I hope you are signed on to Instagram. This is a commentary you should hear.
And this is a TikTok you should see to understand how quickly women’s rights can disappear.
Archives for category: Lies
Jennifer Berkshire writes a blog called The Education Wars, where she explains the latest attacks on public schools by entitled billionaires and their lackeys. In this one, she reviews the revival of the New Orleans “miracle,” you know, the claim that turning almost every public school in the city into a privately run charter schools produced dramatic gains. Not true.
She wrote:
Ten years ago, I wrote a piece about some of the many unintended consequences of New Orleans’ charter school experiment. Wildly at odds with the narrative of success and transformation being peddled by the education reform industry, the story was among my first real attempts to do ‘serious’ journalism, and I’m still really proud of it. (For those of you who don’t know, I got my start chronicling the excesses of education reform on a humorous blog.) I learned a lot working on that story, including that writers have no control over whatever terrible headline gets slapped on their masterpiece… But it was in New Orleans that I really began to understand something essential about education reform. If the vision of what’s on offer is narrower than what the community wants, these top-down efforts to “disrupt” public education are doomed from the start.
The twenty year mark since Hurricane Katrina has ushered in a predictable wave of celebratory accounts of the New Orleans miracle. I recommend giving them a miss and spending some time instead with an eye-opening new book by parent advocate Ashana Bigard. (Full disclosure: Ashana is one of my favorite people in the world, not to mention among the most amazing organizers I’ve ever met.) Called Beyond Resilience, Ashana’s book opens with a scene of a meeting held in the period after the hurricane erased whole neighborhoods, and claimed the lives of some 1,800 people. The purpose of these gatherings, Ashana writes, was to give local parents the opportunity to envision the sort of education future they wanted for their children.
What they dreamed of was so much more than their children had before, and more than they themselves had had before. Having seen what was offered to children in other places, they wanted that and more for New Orleans’ children.
Among their demands: fully equipped science labs, theater programs, curriculum rich in local history, career and technical education that prepared students for jobs in the trades. The list was long. It was also grounded in the harsh reality of New Orleans’ brutal poverty. Parents asked for kids to be able to bring food home when money was tight, for washers and dryers in every school because so many laundromats had never reopened. And they wanted swim lessons in order to give their kids a fighting chance against the next hurricane.
The enormous gulf between those wishlists, compiled on flip charts and dry erase boards, and what the parents ultimately got is the subject of Beyond Resilience. “What they gave us instead was almost a cartoonish representation of the opposite of everything we had asked for,” writes Ashana. “The charter school operators and organizations that supported charter school reform efforts would listen to parents, guardians and community members, and then create schools that looked more like juvenile jail facilities than schools.”Subscribe
No excuses
I first encountered Ashana through her work as an advocate for students and parents who were caught up in the draconian discipline practices that took root during the early years of the New Orleans charter school experiment. While the rhetoric was all about preparing kids, or ‘scholars’ in charter parlance, for college, Ashana was spending more and more of her time intervening on behalf of kids who were being treated like criminals. There was the boy whose mother couldn’t afford to buy him the shoes that the uniform required, so got suspended and then expelled. There was the five year old who was repeatedly suspended for eating crackers on the bus. And there were the countless students accused of the vague yet sweeping offense known as “disruption of a school process,” who ended up, not just kicked out of school, but arrested. These children, writes Ashana, weren’t treated as human beings,
but as criminals who had already committed crimes and would most definitley commit more crimes if they weren’t guarded and watched every second of the day.
Since I’ve known Ashana, her criticism of the city’s schools has been remarkably consistent. At its core is this belief: a model of schooling centered on harsh discipline is developmentally inappropriate, especially for young kids. Early in the book, she recounts being told by Ben Kleban, a hard-charging charter school CEO who embodied the no-excuses ethos, that his K-2 elementary school was so quiet that “you could hear a pin drop.” Ashana was aghast. These were kids who should be playing, talking and singing. “[H]e went on to tell me that these kids were different.”
These children are different. That was the refrain. These Black children in New Orleans, who had lost everything, who were sleeping in abandonded buildings, grieving the loss of family members, friends, and entire neighborhoods were ‘different’ and therefore didn’t deserve the same developmental considerations as other children their age.
In recent years, Ashana has been part of an effort called Erase the Board that seeks to bring traditional public schools back to New Orleans. The group’s demands echo the ones put forth by those parents and community members so many years ago—schools that are human focused rather than test and discipline centered, music and art classes, trained teachers, and trauma informed practices. But Erase the Board is also challenging a central tenet of the New Orleans model: schools that fail to raise test scores are closed. Of the city’s 75 charter schools, 50 have been closed or reconstituted at some point. While that churn is in large part responsible for producing academic gains, it has also proven deeply unpopular with parents, who hate school closures even when said shuttering is being done for ‘the right reasons.’
The constant opening and closing of schools is also highly disruptive to students, Ashana argues. She tells the story of one student who attended twelve different schools: half he was pushed out of over disciplinary infractions, the other half closed. “You have schools closing, teachers moving in and out. Kids need stability and that’s the opposite of what we’ve got. All you’re showing these kids is displacement.” Among Erase the Board’s demands is that failing charter schools be reopened as traditional public schools. “We estimate that, at the rate that charter schools close, we’ll have half our city back in seven years,” says Ashana.
Selling the vision
“‘Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution,” was the title of the puffed piece that appeared in the Washington Post recently. Penned by a British scribe who used to pen speeches for former UK prime minister David Cameron, aka Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, it’s the sort of breathless sales pitch that abounded in the first decade after the hurricane. These days, the ‘miracle’ talk is harder to find, in part because so many holes have been poked in the claims of success, as teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein notes here. And while New Orleans may have ended up with a system ‘never seen before,’ the reality is that the same forces are coming for its charter schools that now threaten all public schools.
