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National Parks Scrub Historically Accurate Signs and Exhibits that Offend Trump

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2026 //
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In March 2025, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In reality, the order directed federal sites not to “restore truth and sanity,” but to replace them with lies and pablum. Park officials were told to remove signs and exhibits that “denigrated” American history and prominent Americans. Anything that cast events and people in U.S. history in a negative light was to be removed, even if the events depicted were factual and true.

What followed, of course, were efforts to scrub federal museums, parks, and historic sites of accurate information.

Fortunately, some federal employees built a website to catalog the reactions to the executive order. This article by Karin Brulliard and Brady Dennis in The Washington Post describes what happened.

At the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Mississippi, staff members asked the Trump administration to review an entire exhibit on the Black teen’s brutal 1955 killing by White men and his mother’s decision to publicize it — though the park’s staff warned that its removal would leave the site “completely devoid of interpretation.”

At Arches National Park in Utah, park managers wondered whether a sign about the damage that graffiti and invasive species leave on the iconic red rock landscape violates a Trump directive to focus solely on America’s natural beauty.

And at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia, staff members have asked federal officials to decide whether a document that describes an abolitionist’s murder by a mob might “denigrate the murderers.”

These displays and materials are among several hundred that managers have flagged at hundreds of national park locations since last summer in response to administration orders to scrub sites of “partisan ideology,” descriptions that “disparage” Americans, or materials that stray from a focus on the nation’s “beauty, abundance, or grandeur.” The submissions were compiled in an internal government database and reviewed by The Washington Post, which confirmed its authenticity with current federal employees.

The database does not make clear which of the plaques, maps, films and books ultimately will be removed or recast by the Interior Department, though some have already been axed. But the submissions provide a sweeping portrait of the scope of President Donald Trump’s bid to reconsider how national park sites address the historic legacy of racism and sexism, LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, and pollution — or whether to acknowledge them at all.

A group describing itself as “civil servants on the front lines” posted the database on two public websites Monday, saying in an attached note that it did so to show Americans how the administration is “trying to use your public lands to erase history and undermine science.”

Asked for comment, the Interior Department issued a statement Monday saying that the “draft, deliberative internal documents” in the database “are not a representation of final action taken.” The statement, from spokesperson Charlotte Taylor, asserted that the documents were “edited before being inappropriately and illegally released to the media in ways that misrepresented the status of this effort.”

The department did not respond to questions about the status or process for the reviews, nor about specific examples in the submissions.

The tone and content of the materials described and submitted to Interior by park managers vary widely, reflecting a mix of careful attempts to obey administration orders, confusion about what might violate them and, at times, apparent skepticism about the entire endeavor.

Staff members identified a brochure at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, in North Carolina, for “possible disparaging of a prominent American” because it mentions that aviator and onetime Smithsonian Institution secretary Samuel Langley failed to achieve flight. A park staffer at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona asks for clarification about whether displays on California condors’ return from the brink of extinction disparage hunters “or tell a success ??

Several submissions ask for reviews of book covers, book chapters and entire books on sale at gift shops, including “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” an autobiography by abolitionist Harriet Jacobs.

“They are mostly on slavery and the black experience in Washington DC as well as a few on Lincoln’s assassination,” wrote a park official at Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site. “Not sure they all disparage historical figures, but they do cover dark periods in American history.”

Another inquiry came from the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, where employees shared a list of books on the third president. “I am not sure if they really disparage Thomas Jefferson, but they do aknowledge [sic] that he had children with Sally Hemings,” the inquiry notes.

Bill Wade , executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, said the breadth of the submissions revealed the many hours of work that Trump’s order imposed on already overextended park employees, who “probably should’ve been doing other things most of us believe would be more important.”

The exercise, Wade added, runs counter to the reasons many National Park Service employees gravitated toward their work in the first place. “Park rangers everywhere, and all park employees for that matter, have been passionate about telling true stories about history, and about science,” said Wade, a former superintendent of Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. “It’s a real affront to the values that rangers have.”

Others have embraced Trump’s effort, including Sen. Jim Banks (R-Indiana), who last summer wrote to top officials at Interior and the Park Service over concerns about “woke” projects he said appeared to violate the president’s order.

“The President’s executive order rightfully opposes a decades-long effort by our institutions to usurp American history with an ideology-based narrative that casts America’s founding and history in a negative light,” Banks wrote at the time.

In nearly a year since Trump’s order, National Park sites have responded by removing exhibits that address slavery and the challenges overcome by minority and marginalized groups, as well as signs about the science of climate change.

But there also has been sustained pushback.
Last month, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ordered the Trump administration to restore displays that discussed slavery at a site in Philadelphia where George Washington lived as president.

U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania compared the displays’ removal earlier this year to the mind control employed by the government in George Orwell’s novel “1984.”

Rufe’s ruling — issued on Presidents’ Day — granted an immediate injunction, requiring the reinstallation of 34 educational panels removed in January by the Park Service from a site at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.

Two weeks ago, a coalition of scientific, preservation and historical groups sued the Trump administration over changes that already have been made, arguing that the removal of information about civil rights, climate change and other topics at multiple national parks amounts to illegal censorship.

That lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Massachusetts, argues that Interior officials ignored well-established principles and legal requirements when seeking to overhaul information presented at national parks.

Democratic members of Congress have also sharply criticized the effort, which they describe as a bid to whitewash the American story. “It is absurd that any president would go down this road of trying to retrofit history and culture in their own image instead of getting actual historians to tell us these stories,” said Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee.

The hundreds of submissions reviewed by The Post run the gamut, from signs and exhibits about slavery and the civil rights movement, to how the effects of climate change already are altering American landscapes, to how the nation remembers Indigenous people who inhabited lands long before there was a United States…

At Cape Hatteras, staff members asked whether information on the effect of light pollution on turtles might be “disparaging against park users.” The park also pointed out a Junior Ranger booklet’s mention of female pirates in the 17th and 18th centuries dressing like men to hide among ship crews. “Please review for appropriateness,” the park’s staff asked. At the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington, staff members who surveyed bookshop items submitted pins, magnets and mugs that read: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

But many of the submissions involve even weightier topics in the nation’s history.
At Cane River Creole National Historical Park in Louisiana, park staff members flagged a planned exhibit about the history of the train depot that is used as the site’s visitor center. The depot was still segregated when it ended rail service in 1965, and the exhibit relied on extensive consultation and oral history collection with Black community members, according to a former park employee who worked on the project.

“For the community, it means for the first time having that story being told in an honest way — and actually just being told,” said the former employee, who was laid off from the Park Service last year.

It is now unclear whether the exhibit will be installed

At Harpers Ferry, site of abolitionist John Brown’s raid in 1859, an employee singled out a document that describes how a “mob murders” an abolitionist. “Does this denigrate the murderers?” the employee wrote. “We can reword to: ‘Abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy is murdered for his views.’”

A Civil War battlefield driving tour map was also flagged for its inclusion of direct quotes about the cause of the war from secession documents and Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. The quotes cite slavery as the cause.

“True, but is this considered cherry picking and denigrating southerners?” the park’s staff wrote.
Those quotes were used to provide context and avoid downplaying the role of slavery in the Confederate rebellion, according to a former Harpers Ferry media specialist who inserted them.

Changing the documents and the map would amount to “pulling us back into a position of supporting White supremacy and supporting the ‘Lost Cause’ narrative and erasing the importance of African American history,” said the specialist, who retired last year and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Along the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, staffers highlighted signs and literature that discuss segregation in the South and how “non-violent civil rights demonstrators” crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on “Bloody Sunday” in 1965 “were attacked” by armed officers.

“While these statements are historically accurate and supported by firsthand accounts,” staffers noted in the submissions, “they may be perceived as disparaging by individuals who are less familiar with the history of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Amid the numerous materials submitted for review at Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial, just across the Potomac River from the District, was a line in a Junior Ranger book that reads, “In 1829, Robert E. Lee promised to serve in the Army and protect the United States. In 1861, he broke his promise and fought for slavery.”

Staffers at Arches National Park raised questions about a sign devoted to the effects of human-caused climate change already visible in the park. “The park seeks guidance on whether this entire panel is within the scope of Secretary’s Order 3431 and should be covered or removed,” the submission reads.

In other places, it appears that park officials are wrestling with whether entire exhibits — or even entire sites — somehow conflict with Trump’s order to “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.

At the Mississippi site commemorating Till, the very place deals with one of the grimmest examples of racial violence in the United States.
Without this exhibit to share the difficult Till story, the new NPS site would be almost completely devoid of interpretation,” an employee notes in an inquiry shared with The Post. “The exhibit emphasizes ‘progress of the American people’ toward a better future.”

Wade said he was encouraged by the ruling that ordered the Trump administration to restore displays that discussed slavery at the site in Philadelphia. Wade’s group was also among the plaintiffs in the recently filed lawsuit seeking to halt the administration’s changes and deletions at national parks, saying they amount to censorship.

But if such legal avenues ultimately fail, Wade said, he suspects the push to alter the telling of history at many sites will continue.

“The impact is that the visitors are just not going to get true, accurate stories,” he said. “I just think the public ought to be really concerned about that.”

In some places, such as the preserved home of civil rights activist Medgar Evers or the Manzanar National Historic Site in California, where the U.S. government once incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II, the entire site exists to commemorate painful moments in the nation’s history.

“If you take away the stories, you take away the purpose of the park itself,” Wade said.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Racism

Jan Resseger: Trump Administration Rolls Back Civil Rights Laws

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2026 //
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The Trump administration never ceases to amaze with its far-rightwing policies and its uncontrolled militarism. Trump ran as an anti-war candidate, yet here we are in another war in the Middle East. Trump said no one has done more for Black peoples than himself, yet Jan Resseger shows that he is reversing civil rights policies in every arena. To no one’s surprise, Trump appointed Harmeet K. Dhillon, a lawyer who has litigated against civil rights policies, to lead the Justice Department’s Office for Civil Rights.

