Archives for category: Lies
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Thom Hartmann: Do Not Be Fooled By These GOP Scams

By dianeravitch
December 26, 2023 //
113

Thom Hartmann explains the lies, hoaxes, And scams that Republicans use to deceive middle-income people to vote for them, against their self-interest. He shows how Jeb Bush tilted the election of 2000 in favor of his brother George.

This is a must-read.

Hartmann writes:

The GOP — to keep the support of “average” American voters while they work entirely for the benefit of giant corporations, the weapons and fossil fuel industries, and the morbidly rich — have run a whole series of scams on voters ever since the original Reagan grift of trickle-down economics.

Oddly, there’s nothing comparable on the Democratic side. No lies or BS to justify unjustifiable policies: Democrats just say up-front what they’re all about:

Healthcare and quality education for all. Treat all people and religions with respect and fairness. Trust women to make their own decisions. Raise the pay of working people and support unionization. Get assault weapons off the streets. Do something about climate change. Clean up toxic waste sites and outlaw pesticides that damage children. Replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

Nonetheless, the media persists in treating the two parties as if they were equally honest and equally interested in the needs of all Americans. In part, that’s because one of the GOP’s most effective scams — the “liberal media bias” scam — has been so successful ever since Lee Atwater invented it back in the early years of the Reagan Revolution.

For example, right now there’s a lot of huffing and puffing in the media about how the Supreme Court might rule in the case of Trump being thrown off the ballot in Colorado. They almost always mention “originalism” and “textualism” as if they’re honest, good-faith methods for interpreting the Constitution when, in fact, they’re cynical scams invented to justify unjustifiable rulings.

Thus, the question: how much longer will Americans (and the American media) continue to fall for the GOP’s scams? 

They include:

— Originalism: Robert Bork came up with this scam back in the 1980s when Reagan appointed him to the Supreme Court and he couldn’t come up with honest or reasonable answers for his jurisprudential positions, particularly those justifying white supremacy. By saying that he could read the minds of the Founders and Framers of the Constitution, Bork gave himself and future generations of Republicans on the Court the fig leaf they needed.

The simple fact is that there was rarely a consensus among the Framers and among the politicians of the founding generation about pretty much anything. And to say that we should govern America by the standards of a white-men-only era before even the industrial revolution much less today’s modern medicine, communications, and understanding of economics is absurd on its face.

— Voter Fraud: This scam, used by white supremacists across the South in the years after the failure of Reconstruction to prevent Black people from voting, was reinvented in 1993, when Bill Clinton and Democrats in Congress succeeded in passing what’s today called the “Motor Voter” law that lets states automatically register people to vote when they renew their driver’s licenses. Republicans freaked out at the idea that more people might be voting, and claimed the new law would cause voter fraud (it didn’t).

By 1997, following Democratic victories in the 1996 election, it had become a major meme to justify purging voting rolls of Black and Hispanic people. Today it’s the justification for over 300 voter suppression laws passed in Red states in just in the past 2 years, all intended to make it harder for working class people, minorities, women, the elderly dependent on Social Security, and students (all Democratic constituencies) to vote.

The most recent iteration of it is Donald Trump‘s claim that the 2020 election, which he lost by fully 7 million votes, was stolen from him by voter fraud committed by Black people in major cities.

As a massive exposé in yesterday’s Washington Post titled “GOP Voter-Fraud Crackdown Overwhelmingly Targets Minorities, Democrats” points out, the simple reality is that voter fraud in the US is so rare as to be meaningless, and has never, ever, anywhere been documented to swing a single election. 

But Republicans have been using it as a very effective excuse to make it harder for Democratic voters to cast a ballot, and to excuse their purging almost 40,000,000 Americans off the voting rolls in the last five years.

Right To Work (For Less): back in the 1940s, Republicans came up with this scam. Over the veto of President Harry Truman, they pushed through what he referred to as “the vicious Taft-Hartley Act,” which lets states make it almost impossible for unions to survive. Virtually every Red state has now adopted “right to work,” which has left their working class people impoverished and, because it guts the political power of working people, their minimum wage unchanged.

— Bush v Gore: The simple reality is that Al Gore won Florida in 2000, won the national popular vote by a half-million, and five Republicans on the Supreme Court denied him the presidency. Florida Governor and George W. Bush’s brother Jeb had his Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, throw around 90,000 African Americans off the voting rolls just before the election and then, when the votes had come in and it was clear former Vice President Al Gore had still won, she invented a new category of ballots for the 2000 election: “Spoiled.”

As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the ballots:

“While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.

“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”

George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes in Florida, because the statewide recount — which would have revealed Harris’s crime and counted the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore (who’d won the popular vote by over a half-million) — was stopped when George HW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.

Harris’ decision to not count the 45,599 more votes for Gore than Bush was completely arbitrary; there is no legal category and no legal precedent, outside of the old Confederate states simply refusing to count the votes of Black people, to justify it. The intent of the voters was unambiguous. And the 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court jumped in to block the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court (in violation of the 10th Amendment) just in time to prevent those “spoiled” votes from being counted, cementing Bush’s illegitimate presidency.

— Money is “Free Speech” and corporations are “persons”: This scam was invented entirely by Republicans on the Supreme Court, although billionaire GOP donors — infuriated by campaign contribution and dark money limits put into law in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals — had been funding legal efforts to get it before the Court for years.

In a decision that twists logic beyond rationality, the five Republicans on the Court — over the strong, emphatic objections of all the Democrats on the Court — ruled that our individual right to free speech guaranteed in the First Amendment also includes the “right to listen,” as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and they wrotein Citizens United:

“The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.”

Without being able to hear from the most knowledgeable entities, they argued, Americans couldn’t be well-informed about the issues of the day.

And who was in the best position to inform us? As Lewis Powell himself wrote in the Bellottidecision, echoed in Citizens United, it’s those corporate “persons”:

“Corporations and other associations, like individuals, contribute to the ‘discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas’ that the First Amendment seeks to foster…”

“Political speech is ‘indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual.’ … The inherent worth of the speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend upon the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, union, or individual.”

They doubled down, arguing that corporations and billionaires should be allowed to dump unlimited amounts of money into the political campaigns of those politicians they want to own so long as they go into dark money operations instead of formal campaigns. What was called “bribery” for over 200 years is now “free speech”:

“For the reasons explained above, we [five Republicans on the Supreme Court] now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

— Cutting taxes raises revenue: As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman notes, the idea promoted by Reagan, Bush, and Trump to justify almost $30 trillion in cumulative tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations is “The Biggest Tax Scam in History.”

Reagan first pitched this to justify cutting the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74% down to 25% in the 1980s, and it was reprised by both George W. Bush and Donald Trump for their own massive tax breaks for their well-off donors and peers.

