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Trump Lies About Kamala’s Crowd in Detroit

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2024 //
15

It’s not news when Donald Trump lies. Maybe it’s news when he tells the truth. But this is too weird to pass up.

Trump is angry that Kamala Harris is drawing large crowds whenever she gives a speech. So when she landed in Detroit and was met by a large crowd, Trump insisted that there was no crowd at all and that the image of a crowd was generated by artificial intelligence.

Trump claimed that no one attended Kamala’s rally at the airport: No one.

The news media covered the event; they saw the crowd. People who attended the event saw the crowd. But Trump insisted they were all lying. No one was there.

CNN reported:

Donald Trump falsely claimed in a series of social media posts Sunday that “nobody” attended Vice President Kamala Harris’ Michigan rally last week — and said his Democratic rival should be “disqualified” over a “fake crowd picture.”

The former president appeared to have fallen for a far-right conspiracy theory — one easily disproved by photos and videos captured by attendees and media showing thousands of supporters at the event at an airport hangar near Detroit.

The false claims about attendance at Harris’ event come as Trump navigates the contours of a changed presidential race, with the vice president riding a wave of new Democratic enthusiasm after replacing President Joe Biden atop the ticket. The GOP nominee, who regularly draws large crowds of his own, has long been fixated on audience size, with his speeches often filled with exaggerated boasts about the turnout.

Trump, on his social media website Truth Social, made the fabricated claim that Harris had been “turned in” by an airport maintenance worker who “noticed the fake crowd picture.”

He then said Harris should be “disqualified” from the 2024 election “because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!”

However, photos and videos of the event — including videos captured with CNN’s cameras — reflect a sizable audience for Harris’ Wednesday event. The crowd filled a large hangar and spilled onto the sprawling tarmac where Air Force Two had stopped. Two large risers and many rows of chairs were outside, as were several giant screens for the outdoor crowd that couldn’t see the rally stage.

Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said on LinkedInthat he analyzed the photo with two models designed to detect patterns associated with AI-generated images. Both models found no evidence of AI generation, he said, adding that “the text on the signs and plane [showed] none of the usual signs of generative AI.”

“While the lack of evidence of manipulation is not evidence the image is real,” he said, “we find no evidence that this image is AI-generated or digitally altered.”

Julia Nikhinson/AP

People listen to Harris speak at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport on August 7, 2024, in Romulus, Michigan, where screens were set up for those who couldn’t see the stage.

David Plouffe, a Harris campaign senior adviser, wrote on X: “These are not conspiratorial rantings from the deepest recesses of the internet. The author could have the nuclear codes and be responsible for decisions that will affect us all for decades.”

Trump on Sunday shared a screenshot of an X post that featured two photos: one shared on X by a Harris staffer that showed thousands of people greeting Harris’ plane; another zoomed in on the curved, reflective side of one of Air Force Two’s engines in which the crowd isn’t clear.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane.”

“She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches,” Trump added. “She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!”

CNN suggests that Trump fell for a conspiracy theory. There is another possibility: Trump’s father suffered from dementia. Is he losing it?

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Lies, Trump

Adam Kinzinger: The Despicable Attacks on Walz’s Military Service

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2024 //
9

Adam Kinzinger is a military veteran who did not like JD Vance’s attack on Tim Walz’s military record. Now that I’m restored to Twitter, I have seen many military veterans express disgust for Vance’s low blows against Walz, who was a member of the National Guard for 24 years, in Nebraska and in Minnesota.

Kinzinger was elected to Congress from Illinois in 2010 as a Republican. He was a popular elected official but ran afoul of Trump when he voted to impeach him after the 2021 insurrection. He served, with Liz Cheney, on the Commission investigating the January 6 insurrection. He left Congress and is now a commentator on CNN.

His Wikipedia says this about his military service:

Kinzinger resigned from the McLean County Board in 2003 to join the United States Air Force. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in November 2003 and later awarded his pilot wings. Kinzinger was initially a KC-135 Stratotanker pilot and flew missions in South America, Guam, Iraq and Afghanistan. He later switched to flying the RC-26 surveillance aircraft and was stationed in Iraq twice.[11]

Kinzinger has served in the Air Force Special Operations Command, Air Combat Command, Air Mobility Command, and Wisconsin Air National Guard and was progressively promoted to his current rank of lieutenant colonel.[12] As part of his continued service with the Air National Guard, Kinzinger was deployed to the Mexico–United States border in February 2019 as part of efforts to maintain border security.[13]

Kinzinger wrote on his own blog:

As anyone who has served in the military knows, there are often good-spirited jokes about other branches and jobs. The Air Force gets called the “Chair Force” (we love this, actually), the Marines get called dumb, and so on. While not true, these jokes keep interservice rivalries lively and everyone on their toes. In general, we all respect each other and understand that whether you are kicking down doors, flying planes, gassing vehicles, or cooking food, you are willing to do what 98 percent of the country isn’t: serve for a cause above all others. This makes the attacks on Tim Walz, particularly from JD Vance, especially sickening.