For one, there aren’t enough kids, especially when you consider that the model entails constantly opening new schools. Back in 2022, New Schools for New Orleans, an architect of the all-charter model, warned “that schools citywide were nearing a tipping point in terms of enrolling enough students to pay for a full array of academics and services.” And that was before Louisiana enacted its ginormous new school voucher program. In a system that is entirely focused on test scores, the appeal of attending a private school where kids don’t take tests seems pretty obvious.
Indeed, at a time when the GOP has largely moved on from charter schools, save for the classical variety, and gone full voucher, the New Orleans experiment—expensive, interventionist, couched in the language of civil rights—feels like a throwback. So too does one of the animating beliefs driving the experiment: that kids in one of the country’s poorest cities could overcome poverty if they all went to college. Hence the frustration in the final puffish piece I’ll mention: edupreneur Ravi Gupta’s lament for the 74: “The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools.” Conservatives aren’t keen on the model’s aggressive intervention, complains Gupta, while Progressives are squeamish about the fact that New Orleans’ success required wiping out the city’s unionized teaching force, which made up much of its Black middle class.
Gupta implores us to focus on the ‘hard numbers’ and avoid what he calls “the tyranny of the anecdote.” But Ashana Bigard and her powerful new book show exactly why that perspective is so short sighted. Why, if the model is so successful, asks Ashana, does the city require so many alternative schools and programs to catch the kids who ‘fall through the cracks’? Why are there so many ‘opportunity youth,’ kids who aren’t in school or working? Indeed, if you expand the frame beyond the metrics of academic achievement, it’s hard to make the case that life for young people in New Orleans has improved, the conclusion I reached back in 2015. “The math ain’t mathin’,” is how Ashana put it when we spoke recently.
That there’s been so little laudatory coverage of New Orleans’ education revolution “reveals something broken about our politics and media,” insists Gupta. But I think the real reason is much more simple. The reformers who drove the experiment never recovered from the scene that plays out at the start of Ashana’s book, when parents and community members, some of whom had been pushing for reform in the city’s schools long before Katrina, envisioned what education in New Orleans could be. Today, the gap between that vision of possibility for the city’s kids and what was delivered remains a chasm.
Two decades after hurricane Katrina, Ashana is still fighting for the schools New Orleans’ children deserve. The rebuilding is still happening, she writes in the book’s conclusion.
But it’s not about getting back to what it was—it’s about creating something that never existed: a New Orleans where all of our children can thrive, where our culture is respected and our people are valued, where love and justice aren’t just words but ways of life, where the billions generated by our creativity flow back to strengthen our communities.
An eternal optimist, Ashana ends on a hopeful note, insisting that “That New Orleans is possible. That future is within our reach.”
I hope she’s right.
John Merrow was the education correspondent for the PBS Newshour for many years. He writes here about the insane insults hurled at our nation’s teachers by MAGA.
The US has nearly 3.6 million K-12 teachers, and another 1.5 million college teachers. One-third of 5.1 million is 1.7 million. Who knew that we have 1,700,000 terrorists in our classrooms!
I certainly had no idea things were that bad, and I’m kicking myself for not knowing. After all, I spent more than 67 years in American classrooms, as a student, a teacher, a parent, and a reporter. I must have interviewed and maybe even socialized with thousands of these terrorists, and I didn’t have a clue.
My 4th grade teacher yelled a lot and banged desks (and some ears too), so I supposed she “terrorized” us, but I don’t think that’s what the accuser had in mind.
I can think of one other possible example of ‘terrorism’ in the classroom: My 10th grade English teacher, Mr. McKinley, would deliberately make mistakes when he wrote stuff on the blackboard and then erupt in (faux) fury if we failed to catch his flubs. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what the accuser had in mind.
Are you questioning the accuracy of the accusation? OK, it came from President Donald Trump’s buddy Steve Bannon, who opened his mouth while in Arizona to pay tribute to Charlie Kirk, the assassinated leader of Turning Point. The podcast host was saying to Bannon that Kirk’s ideas about marrying early and having lots of children were actually not popular with young people, which prompted Bannon to blame teachers for brain-washing their students. Here’s what he said:
“…..those kids — look, from kindergarten all the way up, they are essentially, you know, a third of the teachers are terrorists that are trying to form them.”
Predictably, the right-wing podcaster didn’t challenge Bannon’s wild accusation or even ask him what he meant by ‘terrorist,’ so I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Bannon meant that teachers were teaching values that Bannon disapproves of, like tolerance and cooperation. I have seen lots of teachers work hard to inculcate such values, and, if that’s ‘terrorism,’ I approve.
Mocking Bannon is a woefully insufficient response, however, because his blatant teacher-bashing is part of the right wing’s persistent, harsh, and (unfortunately) often successful campaign to bring down public education.
And Bannon’s not even a field general in this war. He’s clearly outranked by Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters, who in January reacted to violence at the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. You may recall that, early on New Year’s Day an army veteran carrying an ISIS flag drove his pickup truck down Bourbon Street and killed 14 people and injured dozens more before the police killed him. It was labeled a possible terrorist incident, prompting Mr. Walters to go off: “We also have to take a look at how are these terrorists coming from people that live in America. …. You have schools that are teaching kids to hate their country, that this country is evil. You have the teachers’ unions pushing this on our kid (sic).”
Mocking the hyperbole of school critics like Walters and Bannon is ineffective, because culture warriors are immune to humor. Instead, they are seriously opposed to just about everything that some of us believe is in the public interest, such as public education, public transportation, public libraries, public parks, public health, and so on. They recognize that public education is a cornerstone of our democracy, and they are going after it, with sledgehammers and other implements of destruction, including lies and absurd accusations from the likes of Bannon and Walters.
(They are anti-public-everything, acronym APE. Don’t be an APE!)