The simple fact is that America went from a national debt of over 124% of GDP following World War II to a national debt of a mere $800 billion when Reagan came into office. We’d been paying down our debt steadily, and had enough money to build the interstate highway system, brand new schools and hospitals from coast to coast, and even to put men on the moon.

Since Reagan rolled out his tax scam, however, our national debt has gone from less than a trillion in 1980 to over 30 trillion today: we’re back, in terms of debt, to where we were during WWII when FDR raised the tippy-top bracket income tax rate to 90% to deal with the cost of the war. We should be back to that tax rate for the morbidly rich today, as well.

— Destroying unions helps workers: In their eagerness to help their corporate donors, Reagan rolled out a novel idea in 1981, arguing that instead of helping working people, corrupt “union bosses” were actually ripping them off.

Union leaders work on a salary and are elected by their members: the very idea that they, like CEOs who are compensated with stock options and performance bonuses and appointed by their boards, could somehow put their own interests first is ludicrous. Their only interest, if they want to retain their jobs, is to do what the workers want.

But Reagan was a hell of a salesman, and he was so successful with this pitch he cut union membership in America during his and his VP’s presidency by more than 50 percent.

— Corporations can provide better Medicare than the government: For a corporation to exist over the long term, particularly a publicly-traded corporation, it must produce a profit. That’s why when George W. Bush and friends invented the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003 they allowed Advantage providers to make as much as 20 percent in pure profit.

Government overhead for real Medicare is around 2% — the cost of administration — and corporations could probably run their Advantage programs with a similar overhead, but they have to make that 20% profit nut, so they hire larger staffs to examine every single request to pay for procedures, surgeries, tests, imaging, and even doctors’ appointments. And reject, according to The New York Times, around 18% of them.

“Advantage plans also refused to pay legitimate claims, according to the report. About 18 percent of payments were denied despite meeting Medicare coverage rules, an estimated 1.5 million payments for all of 2019.”

When they deny you care, they make money. If they ran like real Medicare and paid every bill (except the fraudulent ones), they’d merely break even, and no company can do that. Nonetheless, Republicans continue to claim that “choice” in the marketplace is more important than fixing Medicare.

With the $140 billion that for-profit insurance companies overcharge us and steal from our government every year, if Medicare Advantage vanished there would be enough money left over to cut Medicare premiums to almost nothing and add dental, vision, and hearing. But don’t expect Republicans to ever go along with that: they take too much money from the insurance industry (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court).

— More guns means more safety: Remember the NRA’s old “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”? They’re still at it, and there’s hardly a single Republican in America who will step up and do anything about the gun violence crisis that is uniquely experienced by our nation.

Bullets are now the leading cause of death among children in the US, and we’re literally the only country in the entire world for which that is true. And a child living in Red state Mississippi is ten times more likely to die from a gun than a child in Blue state Massachusetts. But as long as the NRA owns them, Republicans will never do anything about it.

— The media has a liberal bias: This canard was started by Lee Atwater in an attempt to “work the refs” of the media, demanding that they stop pointing out the scams Republicans were engaging in (at the time it was trickle-down). The simple reality is that America’s media, from TV and radio networks to newspapers to websites, are overwhelmingly owned by billionaires and corporations with an openly conservative bent.

There are over 1500 rightwing radio stations (and 1000 religious broadcasters, who are increasingly political), three rightwing TV networks, and an army of tens of thousands of paid conservative activists turning out news releases and policy papers in every state, every day of the year. There are even well-funded social media operations.

There is nothing comparable on the left. Even MSNBC is owned by Comcast and so never touches issues of corporate governance, media bias (they fired Brian Stelter!), or the corruption of Congress by its big pharma and Medicare Advantage advertisers.

— Republicans are the party of faith: Republicans claim to be the pious ones, from Mike Johnson’s creepy “chastity ball” with his daughter, to their hate of queer people, to their embrace of multimillionaire TV and megachurch preachers. But Democrats, who are more accepting of people of all faiths and tend not to wear their religion on their sleeves, are the ones following Jesus’ teachings.

Jesus, arguably the founder of Christianity, was emphatic that you should never pray in public, do your good deeds in private as well, and that the only way to get to heaven is to feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick, and love every other human as much as you love yourself.

Republicans, on the other hand, wave their piety like a bloody shirt, issue press releases about their private charities, and fight every effort to have our government feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick, or even respect, much less love, people who look or live or pray differently from them.

— Crime is exploding and you’re safer living in an area Republicans control: In fact, crime of almost all sorts is at a low not seen since 1969. Only car thefts are up, and some of that appears to have to do with social media “how to” videos and a few very vulnerable makes of autos.

New FBI statistics find that violent crime nationwide is down 8 percent; in big cities it’s down nearly 15 percent, robbery and burglary are down 10 and 12 percent respectively. 

But what crime there is is overwhelmingly happening in Red states. Over the past 21 years, all types of crime in Red states are 23 percent higher than in Blue states: in 2020, murder rates were a mind-boggling 40 percent higher in states that voted for Trump than those Biden carried.

— Global warming is a hoax: Ever since fossil fuel billionaires and the fossil fuel industry started using the legal bribery rights five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court created for them, virtually every Republican politician in the nation is either directly on the take or benefits indirectly from the massive infrastructure created by the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel barons. As a result, it’s almost impossible to find even one brave, truthful Republican who’s willing to do anything about the climate crisis that is most likely to crash not just the US but civilization itself.

— Hispanic immigrants are “murderers and rapists”: Donald Trump threw this out when he first announced his candidacy for president in 2015, saying, “They are bringing drugs. They are bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In fact, Hispanic immigrants (legal or without documentation) are far less likely, per capita and by any other measure, to commit crime of any sort than white citizens.

— Helping people makes them lazy. The old Limbaugh joke about “kicking people when they’re down is the only way to get them up” reveals the mindset behind this Republican scam, which argues that when people get money or things they didn’t work for it actually injures them and society by making them lazy. The GOP has used this rationalization to oppose everything from unemployment insurance in the 1930s to food stamps, Medicaid, and housing supports today.

In fact, not only is there no evidence for it, but studies of Universal Basic Income (UBI), where people are given a few hundred dollars a month with no strings attached, finds that the vast majority use the extra funds to improve themselves. They upgrade their housing, look for better jobs, and go back to school.

If the morbidly rich people behind the GOP who promote this scam really believed it, they’d be arguing for a 100% estate tax, to prevent their own children from ending up “lazy.” Good luck finding any who are leaving their trust-fund kids destitute.

— Tobacco doesn’t cause cancer: Back in 2000, soon-to-be Indiana Governor and then-Congressman Mike Pence wrote a column that was published statewide saying, “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.” Pence’s family had made money off tobacco for years with a small chain of now-bankrupt convenience stores called “Tobacco Road,” but he was also being spiffed by the industry.