Resseger writes:

At the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, Rachel Perera disdains the Trump administration’s, “unprecedented effort to repurpose federal anti-discrimination law to reverse longstanding efforts to promote equality in public life… Federal laws prohibiting racial and sex-based discrimination are being used to withhold federal funding from schools  and colleges without even the facade of an investigation… (C)olleges that didn’t crack down on student protests against the war in Gaza are being punished for ‘antisemitism’; school districts with transgender-inclusive policies are being denounced for sex-based discrimination against girls; and schools and colleges pursuing racial equity… are being accused of racial discrimination against white and Asian students. All the while, legitimate complaints of discrimination are piling up (at the Office for Civil Rights).”

Vague federal threats to scrub hiring practices and programming said to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” have produced a McCarthy-era level of fear that has undone academic freedom, undermined hiring practices, threatened the jobs of school teachers, college professors, and even university presidents, and resulted in significant cuts to federal dollars that we all count on to pay for essential programs in the nation’s public schools and colleges and universities.

Last week Laura Meckler and a team of Washington Post reporters surveyed the impact of Trump administration policies on university hiring practices: “When President Donald Trump took office last year, America’s research universities were in the midst of an aggressive quest to hire more Black and Latino professors. All but three of the 187 most prominent schools had made public commitments…. Now most of these efforts are on ice or abandoned…. Of the 184 universities that made faculty pledges at least 108 have fully or partially rolled them back…. In 2020, the University of Virginia vowed to double the number of underrepresented faculty… ‘We must be a community that is diverse, inclusive, and equitable,’ Jim Ryan, then-president of U-Va., wrote at the time. ‘Diverse because talent exists all around the globe and within every demographic, and because the very best ideas emerge from the consideration of diverse viewpoints and perspectives.’  Under pressure from the Trump administration and the state, U-VA. ended its DEI programs last year…. Ryan resigned.”

Meckler and her colleagues describe how slowly racial and ethnic diversity has increased among the faculty at American universities: “Before the concentrated push began, the share of Black and Hispanic professors at top research universities barely moved—inching up 1.7 percentage points between 2005 and 2015.  There was slightly more growth after the wave of university commitments. Between 2015 and 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, the share of Black and Hispanic professors increased by 3.1 percentage points. Absent focused diversity effort, faculties will remain overwhelmingly white, said Freeman Hrabowski, president emeritus of the University of Maryland at Baltimore County and a national leader on faculty recruitment. ‘People tend to choose people who look just like themselves,’ he said. ‘That’s just nature.’ “

While most job openings at the nation’s colleges and universities continue to be filled by white candidates, in a lawsuit that would have been unheard of a year ago, a white biologist, with legal representation from the America First Policy Institute (where Education Secretary Linda McMahon was formerly president of the board), recently sued Cornell University for violating the Civil Rights Act by favoring candidates of color and discriminating against him for being white. Meckler reports: “Colin Wright, the plaintiff, was a postdoctoral researcher… at the time. He said he was seeking an academic job and was well qualified for the tenure-track position that Cornell allegedly filled without ever posting the job publicly, as was required by university policy. Attorneys for the America First Policy Institute… contend that internal documents classified a list of candidates by race, ethnicity, disability status, and sexual orientation.”

The impact of the Trump administration’s rollback of civil rights protections is not limited to faculty hiring. In late January, the NY Times‘ Sarah Mervosh tracked a lawsuit filed by “the 1776 Foundation, a group that opposes racial preferences in education,” against the Los Angeles City School District: “A decades-old policy meant to combat the harms of school segregation in Los Angeles was challenged in federal court by a conservative group that says the policy discriminates against white students. The policy dates back to the 1970s, when the Los Angeles school district… was under a court order to desegregate and improve conditions for students of color… The plaintiffs argue that students at schools with more white students receive ‘inferior treatment and calculated disadvantages’… A 2023 Supreme Court decision outlawing race-based affirmative action in college admissions has galvanized conservative groups and the Trump administration, which has pushed to apply the ruling beyond college admissions.”

Finally, there is the Trump administration’s fight with the nation’s universities and especially with Harvard, which has refused to capitulate to the President’s demands.  For refusing to cave in, Harvard University has reaped the Trump whirlwind. The conflict began as the Trump administration attempted to punish the university for failing to contain demonstrations during the war between Israel and Palestine. The Department of Education subsequently launched an attempt to force a number of universities to comply with the Trump administration’s redefinition of the meaning of the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard by insisting that it ban not just affirmative action in student admissions but also now eliminate all programs that promote ‘diversity, equity and inclusion.’ Several universities and a mass of public school districts have submitted to the President’s demands, but Harvard, so far, has stood firm.

The NY Times‘ Alan Blinder summarizes the Trump administration’s year-long attack on Harvard: “The Trump administration’s biggest target has been Harvard…. The dispute erupted after Harvard rejected Trump administration proposals, including one for the use of an outsider to audit ‘programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.’ The government also wanted Harvard to curb the power of its faculty and report international students who commit misconduct. The Trump administration almost immediately began cutting off billions in funds… Harvard sued the administration over the cuts. In September, a federal judge in Boston broadly ruled in Harvard’s favor, and research money is largely flowing again. The administration filed a notice of appeal in December. But the administration’s onslaught goes beyond research funding… Mr. Trump has also threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status. His administration has also tried repeatedly to bar the university from enrolling international students. A federal judge in Boston has blocked those efforts. In June, Harvard and the White House began discussing the possibility of a settlement… Harvard told the government that it is willing to spend $500 million… to go toward work force programs. But the Trump administration shifted its demands… demanding that $200 million be paid directly to the government.”