JD Vance was an enlisted Marine who served honorably. While he didn’t see combat (he was in public affairs), he still deployed and served his nation as expected. He got out at the end of his service commitment and did not make it a 20-year career. Tim Walz joined the Army Guard and served honorably for 24 years, achieving the highest enlisted rank offered. That is quite an accomplishment. The nation should be proud, and JD Vance should be respectful of his fellow warrior.Subscribe

The attacks on Walz have proven to be not only false but also disgusting. I will debunk the attacks that have been floating around. But first and foremost, keep one thing in mind: Donald Trump not only didn’t serve in the military, he actively avoided service by claiming he had “bone spurs.” With him, everything is a projection, and he’s projecting his cowardice onto others, in this case, Gov. Walz.

First Lie: Governor Walz quickly exited the military after learning he was going to deploy, thereby leaving his men out to dry.

Truth: Gov. Walz actually put in his paperwork for retirement before any deployments were alerted. In fact, he served for four years AFTER 9/11 and two years after the Iraq war. He did not leave at the first sign of combat. He stayed well past when he could have retired at 20 years.

Even if he had learned of a deployment and then retired (he didn’t), there were countless people during that time who were retirement eligible and left when deployments were on the horizon. After 20 years of serving, it was their right, and who could fault them?

Lie: Gov. Walz left his men without leadership.

Truth: His unit was fully staffed and had adequate leadership without him. In fact, had the unit not had appropriate staffing, they could have denied his retirement and ordered a “stop loss,” which happened to thousands of military members in jobs that needed people. Stop loss was used regularly and would have been enacted if the situation deemed it.

Lie: Gov. Walz never made Chief Master Sgt.

Truth: He was a CMSGT for a few years, and after retiring, was only demoted because he had not completed his professional military education and hadn’t served in that rank long enough to retire in it. To retire at a rank, you must have held it for three years. I retired as a Lt Colonel; had I retired before being an LTC for three years, I would have reverted to the previous rank of Major. There is no dishonor in this; it happens all the time. I still would hold the title of LTC.

In fact, in the Army aviation branch, many officers resign their commissions to become warrant officers, a lower rank, so they can keep flying and do less desk work. This is common in the Army National Guard, and just because they did that doesn’t mean it was a scandalous demotion.

We have a pandemic in this country of weak men attacking stronger men to feel better about themselves and to denigrate military service to make their own lack of service not appear so self-serving or cowardly. It bodes darkly for the future, and we must push back against this with everything we have. Serving in the military is honorable and must be seen as such, regardless of the veteran’s party affiliation.

The attacks from anyone, especially the coward Trump, are a disservice not just to Gov. Walz but to anyone who served in uniform. Now, any military member thinking of running for office could be dissuaded because who knows how any part of your military record could be twisted or distorted to make your service look less than honorable.

Finally, JD Vance got out after his initial enlistment. If we wanted to play his game, we could say he left his country out to dry by not reenlisting, and if he was a real hero, he would have stayed. Of course, I don’t mean that, he served honorably, but it’s equivalent to what they are doing to Gov. Walz now. And it makes me sick.

Categories Accountability, Character, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Trump, Vance, J.D., Walz, Tim

Trump Insists His Helicopter Story Is True and Promises to Produce the Records—But Doesn’t

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2024 //
16

The media carried stories debunking Trump’s claim that he flew in a helicopter with Willie Brown, a noted California politician, and Brown told disparaging stories about Kamala Harris, whom he dated. The helicopter had a problem, Trump said, and almost crashed.

Brown denied that he was ever in a helicopter with Trump or that he ever bad-mouthed Harris to Trump. Trump did take a helicopter trip in 2018 with California leaders Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown. Another Black politician stepped forward, Nathan Holden, and said he was on a helicopter trip with Trump many years ago.

Despite the fact that literally no one corroborated his story, Trump insists it is true.

Former president Donald Trump insisted again Friday that he took a dangerous helicopter ride with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, telling the New York Times that he would release flight records.

Trump, who did not release the records, told reporters at a news conference Thursday that he had ridden in a helicopter with Brown, who dated Vice President Kamala Harris 25 years ago, claiming that Brown had criticized her during the flight.

Brown, who is Black, called Trump’s story “fiction.” Former California governor Jerry Brown, who is White, and the state’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, said they rode in a helicopter with Trump to survey the fire-devastated town of Paradise, Calif., in 2018, but they said Harris was not a topic of conversation and the landing was uneventful.

And late Friday night, Politico reported that Nate Holden, who is Black — a former Los Angeles council member who grew close to Trump when he tried to renovate the historic Ambassador Hotel in the 1990s — said he was the one in a helicopter with Trump when it almost crashed.

Trump claimed in the Times interview that he had “flight records of the helicopter” showing he was with Willie Brown and that he would release the records. The Times reported Trump said he was “probably going to sue” the news organization, according to an article written by longtime Trump reporter Maggie Haberman, and he responded mockingly to a request for the flight records by repeating it in a “singsong” voice.