Similarly, George W. Bush pushed the “Healthy Forests Initiative” as president after big contributions from the timber industry: “healthy” meant “clear cut.” Bush also had his “Clear Skies Initiative” that let polluters dump more poison into our air. And the Trump administration, after big bucks and heavy lobbying from the chemical and Big Ag industries, refused to ban a very profitable pesticide used on human food crops that was found to definitely cause brain damage and cancer in children.

— For-profit utilities produce cheaper and more reliable electricity than government-owned and -run ones: This one goes back to the Reagan era, with Republicans arguing that the “free market” will always outperform government, including when it comes to generating and distributing electricity. In fact, each of us has only one wire coming into our homes or offices, so there is no possible competition to drive either improved performance or lower prices among for-profit utilities.

In fact, non-profit community-owned or government run utilities consistently produce more reliable electricity, serve their customers better, and charge lower prices. And the differences have become starker every year since, in 1992, President GHW Bush ended federal regulation of electric utilities. It’s why Texas, which has almost completely privatized its power grid, suffers some of the least reliable and most expensive electricity in the nation when severe weather hits.

— The electoral college protects our democracy: There was a time when both Democrats and Republicans wanted to get rid of the Electoral College; a constitutional amendment to do that failed in Congress by a single vote back in 1970. But after both George W. Bush and Donald Trump lost the White house by a half-million and three million votes respectively but ended up as president anyway, Republicans fell newly in love with the College and are fully planning to use it again in 2024 to seize power even if ten million more people vote for Biden this time (Biden won by 7 million votes in 2020).

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Republicans are now defending billionaires buying off Supreme Court justices and most recently Lever News found that they’ve been spiffing over 100 other federal judges — who regularly vote in favor of the interests of corporations and the morbidly rich — in addition to Alito, Thomas, Roberts, et al.

Republicans are also claiming that:

— Trump isn’t a threat to our democracy and his promises to be a dictator are “mere hyperbole.” 
— Letting Putin take Ukraine won’t put Taiwan and other democracies at risk.
— Ignoring churches routinely breaking the law by preaching politics while enjoying immunity from taxes is no big deal. 
— Massive consolidation to monopoly levels across virtually every industry in America since Reagan stopped enforcement of our anti-trust laws (causing Americans to pay an average of $5,000 a year more for everything from broadband to drugs than any other country in the world) is just the way business should be run.
— Teaching white children the racial history of America will make them feel bad, rather than feel less racist and more empathetic. 
— Queer people are groomers and pedophiles (the majority in these categories are actually straight white men).
— Banning and burning books is good for society and our kids.
— Ending public schools with statewide voucher programs will improve education (every credible study shows the opposite).

I could go on, but you get the point. When will America — and, particularly, American media — wake up to these scams and start calling them out for what they are?

I’m not holding my breath, although you could help get the ball rolling by sharing this admittedly incomplete list as far and wide as possible.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Bush, Jeb, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Extremism, Fake, Florida, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Inequality, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, Republicans

Robert Hubbell: Two Heroes of Democracy: “They Stood Their Ground”

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2023 //
18

Robert Hubbell wrote about two women who refused to be intimidated by the MAGA cult: Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. Despite death threats and harassments, they stood their ground. Guiliani will appeal the verdict.

He writes:

Jury Awards Ruby Freemen and Shaye Moss $148 million in damages against Rudy Giuliani for defamation.

The damages award of $148 million against Rudy Giuliani encapsulates the madness, frustration, and perseverance that define the lives of millions of activists during the American era of The Big Lie. It is tempting to characterize Giuliani’s defamation of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss and their hard-won victory as a metaphor for Trump’s political arc over the last seven years.

But what happened to Freeman and Moss is not a metaphor. It is the cold, hard reality that slaps each of us in the face every day as we are assaulted by lies heaped upon lies. Not everyone is a direct victim of the lies like Freeman and Moss, but we are all victims, nonetheless.

The point of the lies is not (only) to injure Trump’s enemies, it is to erode trust in the system until there are no guardrails left—hoping to create chaos in which the most depraved believe they have an advantage over those still ruled by conscience, decency, and fealty to the rule of law.

Trump and his enablers tell outlandish lies because they know that media outlets will dutifully repeat the lies in headlines and news alerts, reserving tepid skepticism for paragraphs buried deep in their coverage. 

Direct victims like Freeman and Moss are viewed as expendable collateral damage. Their names and addresses are shared in dark corners of the web so Trump’s followers can make threats even he dares not voice (in public).

The full weight of Trump’s malevolent organization was directed at Freeman and Moss. But they did not buckle. Two women who were motivated to help fellow Georgians vote in a free and fair election stood their ground. 

Their reputations were smeared by the sitting President of the United States, the Georgia legislature, Fox News, One America Network, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and millions of users on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. 

A preacher and a rap star’s publicist teamed up to urge them to falsely confess to non-existent crimes—saying it was the only way to stop the ugly death threats. The FBI’s unhelpful response was to advise them to “Move out of your homes.”Despite tens of thousands of vile threats, no one was arrested, investigated, charged with crimes, or sued for defamation.

At least not at first.

But the guardrails held. Because Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss stood their ground. 

Because they stood their ground, Democrats on the January 6 Committee allowed them to tell their story to the nation.

Because they stood their ground, the rap star’s publicist and the preacher were indicted in Fulton County, Georgia for “solicitation of false statements and influencing witnesses.”

Because they stood their ground, the former president was indicted for lying about the 2020 election. The indictment specifically alleged that the former president was responsible for the campaign to smear Freeman and Moss—lies that were part of his conspiracy to defraud the United States. (See indictment, ¶ 26.)

Then, Freeman and Moss sued Rudy Giuliani for defamation. He did his best to derail and delegitimize the civil claim for damages. But he failed. The guardrails held. All because Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss stood their ground.

Two women who wanted to help people vote in Georgia stood their ground against fancy lawyers and paid liars, a depraved president and corrupt legislators, and a news ecosystem determined to sell as much soap for as long as possible by repeating the baseless claims about Freeman and Moss.

Two women who stood their ground. That is all it took for the guardrails to hold.

It was not easy. Their stance took courage and faith. They suffered mightily. But they persevered. They are heroes of American democracy.

There can be nothing more hopeful than their example—and their victory—to remind us of the power within each of us to maintain the guardrails of democracy. Those who sow chaos in the hope that the most depraved among us will win by brute force are wrong.

People are drawn to those who promote conscience, decency, and fealty to the rule of law—especially during times of turbulence and distress.

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss prevailed over Giuliani (and Trump) the moment they reported for work on November 3, 2020—because they joined tens of thousands of other Americans in becoming the guardrails of democracy that ensured a free and fair election.

Concluding Thoughts.