Early in September, the New York Times reporter Dana Goldstein did a deep dive into the impact of vouchers, education savings accounts, tax credit scholarships, and other programs that divert funds from public schools to non-public schools. The entire article is well worth your time.
The number of students whose parents are using these programs has doubled since 2019, nearly all in Republican-led states. Five years ago, only about 20,000 students had education savings accounts (ESA), which allow deducting any ‘educational’ expense from one’s taxes; today, more than 500,000 families have ESA’s.
In the past, eligibility for most of these programs was means-tested because the stated goal was to help low income families. That’s changed, and in the new programs, any family can take advantage, regardless of income.
This ain’t cheap. Indiana’s program, for example, is costing more than $600 million dollars a year, dollars that might have gone to public education.
Joining the 14 states with voucher-type programs is your federal government, because the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by Congress earlier this year includes a $5,000 voucher.
Do these voucher programs work? The evidence is mixed, at best.
Are they popular with voters? Here the answer is crystal clear: NO! In the 17 opportunities that voters have had to weigh in on vouchers since 1970, they’ve said NO, including three votes in Republican-led states in 2024.
For a critical view of what’s going on, read David Osborne’s analysis here.
If you support public education, begin by thanking teachers. Take a minute to picture the teachers who had changed your lives for the better…and then to ask yourselves if you ever said ‘Thank you’ to those women and men. If it’s too late to connect directly with them, you might write something about them and share it with others.
That’s only the first step. Consider attending school board meetings, perhaps even running for election to your local school board. You might join the parent-teacher organization, or volunteer as a tutor. You might contribute supplies, or help with school fund-raising efforts. Let your elected officials at all levels know that you support public education. If you’re a public school parent, move beyond ‘involvement’ to ‘engagement,’ by getting to know your children’s teachers.
(I’ve written about this in more detail in “Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education,” which is available at most public libraries, some bookstores, and Amazon. It’s reviewed positively here and negatively here.)
It’s not pie-in-the-sky idealism to believe that a strong public education system is the road to equality and citizenship, or that the real safeguard of democracy is education. Those insights came from FDR and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others.
Please make certain that you are registered to vote, and that your friends and neighbors are as well. This attack on public education is serious, folks. Don’t take our democracy for granted.
Joe Perticone of The Bulwark describes the committee that has been created by House Republicans to recast what happened on January 6, 2021. They aim to show that it was mostly staged by anti-Trump provocateurs, with substantial help from the FBI. And at the same time, despite what everyone saw with their own eyes, it was “a day of love,” because Trump said so.
Frankly, I can’t make sense of it. Why would Trump praise a large group of people driven and controlled by anti-Trump forces?
A new House subcommittee has been established to finally, at long last, give the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol the investigation Donald Trump thinks it deserves. Two weeks ago, Republicans tucked its formation into a rule vote that, among other things, approved a resolution expressing support for the House Oversight Committee’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation. The new subcommittee’s Republican members, appointed by House Speaker Mike Johnson, have all held conspiratorial views about what transpired at the Capitol that day.
Atop the subcommittee will be Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.). The other Republicans joining him will be:
- Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.)
- Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas)
- Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.)
- Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.)
Democrats, for their part, put their more pugnacious members on the subcommittee as a counterbalance of sorts. The list includes Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.).
Loudermilk had been advocating for the formation of this panel for quite some time, saying over the summer that setting it up was a high priority for Trump. The nature and extent of the proposed subcommittee’s jurisdiction had been debated for months before Loudermilk introduced the resolution establishing it in July. The Capitol riot has been a consistent focus of Loudermilk’s throughout the 119th Congress and even before it was convened: Back in December, he oversaw the publication of a report that downplayed January 6th by emphasizing—as the lawmaker put it in a prefatory letter—“that there was not just one single cause for what happened at the U.S. Capitol . . . it was a series of intelligence, security, and leadership failures at several levels and numerous entities.”
The committee structure is unique. Loudermilk will have unilateral subpoena authority, allowing him to go through with decisions that even a majority of subcommittee members might oppose.
But I don’t think Loudermilk need worry much about being stymied in his quest to uncover the real truth behind January 6th. The new subcommittee is stacked with lawmakers who have peddled baseless conspiracy theories about that day.
Loudermilk himself claimed widespread voter fraudleading up to the attack and voted againstestablishing the original January 6th Committee that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi put together.
Over the years, Higgins’s conspiracy theories have proliferated like daisies in an unmowed field. He claimed that “ghost buses” had provided transportation to many of the rioters, by which he meant that the buses were most likely non-MAGA plants being used to cause trouble for Trump.¹ His evidence for the “ghost buses” claim, which he presented on blown-up posters in a hearing with former FBI Director Christopher Wray, consisted of photographs showing that there were many buses parked at Union Station on the day of the attack. (Union Station hosts more than 2.6 million intercity bus riders per year.)
The FBI was not only involved in actions on January 6th from within. They had, I suspect, over two-hundred agents embedded within the crowd, including agents—or as they would call [them], “human assets”—inside the Capitol dressed as Trump supporters before the doors were opened.
Higgins has also claimed a large portion of the January 6th crowd consisted of actual FBI agents. As he told Newsmax in 2023:
Along with Higgins, Nehls has spread the “fedsurrection” conspiracy theory that the FBI was behind the attack, elevating claims that wedding planner Ray Epps was one of the government’s plants. Epps, a two-time Trump voter who became a central character in a wild yarn of conspiraciesaround that day, later pleaded guilty to January 6th–related charges. He was ultimately pardoned by Trump as part of the mass absolution on the first day of the new administration.
Hageman, who defeated Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) in a Republican primary after Cheney worked on the original January 6th Committee, has cosponsored legislation claiming Trump didn’t engage in any wrongdoing with regard to the attack. Hageman also signed on to an October 2024 letter to then–Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding he not withhold any evidence that could show how the FBI may have been involved in January 6th.