The Times reported that Trump did not provide the records Friday night. On Saturday, campaign spokesman Steven Cheung shared a photo of a coffee-table book published last year in which Trump mentions the story of the ride with Willie Brown when The Washington Post asked for the helicopter records.

Trump’s dubious account comes less than a month after President Joe Biden, 81, left the presidential race amid concerns over his acuity after a damaging debate performance in June. Trump, 78, told more than 30,000 lies or falsehoods during his presidency and in recent weeks has lashed out as Harris, who is challenging him for the presidency, and who has drawn large crowds and enthusiasm among Democrats…

At his rally, Trump brought up the call with Haberman. He did not offer any clarity about the helicopter story.

Reiterating a statement made Thursday, a spokesman for Newsom on Friday said Newsom, then governor-elect, was on a helicopter flight in 2018 with Jerry Brown; there was no emergency landing and Harris was not discussed. The spokesman also said that Trump repeatedly said he was worried about crashing and wrongly referred to the fire-ravaged town of Paradise as Pleasure on more than one occasion.

“It was a lively ride, but an utterly safe landing,” Jerry Brown said in an email through his spokesperson, adding that “the subject of Harris never came up.”

“I’m laughing about it,” Willie Brown told KPIX, CBS News’s Bay Area affiliate, on Friday, denying ever being on a helicopter with Trump. Brown enthusiastically praised Harris as highly qualified for the presidency and mocked Trump for making up the story.

In the Politico report, Holden says he met Trump at Trump Tower, en route to Atlantic City, where they were going to tour the developer’s brand new Taj Mahal casino in what he remembers to be 1990. Barbara Res, Trump’s former executive vice president of construction and development, told Politico that she remembers the flight, which she wrote about in a book, and that Holden, not Brown, was on board. She said the helicopter had to make an emergency landing due to instrument failure…

“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden told Politico. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”

“I guess we all look alike,” Holden added with a laugh.

Does this story mean that the media will now report on Trump’s lies and not ignore them?

Categories Elections, Insane, Lies, Trump

Mary Trump: Keep Talking, Donald!

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2024 //
9

Mary Trump is a niece of Donald Trump, the daughter of his older brother. She knows Trump well. She loathes him.

She wrote:

Here’s some advice I never thought I would give Donald: Talk more.

Personally, I’d prefer he keep hiding and leave our exhausted, terrorized nation alone. But after watching him meltdown on national television this afternoon, I’ve changed my mind. The more America sees this vicious, broken man, the better it will be for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz. The better it will be for all of us—because his unremitting darkness and unrelenting negative have to be wearing people out.

Donald would never admit this, but the fact that he can’t draw big crowds anymore is making him crazy. That’s an even worse fate than getting knocked off the front page of every newspaper he reads. Having ceded the spotlight to the positive and hopeful campaign of the Harris/Walz team, he’s in desperate need of attention.

He obviously misses campaigning against President Joe Biden. Then the media focused almost exclusively on Biden’s age while Donald’s violent and delusional rhetoric went unscrutinized. But he’s running against Kamala Harris now.

And what a difference 18 days makes. Actually, what a difference five days makes. At his rally in Atlanta last weekend, Donald was a rambling and incomprehensible as he usually is, but he had the kind of bullying energy—focused mainly on extremely popular Republican governor Brian Kemp—that has led a lot of people to believe he’s still cognitively intact. Today, standing alone behind a podium in an echoey ballroom in front of a small gaggle of reporters, he seemed lost and unfocused.

As he meandered from one unrelated topic to the next, he repeated his greatest hits—20 million immigrants released from prisons and insane asylums! World War III!—and reminded us just what a nihilist he is. He flailed and he fumbled, the desperation coming off him in waves.

He regained his footing somewhat after the questioning started. It helps to have a pool of hand-picked corporate-media reporters present who will hold the safety net under you; it’s easy to feel confident when said reports are already in the tank for you. This is his comfort zone—when the game is already rigged in his favor.

Even with the promise of softball questions and lack of follow up, the press conference itself was a train wreck. He bragged that his crowd on January 6th was bigger than the crowd that came to hear Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech; he accidentally admitted he’s open to banning abortion medication and claimed erroneously that abortion isn’t much of an election issue; he pretended to defend Hillary Clinton but then, in a threatening tangent, said “I could have done things to her that would’ve made your head spin.”

He even alluded to his “beautiful sofa” without seeming to realize that sofa is a synonym for couch.

We can’t get complacent. The more Donald slips in the polls, the more the Harris-Walz movement grows, the more dangerous Donald and his followers will become. We need to hang onto the joy and energy Harris and Walz are bringing to this campaign, but we can never get complacent and we must remain vigilant.

At the same time, his cruel, hateful act has gotten old, and he’s gotten old, and we should talk about what a joke Donald is—how weak, how feckless, how pathetic. We can’t write him off—despite Harris’ surge in the polls, the electoral college will keep things close—but we can mock him without mercy.

The more America sees that side of him, the better it will be for all of us. This afternoon it was evident that Donald is fighting against the reality of his new situation—a bitter, vengeful man sliding into irrelevance—if the corporate media and the Republican Party would only let him. That’s why he almost only grants interviews on propaganda networks. That’s why he only does town halls in front of friendly audiences who applaud him in all the right places. But as we saw today, even controlled environments aren’t enough to keep him safe from his lack of discipline and impulse control.

So, keep talking, Donald. Get be among the people—your people—and let them get a good look at you. Let them hear what you have to say. Please.

Categories Elections, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Walz Left the National Guard Before His Unit Learned about Deployment to Iraq, Says Man Who Served Under Him

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2024 //
28

JD Vance has accused his rival, Tim Walz, of evading combat duty by quitting the National Guard before his unit was deployed to Iraq.

But a man who served under Walz’s command in the same unit told journalists that Walz retired to run for Congress before the unit received orders to deploy to Iraq.

The Hill published the story:

Al Bonnifield, who served 22 years in the Minnesota National Guard, told NewsNation’s Joe Khalil that Walz, like many of the men in their unit, suspected they might be deployed soon but had been given no such official order when he decided to retire.

“He told us that he wanted to run for Congress, and he was in a tough spot, because he was pretty sure we were going to Iraq,” Bonnifield said. “We didn’t have orders. We didn’t have any kind of orders at all.” 

Bonnifield added that Walz struggled with the decision, and talked with his fellow service member for 30 to 45 minutes about, “‘What do I do? Where can I be a better person for the soldier? Where can I be a better person for Minnesota? Where can I be a better person for the United States?’…”

Joe Eustice, who served with Walz for years, told The Washington Post he disagreed with the governor’s politics, but Walz did not avoid combat duty and was a good soldier. At the time Walz left the unit, Eustice told the Post there had only been speculation the unit could be deployed.

“When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did?” Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), former President Trump’s running mate, said at the Michigan campaign event. “He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him.” 

But Bonnifield vehemently pushed back on the assertion that Walz abandoned his unit, calling it “wrong” and “bulls‑‑‑.”

And after Walz retired, Bonnifield said there was “a little remorse” in the unit, given he had trained many of them across a decade.

“He was our person to go to. He had the answers. He was also a father figure to us. If we had a problem we needed to talk to somebody, he was there.” 

It’s ironic that Vance would bring up this topic since Donald Trump was a notorious draft-dodger. When he was eligible for the draft, his father arranged for him to evade the draft by getting a diagnosis of “bone spurs” from a storefront podiatrist in Queens, enabling him to receive five deferments. The podiatrist rented office space from Donald Trump’s Father, Fred Trump. Neither Donald nor his older sons—Don Jr. and Eric—ever wore their country’s uniform.

Categories Accountability, Character, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Fake News, Lies, Vance, J.D., Walz, Tim

Trump Doubles Down on his Racist Remarks about Kamala

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
14

After telling the National Association of Black Journalists that Kamala Harris “turned black” and that she used to portray herself as Indian, Trump was roundly criticized for raising the issue of her race. Kamala is the daughter of an India-born scientist and a Jamaica-born father who is an economist. She has never denied her biracial heritage.

Yet Trump released a photo of Kamala with her mother’s family, who are Indian, hoping to prove that she only recently “turned black.” This is ridiculous. Kamala went to a black university and joined a black sorority.

Some Republicans thought his attack on Kamala was embarrassing but he’s still the party’s candidate, and they still support the convicted felon.

The New York Daily News reported:

Former President Trump on Thursday posted a photograph of Vice President Kamala Harris wearing an Indian sari as he continued to push false racially charged claims that the Democratic presidential candidate isn’t really Black.A day after accusing Harris of only recently claiming Black heritage, Trump leaned into the controversy by sharing the photo of Harris wearing traditional Indian attire alongside her mother and maternal relatives.

“Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago!  Trump wrote on his social media site. “Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated,”

The message came as Trump and his campaign showed no signs of backing away from the firestorm controversy he launched during a contentious 35-minute sparring match with reporters at the National Association of Black

Trump’s campaign posted a headline depicting Harris as the “first Indian-American senator” elected from California as he addressed a rally in Pennsylvania.J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, praised Trump for having the courage to respond honestly to tough questions and slammed Harris as a “chameleon.”

Harris’ father is a Black immigrant from Jamaica and she has always proudly claimed both Black and South Asian heritage. She attended Howard University, a historically Black college, and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority.

Like most mixed-race people, Harris says there is nothing to be ashamed of about having roots in more than one culture or continent.

Moderate Republicans Thursday distanced themselves from Trump’s gibe as pundits branded the statement as an unforced error that could fuel Democratic political momentum.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu joined Maryland Senate candidate Larry Hogan and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in trashing Trump for the divisive and untrue claim.

“The path to victory in November is not won through character attacks or personal insults,” Sununu tweeted Thursday.

Haha, expecting Trump to abandon character attacks and personal insults is far-fetched. What else would he talk about? Policy? But he never read the briefing books and knows nothing about policy.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Elections, Ethics, Harris, Kamala, Lies, Racism

The Hartman Report: Please Don’t Lie to Students!

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
14

Greg Palast wrote a guest column for Thom Hartmann about the mendacity of “divisive concepts” laws, which require teachers to lie or suppress the truth, because the truth night make someone uncomfortable. Let’s all be happy by imbibing a steady diet of lies!

Palast writes here:

A Sunday special editorial by my good friend Greg Palast for The Hartmann Report.  Catch Palast this week on Thom.TV

Do you know about Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order 13950?  If you don’t, be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Just weeks before he was fired by America’s voters in 2020, President Trump issued this piece of nastiness which was quickly rescinded by just-inaugurated President Biden.

The Executive Order is a “DCL,” what the right-wing brilliantly calls a, “Divisive Concepts Law.”   These DCL’s terrorize teachers with the threat of losing their jobs if they dare teach the truth of America’s racial history:  That white people enslaved Africans, that the Klan enforced racial vote suppression with the hanging rope.  And God forbid, they teach that women were banned from the vote until the 20th Century.  The Executive Order bans teaching  any historical facts if, 

“….any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex….”

As a practical matter, it means teaching the truth of America’s racial stain will get you fired.   In 2021, Tennessee high school teacher Matt Hawn lost his job because a student accused him of teaching—cover your children’s ears—“Critical Race Theory.”  Hawn said he’d never heard of Critical Race Theory when he was canned.

(Critical Race Theory, taught in law schools, says many of America’s laws and their enforcement, contain a racial bias.  Well, D’oh!].

On Thursday, Vice-President Harris told the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston, epicenter of the anti-CRT hysteria,

“While you teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history; including book bans! Book bans — in this year 2024!  Just think about it: we want to ban assault weapons and they want to ban books.”  

It was a century ago, that Tennessee was the laughingstock of the nation for prosecuting a schoolteacher for telling his class about human evolution, a story recounted in the film, Inherit the Wind.   Now, a hundred years later, Trumpsters are again passing wind over Tennessee.

And he’s baaaaack!  Trump has put his fixation with censoring “divisive concepts” into the GOP platform.  Details are provided in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 master plan for the master race. 

Ill wind out of Georgia

This ill wind originated in Georgia when Gov. Brian Kemp signed HB1084, threatening the jobs of  teachers fot teaching ‘divisive concepts’ that could make a white child feel “discomfort.”

Who would feel “discomfort” about the uncensored history of Georgia? Well, maybe it’s Gov. Kemp himself.  Because it was the Kemp family, then known as the Habershams, that first brought Africans in chains to Georgia.

Maybe Kemp and family should feel a bit of discomfort.  I spoke with Janie Banse, who told me she is she is heartsick that her cousin, Gov. Kemp, won’t admit that their family’s wealth originated in the African slave trade.  Kemp’s ancestors held the largest auction of human beings in American history, still remembered by Black Georgians today as “Weeping Time,” when 436 men, women and their children were separated and sold.

Georgia’s HB 1084, passed in 2022, 

Prohibit[s] the use of curricula that addresses the topics of slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, or racial discrimination, including topics relating to the enactment and enforcement of laws resulting in racial oppression, segregation, and discrimination in a professionally and academically appropriate manner and without espousing personal political beliefs;

And what if a teacher expresses a personal distaste for slavery?
Since Georgia was among the first to pass a “DCL,” and at least 16 states have followed.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, dubbed his DCL the “Stop WOKE Act.”

He banned the College Board’s AP African American Studies course and supported new Black history standards that include the requirement to teach, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

I can’t make this up.

Since 2021, at least 27 states have imposed or proposed bans or restrictions on teaching topics related to race and gender. Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona and Oklahoma all passed these Divisive Concepts laws.  What do these states have in common?  According to rankings by US News and World Report, they are all in the nation’s bottom third in educational achievement.  Apparently, they won’t teach uncensored history—but then, it’s not clear that they teach much history at all.

Killing Killers

Trump’s DLC brigade is not just putting a blindfold over students regarding slavery and Jim Crow.  Oklahoma’s Divisive Concepts Law has effectively silenced the true story of the state that was once known officially as, “Indian Territory.”

Jim Gray, former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, told me that teachers throughout the state have been yanking copies of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon off their classroom shelves.  Killers, on which the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio movie is based, tells the true story about how, in the 1920s, over 100 Oklahoma Osage were murdered for their oil rights.

The insidious brilliance of the Oklahoma law is that it has a fuzzy general prohibition on “divisive” concepts—with teachers facing loss of their teaching credentials and the entire school district losing funding.  Because teachers have to guess which books or films will get them fired, the result is mass self-censorship, with Killersculled from classrooms across the state.

A RAND corporation study found that a breathtaking two out of three K-12 teachers, “have decided on their own to limit instruction about political and social issues in the classroom.”  Can you blame them?

Any student or parent can put a legal gun to a school principal’s head.  But when the law says, “students,” as a practical matter, they don’t mean young kids on the Reservation.  Every year, on April 22, Oklahoma celebrates “Sooner Rush Day”, the day in 1889, when any white man could simply stand on a plot of land and seize the surrounding 160 acres of what was, by treaty, Indian Territory.  Indigenous kids have to re-enact the theft of their property whether they feel discomfort or not.

I have included this story of the Sooner Rush land grab in my documentary, Long Knife: the Osage Nation, Koch Oil and the new Killers of the Flower Moon.  And for that alone, says Chief Gray, the chance it will screen in an Oklahoma school, even a state university, is zilch.

But some states are not shy about creating Black Lists of books to ban.  Assigning anti-racist classics Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, could kill a teacher’s career.  PEN America counted 3,132 books banned in nine states in the 2022-23 school year.
 

Evicted from the Historical Society

Cui Bono? Who benefits from historical amnesia?  Kemp alone was not the only white boy to make his fortune from a slaver’s whip.  Historic amnesia is a profit center covering many historic misdeeds from Jim Crow to union busting to corporate corruption.

I found this out when I was physically ejected from the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah.  I was having a polite interview with the Society’s in-house historian, Dr. Stan Deaton, who was explaining that the Klan took over control of the South when, in 1876, Republicans lost both the popular vote and the Electoral vote—yet a pact between the Klan-backed Southern Democrats and northern Republicans used a sly maneuver to overturn the vote and install the GOP candidate as President.  It came down to one official, Dr. Deaton noted, then added, “We saw Mike Pence in that situation recently.”

The second the historian uttered the words, “Mike Pence,” the door flew open and the Society’s PR man halted the interview and expelled me from the building, saying, “We have to protect the new corporate donors on our board.”

I was curious.  Who were these “donors” needing protection from history?  I found their gala dinner on YouTube with their tuxedoed corporate money men:  Georgia Pacific (owned by Koch Industries), Home Depot (owned by right-wing union buster Ken Langone), and Southern Company, whom I investigated some years ago for racketeering and the inexplicable death of whistleblowers.  And the Chairman of the Historical Society?  Gov. Brian Kemp.

The Occupation

Just below Savannah, at the Kemp family’s old plantation, I spoke with caretaker and Councilman Griffin Lotson whose own great-grandmother was sold at Weeping Time by Kemp’s progenitors.

Lotson emphasizes the connection between this legally enforced historical amnesia and the fight for voting rights. He says,  “Suppressing history is suppressing the vote.” 

Back in Oklahoma, the current Principal Chief of the Osage, Geoffrey Standing Bear, explained that if Oklahoma were to admit that its “Sooner Rush” was simply theft from the indigenous owners of the land, then it would force open eyes to what he calls, the “military occupation [of Native land] that continues today.”

Napoleon famously said, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Trump’s DCL crusade sees history as a set of truths silenced

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Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, History, Lies

A Few Memorable Rants from Trump’s Speeches

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2024 //
10

Margaret Hartmann, a senior editor at New York magazine, compiled six examples (by no means definitive!) of Trump rants.

Hartmann’s article includes tweets and videos that I did not include. Open the link to read the article in full.

She writes:

Donald Trump’s rally speeches have always been a dizzying mix of fearmongering, conspiracy theories, threats against his enemies, and laments about how America is a “nation in decline.” Since Trump made Joe Biden’s decrepitude the centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, even before the Democrat’s calamitous debate, you might have expected the Republican to focus on appearing more competent and presidential at his MAGA gatherings. Yet Trump’s rallies are now weirder than ever.

It’s not just that the substance of Trump’s remarks has grown more disturbing, though it certainly has (for example, he regularly celebrates the January 6 rioters and uses Nazi rhetoric to describe migrants). These days his speeches are also littered with pointless and astoundingly strange musings, like his anti-shark diatribes and tributes to a fictional serial killer.

Trump insists he isn’t incoherent; he’s just misunderstood. “The fake news will say ‘Trump is rambling,’” he declared recently in Philadelphia. “No, it’s genius what I’m doing up here, but nobody understands.”

You can be the judge of that. Here’s a running list of Trump’s most bizarre rally rants from the 2024 campaign trail.

Trump claims magnets don’t work underwater.

Trump likes to brag that he’s “like, a really smart person,” often citing his MIT professor-uncle as proof that scientific brilliance is in his genes. But it seems Uncle John forgot to cover the basics properties of magnets.

“Think of it, magnets,” Trump said at a January 2024 rally in Mason City, Iowa. “Now all I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.”

Fact check: It is not.

Trump brags about putting on pants.

Okay, so Trump isn’t smarter than a fifth-grader when it comes to magnets. But as he revealed at the same January rally in Mason City, he does dress himself like a big boy.

“First they say, ‘Sir, how do you do it? How do you wake up in the morning and put on your pants?’” Trump mused. “And I say, ‘Well, I don’t think about it too much.’ I don’t want to think about it because if I think about it too much maybe I won’t want to do it, but I love it because we’re going to do something for this country that’s never been done before.”

Trump is so proud of his ability to put on pants that he bragged about it again at a rally in the Bronx in May.

Trump blasts Abraham Lincoln for not negotiating his way out of a Civil War.

Trump has a longstanding rivalry with Abraham Lincoln. It seems he knows this will not be received well by the public, as Lincoln is beloved, and also dead. But during a January rally in Newton, Iowa, the 45th president could not resist jabbing the 16th president for failing to prevent the Civil War via negotiation.

“So many mistakes were made” ahead of the Civil War, Trump said. “See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died. So many people died.”

Trump went on to suggest that concerns about his legacy might have prevented Lincoln from embracing the lessons of The Art of the Deal.

“Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was,” Trump said. “He would’ve been president, but he would’ve been president, and he would have been — he wouldn’t have been the Abraham Lincoln.”

Trump imitates Dread Pirate Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg.

In April, Trump showed off another thing he has on Lincoln: His predecessor’s Gettysburg Address did not feature a pirate impression. (As far as we know!)

After describing the Battle of Gettysburg, in which about 50,000 soldiers died, as “so beautiful in so many different ways,” Trump delivered a fake quote from Confederate general Robert E. Lee in a Captain Jack Sparrow voice:

Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor — did you ever notice it? He’s no longer in favor. “Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.” They were fighting uphill. He said, “Wow, that was a big mistake.” He lost his big general. “Never fight uphill, me boys,” but it was too late.

Trump reveals he’d rather die by shark than by electrocution.

The chances of Donald Trump being caught on a sinking boat and forced to choose between electrocution and being devoured by a shark are fairly slim. Yet he seems to think about this dilemma quite a lot.

He debuted his shark-versus-electrocution riff during an October 2023 rally in Ottumwa, Iowa. There was no context that would have explained these remarks, other than the fact that Trump has a well-documented shark phobia and an irrational disdain for electric-powered vehicles.

No one had any idea what Trump was talking about, but that did not keep him from telling the tale again and again during rallies, or insisting in June that we’re dumb for not understanding his “smart story” about ways he might die at sea.

Trump praises ‘great man’ Hannibal Lecter.

If there’s one Trump rant that’s guaranteed to make your brain melt, it’s the one where he gushes about fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Praising the Silence of the Lambs villain is now a regular part of Trump’s stump speech, but most people only noticed in May because he went on and on about it.

Trump does sort of have a reason for bringing up Lecter: He’s invoking the movie villain to demonize migrants. But Trump’s tale is all wrong, both factually and dramaturgically. Here’s why:

• Trump says many migrants have been in mental institutions like the one shown in Silence of the Lambs, but there is no evidence that criminals and mentally ill people are flooding into the U.S.

• Trump has repeatedly said that Hannibal Lecter is a “great man’ who deserves our “congratulations” — so why keep him out of the U.S.?

• Trump seems confused about whether Hannibal Lecter is a character or the man who played him. He’s remarked, “Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he?”

• Trump has said he loves Lecter because the actor once said “I love Donald Trump” in a TV interview. It’s unclear who he was referring to, but all the actors who have portrayed Lecter — Anthony Hopkins, Mads Mikkelsen, and Brian Cox — have said they dislike Trump.

• Trump often refers to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” but the character does not die in any of the book, TV, or film adaptations.

• By the end of The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter has escaped from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and is stalking his next victim in the Bahamas. So this is an example of the United States unleashing its inmates on a foreign country, not the other way around….

Trump isn’t stressing about any of these details. The once-and-possibly-future president of the United States just loves yelling “Hannibal Lecter!” at his rallies, even if it doesn’t make any sense.

Even at his rambling 92-minute speech accepting the Republican nomination, he went off-script to refer to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.” Why? Any ideas why he is obsessed with this film creature?

  

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Lies, Trump

ProPublica: J.D. Vance Says Trust Alex Jones, Not Rachel Maddow

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2024 //
89

ProPublica reported on a speech by J.D. Vance in which he praised the notorious Alex Jones, who has been ordered to pay $1.5 billion to the parents of children murdered in the Sandy Hook school massacre. Jones claimed that the massacre was staged by “crisis actors” to build support for gun control. The parents of the dead children were harassed by Jones’ followers for years.

Now we learn, in a report by Andy Kroll of ProPublica and Nick Sugrey of Documented, that Vance’s views are more extreme than we knew.

They wrote:

Sen. J.D. Vance, whom Donald Trump named as his vice presidential running mate Monday, told a group of influential young conservatives in a closed-door speech in 2021 that they should stand up for “nonconventional people” who speak truth, such as Infowars founder Alex Jones.

“If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country,” Vance said. “But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.”

Vance went on, “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.”

He said that every person in attendance for his speech believed “something that’s a little crazy.” In his case, he said, “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now.”

Vance made these remarks at a September 2021 gathering of the Teneo Network, an invitation-only group of young conservatives that counts elected officials, pro athletes, financial executives and media figures among its members. Vance joined Teneo six years ago. ProPublica and Documented obtained a video recording of his 30-minute speech and question-and-answer session, which has not been previously reported.

Vance’s remarks at the conference — which you can read a transcript of or watch in full below — give a rare unvarnished look at his thinking and illustrate how aligned he is with various factions within the conservative and MAGA movements. “I’ll throw out the standard campaign speech,” he began his Teneo talk. “[I’ll] actually just try to level with you guys about what I do see is the big — a few big problems that are in our country right now.”

Watch J.D. Vance’s Speech at a Private Teneo Network Event

Vance’s 2021 speech lays out what he sees as the “big problems” facing the United States and what the conservative movement should do to address them. (Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

According to tax records, the Teneo Network’s chairman is Leonard Leo, the legal activist who built a pipeline of lawyers who interpret the Constitution based on the “original intent” of the framers or the meaning of the words in the text when they were written. One of the most influential conservatives of the past three decades, Leo helped confirm all six conservative justices currently serving on the U.S. Supreme Court. Leo-aligned judges have pushed to restrict abortion rights and rein in the government’s power to regulate corporations.

Leo has said he views the Teneo Network as a way to extend his influence beyond the judiciary to industries including finance, media, government and Silicon Valley. The network identifies and cultivates conservative leaders in “other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now,” as Leo put it in a Teneo video.

According to internal Teneo documents, Vance joined Teneo in 2018, several years before he ran for Senate in his home state of Ohio. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” had already become a bestseller, and Vance was a commentator for CNN while running his own nonprofit and investment fund backing startup companies outside of Silicon Valley.

“JD Vance has been part of the organization for at least five years and his appearance at the 2021 Teneo Retreat was well received by many young professional leaders in attendance,” Leo said. A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

By the time Vance spoke at Teneo’s 2021 conference, he had joined the race to fill outgoing Sen. Rob Portman’s seat. Despite his past criticisms of Trump, which included calling the former president an “idiot” and comparing him to Adolf Hitler, Vance won Trump’s endorsement in 2022 and cruised to a comfortable victory.

Vance’s connection to Teneo could form a bridge between different factions of the Republican Party that seem to be at odds. Previous news stories have reported that Trump and Leo, who advised the former president on judicial nominees during his administration, are no longer as close as they once were. Russ Vought, a Trump ally, publicly denigrated the Federalist Society, the legal networking group Leo and others built into a juggernaut.

Adding Vance to the ticket bolsters the connections between Leo’s network and the Trump 2024 campaign. It also strengthens ties between Trump’s reelection bid and the Project 2025 blueprint, which outlines plans for a second Trump administration, including firing thousands of career civil servants, shuttering the Department of Education and replacing ambitious goals to combat climate change with ramped-up fossil fuel production. In a recent TV interview, Vance said the document contained “some good ideas” but claimed that “most Americans couldn’t care less about Project 2025” and that the Trump campaign wasn’t affiliated with it.

In his Teneo remarks, he bemoaned that decades ago major corporate CEOs reliably donated money to Republicans but now they give heavily to Democrats. He lamented that conservatives had “very few oligarchs on our side,” had “lost every institution in American society” and needed to make corporations “taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain.”

“So we’ve not just lost the academy,” meaning universities, “which we’ve lost for a long time; we haven’t just lost the media, which has been on the side of the left for a long time; we now find ourselves in a situation where our biggest multinational corporations are active participants in the culture war on the other side,” he said. “It’s really been a few of us over the past few years who have recognized that the big corporations have really turned against conservatives in a very big and powerful way.”

He argued that conservatives needed to take action against corporations that, say, defended abortion rights or punished employees who spoke out against abortion access. “If we’re unwilling to make companies that are taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain, then we’re not serious about winning the culture war,” he said.

He said that Americans were “terrified to tell the truth” and “point out the obvious,” including that “there are real biological, cultural, religious, spiritual distinctions between men and women.” He added, “I think that’s what the whole transgender thing is about, is like fundamentally denying basic reality.”

Shortly before he spoke at the Teneo conference, Vance drew criticism when he tweeted that “Alex Jones is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow.” Jones, founder of the online show Infowars, gained a following with his promotion of conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. More recently, judges in several states ordered him to pay $1.5 billion to the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which Jones had called a hoax.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Guns, Lies

Fact-Checking What Vance Said about Kamala

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2024 //
44

The anticipated barrage of misleading ads about Kamala Harris has begun. Expect nasty racist and sexist tropes as well as inflammatory exaggerations both on campaign ads and from candidates.

FactCheck.org is a nonpartisan group at the Annenberg Center for Public Policy in Philadelphia. It reviewed J.D. Vance’s latest claims about Kamala Harris.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Lies, Vance, J.D.
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