Every American who is taking action to defend democracy is like Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The work may not seem glamorous. But counting ballots in Georgia on November 3, 2020, was tedious work—until it became a nation-defining moment that tipped the balance of a contested election.

We will never know which letter, text, door knock, or donation will become a tipping point. But some of them surely will. Indeed, because a tipping point always sits atop every action that preceded it, every letter, text, door knock, or donation contributes to the tipping point. Like Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, you are part of the guardrails of democracy.

S

Categories Accountability, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Fascism, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Guiliani Trial Begins Today in Georgia

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2023 //
16

Rudy Guiliani admitted that he defamed two Georgia election workers by accusing them of fraudulently switching ballots. The two are mother and daughter Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. As a result of his repeated accusations on national television, which were repeated by Trump, calling them out by name, the pair were subjected to continual threats, harassment, and intimidation. They are suing Guiliani for a sum between $15.5 million and $43.5 million. Jury selection begins today.

The showdown between the financially strapped Giuliani and the two temporary poll workers he baselessly accused of ballot tampering in 2020 will highlight a major court battle over false claims that became central to former president Donald Trump’s efforts to stay in power and is now at the heart of two criminal cases against him.


U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell has already found Giuliani liable for more than a dozen defamatory statements against Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, who are mother and daughter, leaving a jury of eight only to decide how much he should pay in damages for violent threats and harassment the pair received. Howell previously ordered Giuliani to pay the women $230,000 in legal fees and sanctions for failing to turn over relevant information. She said those failures, combined with Giuliani’s own admissions, compelled her to rule without a trial that he defamed both women, intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them as part of a civil conspiracy, and owes punitive damages.

If you want to hear the details of what happened to them, watch this clip from the Rachel Maddow show. In addition to hearing their story, you will also hear testimony from the #2 official at the Justice Department, Richard Donahue, who testified to the January 6 Commission that he met with Trump and told him that the Justice Department had investigated all his claims of election fraud and found no evidence for them.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Georgia, Justice, Lies, Trump

Peter Greene: Vouchers Are NOT “Saving Poor Kids from Failing Schools”

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
7

A quarter-century after the launch of vouchers in Milwaukee, we now know a lot that we didn’t know then. The sales pitch was always humanitarian: vouchers, said its rightwing advocates, would “save poor kids from failing schools.” Except they didn’t. We now know, writes Peter Greene, that vouchers do not save poor kids from failing schools. They are a subsidy for students who were already in private and religious schools. Maybe that was their purpose all along.

One other thing we have learned about vouchers: the first voucher program is for low-income kids, but it is the camel’s nose under the tent. The income restrictions will be raised again and again, and more groups of eligible students will be eligible for vouchers. And one day, there will be vouchers for everyone, without regard to income or need.

He writes:

Voucher program after voucher program is launched with the same promise–this program will rescue disadvantaged students from public schools that can’t get the job done. But now that they’ve been around for a few years, we can see pretty clearly what they actually do.

They expand.

They subsidize private school costs for families that were already in private schools.

Arizona’s program is growing into a state budget buster. New Hampshire’s state subsidy for private school tuition is mushrooming in just three years, and roughly 90% of the students using vouchers are still students who were already in private school. Iowa’s program cost looks to be tremendous, with 19,000 students approved for vouchers.

Arkansas is joining the crowd, and provides a fine example of how these programs grow and who they actually benefit.

Arkansas’s voucher program was set up to start with disabled and low-income students. One immediate effect has been a boom in the Fake Your Way To Disability industry in Arkansas, where options to “prove” your eligibility include “a note from your doctor.” And the Arkansas Times has learned that many students qualifying for vouchers didn’t not even clear that low bar. It’s a bit of a Catch-22, as students often have difficulty getting admitted to a private school if they have an IEP, 504 plan, or disability. Still, almost half of Arkansas’s voucher students were approved based on some sort of claim of disability.

That may contribute to Arkansas’s numbers– of its voucher users, 95% did not attend a public school last year.

And the program is only slated to expand as the bars for qualifying are lowered even further.

Proponents of vouchers, like Governor Reynolds of Iowa, point at the expansion and huge cost runs as signs that families were “hungry for educational freedom.” Well, no. What it shows is that families like free money from the state to help pay for the expenses they have already freely chosen for their children.

Please open the link to finish the article.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Funding, Lies, Vouchers

BOMBSHELL: Cardona Gives Hillsdale Charter School $2 Million, Despite Lies and Lack of Diversity

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2023 //
29

What an embarrassment for the U.S. Department of Education!

Carol Burris writes on Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post blog, “The Answer Sheet,” that Secretary Miguel Cardona just awarded one of its largest grants ever to expand a Hillsdale College charter school in Ohio. Hillsdale is closely tied to the conservative Christian movement and to Republican leaders such as Donald Trump, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, and Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee.

Hillsdale’s history program is called “the 1776 curriculum,” intended to refute the ideas of journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones’ controversial “1619 Project.” Hannah-Jones argued that American history began with the arrival of African slaves in 1619. To counter her narrative, the Trump administration in its waning days created “the 1776 Commission” to produce a quick version of a patriotic history. On President Biden’s first day in office, he abolished the 1776 Commission. Hillsdale College, however, continued the work of writing a full U.S. history curriculum based on the work of the 1776 Commission and made it available to schools that wanted history as it used to be taught: with great men, high ideals, and unblemished patriotism.

Hillsdale is now associated with a chain of charter schools that have adopted its Christian worldview and the 1776 curriculum. As Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education explains, a Hillsdale charter just won nearly $2 million from the federal Charter Schools Program. CSP is administered by the U.S. Department of Education. The charter made claims about its location and its demographics that are “misleading.”

Trying to think of an analogy to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona giving a large grant to a Hillsdale charter school: imagine Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos giving $2 million to a charter school for transgender children. Neither seems likely. But one scenario happened.

Valerie Strauss introduces Burris’s column.

A recent federal audit had a bit of bad news for the U.S. Education Department’s Charter Schools Program (CSP), which has provided more than $2.5 billion in grants to help open or expand charter schools. The audit by the department’s Office of Inspector General found that the CSP office may not have had “reliable information needed to make informed decisions” about continuing funding for charter schools with program grants.

There was more in the audit, which you can read about here, but this post looks at a different problem facing the CSP: schools with highly problematic applications that win millions of dollars of federal money anyway.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated, some of them as for-profit entities, and they educate about 7 percent of U.S. schoolchildren. The 30-year-old charter sector has been riddled with financial and other scandals over the years, although supporters say that the problems these schools face are expected growing pains and that they offer families an important option to schools in publicly funded districts. Critics say that they are part of the movement to privatize public education and that some states have lax charter school laws that do not properly regulate them.