“The American people deserve to know those federal employees involved in formulating and carrying out the events on January 6th,” Hageman said in a statement accompanying the letter. “With today’s weaponized federal government, led in no small part by an FBI that continues to target conservatives, we should take every measure to ensure the truth is revealed.”
And while Griffith hasn’t openly promoted conspiracy theories in the way that Nehls and Higgins have, he did, like the others, vote against the 2020 election certification.
If you’re wondering why Republicans feel there is a need to relitigate the findings of the original January 6th Committee, the simplest explanation is purely political. The new subcommittee is meant to downplay the events of the attack, shift blame to the Democratic lawmakers and staff who hid behind locked doors while Trump watched television footage of the mob roaming the hallways of the Capitol, and—perhaps most importantly—to validate the president’s longstanding delusion that January 6, 2021, was a “day of love” for all involved.
For many years, Glenn Kessler was a fact-checker for The Washington Post. He retired and now has his own Substack blog, where he continues doing what he does best.
In this post, he fact-checks a few of Trump’s most egregious claims when he spoke to the United Nations.
To me, what’s most striking about the speech is the fantasy world in which Trump has cocooned himself — with no modesty, he depicts himself as a brilliant peacemaker worthy of a Nobel Prize (or maybe seven), an economic genius and someone who is right about everything.
In my years as diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, I watched many speeches delivered during the U.N. General Assembly. When the stage was occupied by a tyrant, such as then-Venezuela president Hugo Chavez in 2006, the insults came fast and furious.
“The devil came here yesterday, and it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of,” Chavez declared, referring to President George W. Bush.
Well, Chavez doesn’t hold a candle to Donald Trump, who in today’s bombastic speech managed to denounce leaders — once among America’s closest allies — concerned about refugees and climate change and even question the U.N.’s existence. Predictions about climate change “were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes,” Trump fumed.
Of course, much of what he says is false. Here’s just an inkling of the false claims he made to other world leaders.
“We are rapidly reversing the economic calamity we inherited from the previous administration, including ruinous price increases and record-setting inflation, inflation like we’ve never had before.”
Nope. Inflation peaked in 2022, largely because of supply chain issues after the pandemic, and it was far from the worst inflation in U.S. history (or Trump’s lifetime). Two months before the 2024 election, the Economist magazine published a cover story declaring that the U.S. economy was “the envy of the world.”
“Energy costs are down, gasoline prices are down, grocery prices are down, mortgage rates are down, and inflation has been defeated. The only thing that’s up is the stock market, which just hit a record high. Fact, it hit a record high 48 times in the last short period of time.”
Not quite. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has hit seven highs this year. Grocery prices are increasing and mortgage rates have been generally higher in 2025 than 2024. Gas prices have declined slightly but electricity has gone up.
“Workers’ wages are rising at the fastest pace in more than 60 years, and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
Too soon to say. This is based on a misleading Treasury Dept chart that looks only at the December-May period. In fact, growth stalled in June and July.
“In four years of President Biden, we had less than $1 trillion of new investment into the United States. In just eight months since I took office, we have secured commitments and money already paid for $17 trillion.”
This is made-up math that undercounts Biden’s numbers and inflates Trump’s numbers.
“In my first term, I built the greatest economy in the history of the world. We had the best economy ever, history of the world.”
False. Even before the pandemic sent the economy spiraling, Trump’s economy was not better than under Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton. As for best in the history of the world, how can a serious person even say that?
“Hard to believe, because if you look back just a year ago, it was millions and millions of people pouring in from all over the world, from prisons, from mental institutions; drug dealers.”
This is again fantasy. Some bad apples crossed the borders but millions from mental institutions and prisons?
“On the world stage, America is respected again like it has never been respected before. You think about two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, or one year ago, we were a laughingstock all over the world.”
False. By any objective measure, the United States has never been more isolated than under Trump’s current presidency. In a diplomatic defeat, the White House even could not head off a move by close allies, led by France, to recognize Palestine.
“Likewise, in a period of just seven months, I have ended seven unendable wars….No president or prime minister, and for that matter, no other country has ever done anything close to that, and I did it in just seven months. It’s never happened before.”
This number is dubious, as many fact checks have pointed out.
“I was too busy working to save millions of lives, that is, the saving and stopping of these wars.”
Not the whole story. By one estimate,165,000 adults and 344,000 children likely have died because of funding cuts from Trump’s closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“This [Russia-Ukraine] war would never have started if I were President. This was a war that should have never happened. It shows you what leadership is, what bad leadership can do to a country.”
Another fantasy. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Trump applauded Putin’s savvy, saying “this is genius.”
“Just a few years ago, reckless experiments overseas gave us a devastating global pandemic.”
This is still not proven, but Trump states it as an undisputed fact.
“The previous administration also lost nearly 300,000 children. Think of that. They lost more than 300,000 children, little children who were trafficked into the United States on the Biden watch, many of whom have been raped, exploited and abused and sold. Sold. Nobody talks about that. The fake news doesn’t write about it.”
False. The Biden administration did not lose 300,000 children. Trump is citing a figure that refers to children who were never given a date to appear in immigration court or missed an appearance — including during almost 2½ years of Trump’s first term. He then hypes it up with unverified claims of sex-trafficking.
“Energy is another area where the United States is now thriving like never before. We’re getting rid of the falsely named renewables. By the way, they’re a joke, they don’t work. They’re too expensive, they’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all of the time and they start to rust and rot.”
Trump hates wind power. He often imagines that if there is no wind, then homes lose electricity. That’s ridiculous. Wind turbines do not generate power when there’s no wind, but the power grid can handle this variability.
“Washington, D.C. was the crime capital of America. Now it’s a totally – after 12 days, it’s a totally safe city.”