Last week in a pair of reports, here and here, a team of NY Times reporters covered the latest developments in the President’s attack on Harvard.  The Times reporters described what appeared perhaps to be Trump’s willingness to backtrack “on a major point in negotiations with Harvard, dropping his administration’s demand for a $200 million payment to the government in hopes of finally resolving the administration’s conflicts with the university.” The reporters added: “The White House’s concession comes amid sagging approval ratings for Mr. Trump, and as he faces outrage over immigration enforcement tactics and the shooting deaths of two Americans by federal agents in Minnesota.”  The president responded with outrage on Truth Social: “Strongly Antisemitic Harvard University has been feeding a lot of ‘nonsense’ to The Failing New York Times… We are now seeking One Billion Dollars in damages, and want nothing further to do, into the future, with Harvard University.”

No one believes the Trump administration is permanently backing off its attack on Harvard University and the Trump administration’s attack more broadly on equity, diversity, and academic freedom.  However, Harvard’s dogged refusal to capitulate to the Trump administration has proven a model for other university leaders who are realizing that conceding to the Trump administration’s demands erodes academic freedom, undermines their autonomy, undermines the rights of their faculty, and threatens programs that protect equity and inclusion among their students.

In late January the American Council on Education (ACE) joined 22 other national higher education associations to file “an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit supporting  Harvard University in its lawsuit challenging a Trump administration effort to bar international students from attending.”  The American Council on Education explains why it is urgently important to support Harvard University in this case:

“ACE and the other higher education associations focus on the extraordinary implications of the case for colleges and universities nationwide, not just Harvard. The brief argues that the First Amendment protects the autonomy of educational institutions to govern themselves free from unwarranted federal intrusion, and that this autonomy is essential to the nation’s academic, scientific, and civic interests… The (presidential) proclamation reflects an effort to punish a single institution for perceived viewpoints by leveraging immigration policy in a manner that would chill speech and academic decision-making across higher education… International students would remain eligible to enter the United states to study at any institution other than Harvard—underscoring, the associations argue, that the measure is punitive rather than regulatory in character… ACE and its co-signatories warn that allowing the proclamation to stand would have consequences far beyond this single case, creating a chilling effect on institutional governance, campus expression, and the free exchange of ideas. Colleges and universities, they argue, could face pressure to alter academic programs, research priorities, or campus policies to avoid becoming targets of similar executive action.”

Categories Civil Rights, Cruelty, Racism, Trump

Trump Nominates White Extremist for High-Level Post in State Department

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2026 //
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President Trump claims to be deeply concerned about anti-Semitism and discrimination against whites, both here and abroad. But he is persistently indifferent to racism directed towards people of color. He is keen to aid whites who suffer because of government programs intended to help people of color (DEI), but blind to historic and persistent racism directed at people who are Black and brown.

Trump’s racism showed when he nominated a man named Jeffrey Carl to be assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, Carl had served as a deputy assistant secretary of the interior in the first Trump administration. He has sterling academic credentials. But even some Republicans are unnerved by his views about race.

Carl is committed to the importance of protecting white identity. At his senate confirmation hearings, he explained his concerns about “white erasure.”

The New York Times reported, “After nervously rambling about white food and Black food, white music and Black music and white worship styles, Mr. Carl told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that a loss of a dominant white culture is weakening the country. That notion has become an intellectual framework animating much of what has been described as the New Right.“

Carl is “a proponent of ‘national conservatism,’ a movement that holds that American society lost its moorings when it drifted from a core power structure centered on the Christian white men who founded the nation and instead embraced diversity, multiculturalism and feminism…”

Mr. Carl has argued that white people should organize as a group to protect their rights.

“White Americans are increasingly second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded and in which, until recently, they were the overwhelming majority of the population,” he writes in his 2024 book, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart…”

Mr. Carl has also espoused the Great Replacement Theory, the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” white Americans with nonwhite immigrants.

Carl openly espouses views that are far out of the mainstream, although his confirmation might redefine the “mainstream.”

Civil rights organizations oppose Carl’s nomination. At the close of the Senate hearings, Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah said that he would not support Carl’s nomination.

We will keep an eye on this nomination to gauge the Republican party’s stance on the issues that Carl raises.

Categories Trump, Bigotry, Racism

What Motivates Trump?

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2026 //
23

Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for The NewYork Times, writes here about a question that has puzzled many observers: what motivates Trump? Some would say he ran the first time out of sheer egoism and the second time to stay out of jail. Or, he ran the first time because of his innate competitiveness and the second time because he figured out how to monetize the Oval Office.

Bouie has a different take.

He wrote:

What motivates Trump?

Not what motivates Trumpism, whatever that is. Not what motivates his MAGA supporters. Not what motivates the infrequent and marginal voters who delivered him his victories in 2016 and 2024.

No. What specifically motivates Donald J. Trump? What brought him into national politics? What drives him as a national political figure?