This post was written by Carol Burris, an award-winning former New York high school principal and now executive director of the advocacy group called Network for Public Education, which is an alliance of organizations that advocates for the improvement of public education and seeks legislative reform of charter schools. Burris has written previously on the charter school program for Answer Sheet (for example, here and here). She has chronicled how the program spent hundreds of millions of dollars on charter schools that never opened or closed not long after opening.

Burris writes about the funding application of a charter school in Ohio, the Cincinnati Classical Academy, and says that her organization, along with a group of Ohio legislators and other organizations, have asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to rescind the school’s nearly $2 million CSP grant. I asked the school to comment and will add its response if I get one. I asked the Education Department about the letter, and a spokesman said this in an email:

“The U.S. Department of Education (Department) is committed to supporting state and local efforts to increase school diversity and reduce racial and socio-economic isolation in schools, including through the Charter School Program (CSP). There are multiple safeguards in place to ensure the integrity of CSP applications and funded grants. For example, all CSP applicants must provide attestations confirming the accuracy of information submitted in their application. False, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or claims may subject applicants to criminal, civil, or administrative penalties. Such safeguards are in place to help ensure charter schools serve communities well.”

By Carol Burris


An invitation to fiction writing. That is how Mike Winerip described the federal Charter School Program (CSP) grant process in a 2012 New York Times story, a characterization based on his investigation of a New Jersey charter school, which, despite three failed attempts to open and an application full of “misrepresentations,” had secured a CSP grant.

This issues didn’t go away. The All Football Club of Lancaster, Pa., an unauthorized charter school with no community support, submitted an often-incoherent application and yet won $1.2 million in 2020. A school run by a for-profit operator immersed in self-dealings and a segregation academy turned charter school cashed in on a North Carolina grant.

But the prize for the most inventive story to secure a CSP grant may belong to the Cincinnati Classical Academy (CCA), a Hillsdale College member school, for securing a nearly $2 million grant. CCA, which prides itself on teaching virtue, asked for the grant on the basis of its claim that it was closing the achievement gap and serving disadvantaged students, never reporting that only 16 percent of its students are economically disadvantaged and that 2 percent are Black — a starkly different student body from the overwhelmingly disadvantaged and majority-Black Cincinnati Public School students, who, CCA says, it wants to save from poverty.

Cincinnati Classical Academy


Cincinnati Classical Academy is located on a cul-de-sac in a leafy residential suburb of Cincinnati called Reading. The school’s website features a motto and a coat of arms, and plays a video showing the school building with a cross atop a tower at the entrance as well as a large American flag. It currently runs from kindergarten through seventh grade but says it plans to add a grade each year until it becomes a full K-12 school.

It takes considerable digging on its website to realize that CCA is a charter school, not a tuition-free Christian private academy. Its headmaster’s message speaks of morals, virtue and “old-fashioned” methods. Pictures of the gymnasium show a large crucifix on the wall next to an American flag. In a photograph of a school hallway lined with posters depicting the school’s virtues, Mary and the infant Jesus from Botticelli’s “Madonna of the Magnificat” illustrates the virtue of humility. To illustrate gratitude, CCA shows a family praying before a meal.

Nearly all of the uniformed children featured on the website are White. There is no mention of a provision for free lunch on the school’s webpage, which features catered lunches students can purchase in full or a la carte.

Although CCA is only in its second year, it has the status of being a member school of Hillsdale College’s K-12 initiative, which entitles it to free curriculum, training and consultation from the small, nondenominational, conservative Christian college in Michigan. Hillsdale President Larry Arnn is an ally of former president Donald Trump as well as of Trump’s former education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and “distinguished fellow” Christopher Rufo, an activist who has fueled the culture wars.

Hillsdale provides support for CCA through its Barney Charter School Initiative, which began in 2010 with a half-million-dollar contribution from the Barney Family Foundation and which has opened a few dozen charter schools across the country. Hillsdale College’s mission is to maintain “by precept and example the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith,” while the mission of its K-12 charter schools includes a call for “moral virtue.” A Hillsdale K-12 civics and U.S. history curriculum released in 2021 praises conservative values, criticizes liberal ones and distorts civil rights history.

According to its 990 tax forms, the Barney Family Foundation gives to health and child-centered charities along with Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Heartland Institute, the State Policy Network, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the Heritage Foundation, and other right-wing foundations and think tanks.

Stephen Barney, a trustee emeritus on the Hillsdale College Board, has been one of its most generous donors. Between 2010 and 2019, the Network for Public Education identified more than $4 million earmarked for Hillsdale from Barney’s foundation, excluding unlisted donations in 2011 and or donations before or after those years.

Despite Hillsdale College’s frequent boasts of rejecting federal money (and the federal regulations that come with it, including Title IV provisions), the college’s affiliated charter schools eagerly dip into the federal Charter School Program through state entitlement grants. To date, the Network for Public Education has identified more than $16.75 million given to Hillsdale charters for school start-ups or expansions.
The grant to CCA is the first given directly by the federal department to a Hillsdale-connected charter school.

The questionable narrative

Applicants for Charter Schools Program Developer Grants fill out extensive applications in making the case for why their schools deserve the funds. According to the Federal Register, which calls for applications, the first purpose of the CSP is to “expand opportunities for all students, particularly for children with disabilities, English learners, and other traditionally underserved students, to attend charter schools.”

However, CCA caters to the well-served in disproportionately high numbers. State records show that it had no English language learners in 2022-2023 when it applied. Students with disabilities were enrolled at less than half the rate of the Cincinnati Public Schools. More than 80 percent of the students in Cincinnati Public Schools were economically disadvantaged compared to fewer than 17 percent at CCA. Other charter schools in Hamilton County had no problem attracting economically disadvantaged students; their average rate topped 85 percent.

The only category in which CCA exceeds a demographic of Cincinnati Public Schools is White students. More than 82 percent of CCA students are White, compared to 20 percent in the public school district.

So what can a school like this do to get a grant intended for schools that serve underserved kids? It didn’t reveal itself.

CCA cited Cincinnati Public Schools demographics to make its case in its application even though it is located in the Reading Community City School District, which is whiter, wealthier and has better ratings. Then it provided another handful of schools within five miles for comparison, none of which are in Cincinnati Public Schools. The school also talked in its application about closing the achievement gap and serving diverse, underserved students even though its unrevealed Black student population (2.4 percent) is so tiny the state does not even give it a gap-closing measure.

But where the school best revealed itself is in its list of goals and objectives. Not only did it fail to share its lack of diversity, it included no goals or objectives to address it. The application does not discuss the need to increase the number of English language learners, homeless children, students with disabilities, or students who get free or reduced-price lunches to level the enormous gap between the school’s proportions and the greater Cincinnati area.

If achieved, the goals in the application prepared by Kentucky’s Adkins and Company and signed off by the president of the school’s governing board will not disrupt the status quo. CCA will be able to meet them and keep the federal dollars flowing for four years while maintaining the reality projected on its website — that it is a magnet for White, Christian conservative families to escape the area’s diverse schools.