Trump invents a problem, and then solves it. Crime was already falling when he sent in the National Guard. Trump likes to cite a 12-day homicide-free period, but in March there were 16 straight days without a homicide.
“In 1982, the executive director of the United Nations’ Environmental Program predicted that by the year 2000, climate change would cause a global catastrophe. He said that it will be irreversible as any nuclear holocaust would be. This is what they said at the United Nations. What happened? Here we are. Another UN official stated in 1989 that within a decade, entire nations could be wiped off the map by global warming. Not happening.”
Trump misquotes Noel Brown, then the director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program. In 1989, Noel Brown was quoted by the Associated Press as saying nations had to take action by 2000 or else the damage could be irreversible. He didn’t say nations would be underwater. At the time, UNEP was studying the effect of rising sea levels and the projections made at the time have held up well. Check out this 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning series in The Washington Post about the impact of extreme climate change.
“And I’m really good at predicting things, you know? They actually said during the campaign – they had a hat, the best-selling hat, ‘Trump was right about everything.’ And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.”
Noted without comment.
“Europe loses more than 175,000 people to heat deaths each year cause the costs are so expensive, you can’t turn on an air conditioner.”
This figure — which is correct — demonstrates the risks of climate change. Many European buildings are not fitted with air conditioning because it was not necessary until recently. Trump is apparently ignorant of that.
The New Republic tells the shameful story of Trump’s decision to fire Eric Siebert, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia for his failure to find evidence to indict New York State Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump has said repeatedly that he wants to bring retribution on his enemies. His Attorney General Pam Bondi has protected and obliged him, not only by not releasing the unredacted Epstein files, but by firing any lawyers who worked on Trump investigations while he was out of office.
Trump is determined to prosecute Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, James Comey, and Adam Schiff.
He assigned Erik Siebert, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, the job of prosecuting Letitia James. Trump hoped to get her criminally prosecuted for mortgage fraud, for having obtained a mortgage on a vacation home, getting a favorable rate by claiming it as her home. Unfortunately, the case fell apart when evidence emerged that she had not claimed her second home as her primary residence.
Trump was furious at Siebert.
Siebert announced that he had resigned since the President didn’t want him. Trump quickly contradicted him and said Siebert had not resigned, he was fired. Trump promptly announced a replacement, a conservative Republican, Mary “Maggie” Cleary.
Just last night, Trump expressed his frustration that there had not yet been indictments of his enemies.
The New Republic wrote before Siebert’s ouster:
Trump is set to remove Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, for being faithful to facts, evidence, and guidelines governing good prosecutorial conduct, rather than fully corrupting his office to target Trump’s enemies.
That’s not a rhetorical cheap shot. It’s what Trump is actually doing, per ABC:
President Donald Trump is expected to fire the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after his office was unable to find incriminating evidence of mortgage fraud against New York Attorney General Letitia James, according to sources.
Federal prosecutors in Virginia had uncovered no clear evidence to prove that James had knowingly committed mortgage fraud when she purchased a home in the state in 2023, ABC News first reported earlier this week, but Trump officials pushed U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert to nevertheless bring criminal charges against her, according to sources.
Nixon tried to hide his plots against his enemies. Trump says the quiet parts out loud.
What are they guilty of? Criticizing Trump and–in the case of Schiff and James– trying to hold him accountable.
Scott Maxwell is my favorite opinion writer at The Orlando Sentinel. He always makes sense, in a state led by a Governor and Leguslature that make no sense at all.
In this column, he asks a straightforward question: Why is there no accountability for school vouchers? Why are taxpayers shelling out money for substandard schools? Why is money diverted from public schools to pay for schools where the curriculum is based on the Bible, not facts?
Maxwell writes:
Florida recently joined about a dozen states in passing new rules that say participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, can’t use their vouchers on junk food.
I think that makes sense to most people. This program, after all, is supposed to provide “nutrition” to people in need, most of whom are children, elderly or people with disabilities.
Basically, if taxpayers are providing $330 a month for basic food needs, that money shouldn’t be used on Red Bull and Oreos.
So now let’s take that a step further.
Taxpayer money also shouldn’t be used to send students to the junk-food equivalent of school — places that hire “teachers” without degrees, use factually flawed curriculum or that hand out A’s to every kid, regardless of what they actually learn, just to make their parents feel better.
Just like with food stamps, taxpayers have a right to know that the money they’re providing for schools is actually funding a quality education.
Yet in Florida that is not the case. Here, the voucher-school system is the Wild West with a lack of accountability and scary things funded with your tax dollars.
The Orlando Sentinel has documented this mess for years through its “Schools without Rules” investigation that found taxpayer-funded voucher schools where:
• “Teachers” lacked degrees or any kind of basic teaching certification
• Finances were so disastrous that schools actually shut down in the middle of the school year, stranding families and students
• Science classes taught students that dinosaurs roamed the earth alongside man, and history lessons claimed slavery and segregation weren’t really all that bad
• Administrators refused to admit students with disabilities or who had gay parents
• Parents filed complaints that included “Cleaning lady substituting for teacher,” “They don’t provide lunch and they don’t even have a place to eat” and “I don’t see any evidence of academics”
I don’t care how pro-school choice you are, tax dollars shouldn’t fund that kind of nonsense.
Some of these fly-by-night schools set up in strip malls seem to thrive because they tell parents what they want to hear — that their kids who were struggling in public schools magically became straight-A students at voucher schools with little to no standards or legitimate measures of success.
Well, that’s the educational equivalent of junk food. And taxpayers wouldn’t fund that kind of nonsense if the state enacted basic accountability measures.
Namely, all voucher-eligible schools should be required to:
• Publish graduation rates and nationally accepted test scores
• Hire teachers who are certified or at least have a college degree
• Disclose all the curriculum being taught
• Ban discrimination
Most good schools already do this. Think about it: what kind of reputable school wouldn’t agree to hire qualified teachers? Or wouldn’t want the public to see what kind of test scores their students produce?
