of law seems centered on the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It began with the nomination of Trump apparatchik and defender of the January 6th rioters Kash Patel to be FBI director. Patel tried to reassure Senators during his confirmation hearing last Thursday that “all FBI employees will be protected from political retribution.”

But the next day, Emil Bove, Trump’s former defense lawyer, who is now acting deputy attorney general and in charge of the Justice Department, ordered the removal of at least six top FBI career executives. Bove also requested the names of all FBI agents who worked on January 6th cases.

All seemed on track for Trump’s efforts to purge the agency and remake it in his own image.

But FBI officials may not permit their agency to go gentle into the dictatorial night.

Over the weekend, in a blizzard of activity (helpful reporting can be found here, and here, and here), FBI officials moved to resist the attempted coup.

Though he had carried out the order to decapitate the bureau’s top executives the day before, on Friday acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll reportedly refused to agree to fire certain agents involved with January 6th cases, and was trying to block a mass purge of such agents. In a message to staff Saturday, Driscoll reminded FBI agents of their rights to “due process and review in accordance with existing policy and law,” and emphasized “That process and our intent to follow it have not changed.”

The FBI Agents Association sent a memo to employees over the weekend to remind them of their civil service protections. The memo urged them not to resign or to offer to resign, and recommended that agents respond to one question in the survey they’ve been instructed to answer: “I have been told I am ‘required to respond’ to this survey, without being afforded appropriate time to research my answers, speak with others, speak with counsel or other representation.”

And in a remarkable letter, obtained by The Bulwark, the president of the Society of Former FBI Agents—a group that seeks to stay out of politics—said the following:

The obvious disruption to FBI operations cannot be overstated with the forced retirement of the Director, Deputy Director, and now all five Executive Assistant Directors. Add in the immediate removal of a number of SACs [Special Agents in Charge] and the requests for lists of investigative personnel assigned to specific investigations and you know from your experience that extreme disruption is occurring to the FBI—at a time when the terrorist threat around the world has never been greater.

Then on Sunday the top agent at the FBI’s New York field office, James Dennehy, wrote in an email to his staff: “Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy. . . . Time for me to dig in.”

It’s surely time for many others to dig in. Especially the United States Congress, which authorizes FBI activities, appropriates its funds, and before whom Kash Patel’s nomination is pending.

It’s pointless to ask President Trump to recall the oath he took two weeks ago, to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

But members of Congress also take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” As it was fifty years ago, so it is today: The fact that the Constitution’s enemies now include the president of the United States does not relieve members of Congress of their responsibility to that oath.

Categories Accountability, Character, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Failure, History, Republicans, Trump

My Article on the Plot to Sell Out Our Public Schools

Timothy Snyder: Trump Unleashes Chaos on the World by Defending Russia

Thom Hartmann: Why Does the Media Ignore Nazi Symbolism at Trump-Musk Events?

Our Allies Speak Up in Support of Ukraine

The Trump-Putin New World Order

ProPublica: Mike Johnson Shares Home with a Far-Right Pastor Who Has a Political Agenda

I Sound Off on the GOP Campaign to Destroy Public Schools

What You Need to Know about Trump’s Plan to Close the Department of Education

The most classic definition of equity in my lifetime was contained in a speech that President Lyndon B. Johnson gave at Howard University in 1965.

MMA Fighter Praises Hitler, Denies Holocaust as Mass Stupidity Epidemic Spreads

Bill Kristol: This Coup is Worse Than Nixon’s Watergate

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The most classic definition of equity in my lifetime was contained in a speech that President Lyndon B. Johnson gave at Howard University in 1965.

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