The CSP review process

If you have ever applied for a mortgage, you remember the extraordinarily detailed evidence you must provide to support every claim. That is not the case when “free government money” for charter schools is at stake.

The curious lack of a demographic profile of the school’s students was never a concern for the reviewers. CCA received the highest score of all applicants — 101. One of the three reviewers gave the school a perfect score. You can find the application and the reviewers’ scoring here.
Reviewers, who are solicited from the charter school world, were satisfied that “comprehensive data is provided, revealing the underperformance of Cincinnati public schools and underscoring the necessity for a high-quality alternative that offers families a viable choice,” even though the school is not a part of Cincinnati Public Schools.

The reviewers bought the same old narrative — a high-poverty district is bad, so bring in a charter school. They parroted back what the applicant said and praised Hillsdale College’s Barney Charter School Program.

Inexplicably, given the CSP’s checkered history, the Education Department increased the maximum amount of Developer Grants per charter school from $1.5 million to $2 million this year, and CCA got nearly every penny of the limit: a grant for $1,991,846. Grants are usually for five years, but CCA had been open for a year when it applied, so it got a four-year grant. The average amount per year is $300,000 but the Education Department gave CCA nearly half a million dollars a year — on the basis of claims that even cursory checks on state data or a visit to the school’s website would show to be untrue.

Back in Ohio, public education advocacy groups are outraged but not surprised. Bill Phillis, the executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, told me that the charter industry in his state “has been rife with financial and academic fraud and corruption.” He also said the CCA’s application for a development grant, with its “deception and disingenuous information,” is “typical of the charter industry in Ohio.”

The Network for Public Education sent a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona protesting the grant and asking that it be rescinded. It was signed by Phillis’s coalition, along with U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio), five state legislators who represent the area, the Ohio PTA, both state teachers unions, the Cincinnati NAACP, and more than a dozen public education, civil rights, local teacher associations and advocacy groups.

Other 2023 CSP awardees are being challenged. The St. Louis Board of Education has passed a resolution protesting the more than $35 million CSP grant received by the billionaire-funded Opportunity Trust to open more charter schools in Missouri — nearly all of which will, because of state law, be located in St. Louis or Kansas City. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

“The group misrepresented its relationship with SLPS in its application to the U.S. Department of Education, the resolution states. The school board “does not have a working relationship with the Opportunity Trust, does not collaborate with the Opportunity Trust and has opposed efforts by the Opportunity Trust to enact legislation to divert district funds to charter schools,” it [the resolution] reads.”

CSP grant applications that have been misleading and deceptive have still been rewarded with millions of taxpayer dollars from CSP. Whether the source of the problem is the department’s process, a less-than-rigorous application, the reviewer selection process or faulty regulations, awards that are based on disingenuous claims and deceit do not serve children or taxpayers well.

Until something changes, the statement that applicants sign — “I am aware that any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or claims may subject me to criminal, civil, or administrative penalties. (U.S. Code, Title 18, Section 1001)” — should be enforced, and the secretary should use his authority to terminate the grant.

Categories Accountability, Cardona, Miguel, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Equity, Extremism, Funding, History, Lies, Ohio, Race, Scandal, U.S. Department of Education

PR Firm Releases Statement from Moms for Liberty about Bridget and Christian Ziegler

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2023 //
27

By now, you have heard about the allegations of sexual misconduct by Christian Ziegler, leader of Florida’s state Republican Party, and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, school board member in Sarasota, and DeSantis appointee to the Disney World governing board. An unnamed woman accused Christian Ziegler of raping her. In her statement to the police, she referred to a prior three-way sexual tryst that included Bridget Ziegler. She canceled her date with Christian because he didn’t bring Bridget. Then she claims he showed up and raped her.

If you want to see the full police affidavit, read Mercedes Schneider’s account of the ménage a trois.

If you want to see Peter Greene’s wise take, read here.

Moms for Liberty released the following statement via a public relations person:

From: Grace English <Grace@cavalrystrategies.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 5, 2023 1:16 PM
Subject: Statement from Moms for Liberty Co-Founders re: Christian and Bridget Ziegler

 

Hello,

 

In response to numerous media inquiries about Christian and Bridget Ziegler, please see the following statement from Moms for Liberty Co-Founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich:

 

Comment from Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice: 

 

“We have been truly shaken to read of the serious, criminal allegations against Christian Ziegler. We believe any allegation of sexual assault should be taken seriously and fully investigated.

“Bridget Ziegler resigned from her role as co-founder with Moms for Liberty within a month of our launch in January of 2021, nearly three years ago. She has remained an avid warrior for parental rights across the country.

“To our opponents who have spewed hateful vitriol over the last several days: We reject your attacks. We will continue to empower ALL parents to build relationships that ensure the survival of our nation and a thriving education system. We are laser-focused on fundamental parental rights, and that mission is and always will be bigger than any one person.” – Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice

 

— 

Grace English

Cavalry Strategies

(904) 923-1684

Categories DeSantis, Ethics, Florida, Lies, Scandal

Chris Tomlinson: Texas Oilmen Spreading Hate and Lies

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
5

Chris Tomlinson is an award-winning columnist for the Houston Chronicle. He uses his space to combat bigotry, stupidity, and lies. He is not a “both sides” kind of journalist.

He writes here about the infamous oil billionaires who use their money to spread their religious views, attack public schools, and encourage indoctrination.

He writes:

Texas oilman H.L. Hunt may have been the first to spend millions to promote right-wing media and extremist ideas, but he was far from the last.

Most Texans, let alone Americans, had never heard of Farris and Dan Wilks or Tim Dunn before this year. But journalists have revealed them as key supporters of some of the most controversial figures in Texas politics and bankrollers of political action committees staffed by Christian nationalists and antisemites.

The reclusive billionaires and their allies rarely respond to requests for comment from mainstream media and did not respond to my messages.

Farris Wilks, fracking billionaire and pastor of the Assembly of Yahweh (7th Day) Church, preaches that the Bible is “true and correct in every scientific and historical detail” and that abortion, homosexuality and drunkenness are serious crimes, according to the church’s doctrinal statement, the Reuters news agency reported.

Dan Wilks attends church with his brother, with whom he co-founded Frac Tech, a company they sold for $3.5 billion. They have since become some of the largest donors in Texas GOP politics, giving $15 million in 2016 to a political action committee backing Sen. Ted Cruz.

Like Hunt, who broadcast his extremist commentary on radio stations nationwide, the Wilks brothers have also invested in media, supporting conservative mouthpieces like The Daily Wire and Prager University. Their PAC bought ads disguised as articles in the Metric Media news network, which includes 59 pseudo-local news sites in Texas, the Columbia Journalism Review reported.