If you want to send your kid to a school that’s unwilling to clear those ground-level hurdles, you shouldn’t expect taxpayers to fund it.
Similarly, if you want to run a school that refuses to serve kids in wheelchairs or who are gay, you shouldn’t fund your discrimination with money that belongs to the people against whom you’re discriminating.
In Florida, some of the worst voucher schools are faith-based. But so are some of the best. Parents and taxpayers deserve to see the difference — the test scores that show whether students are actually learning.
Many faith-based schools embrace science and history. But some try to replace proven facts with their own beliefs or opinions, using “biology” books that claim evolution data is false and “history” books that try to put sunny spins on slavery and segregation.
The people who defend — and profit off — Florida’s unregulated voucher system usually cite “freedom” and “parental rights” as a justification for unfettered choice. But you know good and well that virtually every other taxpayer-funded system has sensible guardrails.
You can’t take Medicaid money to a witch doctor or a psychic “healer.” And just like we don’t give parents the “choice” to use SNAP vouchers to buy their kids Snicker bars, they don’t deserve the “freedom” to take money meant to provide a quality education to a school that can prove it’s providing one.
Basic transparency and accountability measures are needed for any program to be effective. So whenever you hear anyone protesting them, you have to wonder what it is they don’t want you to see.
I seldom recommend a blog that requires payment. Here is an exception: Glenn Kessler. He served for many years as the Fact Checker for The Washington Post. He is remarkably good as a fact checker. After many years, he left The Post and started his own blog, as so many other journalists have done. He is a member of the International Society of Factcheckers. He relies on facts, not opinion. Consider subscribing. He has my stamp of approval.
Kessler recently started a series about Trump’s long history of bullshitting. As he explains here, there is a difference between lying and bullshit.
Kessler writes:
This is the first in a series of Substack essays looking at Trump’s bullshit. Future installments will be available to paid subscribers.
Twenty years ago this month, the late Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt published his seminal work On Bullshit, which argued that bullshit was worse than lying. His point was that a liar knows the truth and deliberately tries to hide or distort it, while a bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all — they care only about the impression they make.
When Donald Trump emerged on the political stage in 2015, Frankfurt wrote in Time magazine that Trump was the epitome of the bullshit artist he had identified a decade earlier.
“Trump freely offers extravagant claims about his own talents and accomplishments,” Frankfurt said. “He maintains, for example, that he has the greatest memory in the world. This is farcically unalloyed bullshit.”
When I managed The Fact Checker for The Washington Post, readers constantly asked: Why rely only on Pinocchio ratings? Why don’t you call Trump a liar?
I thought “liar” was a conversation stopper — it would be my judgment that he lied. With Trump, it’s hard to tell. He might actually believe some of the stuff he says, or has convinced himself it’s true.
The one time I clearly labeled a lie was when I had convincing evidence. Trump had insisted he knew nothing about hush-money payments to silence alleged paramours before he was elected president. Then his former attorney released a recording of Trump discussing an arrangement with the National Enquirer to pay $150,000 to one woman. Trump was caught on tape, so there was no doubt Trump had lied.
But, following Frankfurt’s theory, focusing only on Trump’s lies obscures a deeper danger to American society. As a bullshitter, Trump doesn’t care whether what he says reflects reality. He says whatever serves his momentary purpose, often contradicting himself without hesitation or shame. This indifference to truth makes Trump’s bullshit more insidious than lies.
Trump is the dominant political figure of the past decade — perhaps of our lifetimes. Tens of millions of Americans support his policies, or at least disdain the policies of his Democratic opponents. In the last election, he narrowly won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. He views those victories as a mandate for a reordering of the federal government, with an unchallenged executive wielding vast power.
The danger is that Trump’s bullshit has become woven into the fabric of American life. Many citizens now struggle to discern reality from spin. Was January 6 a violent attack on democracy — or a peaceful protest demonized by the media? Was Joe Biden legitimately elected — or did Democrats steal the presidency in the greatest fraud in U.S. history?
Trump bullshits to construct an alternative reality — one that almost half the country has accepted as fact. He has been aided by the balkanization of American society, where people live in blue or red zones and often absorb information that confirms what they already believe. Social media, unfiltered and often partisan, has replaced legacy media as a source of information.
Trump’s handling of the Covid pandemic in his first term was disastrous, with the exception of producing vaccines in record time. Yet Americans seemed to erase that period from memory. Thanks to Trump’s relentless bullshit during his first term about having created the “greatest economy in history” — in reality, it was on the brink of recession when the pandemic struck — many Americans retained halcyon memories of Trump’s economic policies, especially once inflation soared in the pandemic’s aftermath.
I often wondered how, if Trump had been re-elected in 2020, he would have explained the runaway inflation. I can only guess, but in any case, he would have spouted bullshit. Most economists agree Biden’s policies added some inflationary pressures on the margins, but pandemic-related supply-chain issues were mostly responsible.
In his second term, Trump has weaponized his bullshit. He is surrounded by lackeys who echo and defend his untruths.
No accurate damage estimate was available when Trump in June declared Iranian nuclear weapons sites had been obliterated. So when he made the statement he was bullshitting. In previous administrations, the results of such an attack might have received positive spin from unnamed officials, but since Trump is never wrong, once he puts it in his own words, the rest of government must twist its findings to conform with Trump’s claim.
Sometimes Trump gets lucky, and his bullshit turns out to be true. But more often than not, he just pretends he was right even when he was wrong.
Trump a few weeks ago fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because job-growth estimates were revised downward — a common occurrence, especially if an economy is stumbling. Trump claimed the BLS director had manipulated the figures because she was a Biden appointee. That was bullshit. The BLS director cannot manipulate the job numbers, which are derived from surveys conducted by professionals many rungs below in the Labor Department. Yet Trump’s bullshit now threatens to erode faith in the accuracy of federal data.
This week provided another example. Trump, desperate to win a Nobel Peace Prize ever since Barack Obama did, keeps claiming he ended six wars in six months. This is, of course, exaggerated, as numerous fact checks have documented. But Trump took it a step further when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders visited the Oval Office and Trump explained to reporters why he had dropped his demand for a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war.
“If you look at the six deals that I settled this year, they were all at war. I didn’t do any ceasefires,” Trump said.
That was bullshit. At least three of the conflicts on Trump’s “six wars” list were halted with ceasefires. But Trump needed to explain why he folded on his demand for an immediate ceasefire — embraced by Ukraine — in the face of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s charm offensive in Alaska last week.
So he just invented bullshit on the spot. The consequence is that Russia feels no pressure to end the war and can continue shelling Ukrainian cities. More people will die.
As part of this Substack, I intend to write a series of essays that examine specific examples of Trump’s bullshit and the consequences. I will likely start with Trump’s claim that he was a self-made business success — so central to the myth that carried him into office — but I also welcome suggestions from readers. Future posts on this theme will be limited to paid subscribers, so please consider signing up.
Trump’s central tactic is saturation — flood the zone with bullshit until the truth becomes impossible to locate. I intend to create a record of what happened before it’s lost in a storm of revisionism and propaganda.
To open the next Glenn Kessler fact-checks, become a subscriber.
Mercedes Schneider reviews Kristen Buras’ new book about a Black high school that was closed against the wishes of the community it served. The book is What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans School (2025, Beacon Press). Buras describes a school whose teachers went beyond the call of duty to help their students. If you care about education, if you care about social justice, you should read this book. I did not post the review in full, so please open the link to finish reading.
Mercedes Schneider writes:
I was born in 1967 in Chalmette, Louisiana (St. Bernard Parish), a suburb of New Orleans so close to the city that is is the actual site of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans.
I did not know that my father moved to Chalmette in the mid-1950s as part of the “white flight” from New Orleans.
I did not know why the St. Bernard-Orleans Parish line was so starkly white on the St. Bernard side and black on the Orleans side.
I did not know that the black teachers at my all-white elementary and middle schools were part of an effort for local officials to dodge federal mandates to racially integrate the schools (as in integrating the student body).
(I do remember seeing what I think was one black student in the special education, self-contained classroom of my elementary school– such an unusual, remarkable event that it puzzled my young mind to see him as a student assistant in the cafeteria, and the moment remains clearly in my memory to this day.)
I did not know that when I moved to a more rural section of St. Bernard Parish as I started high school that the African-American residents “down the road” knew full well of the dangers of trying to reside in certain sections of the parish (namely, Chalmette and Arabi).
I did not know that the school-superintendent uncle of one of my favorite teachers tried circa 1961 to create an “annex school” near the Arabi-New Orleans city line in order to enable white parents in the city to avoid racial integration by using school vouchers from New Orleans to enroll their children in an all-white public school just across the parish line.
I did not know that the proliferation of parochial schools in New Orleans was fueled by white flight from the New Orleans public schools.
I did not know that the reason I attended an all-girls public middle- and high school was for local officials to try to sham-integrate the St. Bernard public schools but to keep “those black boys away from our white girls.”
There’s a lot that I did not know and did not begin to learn until I was in my twenties and started asking questions.
But there were a lot of lessons that many white adults in my life tried to instill in me, lessons that indeed needed some serious questioning:
“You know property values will drop if the blacks start moving into a neighborhood.”
“It is better for a white woman to have a physically-abusive white boyfriend or husband than a black one, even if he does treat her well.”
“Interracial marriage is cause for a family disowning a child.”
“The city is a wreck because blacks are lazy and destroy everything.”
As I began reading about New Orleans officials’ cross-generational efforts to obliterate the black middle class in New Orleans (by, for example, by destroying multiple black owned businesses in order to build both the Desire housing project in 1956 and construct Interstate 10 in 1966), I felt like I had been lied to for decades– and my views as a white child and young adult repeatedly manipulated in order to purposely cement in me a sense of white superiority that no amount of personal maturity would ever shake.
Nevertheless, I am happy to say that such twisted, misplaced superiority is indeed and forever shaken in me and shown to be the mammoth lie that it is– the very lie that happens to fuel the white saviors who would impose themselves on black communities– including the center of the community:
The community school.
The community should be the final word on its schools, and when it is, those schools are successful, even in the face of racially-imposed hardship and intentional, multi-generational deprivation of basic resources, including physical space, current textbooks, and even ready supplies of toilet paper.
Such is the story of George Washington Carver High School in New Orleans– a school created as part of a school complex and housing project and build in New Orleans, Louisiana, to intentionally be a segregated school despite its opening post-Brown vs. Board of Education.
In her book, What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans School (2025, Beacon Press), Dr. Kristen Buras offers to readers a detailed history and daily life of G. W. Carver High School in New Orleans, from its inception to its white-savior closure in 2005, post-Katrina, when the state of Louisiana refused to grant the returning Carver community a charter to operate their own school. Buras details what no pro-charter, education reformer discussed at any length as regards traditionally-black New Orleans public schools: the repeated, intentional, multi-generational, systematic fiscal neglect of both the schools and the black community in New Orleans.
In contrast, Buras not only discusses these issues; she brings them to life through her numerous interviews with Carver faculty and staff, a life that begins even before Carver High School opened its doors in the 1958-59 school year.
Right out of the gate, the community served by Carver High School– families residing in the Desire Housing Project– had to face the reality that the project homes were poorly constructed and were starting to fall apart due to a lack of concrete foundations on swampland, no less.
Indeed, the location of what was known as the “Carver Complex” was originally a Maroon colony for escaped African slaves in a backswamp area that 1973 Carver graduate describes as “really not made for residential living.”
Separate was not equal, but to the Carver community, it was theirs, and in the midst of profound racism, the faculty and staff at Carver High devoted themselves to their students and the students’ families, who also happened to be their neighbors.
What speaks loudly to the teacher commitment to Carver High students, as Buras notes, is their multi-decade commitment. Despite being chronically underfunded and under-maintained across its almost-fifty years pre-Katrina, Carver High School had a very low teacher turnover.
In What We Stand to Lose, readers are introduced to the precise and disciplined teachings of music teacher Yvonne Busch, who was known for offering free music lessons during summer break. Former student Leonard Smith produced a documentary about Busch, who retired in 1983 after a 32-years at Carver. We learn of the 38-year career of social studies teacher, Lenora Condoll, who wanted so much for her students to experience the larger world that she organized fundraisers to take her students on Close-Up trips to Washington, DC, and who, on a practical note, showed students that they could make a dressy wardrobe out of a few basic items, including her “black, cashmere skirt.” We meet Enos Hicks, head coach of track and football and athletic director once Carver High opened. By that time, Hicks had been teaching for twenty years already. When Hicks’ students saw “his bag of medals” for track and field, they believed that they, too, could excel and receive their own medals.
These are real teachers whose legacy is undeniable among Carver alumni. They inspired their students to hold their heads high in self-respect despite the cultural pressures and dangers to be pressed into a Whites Only mold of “forever less-than.”
Carver High School was at most 30 minutes from my own high school. I had no idea such quality against the odds was so nearby.
To continue reading the review, open the link.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrote an article for The New York Times calling for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign. Since Sanders was chairman of the Senate Committee overseeing HHS, he argues with facts, not just indignation.
He writes:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign.
Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.
This week, Mr. Kennedy pushed out the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after less than one month on the job because she refused to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous policies. Four leading officials at C.D.C. resigned the same week. One of those officials said Mr. Kennedy’s team asked him to “change studies that have been settled in the past” apparently to fit Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views. This is not Making America Healthy Again.
Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, Secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts.
It is absurd to have to say this in 2025, but vaccines are safe and effective. That, of course, is not just my view. Far more important, it is the overwhelming consensus of the medical and scientific communities.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the country’s largest professional association of pediatricians, representing over 67,000 doctors who treat our children every day, calls immunizations “one of the greatest public health achievements,” which prevents tens of thousands of deaths and millions of cases of disease.
The American Medical Association, the largest professional association of physicians and medical students, representing over 270,000 doctors along with 79 leading medical societies, recently said that vaccines for flu, R.S.V. and Covid-19 are “the best tools to protect the public against these illnesses and their potentially serious complications.”
The World Health Organization, an agency with some of the most prominent medical experts around the globe, recently noted that over the past 50 years, vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives and reduced the infant deaths by 40 percent.
Against the overwhelming body of evidence within medicine and science, what are Secretary Kennedy’s views? He has claimed that autism is caused by vaccines, despite more than a dozen rigorous scientific studies involving hundreds of thousands of children that have found no connection between vaccines and autism.
He has called the Covid-19 vaccines the “deadliest” ever made despite findings cited by the W.H.O. that Covid shots saved over 14 million lives throughout the world in 2021 alone.
He has ridiculously questioned whether the polio vaccine has killed more people than polio itself did even though scientists have found that the vaccine has saved 1.5 million lives and prevented around 20 million people from becoming paralyzed since 1988.
He has absurdly claimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”
Who supports Secretary Kennedy’s views? Not credible scientists and doctors. One of his leading “experts” that he cites to back up his bogus claims on autism and vaccines had his medical license revoked and his study retracted from the medical journal that published it.
Many of his supporters are from Children’s Health Defense — the anti-vaccine group he founded and profited from — and a small circle of loyalists that have spread misinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories on vaccines for years.
The reality is that Secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of H.H.S., he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.
What will this mean for the health and well-being of the American people?
Short term, it will be harder for Americans to get lifesaving vaccines. Already, the Trump administration has effectively taken away Covid vaccines from many healthy younger adults and kids, unless they fight their way through our broken health care system. This means more doctor’s visits, more bureaucracy and more people paying higher out-of-pocket costs — if they can manage to get a vaccine at all.
Covid is just the beginning. Mr. Kennedy’s next target may be the childhood immunization schedule, the list of recommended vaccines that children receive to protect them from diseases like measles, chickenpox and polio. The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm.
Two years ago, when I was the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, I held a hearing with the major government officials responsible for protecting us from a new pandemic, including the head of the C.D.C. Without exception, every one of these agency heads said that, while they could not predict the exact date, there will be a future pandemic and we must be much better prepared for it than we are today.
Unfortunately, Secretary Kennedy’s actions are making a worrisome situation even worse by defunding the research that could help us prepare for the next pandemic. This month, he canceled nearly $500 million in research for the kinds of vaccines that helped us stop the Covid pandemic. At the same time, Mr. Kennedy is cutting funding to states to prepare and respond to future outbreaks of infectious diseases. This is unacceptable.
America’s health care system is already dysfunctional and wildly expensive, and yet the Trump administration will be throwing an estimated 15 million people off their health insurance through a cut of over $1 trillion to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. This cut is also expected to result in the closing of or the decline in services at hundreds of nursing homes, hospitals and community health centers. As a result of cuts to the Affordable Care Act, health insurance costs will soar for millions of Americans. That is not Making America Healthy Again.
Secretary Kennedy is putting Americans’ lives in danger, and he must resign. In his place, President Trump must listen to doctors and scientists and nominate a health secretary and a C.D.C. director who will protect the health and well-being of the American people, not carry out dangerous policies based on conspiracy theories.
Diane Ravitch's blog 