His allies say a love of country, but this is betrayed by his indifference to the nation’s ideals, traditions and symbols. It is unclear whether Trump has even read the Constitution, and there’s no evidence that he understands its history and significance to the nation he leads. (It would be unfair to ask whether he’s read the Declaration of Independence — we all know he hasn’t.)

The best way to understand the president’s motivations is to find him at his most unfiltered, which is to say, on social media, late at night. And Thursday night, Trump posted a video to his Truth Social account that depicted President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. The clip, which runs for roughly a minute and shows the Obamas at the end, is set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

I try to avoid superlatives in my writing, but there is simply no question that this is the most flagrant display of presidential racism since Woodrow Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” in the White House in 1915. And for a sense of the racism of Griffith’s film, recall that it both reinvigorated the Ku Klux Klan and gave the organization its modern iconography.

I doubt that Trump’s video — less a creative product than half-baked agitprop — will have the same effect. But it carries many of the same messages. It uses an old white supremacist trope to denigrate the Obamas and, by extension, every American who shares their racial background. It presents people of African descent as little removed from beasts, an insult used to great effect in “The Birth of a Nation,” as you can see in this clip from the film.

Initially, the White House defended the video as a joke. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

But then Republicans began to speak out. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate and the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, posted online.

Representative Mike Lawler, an otherwise stalwart Trump ally, said the video was “wrong and incredibly offensive.” Representative Michael Turner of Ohio decried the “racist images” as “offensive, heart breaking and unacceptable.”

Here, I should probably note that Barack and Michelle Obama are among the most popular political figures in the United States. Trump, on the other hand, is barely treading water with the public, and majorities of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. It makes sense, then, that some Republicans would use this as an opportunity to distance themselves from an unpopular incumbent.

Let’s walk back to where we started. What motivates Trump? The answer is simple: racism. You might also say ego and raw self-interest, but the two are connected. Racism, among other things, is a kind of chauvinism, a belief in one’s inherent superiority, based on nothing other than a meaningless accident of birth. It’s an ideology that papers over feelings of inadequacy, that tells you that — no matter what you have or have not accomplished in your life — you’re still better than someone, some group.

Let’s suppose you’re the spoiled son of a self-made man. Let’s suppose that, despite your flash and bravado, you’ve failed at virtually everything you’ve tried. You’re the laughingstock of polite society, a punchline for the privileged. You think you’re superior enough to be the president of the United States — the highest honor in your country — but the actual president is a man of humble origins, a minority of the kind your family didn’t even rent to when you were in the landlord business. And he is claiming power that rightfully belongs to you. He’s even mocking you, ridiculing you for all the world to see.

For years, a cottage industry of political observers has contorted itself to obscure and occlude the obvious. That regardless of what others see in him, Trump’s entire political career — from his embrace of birtherism to his hatred of birthright citizenship — cannot be understood outside the context of his bitter, deep-seated racism.

Trump is not profound. He has been the same person this whole time. The question is why so many others have refused to see what he has never bothered to hide.

Categories Racism, Trump

Nick Covington Interviews Me About My Memoirs

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2026 //
4

This is a terrific interview conducted by Nick Covington about my bio, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.

Please listen.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Democracy, Education Reform, Inequality, NCLB, Racism, Ravitch, Diane

Thom Hartmann: The ICE Raids are Not About Immigration Enforcement. They Are About Racial Control.

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2026 //
9

When Joe Rogan starts referring to the Trump regime as if they’re Nazis, you know ICE and the GOP have a problem. Yesterday, he said:

“Are we really going to be the Gestapo? Where’s your papers? Is that what we’ve come to?”

At the end of this month, funding for the Department of Homeland Security runs out. Congress is going to have to act and that makes this a very important moment, politically.

The attraction of ICE to white supremacists — and now their open appeal to racists in their recruiting messages — didn’t start with George W. Bush adopting the word “Homeland” on October 8, 2001, the first time it’d been publicly used by a mainstream politician in American history. It arguably started on September 5, 1934, with a speech by Rudolf Hess, introducing Adolf Hitler at the Nurnberg Rally.

I have a weird connection to that speech, and it’s always haunted me. For more than half of my life I’ve been a volunteer for a German-based international relief organization that was founded by Gottfried Müller, who’d been an intelligence officer in Hitler’s army until he was captured in Iran and spent virtually all of WWII in a prison camp. There, he had a conversion experience and dedicated his life to helping “the least of the least of this world, as Jesus taught us.”

Müller told me how he was there for that Nuremberg Rally, in which Hess introduced Hitler with the following speech:

“Danke irher Führung wird Deutschland sein Zeil erreichen. Heimat zu sein. Heimat zu sein für alle Deutschen der Welt. (“Thanks to your leadership, Germany will reach its goal: to be a homeland. A homeland to be for all Germans of the world.”)

This use of Heimat (“Homeland”) was intentional on the part of Hess and Hitler. “Homeland” suggested a racial identity, as Hitler noted in Mein Kampf when he speaks of the German people as a racial organism with the German land (Boden) and hereditarily German people (Volk) inseparable:

“The German Reich must gather together and protect all the racially valuable elements of Germandom, wherever they may be.” (Volume II, chapter 13)

As Herr Müller told me, Hitler wanted to create an identity that went beyond language and culture. He wanted to posit a pure “German race,” and have Germany be that race’s “homeland,” all so he could sell to the German people their own racial superiority and use that to justify exterminating others.

Throughout American history, our leaders have avoided that type of language:

— Thomas Paine wrote: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
— Abraham Lincoln said that our Founders had created: “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…”
— Woodrow Wilson used the word “democracy” instead of “homeland” during WWI: “The world must be made safe for democracy.”
— FDR simply used the name of our nation on December 7, 1941: “The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked…”

Across 220+ years, during revolution, civil war, global war, and even the attack on Pearl Harbor, American presidents systematically avoided homeland-style language that implied ancestral ownership, ethnic belonging, or insiders versus outsiders.

Instead, they used words like: republic, nation, people, citizens, democracy, and country to describe America. This wasn’t accidental: it was the core distinction between American civic nationalism, and 19th century European whites-only ethno-nationalism.

George W. Bush blew that all up when he announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. I immediately called it out, writing more than 20 years ago that using that word would lead America in a dark direction. 

And here we are.

ICE is now openly using white supremacist slogans, memes, and advertisements to recruit men who’re enthusiastic about chasing down Black and brown people. As the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project documents:

“The increase in white nationalist content [from ICE] appears to originate with a June 11, 2025 post. That day, DHS’ official X and Instagram accounts posted a graphic of Uncle Sam hammering up a sign with the caption: “Help your country … and yourself … REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS.” A hotline number for ICE accompanied the post.

“Mother Jones reported the doctored graphic of Uncle Sam originated from an X user called ‘Mr. Robert,’ who is associated with white nationalist content. Mr. Robert’s bio highlights the phrase: ‘Wake Up White Man.’

Since then, it’s been a nonstop barrage of white nationalist and Nazi rhetoric and symbology, as compiled by Dean Blundell.

Thanks to Dean Blundell for compiling these images

— Kristi Noem behind a podium with the words “One of ours. All of yours.” Malcolm Nance noted: 

“This is the order to kill all the people in the village of Lidice in Czech Republic when the sadist SS General Heydrich was ambushed and killed by the British SOE. THEY ORDERED 173 MEN MASSACRED. ALL WOMAN AND CHILDREN SENT TO AUSCHWITZ WITH THESE WORDS.”

— The US Department of Labor posting an image of George Washington with the words: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” an eerie echo of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Nation, One Leader).

— Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, who showed up in Minneapolis last week, photographed for the ICE/CPB website in nearly-full Nazi drag.

Others consistently feature white people with slogans or images appealing to a white supremacist or nationalist base: 

As political scientist Dr. Rachel Bitecofer noted in her excellent The Cycle newsletter:

“‘We’ll have our home again’ is the emotional core of Great Replacement ideology, the white nationalist belief system that frames demographic change as dispossession and recasts the nation as something that has been stolen and must be taken back. This is the same worldview that produced the chant ‘You will not replace us’ at Charlottesville. The only thing that has changed is who is now saying it. … 

“This ideology is not abstract. It has been articulated explicitly by mass shooters, embedded in white nationalist manifestos, and popularized by contemporary influencers who now operate openly in American political discourse. Figures like Nick Fuentes center their politics on the claim that the United States properly belongs to a single cultural and racial group, and that reclaiming it requires hierarchy, exclusion, and force.”

From Hess to Bush to Trump, here we are.

One of the regular themes of callers to my radio/TV show is the question:

“Are they hiding their faces behind masks so we can’t see that so many of these well-paid goons are open members of the Klan, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Goyim Defense League, and J6ers?”

It’s as good an answer for the masks as any other I can come up with. Throughout American history, the only police agency known to conceal their identities were the Klansmen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they were routinely deputized in the South to police segregation laws.

The police officers who murdered Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi on June 21, 1964, for example, were all Klansmen, and that’s where Don Jr. went to give a speech on “states’ rights,” echoing Reagan’s first official speech on the same subject in the same place after he got his party’s nomination in 1980.

Yesterday, Congressman Jamie Raskin sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asking if their “white nationalist ‘dog whistles’” are being used in their recruitment campaigns that appear to target members of “extremist militias” like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters:

“Unique among all law enforcement agencies and all branches of the armed services, ICE agents conceal their identities, wearing masks and removing names from their uniforms. Why is that? Why do National Guard members, state, county, and local police officers, and members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all routinely work unmasked while ICE agents work masked?

“Who is hiding behind these masks? How many of them were among the violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and were convicted of their offenses? The American people deserve to know how many of these violent insurrectionists have been given guns and badges by this administration.”

Racism has been one of the animating themes of Trump’s three candidacies and two administrations; finally Americans and the mainstream media are waking up to it and calling it out. 

We need a purge, and that begins by calling our elected officials at 202-224-3121 and telling them to vote “No” on funding DHS and ICE until there have been significant reforms.

Get rid of the masks and weapons of war. Require them to follow the law and the Constitution. No more arrests or home invasions without warrants signed by judges per the Fourth Amendment.

If America is a homeland, it’s only a homeland to the surviving Native Americans who Europeans haven’t entirely wiped out. 

It’s far past time to end this use of white ethnonationalist rhetoric, rename the Department of Homeland Security, and purge that organization — and it’s ICE offspring — of their white nationalist bigots.

Categories Immigration, International, Racism, Trump

Trump Says Civil Rights Laws Discriminate Against Whites

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2026 //
14

In an interview with The New York Times, President Trump explained his hostility towards the civil rights laws meant to end discrimination against racial minorities and women and to expand opportunities for them in the workplace and in education.

He believes that civil rights protections have hurt white men. That is the rationale for his aggressive campaign to purge policies of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) from all institutions receiving federal funding.

Trump is indifferent to the long history of slavery, racism, Jim Crow laws, bigotry, and segregation that harmed minorities, especially African Americans. He is equally indifferent to the long history of sexism and misogny that restricted the careers of women.

Erica Green reports:

President Trump said in an interview that he believed civil rights-era protections resulted in white people being “very badly treated,” his strongest indication that the concept of “reverse discrimination” is driving his aggressive crusade against diversity policies.

Speaking to The New York Times on Wednesday, Mr. Trump echoed grievances amplified by Vice President JD Vance and other top officials who in recent weeks have urged white men to file federal complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

When asked whether protections that began in the 1960s, spurred by the passage of the Civil Rights Act, had resulted in discrimination against white men, Mr. Trump said he believed “a lot of people were very badly treated.” 

“White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college,” he said, an apparent reference to affirmative action in college admissions. “So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases.”

He added: “I think it was also, at the same time, it accomplished some very wonderful things, but it also hurt a lot of people — people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So it was, it was a reverse discrimination.”

Trump’s approach is calibrated to appeal to white men who blame their grievances on laws that protect racial minorities and women.

Carrying out Mr. Trump’s agenda is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was formed in 1965 under the Civil Rights Act. The commission’s chair, Andrea Lucas, issued a striking video message last month underlining the agency’s new posture.

“Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex?” Ms. Lucas said in the video posted on X. “You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Contact the E.E.O.C. as soon as possible. Time limits are typically strict for filing a claim.”

“The E.E.O.C. is committed to identifying, attacking, and eliminating ALL forms of race and sex discrimination — including against white male applicants and employees,” she said.

In the video, Ms. Lucas pointed white men to the commission’s F.A.Q. on “D.E.I.-related discrimination,” which notes that D.E.I. “a broad term that is not defined” in the Civil Rights Act.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the nation’s primary litigator of workplace discrimination, and for decades has been a resource for minorities, women and other groups who have historically faced discrimination. But Ms. Lucas has endeavored to make it one of Mr. Trump’s most powerful tools against D.E.I., with a particular focus on remedying perceived harms against white men.

Trump has combatted DEI in universities by threatening to cut off the funding of institutions that implement affirmative action for students and faculty and that have programs to encourage minorities.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, History, Racism, Segregation, Trump

Jess Piper: Not That Kind of White

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2025 //
7

Jess Piper lives on a farm in rural Missouri. She taught American literature in high school for many years. She left teaching to run for the state legislature. She raised a goodly amount of money but lost. She has chastised the Democratic Party for abandoning large swaths of the country. In rural areas, most seats are uncontested. They are won by Republicans who have no opponents. She’s trying to change that and restore a two-party system.

As a former teacher, she is upset that so many students are miseducated about race and racism. She posted her views about that here.

She wrote:

I can’t tell you how many times I was asked the same question while teaching American Literature: 

“If there is a Black History Month, why isn’t there a White History Month?”

My usual response? Because every month is White History Month. History is written by the victors — and colonizers. Much of the American history and literature we learned for generations erased the contributions of marginalized groups. 

A strange fact is that much of the history and literature I learned in the South was written by the losers, not the victors. I learned an entirely incorrect version of history because my textbooks and curriculum were shaped by The Daughters of the Confederacy — I didn’t understand that until college.

That was purposeful. 

For a few decades, we have made a conscious effort to highlight the experiences of minority groups in curriculum — no such effort is required for the majority because their experience is always present.

I think it is incredibly important to teach rural kids the literature and history of marginalized groups. Many of my former students lived in White spaces with limited travel experiences. 

So, I applied for scholarships to learn what I had not been taught, and I traveled the country every summer to learn to be a better teacher. I studied slavery in New York and Mount Vernon and Atlanta and Charleston. 

My students had the advantage of learning the history I had never learned. I had the confidence to teach the hard truth.

You can imagine, after so many years teaching an inclusive curriculum, I am horrified daily by the naked White supremacy I see coming from the Trump regime and many Republicans in general. 

I have lived under a GOP supermajority for over two decades, and these lawmakers often slide into racism and try to cover their tracks by attacking the rest of us as being “woke” or “DEI warriors.” 

It is projection.

A moment I will never forget is when a Missouri Representative stood on the House floor and spoke on “Irish slavery” to dispute the suggestion that Black folks have no exclusive claim to slavery and that both Black and Irish slavery should be taught in Missouri schools. He obviously failed American History as he did not understand chattel slavery and that most Irish immigrants were indentured servants, not enslaved people. 

Indentured servitude is not an ideal situation, but it is not comparable to chattel slavery.

You know my infamous Senator Josh Hawley, who held up a fist on January 6, but you may not know my other Senator, Eric Schmitt, who is an open White supremacist. When comparing the two men, I am left to say Schmitt is even worse than his insurrectionist counterpart. Hawley is a Christian nationalist. Schmitt is both a Christian nationalist and a White supremacist.

In a speech titled “What Is an American,” Schmitt wrote:

America is not “a proposition” or a shared set of values, rather it is a country for White people descended from European settlers, whose accomplishments should not be diminished by acknowledging the people that some of them enslaved, the Native Americans they killed, or anyone else denied equal rights at the founding.

Schmitt went on to say that the real Americans are those who settled the country, denying both the people who lived here centuries before colonization and the Black people who were forced here on slave ships. 

I am horrified by the speech — Schmitt references Missouri so many times that I want to scream. He is reinforcing the White supremacy that I specifically taught my students to watch for…to listen for. To speak out against. 

Senator Schmitt even went so far as to make light of George Floyd’s killing. The entire speech had a “blood and soil” feel. It makes me sick. I am embarrassed to be his constituent.

I opened my news app yesterday to see that JD Vance gave a speech at the Turning Point USA Summit in which he said, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” 

My God. I am so tired. And I am White. 

I can only imagine what it feels like to be a person of color in America and hear the daily racism. To feel racism. To exist in this country when our government is attacking Black and Brown folks. Disappearing them. Killing them.

So, I fight to elect people who do not espouse racist views and do not want to harm immigrants. 

But I also do work in my own family. My children and grandchildren are White. They deserve the truth of the country of their birth. They should know what the Trump regime is doing in the name of White supremacy. So, I teach them.

I took my teenage daughter to Charleston. We visited the regular sites, and then I took her to the sites of the enslaved who were shipped across the world to be enslaved for their labor. She saw the slave pen downtown. I took her to Fort Sumter, where she listened to a Park Ranger tell her the main reason for the Civil War. 

Slavery.

No, it wasn’t Northern Aggression — it was slavery. And if she ever has any doubt, she should read the South Carolina Declaration of Secession, which clearly states that the state broke from the union because of “An increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.”

I took her for a walk to Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The site of a brutal racist massacre. I explained what a White supremacist did to nine Black people who were praying in their own church…people who invited their murderer in with the love and compassion of their faith. 

He murdered them because of the color of their skin and because he didn’t understand history. He thought Black people were given preferential treatment in this country. He had a profound lack of understanding that led him to murder.

The Trump regime is pushing this misunderstanding of history onto another generation, and we can’t sit by while it happens. Teaching hard history to White people is the business of other White people. Teaching about racism should not fall on the marginalized groups who are the target of racism.

Racism is a White problem…not the other way around. 

It’s on people who look like me to do the hard work of challenging the naked White supremacy we see in our country. 

We know the lies. We have to teach the truth.

~Jess

Categories Bigotry, Curriculum, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, History, Missouri, Propaganda, Racism

John Thompson: A Stellar Review of AN EDUCATION

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2025 //
2

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

He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supreme Court Okays Texas’ Gerrymandered Map; Tish James Wins in Court

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2025 //
2

Yesterday was a bad news, good news day.

On the bad side, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled a lower court, which had paused Texas’s disgusting gerrymander of the state’s Congressional districts. The party that wins the Presidency usually loses seats in the midterm election. To avoid that happening, Trump asked red state governors to redraw their districts, something that usually happens every ten years, after the latest census.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott was quick to respond to Trump’s request. The MAGA legislature drew a racially gerrymandered map intended to produce five new Republican seats by sacrificing districts that are currently represented by Black or Hispanic members of Congress.

A lawsuit to block the gerrymander lost in the District Court, won in the Appeals Court, which saw the ploy for what it was: a racial gerrymander. Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the Appeals Court, finding nothing wrong with a racially gerrymandered redistricting, produced only five years after the last census.

The high court proved once again that it is an extension of Trump-MAGA, lacking in any principles or in fidelity to the Constitution or prior decisions.

We wait to see what they do to California’s gerrymander–not racially motivated–but produced to nullify Texas’ gerrymander.

There is also good news.

As is well known, Trump directed his Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political enemies–starting with James Comey, Letitia James (Attorney General of New York), and Senator Adam Schiff.

The first indictment of Comey and James was thrown out because the U.S. Attorney, Lindsey Halligan, was unqualified.

Charges were promptly refiled against James, claiming that she committed mortgage fraud, by saying that a home she purchased in Virginia was her first home, when it was really a second home, enabling her to pocket $18,000 because of a lower borrowing rate. Coming from an administration whose leaders have pocketed billions, this is funny.

The first prosecutor thought the case was so flimsy that he refused to bring charges. Trump installed Lindsey Halligan, one of his many personal attorneys, as U.S. Attorney. Galligan got a grand jury to indict James, but a judge threw out the indictment because Halligan was unqualified and made many errors.

When the charges against Tish James were brought to another grand jury, they refused yesterday to indict James.

Trump will no doubt continue to harass his enemies, but he’s running low on personal attorneys.

Categories Elections, Racism, Republicans, Texas, Trump
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