The Wilks brothers have enjoyed their greatest success by joining Dunn to move the Republican Party of Texas as far right as possible through Empower Texans, one of the most influential dark-money political action committees.

Empower Texans shuttered in 2020 after spinning off operations into Texans for Fiscal Responsibility and Texas Scorecard, which rank politicians by their adherence to the group’s ideology. Dunn and the Wilks brothers have provided most of the financing and set the agenda for conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan, who has led all three organizations.

In 2016, the groups opposed Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, whom they considered too moderate. They also ran ultra-conservative candidates against Republicans who ranked poorly on their scorecard. When Straus, who is Jewish, invited Dunn for a breakfast meeting, he reportedly said only Christians should have leadership positions, Texas Monthly reported in 2018. This is a sentiment he’d previously expressed in a 2016 Christian radio interview.

Republicans have long struggled with antisemitism. In 2010, State Republican Executive Chairman John Cooke wrote an email proclaiming, “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it,” the Texas Observer reported.

Dunn and the Wilkses also finance special interest PACs. In 2017, Empower Texans supported and advised Texans for Vaccine Choice, an early anti-vaccination movement, former state Rep. Jonathan Stickland told the Washington Post.

Stickland left elected office to start Pale Horse Strategies, a political consulting firm that ran a new Dunn and Wilks PAC, Defend Texas Liberty. The PAC defended Attorney General Ken Paxton against corruption allegations and provided $3 million to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick weeks before he presided over Paxton’s impeachment trial, where he was acquitted.

Fresh from that victory, a Texas Tribune reporter observed Stickland, Republican Party of Texas chair Matt Rinaldi, prominent white supremacist Nick Fuentes and Black Lives Matter shooter Kyle Rittenhouse enter the Pale Horse Strategies office in Fort Worth on Oct. 6.

Fuentes was driven to the meeting by Chris Russo, who used Dunn and Wilks money to found Texans For Strong Borders PAC. Russo has past ties to Fuentes, the Tribune reported.

When current GOP House Speaker Dade Phelan demanded Patrick give away the $3 million donation, Patrick said Dunn had called him to apologize.

Dunn “is certain that Mr. Stickland and all PAC personnel will not have any future contact with Mr. Fuentes,” Patrick explained.

Yet, when the Tribune’s Robert Downen kept digging, he found that Pale Horse’s social media manager, Elle Maulding, had called Fuentes the “greatest civil rights leader in history” and shared photos of them together. Shelby Griesinger, Defend Texas Liberty’s treasurer, has said Jews worship a false god and depicted them as the enemy on social media.

Dunn and the Wilks brothers have spent $100 million on ultra-conservative candidates, political action committees in Texas, and radical nonprofits. They finance a movement staffed by publicly antisemitic foot soldiers.

Conservatives considered H.L. Hunt a crackpot in his day. But this new generation has the GOP falling into a goose step.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ignorance, Lies, Religion, Stupid, Texas

Florida: Why a Librarian Quit

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2023 //
24

The Washington Post published this story of a librarian in Florida who “couldn’t take it anymore.” The book bans and censorship imposed by Governor Ron DeSantis and his compliant Legislature violated her professional ethics. Her job became impossible.

Governor DeSantis insists that no book is banned in his state. Maybe he should interview a school librarian.

Florida is the state where freedom to read goes to die.

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — It was her last Monday morning in the library, and when Tania Galiñanes walked into her office and saw another box, she told herself that this would be the last one.

Inside were books. She didn’t know how many, or what they were, only that she would need to review each one by hand for age-appropriate material and sexual content as defined by Florida law, just as she’d been doing for months now with the 11,600 books on the shelves outside her door at Tohopekaliga High School.

Last box, and then after this week, she would no longer be a librarian at all.

She heard the first-period bell ring, 7:15 a.m. She’d wanted to get to the box right away, but now she saw one of the school administrators at her door, asking whether she’d heard about the latest education mandate in Florida.

“What’s the name of this thing?” he said. “Freedom Week?”

She exhaled loudly. “Freedom Week.”

“Oh, good,” he said. “You know about this.”

Yes, Tania knew about it. It was one more thing the state had asked of them, a mandatory recitation of parts of the Declaration of Independence “to reaffirm the American ideals of individual liberty,” along with something else she had heard from the district. “They asked us to please not celebrate Banned Books Week,” Tania said.

She was tired. Her husband was always reminding her: Tania, you have no sense of self-preservation. She had thought about pushing back against the district, had imagined putting up posters all over the walls from the American Library Association celebrating “freedom to read,” a final act before her last day on Friday. But even if she did put up the posters, who would be there to see them once she left? The library would be closed after this week, until they found someone to take her place.

Tania had planned to spend the rest of her career in the Osceola County School District. She was 51. She could have stayed for years at Tohopekaliga, a school she loved that had only just opened in 2018. The library was clean and new. The shelves were organized. The chairs had wheels that moved soundlessly across the carpet. The floor plan was open, designed by architects who had promised “the 21st century media center.”

That was before the school board meeting on April 5, 2022, when Tania watched parents read aloud from books they described as a danger to kids. It was before she received a phone call from the district, the day after that, instructing her to remove four books from her shelves. It was before a member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty told her on Facebook, a few days later, that she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near students.

It had been 18 months since then. Nine months since she had taken Florida’s new training for librarians, a mandatory hour-long video, and heard the state say that books in the library must not contain sexual content that could be “harmful to minors” and that violating this statute would result in a third-degree felony. “A crime,” the training had said. “Districts should err on the side of caution.” It had been seven months since she began collecting Florida’s laws and statutes in a purple folder on her desk, highlighting the sections that made her mad, and also the ones that could get her fired. Six months since she broke out in hives, since eczema crept up the side of her face, since she started having trouble sleeping and got a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication. Five months since she stood in her house crying and her husband said it wasn’t worth it anymore. He could work two jobs if he had to. “You need to quit,” he’d told her. Six weeks since the start of another school year. Five weeks since she had given her notice.

And sometime in the middle of all that, as she showed up every weekday at 7 a.m. and tried to focus on the job she had signed up for, which was, she thought, to help students discover a book to love, Tania could feel something shifting inside her 21st-century media center. The relationships between students and books, and parents and libraries, and teachers and the books they taught, and librarians and the job they did — all of it was changing in a place she thought had been designed to stay the same.

A library was a room with shelves and books. A library was a place to read.

On her desk was a purple folder containing the laws and regulations imposed on librarians by the Legislature.

Inside, there were printouts of 79 pages of Florida law and statute that told her how to think about what students should and should not read. One law made it easier for people to challenge books they believed contained sexual conduct or age-inappropriate material. Another defined that term, “sexual conduct,” in layer upon layer of clinical specificity.

When she had decided to become a librarian almost 10 years ago, it was for a simple reason: She loved to read. Now she watched as the work she did at a high school in Central Florida became part of a national debate. There were fights going on over democracy and fascism. There were parents and school board members arguing on social media and in meetings. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) wasn’t just passing laws but using them to run for president. To Tania, the pure act of reading was becoming more and more political, and as a result, she had to spend much of her time reviewing the books on her shelves — not to suggest one to a student but to ask herself whether the content was too mature for the teenagers at her school. Then she had moved on to the books in each teacher’s classroom, because as of this year, the state considered those books to be part of the library, too.

All of this took time. The librarian’s job was expanding even as she felt it was shrinking to a series of rote tasks: She would copy a book’s ISBN number into a peer-review database. She would decide whether to mark it with the thumb-size red sticker, provided to her by the district, that read “M” for “mature.” If a book wasn’t listed in a database, she would review it by hand, and then she would start again with the next book. In those hours, the job became a series of keystrokes, and she began to feel more like a censor than a librarian.

It wasn’t just Tania doing this. It was more than 1,400 librarians in all of Florida’s 67 counties, each district interpreting the law in its own way. In the panhandle, Escambia County had instructed its schools to close parts of their libraries entirely until every book on every shelf had been reviewed for sexual content. In Charlotte County, near Fort Myers, schools were told to remove any books with LGBTQ characters from elementary and middle school libraries.

This reign of terror has spread from Florida to other red states. Students can see whatever they want on their cell phones. But what they read must be scrutinized and censored, and librarians must abandon their professional ethics.

Categories DeSantis, Florida, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Lies, Literacy, Literature

North Carolina: Traitor Tish Gets Her Reward

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2023 //
5

In North Carolina, Tricia Cotham won election as a Democrat in a Democratic district. She campaigned on a pledge to protect abortion rights and to oppose vouchers. Soon after winning election, Cotham flipped her party affiliation. Her flip gave Republicans a supermajority in both houses, meaning that Democratic Governor Roy Cooper could not veto anything passed by the far-right Republican General Assembly.

Thanks to Cotham, the Republicans tightened restrictions on abortion (to 12 weeks) and expanded the state voucher program.

Having betrayed the people who elected her, Cotham needed her district to be adjusted. Republicans complied, giving her a district with more Republicans.

The AP reported:

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina state Rep. Tricia Cotham, whose party switch earlier this year blindsided state Democrats and gave Republicans veto-proof majorities in both legislative chambers, announced Saturday she will run for reelection.

Cotham’s announcement ends speculation over her political future after Republicans last month redrew maps for the state’s congressional and legislative districts that seemed to reward her with options if she chose to run for office in 2024.

The redrawn state House map places Cotham’s Mint Hill residence in a new district where Republicans appear to have a slight advantage, according to statewide election data. Had her district gone unchanged, she would have faced an extremely tough path for reelection.

It remains to be seen whether her new district likes double-dealers.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Extremism, Lies, North Carolina, Politics

Peter Greene: The History the Christian Nationalists Want

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2023 //
28

Peter Greene writes here about the demand by Christian nationalists to rewrite history to their satisfaction. Whatever promotes the religion of their choice is good, whatever contradicts it must be left out. They want fairy-tale history.

Greene writes:

Recently Oklahoma’s education Dudebro-in-Chief Ryan Walters went on another tear, this time warning textbook publishers that they’d better not try to sell any wokified textbooks in Oklahoma.

“If you can’t teach math without talking about transgenderism, go to California, go to New York,” he told Fox News Digital. He even sent out a letter, just so they’d know. “Listen, we will be checking for these things now. Do not give us textbooks that have critical race theory in them.”

Walters said lots of things. Maybe he’s auditioning for a media spot. Maybe he wants to be governor. Maybe he’s just a tool. But he says all sorts of things like “In Oklahoma, our kids are going to know the basics. We want them to master it. We want them to do exceptionally well academically. We’re not here for any kind of Joe Biden’s socialist Marxist training ground.”

But somewhere in this conversation, Walters lays out a succinct summary of our nation’s history as he believes it should be taught.

“So as you go through, you talk about the times that America has led the free world, that we have continued to be that light. We’ve done more for individual liberty than any other country in the history of the world. And those belief systems that were there in place, it allowed us to do it. You’ve got to talk about our Judeo-Christian values. The founders were very clear that that was a crucial part of our success. Then you go through and you evaluate. Are these times we lived up to our core principles? You’ve got to be honest with kids about our history. So you talk about all of it, but you evaluate it through the prism of our founding principles. Is this a time we lived up to those principles?”

Most of the elements of the christianist nationalist version of US history are here. American exceptionalism– the light that led the free world, the very most ever done for individual liberty. A nation founded on Judeo-Christian values.

With that as a foundation, it’s safe to note some of the lapses, all of which are framed as an aberration, a lapse from our foundation and certainly not part of it (take that, you 1619 project-reading CRTers). In the CN view, every good thing that ever happened is because of our God-aligned nature, and every bad thing is in spite of it, quite possibly because Wrong People were allowed to get their hands on some power.

There are plenty of implications for this view of history. One of the biggest is that these folks simply don’t believe in democracy, because democracy allows too many of the Wrong People to get their hands on power. As Katherine Stewart puts it in her must-read The Power Worshippers—

It [Christian nationalism] asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage.

Or, as she quotes Gary North, a radical free-market libertarian christianist who developed the Ron Paul Curriculum,

Let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then we will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

The idea of individualism is also important in the CN view of US history. There’s no systemic anything–just the work of either good or bad, Right or Wrong individuals. And if everything is about the individual, then your problems are strictly your problems; your failures are all on you, not on society or community (the village has no responsibility to raise your child). That emphasis on the individual runs all through the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum, both original flavor andthe Jordan Adams stealth version.

The rejection of systemic views of society and history matters. It goes along with the view that we pretty much fixed racism in the 1960s (even we got a little too socialist in the process). From which we can conclude that all attempts to talk racism now are just attempts to grab power with made-up grievances.

To take another angle– the underlying idea of the Classical Education that is so popular with the CN crowd is that there is One Objective Truth. Back in classical times, great thinkers understood this Truth, but the 20th century brought a bunch of relativistic thought and the evil notion that there are different, subjective truths. But our Founding Fathers knew the Truth and encoded it into the Constitution and our founding principles, and as long as we are led by people who follow that Truth, which is somehow both a Christian Truth and an American Truth, we are okay. People who don’t follow that Truth are a threat to the integrity and fiber of our country; consequently, they have to be stopped.

People who claim that history is complicated, that our founders were complicated, that humans are complicated–those people are just trying to confuse the issue, to draw others away from understanding The Truth.

Please open the link to finish the article.

Let me add that I don’t want to go back to 1776. The guys who wrote the founding documents were brilliant, but not on subjects like slavery and women’s rights.

Categories Curriculum, Extremism, History, Lies
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »