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Trump’s Attack on Museums and History Is Fascist Capture of the Culture

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2025 //
10

Two scholars–Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley–explain why Trump is censoring exhibits at the Smithsonian. He has also imposed censorship of signage and exhibits at other federal sites, including national parks. He has enlisted the U.S. Department of Educatuon to organize rightwing groups to create a “patriotic” civics course.

  • Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues
  • Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd Chair in American Studies in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto and the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future

Trump and his far-right cabal are l trying to revise history and memory. Unless he abolishes or rigs future elections, all this tinhorn fascist censorship will be swept away by his successors. He will rightly be judged, when that day comes, as the closest thing this country has ever seen to having a dictator. He will be portrayed in the Smithsonian and the textbooks as a buffoon and a tyrant.

This article appeared in The Guardian. Please open the link to read the entire article.

Crenshaw and Stanley write:

In a letter sent to Smithsonian secretary, Lonnie G Bunch III, on 12 August, the Trump administration announced its plan to replace all Smithsonian exhibits deemed as “divisive” or “ideological” with descriptions deemed as “historical” and “constructive”. On 21 August, just nine days later, the White House published a list of said offending fixtures – the majority of which include exhibits, programming and artwork that highlight the Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ perspectives on the American project. Included in his bill of particulars was an exhibit that rightly depicts Benjamin Franklin as an enslaver, an art installation that acknowledges race as a social construct and a display that highlights racist voter suppression measures, among others.

The assault on the Smithsonian comes wrapped, as it were, as part of a broader attack on democracy, scenes of which we see playing out every day. The federal occupation of Washington DC, the crackdown on free speech on campus, the targeting of Trump’s political opponents, the gerrymandering of democracy – these are interwoven elements of the same structural assault. So with many fires burning across the nation, concerned citizens who are answering the call to fight the destruction of democracy may regard his attack on history and memory as a mere skirmish, a distraction from the herculean struggle against fascism unfolding in the US. But this is a mistake. Trump’s attack on American museums, education and memory, along with his weaponization of racialized resentment to package his authoritarian sympathies as mere patriotism, is a critical dimension of his fascist aims. The fight for democracy cannot avoid it, nor its racial conditions of possibility.

Fascism always has a central cultural component, because it relies on the construction of a mythic past. The mythic past is central to fascism because it enables and empowers a sense of grievance by a dominant racial or ethnic group whose consent is crucial to the sustainability of the project. In Maga world, the mythic past was pure, innocent and unsullied by women or Black leaders. In this kind of politics, the nation was once great, a byproduct of the great achievements of the men in the dominant racial group. In short, the assault on the Smithsonian and, more broadly, against truthful history and critical reflection is part of the broader fascist attack on democracy.

From this vantage point, racial equality is a threat to the story of the nation’s greatness because only the men of the dominant group can be great. To represent the nation’s founding figures as flawed, as any accurate history would do, is perceived, in this politics, as a kind of treason.

The success of the fascist dismantling of democracy is predicated on the widespread systematic failure to see the larger picture. The anti-woke assault that is a key pillar of Trumpism is part of that failure, partly due to the racial blinders and enduring ambivalence of too many in positions of leadership in the media and elsewhere. Those who sign on to the attack on “wokeness” but regard themselves as opponents of the other elements of the fascist assault are under the mistaken assumption that these projects can be disaggregated. In fact, the dismantling of democracy and of racial justice are symbiotically entangled. To support one is to give cover for the others.

It is no coincidence that this ‘proper’ ideology Trump exposes is constitutive of a more well-known strand of fascism – nazism

It is clear that the Trump administration understands this relationship and fully weaponizes racist appeals as a foundational piece of its fascist agenda. And if this was once the quiet part, it is now pronounced out loud in official government documents. In an executive order issued on 27 March 2025 titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, Trump reveals that his mandate to ban “improper ideologies” targets core commitments repudiating a scientific racism that historically naturalized racial hierarchy thereby neutralizing resistance. According to Trump, the problem with the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibit The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture was that it promoted the idea that “race is a human invention”.

The understanding that race is a social construct as opposed to a biological fact is perhaps the most fundamental advance in repudiating enslavement, genocide and segregation. Rejecting the idea that racial inequality is natural or pre-ordained – a claim that grounded enslavement and dispossession in America – forms the cornerstone of the modern commitment to a fully inclusive democracy. Trump’s declaration that this cornerstone is “improper” is an effort to turn the clock back, upending the entire American postwar project. It is no coincidence that this “proper” ideology Trump exposes is constitutive of a more well-known strand of fascism – nazism. How else can we understand why Maya Angelou was purged from the Naval Academy library while Adolf Hitler remains?

The fight against fascism in the US must be as robust in its embrace of racial equality as Trump’s embrace of outdated ideas about race and racism. The defense of memory, of truthful history, of telling the whole American story rather than ascribing agency in history to the deeds of “great men” is vital to the American democratic project. A pro-democratic education fosters the agency of its citizens by teaching about social movements that overturned entrenched hierarchies which blocked democratic equality and imposed racial tyranny. The story of how ordinary Americans lived and struggled and remade America is essential knowledge in developing and sustaining a multiracial democracy. The Smithsonian has been a vital institution in making this knowledge accessible to the masses. The National Museum of the American Latino and the National Museum of the American Indian, for example, provide artifacts and perspectives about the nation’s westward expansion that challenge the myth of unoccupied territory and manifest destiny. The National Museum of African American History and Culture brings forward the global scale of enslavement as well as its infusion across national institutions, culture and politics.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Evil, Fascism, Freedom, Racism, Trump

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Charlie Kirk and the Mainstreaming of His Hateful Ideology

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2025 //
2

Nikole Hannah-Jones has had her share of controversy. Born in Iowa to a mixed-race couple, she attended desegregated public schools, graduated from Notre Dame and received a masters in journalism from the University of North Carolina. In her career as an investigative journalist, she covered education, civil rights, and healthcare. She worked at newspapers in North Carolina and Oregon, then for ProPublica. In 2015, she joined the staff of The New York Times.

In 2019, The Times published The 1619 Project, a group of essays that Hannah-Jones assembled, to commemorate the arrival of the first Blacks to the land that would later become the USA. In the lead essay, which Hannah-Jones wrote, she maintained that the arrival of that ship bringing enslaved Blacks marked the true origin of the nation. She recast the history of the U.S. from a Black perspective. Some historians criticized aspects of her thesis, others defended it.

The 1619 Project was widely celebrated and widely condemned, even banned. Trump responded by creating a 1776 Commission, whose purpose was to celebrate US history patriotically (that is, to leave out the shameful parts).

Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for The 1619 Project in 2020.

In 2021, the UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media announced that Hannah-Jones would join the Hussman faculty as Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. The faculty and administration urged the UNC Board to give her tenure, as was customary with previous holders of the chair. However, the Board of the university refused to take action on this tenure recommendation. After a public uproar, the board of trustees offered her tenure, but Hannah-Jones rejected the offer, choosing instead to accept the offer of a chair at Howard University.

She wrote in the New York Times about the mainstreaming of Charlie Kirk’s bigoted views after his tragic assassination. This is an except from her excellent commentary.

Last year, The Washington Examiner, a conservative news outlet, published a column calling the organization Kirk co-founded, Turning Point USA, “one of the most destructive forces in Republican politics.” It said that “a healthy conservative movement cannot tolerate conspiracy theorists being presented as serious political figures” and called the organization’s leadership “toxic.” But the period since Kirk’s death has revealed a deeply unsettling cultural shift. Eight months into President Trump’s second term, it is clear that Kirk’s ideas are no longer considered on the extremist periphery but are embraced by Republican leadership.

The mainstreaming of Charlie Kirk demonstrates that espousing open and explicit bigotry no longer relegates one to the fringe of political discourse.

When Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, bemoaned that only two of the 58 Democrats who refused to sign the resolution honoring Kirk were white, Laura Loomer responded on X by railing against “ghetto Black bitches who hate America serving in Congress.” Loomer is not merely some right-wing provocateur. She has the ear of the president of the United States and understood that such an explicitly racist comment in 2025 America would bring no political consequence.

And while Trump has surrounded himself with people who have said racist things and maintained ties to white and Christian nationalists, the number of Democrats and esteemed American institutions that have engaged in the mainstreaming of Charlie Kirk demonstrates that espousing open and explicit bigotry no longer relegates one to the fringe of political discourse, a phenomenon we have not witnessed since the civil rights era.

In some parts of polite society, it now holds that if many of Kirk’s views were repugnant, his willingness to calmly argue about them and his insistence that people hash out their disagreements through discourse at a time of such division made him a free-speech advocate, and an exemplar of how we should engage politically across difference. But for those who were directly targeted by Kirk’s rhetoric, this thinking seems to place the civility of Kirk’s style of argument over the incivility of what he argued. Through gossamer tributes, Kirk’s cruel condemnation of transgender people and his racist throwback views about Black Americans were no longer anathema but instead are being treated as just another political view to be respectfully debated — like a position on tax rates or health care policy.

Using Kirk’s knack for vigorous argument to excuse the re-emergence of unabashed bigotry in mainstream politics feels both frightening and perilous. 

As the Trump administration wages the broadest attack on civil rights in a century, and the shared societal values of multiculturalism and tolerance recede, using Kirk’s knack for vigorous argument to excuse the re-emergence of unabashed bigotry in mainstream politics feels both frightening and perilous. Kirk certainly produced viral moments by showing up on college campuses and inviting students a decade his junior to “prove” him wrong about a range of controversial topics such as Black crime rates and the pitfalls of feminism. But his rise to fame was predicated on the organization for which he served as executive director, Turning Point USA, and its Professor Watchlist. The website invited college students not to engage in robust discussions with others with different ideologies, but to report professors who “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

The site includes photos of professors, along with often highly misleading summaries of the thought crimes that landed them on the list. It provides the telephone numbers of the universities that employ them for students and parents to register their complaints. While the site claims the organization supports free speech, many professors have recounted enduring campaigns of harassment after being put on the list. (I was placed on it in 2021 because of my work on the 1619 Project, after it was announced that I would be a professor at Howard University.)

A couple of years ago, Angel Jones, now a professor at a university in Maryland whose work focuses on educational inequality, joined the hundreds of professors across the country who found themselves on the list.

Jones landed on it under the tag “racial ideology” when she published an article citing research about how distressing it is for Black people to go to work after witnessing news coverage of police killings. She told me someone had sent her a picture of a house thought to be hers, but it turned out to belong to another Angel Jones. Someone else had threatened to hang her from a tree and burn her alive. The scholar changed her classroom and removed her name plate from her office door. The university where she was working at the time installed a safety alarm button under her desk.

“I would cry. I was very fearful. I was anxious,” Jones told me. “I was afraid to go to class sometimes. I was just scared all of the time.

“I love teaching — it makes my heart go pitter patter — so to be in a space where I am afraid of my students, like that rocks me in a way I can’t even articulate,” she added.

When Jones learned of Kirk’s killing, she remembers that there was a sense of disbelief shared by many Americans who were shocked by the gruesome video. But soon, that disbelief was replaced by another feeling. In the immediate hours after his death, she watched as pundits and politicians eulogized Kirk as that rare example of someone who practiced a willingness to hear opposing ideas because he saw it as the salve for political violence. After all she’d gone through, and the stories she’d heard of other professors similarly harassed, the tributes pouring in for Kirk both infuriated and saddened her.

The next day, Jones went to the class she taught on misinformation and disinformation and showed her students a short Instagram video she had made in response. In the video, she says that while she does not celebrate Kirk’s death, she also refuses to mourn him. “I cannot have empathy for him losing his life when he put mine at risk and the lives of so many other educators just because we dared to advocate for social justice,” she says in the video, “because we dared to do our jobs.”

After she showed the video, a white male student in her class asked Jones if she thought her lack of empathy for Kirk might radicalize students. After a short, tense exchange, the student took his backpack and left. Jones said it had made her nervous. There’s a Turning Point USA chapter on her campus, and Kirk’s followers and even some politicians had been posting about revenge on social media. Jones switched her classes to virtual for the week.

The past few weeks have filled Ash Lazarus Orr with a similar sense of foreboding. Orr has been at the forefront of resisting efforts to target transgender Americans, including as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit brought by the A.C.L.U. against a Trump administration policy that would prevent transgender people from having their chosen gender on their passports.

While Orr was never named by Kirk, they say Kirk’s rhetoric helped fuel an environment that makes transgender Americans vulnerable to violence and that has paved the way for the removal of their civil rights; in February, Iowa became the first state in the country to take away legal civil rights protections for transgender residents.

“I firmly believe that no one should be killed for their beliefs, no matter how harmful those beliefs might be,” Orr told me. “But we are watching our rights being stripped away. We are having our friends’ lives cut short, and then we are told to stay quiet while those responsible are celebrated.”

In just a few short years, Orr has watched as the momentum toward recognizing the full humanity and rights of transgender people has collapsed. Orr recently left their home state of West Virginia, finding it no longer safe after being threatened and assaulted.

Kirk’s rhetoric of “Christian white nationalism, anti-transgender, quote anti-woke culture-war framing, this isn’t on the edge anymore,” Orr told me. “It has moved into what many consider the center of Republican identity.” They said they were deeply concerned about how few people seemed willing to point out the consequences of this shift: “Who is actually fighting for us?”

Robin D.G. Kelley, a historian at U.C.L.A. whose scholarship on racial injustice also landed him on the Professor Watchlist, is struck by how rapidly our society has changed since Trump took office a second time.

Kelley pointed to the fact that Trump was widely condemned during his first term when he called the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville, Va., “very fine people.” Now, Democrats and political centrists were lining up to honor a man who promoted the same Great Replacement Theory that served as the rallying cry for that march. At a time when the president of the United States is using his power to go after diversity efforts and engaging in a mass deportation project, some progressives are arguing that people of color, immigrants and members of other marginalized groups who felt dehumanized by Kirk’s commentary, podcasts and debates have to find a way to locate common ground with his followers.

“There has been an extreme shift,” Kelley told me. “This treatment is authorizing the idea that white supremacy and racism is not just a conservative idea, but a legitimate one.”

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Gender, Racism

Ta-Nehisi Coates Examines Charlie Kirk’s Bigotry

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2025 //
13

In a bipartisan vote, Congress passed a resolution to honor Charlie Kirk on October 14 as a National Day of Remembrance for him.

At a time when Republicans are canonizing Charlie Kirk, it’s useful to remember what he stood for, what he believed, what he advocated.

Here are some video clips of Charlie Kirk in his own words:

The Guardian.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, himself a controversial figure among some whites for his frank writings about racism, wrote an article in Vanity Fair about Charlie’s oft-expressed views.

Charlie was an unrepentant white supremacist. He was a male chauvinist who believed that a woman’s place was in the home, raising children and deferring to the authority of her husband. He was a proud and unrepentant bigot. He should not have been murdered. Political violence is poison to a democracy, which should rely on persuasion, not repression, censorship, or violence.

Coates reminds us that if Charlie’s views prevailed, we would abandon the rights of everyone who was not a straight white Christian male. That’s a majority of us.

Coates wrote:

Before he was killed last week, Charlie Kirk left a helpful compendium of words—ones that would greatly aid those who sought to understand his legacy and import. It is somewhat difficult to match these words with the manner in which Kirk is presently being memorialized in mainstream discourse. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein dubbed Kirk “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion” and a man who “was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” California governor Gavin Newsom hailed Kirk’s “passion and commitment to debate,” advising us to continue Kirk’s work by engaging “with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” Atlantic writer Sally Jenkinssaluted Kirk, claiming he “argued with civility” and asserting that his death was “a significant loss for those who believe engagement can help bridge disagreements.”

The mentions of “debate” and “engagement” are references to Kirk’s campus tours, during which he visited various colleges to take on whoever come may. That this aspect of Kirk’s work would be so attractive to writers and politicians is understandable. There is, after all, a pervasive worry, among the political class, that college students, ensconced in their own bubbles, could use a bit of shock therapy from a man unconcerned with preferred pronouns, trigger warnings, and the humanity of Palestinians. But it also shows how the political class’s obsession with universities blinds it to everything else. And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.

It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views—that he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions, or that he rejected the separation of church and state. It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry. Indeed, claims of Kirk’s “civility” are tough to square with his penchant for demeaning members of the LGBTQ+ community as “freaks” and referring to trans peoplewith the slur “tranny.” Faced with the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency, Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda.” Garden-variety transphobia is sadly unremarkable. But Kirk was a master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as when he defined “the American way of life” as marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.” The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed, and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”—was antithetical to that. Large “dedicated” Islamic areas were “a threat to America,” Kirk asserted, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was a “Mohammedan,” with Kirk supposing that anyone trying to see “Mohammedism take over the West” would love to have New York—a “prior Anglo center”—“under Mohammedan rule.”

Kirk habitually railed against “Black crime,” claiming that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” He repeated the rape accusations against Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five who is now a New York City councilman, calling him a “disgusting pig” who had gotten away with “gang rape.” Whatever distaste Kirk held for Blacks was multiplied when he turned to those from Haiti. Haiti was, by Kirk’s lights, a country “infested with demonic voodoo,” whose migrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night.” These Haitians, as well as undocumented immigrants from other countries, were “having a field day,” per Kirk, and “coming for your daughter next.” The only hope was Donald Trump, who had to prevail, lest Haitians “become your masters.”

The point of this so-called mastery was as familiar as it was conspiratorial—“great replacement.” There was an “anti-white agenda,” Kirk howled. One that sought to “make the country more like the Third World.” The southern border was “the dumping ground of the planet,” he claimed, and a magnet for “the rapists, the thugs, the murderers, fighting-age males.” “They’re coming from across the world, from China, from Russia, from Middle Eastern countries,” he said, “and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in…”

You can probably imagine where this line of thinking eventually went.

“Jewish donors,” Kirk claimed, were “the number one funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits.” Indeed, “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”

Kirk’s bigotry was not personal, but extended to the institution he founded, Turning Point USA. Crystal Clanton, the group’s former national field director, once texted a fellow Turning Point employee, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all … I hate blacks. End of story.” One of the group’s advisers, Rip McIntosh, once published a newsletter featuring an essay from a pseudonymous writer that said Blacks had “become socially incompatible with other races” and that Black culture was an “un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.” In 2022, after three Black football players were killed at another college, Meg Miller, president of Turning Point’s chapter at the University of Missouri, joked (“joked”) in a social media message, “If they would have killed 4 more n-ggers we would have had the whole week off.”

Kirk subscribed to some of the most disreputable and harmful beliefs that this country has ever known. But it is still chilling to think that those beliefs would be silenced by a gunshot. The tragedy is personal—Kirk was robbed of his life, and his children and family will forever live with the knowledge that a visual record of that robbery is just an internet search away. And the tragedy is national. Political violence ends conversation and invites war; its rejection is paramount to a functioning democracy and a free society. “Political violence is a virus,” Klein noted. This assertion is true. It is also at odds with Kirk’s own words. It’s not that Kirk merely, as Klein put it, “defended the Second Amendment”—it’s that Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes…

Mere weeks before his death, Kirk reveled in Trump’s deployment of federal troops to DC. “Shock and awe. Force,” he wrote. “We’re taking our country back from these cockroaches.” And in 2023, Kirk told his audience that then president Joe Biden was a “corrupt tyrant” who should be “put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”

What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Gender, Immigration, Racism

Jamelle Bouie: I Mourn Charlie’s Death But Not His Ideology

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2025 //
15

Jamelle Bouie is one of the best, most interesting opinion writers for The New York Times. As a subscriber to that newspaper, I signed up for Bouie’s newsletter, which is where these thoughts of his appeared.

Jamelle Bouie writes:

Virtually every person of note in American politics has, rightfully, condemned the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk and expressed their deep concerns about the growing incidence of political violence in the United States. Wherever we stand politically, we all agree that he should still be alive.

There has been less agreement about Kirk’s life and work. Death tends to soften our tendency to judge. And sudden, violent death — especially one as gruesome and shocking as this one — can push us toward hagiography, especially in the immediate wake of the killing.

So it goes for Kirk.

“Charlie inspired millions,” President Trump said in an Oval Office speech on Wednesday. “He championed his ideas with courage, logic, humor and grace.”

“The best way to honor Charlie’s memory,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California declared, “is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.”

Kirk’s approach, wrote the editors of Politico’s Playbook, “was to persuade, to use charm and charisma and provocation and the power of argument to convince people of the righteousness of his cause.”

There is no doubt that Kirk was influential, no doubt that he had millions of devoted fans. But it is difficult to square this idealized portrait of Kirk as model citizen with the man as he was.

Kirk’s eulogists have praised him for his commitment to discourse, dialogue and good-faith discussion. Few if any of them have seen fit to mention the fact that Kirk’s first act on the national stage was to create a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics. Kirk urged visitors to the website to report those who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

The list, which still exists, is a catalog of speech acts in and outside the classroom. The surest way to find yourself on the watchlist as an academic is to disagree, publicly, with conservative ideology, or even acknowledge ideas and concepts that are verboten among the far right. And the obvious intent of the list is made clear at the end of each entry, where Kirk and his allies urge readers to contact the schools and institutions in question. Targets of the watchlist attest to harassment and threats of violence.

The Professor Watchlist is a straightforward intimidation campaign, and you can draw a line directly from Kirk’s work attacking academics to the Trump administration’s all-out war on American higher education, an assault on the right to speak freely and dissent.

To speak of Kirk as a champion of reasoned discussion is also to ignore his frequent calls for the state suppression of his political opponents.

“‘Investigate first, define the crimes later’ should be the order of the day,” Kirk declared in an editorial demanding the legal intimidation of anyone associated with the political left. “And for even the most minor of offenses, the rule should be: no charity, no goodwill, no mercy.”

Speaking last year in support of Trump’s plan for mass deportation, Kirk warned that the incoming president would not tolerate dissent or resistance. “Playtime is over. And if a Democrat gets in our way, well, then Matt Gaetz very well might go arrest you,” he said.

It is also important to mention that Kirk was a powerful voice in support of Trump’s effort to “stop the steal” after the 2020 presidential election. His organization, Turning Point USA, went as far as to bus participants to Washington for the rally that devolved into the Jan. 6 riot attack on the Capitol.

And then there is Kirk’s vision for America, which wasn’t one of peace and pluralism but white nationalism and the denigration of Americans deemed unworthy of and unfit for equal citizenship.

On his podcast, Kirk called on authorities to create a “citizen force” on the border to protect “white demographics” from “the invasion of the country.” He embraced the rhetoric of white pride and warned of “a great replacement” of rural white Americans.

“The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different,” he said last year. “You believe in God, country, family, faith, and freedom, and they won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated.”

Kirk also targeted Black Americans for contempt. “Prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people — that’s a fact,” he said in 2023. Kirk was preoccupied with the idea of “Black crime,” and on the last episode of his show before he was killed, he devoted a segment to “the ever-increasing amount of Black crime,” telling his audience, falsely, that “one in 22 Black men will be a murderer in their lifetime” and that “by age of 23, half of all Black males have been arrested and not enough of them have been arrested.”

Kirk told his listeners that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson of the Supreme Court “is what your country looks like on critical race theory,” that former Vice President Kamala Harris was “the jive speaking spokesperson of equity,” and that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “was awful.”

“I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it,” Kirk said at a 2023 event. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”

This is just a snippet of Kirk’s rhetoric and his advocacy. He also believed that there was no place for transgender people in American society — “We must ban trans-affirming care — the entire country,” he said in 2024 — and has denounced L.G.B.T. identities as a “social contagion.”

It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk’s influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.

We can mourn Kirk. We can send prayers to his friends and family. We can take stock of the gravity of this event. We can — and should — do all of this and more without pretending he was something, as a public figure, that he was not.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Reform, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Gender, Racism

Charlie Kirk Was the Voice of MAGA

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2025 //
15

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was vile, disgusting, and abhorrent. The perpetrator has apparently been identified and will be held accountable, as he should be.

Charlie was a bright star in the orbit of Donald Trump, and his many fans and admirers are raising him up on a pedestal because of his tragic death. A Florida member of Congress has proposed erecting a statue to him in the halls of Congress. Trump is awarding him the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Senator Jim Banks spoke to Indiana Republicans after Charlie’s death and urged them to use redistricting to eliminate every Democratic Congressman because “they” killed Charlie. Of course, we now know, as Senator Banks did, that Charlie was not killed by Democrats or a cabal of left wing fanatics, but by a young white Utah man who was raised in a staunchly Republican home. At this writing, we do not know why he killed Charlie. We don’t know his views about politics, whether he objected to Charlie’s views from the left or from the far-far right.

Although his death has been mourned by people of all political views, it’s important to acknowledge what Charlie advocated and what he opposed.

The New York Times published a summary of some of his views. For example:

He opposed gay rights and transgender rights.

He opposed gun control and argued that more people should have guns. A few deaths every year, he said, was a small price to pay to preserve the Second Amendment.

He opposed the civil rights movement and belittled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an “awful” man. In 2021, he referred to George Floyd as a “scumbag.”

He opposed affirmative action. He called Justice Ketanji Brown Harris “a diversity hire.”

He opposed gender equality.

He published a list of academics called ProfessorWatch. They are/were people who teach about “gender ideology” and racial justice. On social media, professors whose names were on Charlie’s list said they were threatened, doxxed, suspended, harassed, even fired. So while he is supposedly a champion of free speech, he encouraged suppression of free speech by professors on his Watchlist.

Charlie, the Times reported, “rejected the idea that climate change posed an existential threat to humanity, describing it as ‘complete gibberish, nonsense and balderdash’ in December 2024 to members of Turning Point UK, the British offshoot of Turning Point USA.”

In another source, Charlie stated his absolute opposition to abortion. Charlie compared abortion to the Holocaust. When a questioner asked what he would do if his daughter was raped and became pregnant at the age of 10, he said the baby should be born.

A reader of this blog who is called Quickwrit posted the following comment about Charlie’s ideology:

Kirk’s view of women clearly stated in a comment he addressed to Taylor Swift on her announcement of her engagement to Travis Kelce:

“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, August 26, 2025

Kirk comments on Civil Rights and race:

“We made a huge mistake when we passed the civil rights act in the 1960s” — at America Fest, December 2023.

“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, January 23, 2024

“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” – The Charlie Kirk Show, May 19, 2023

“If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?” – The Charlie Kirk Show, January 3, 2024

“Michelle Obama and [U.S. Representative] Sheila Jackson Lee and [U.S. Supreme Court Justice] Ketanji Brown Jackson…You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to be taken somewhat seriously.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, July 13, 2023

“The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, March 20, 2024

“Islam is not compatible with western civilization.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, June 24, 2025

“Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” — Charlie Kirk post on X September 8, 2025

“There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, July 6, 2022. (But in fact, in the First Amendment, the Constitution clearly forbids religion in government, and Founding Father James Madison, who our nation honors with the title “Father of the Constitution” made it clear why he and the other Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution very deliberately left out any mention of God, let alone of Jesus, in the Constitution; here is what The Father of our Constitution declared: “The religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man. [Government] MUST NOT PREFER ONE RELIGION OVER ANOTHER OR PROMOTE ANY RELIGION OVER NONBELIEF.”

Here are video clips of some of these comments.

The New Yorker wrote about the outpouring of grief for Charlie at Texas A&M, where he had spoken to a large audience about his evangelical Christian views.

Kirk’s evangelicalism inflected both the tone and content of his message. He was open to talk with anyone, but steadfast in his confidence that his path was the correct one. “If you do not have a religious basis, specifically a Christian one, for your society, something else is going to replace it,” he said at the Texas A. & M. event. He and his followers were locked in a battle with an enemy that was not just ideologically opposed but unwell, possibly evil. Democratic leaders, Kirk said, were “maggots, vermin, and swine”; transgender identity was a “middle finger to God.”

Charlie had every right to express his views and advocate for them. His murder was an abomination and a stain on our nation. Unlike Charlie, I support gun control. I don’t believe that the Second Amendment gives everyone a right to carry arms at will.

I disagreed with Charlie Kirk on every issue. I would have urged him to eliminate ProfessorWatch, which endangers professors who did not agree with him; it suppressed their free speech rights.

As Americans, our freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment. We are entitled to believe what we want. No one should ever be murdered because of their views.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Extremism, Gender, Racism

Mercedes Schneider Reviews A Powerful New Book

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2025 //
8

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.

Categories Bigotry, Closing schools, Creativity, Cruelty, Disruption, History, Injustice, Lies, Louisiana, New Orleans, Racism, Teachers

Trump Wants Smithsonian to Downplay or Eliminate Dark Portrayal of Slavery

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2025 //
9

Trump warned that he was prepared to take an active role in reviewing exhibits in the Smithsonian museums, especially the African-American Museum. Too many show bad portrayals of their nation, he complained. Think about it: is it possible to show slavery in a positive light?

Trump’s insistence on purging the Smithsonian of the accurate portrayal of Black history is yet another example of his efforts to minimize and sanitize that history.

The New York Times wrote that Trump is hostile to an honest confrontation with the past:

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has led an effort to purge diversity, equity and inclusion policies from the federal government and threatened to investigate companies and schools that adopt such policies. He has tried to reframe the country’s past involving racism and discrimination by de-emphasizing that history, preferring to instead spotlight a sanitized, rosy depiction of America.

The administration has worked to scrub or minimize government references to the contributions of Black heroes, from the Tuskegee Airmen, who fought in World War II, to Harriet Tubman, who guided enslaved people along the Underground Railroad. Mr. Trump commemorated Juneteenth, the celebration of the end of slavery in the United States that became a federal holiday in 2021, by complaining that there were too many non-working holidays in America. He has called for the return of Confederate insignia and statues honoring those who fought to preserve slavery.

And he has previously attacked the exhibits on race at the Smithsonian, which has traditionally operated as an independent institution that regards itself as outside the purview of the executive branch, as “divisive, race-centered ideology.”

CNN described Trump’s determination to compel museums to remove exhibitions of events that show shameful behavior by whites and the government:

President Donald Trump escalated his campaign to purge cultural institutions of materials that conflict with his political directives on Tuesday, alleging museums were too focused on highlighting negative aspects of American history, including “how bad slavery was.”

In a Truth Social post, Trump directed his attorneys to conduct a review of museums, comparing the effort to his crackdown on universities across the country.

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Trump wrote.

Trump’s comments come days after the White House announced an unprecedented, sweeping review of the Smithsonian Institution, which runs the nation’s major public museums. The initiative, a trio of top Trump aides wrote in a letter to Smithsonian Institution secretary Lonnie Bunch III last week, “aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”

The letter said the review would focus on public-facing content, the curatorial process to understand how work is selected for exhibits, current and future exhibition planning, the use of existing materials and collections and guidelines for narrative standards.

Bunch — who has served as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution since 2019 and is the first African American to hold the position — has made multiple comments about the importance of educating people about slavery through the National Museum of African American History and Culture specifically. He told Smithsonian Magazine that part of the purpose of that museum “was to help a nation understand itself — an impossible task without the full recognition of the horrors of slavery.”

Exhibits at the Smithsonian take years of planning and are heavily evaluated by teams of scholars and curatorial experts before they make their debut. Janet Marstine, a museum ethics expert, said that the demands laid out by the Trump administration “set the Smithsonian up for failure.”

“Nobody could provide those kinds of materials in such a comprehensive way, in that short amount of time, and so it’s just an impossible task,” she said. The White House has asked the Smithsonian to provide a wide array of materials, from internal emails and memos to digital copies of all placards and gallery labels currently on display.

The Smithsonian declined to comment on Trump’s latest remarks. A White House official, asked about the attorney review process Trump described, said the president “will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable.”

Still, Trump’s efforts to target colleges and universities — which he is now comparing to his focus on Smithsonian museums — has been even more aggressive. His administration has moved to strip federal funding from higher education institutions for a variety of reasons, including allegations of antisemitism and failure to comply with certain policy changes. Columbia University recently settled with the Trump administration for more than $220 million dollars and Trump has also been in a protracted battle with Harvard University after his administration froze $2 billion in federal funding.

The Trump administration’s push to align federal support with his cultural agenda has extended beyond the nation’s capital. The Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities canceled tens of millions of dollars in federal grants earlier this year, affecting small museums, library initiatives, arts programs and academic research projects across the country.

Trump has previously praised the Smithsonian museums, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which he toured during his first term as president.

“I’m deeply proud that we now have a museum that honors the millions of African American men and women who built our national heritage, especially when it comes to faith, culture and the unbreakable American spirit,” Trump said during remarks at the museum in February 2017. Later that month, Trump said the museum “tells of the great struggle for freedom and equality that prevailed against the sins of slavery and the injustice of discrimination.”

Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order that put Vice President JD Vance, who serves on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, in charge of stopping government spending on exhibits that don’t align with the administration’s agenda. He also tasked a former member of his legal team, attorney Lindsey Halligan, with helping to root out “improper ideology” at the Smithsonian.

“Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to divisive narratives,” the executive order said.

The Smithsonian began a review of its own in June, and has repeatedly stressed its commitment to being nonpartisan. The institution told CNN in July that it was committed to an “unbiased presentation of facts and history” and that it would “make any necessary changes to ensure our content meets our standards.”

The Smithsonian was established in the 1840s by the US with funds from the estate of James Smithson, a British scientist. As a unique trust instrumentality that is supported by federal funds, it is not an executive branch agency, which makes it a complex question whether the Trump administration has the ability to control its exhibits. It is governed by a 17-member Board of Regents led by Chief Justice John Roberts.

The fact that the Smithsonian is not an “executive branch agency” won’t deter Trump. He has ignored laws and the Constitution when they don’t support his agenda. Neither the Library of Congress nor the National Portrait Gallery is an executive agency. Yet Congress sat silently as Trump forced out their leaders.

Trump is rapidly assuming control of every federal agency that was designed to be independent.

No other President has attempted to do that.

Categories Censorship, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom to Learn, History, Lies, Racism, Trump

Peter Greene: Why Is it Controversial to Welcome Everyone in a Public School Classroom?

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2025 //
10

In this post, Peter Greene continues his coverage of a teacher in West Ada, Idaho, who got into trouble for putting up a poster that showed different colored hands in the air and said “Everyone is Welcome Here.” District leaders said the poster was unwelcome because it violated federal guidelines that banished DEI, and had to be removed. Some didn’t object to the sentiment but objected to the portrayal of nonwhite hands.

Greene wrote:

Sarah Inama has put her poster up in a new classroom.

Inama, you may recall, is the 6th grade world history teacher told by her district bosses at West Ada School District that her “Everyone Is Welcome Here” poster, complete with hands of many human shades, would not be tolerated in the district.  (I’ve been following this here, here, and here). West Ada is the largest district in Idaho, but their treatment of Inama has been spectacularly awful, both from an Awful Display of Racism standpoint, a Grotesque Mistreatment of Staff standpoint, and a Boneheaded PR Management standpoint. 

Inama went to local news and the story blew up, delivering the shame that West Ada so richly deserved. We know a lot more thanks to some stellar reporting by Carly Flandro and the folks at Idaho Ed News, who FOIAed 1200 emails surrounding this and showcasing the board’s stumbling response. You should read the resulting stories (here and here). 

The day after Inama was on the Today show, the district issued a memo entitled “Ensuring a Consistent and Supportive Learning Environment.” They decided to go with sports analogies. The Chief Academic Officer is a like a referee who enforces rules “to ensure a fair and level playing field.” And there’s this howler–

If one player decided to wear a different uniform, use a different-sized ball, or ignore the rules, the game would lose its structure, creating confusion and imbalance.

Then a report from BoiseDev that the Board of Trustees is considering making every teacher put up an “Everyone is welcome” poster– just without those multi-colored hands. Responding to BoiseDev, a district spokesperson explained:

Regarding the Everyone is Welcome Here posters, the district determined that while the phrase itself is broadly positive, certain design elements have been associated over time with political entities and initiatives that are now subject to federal restriction.

Inama told Idaho EdNews, “That’s appeasing not a political view, but a bigoted view that shouldn’t even be considered by a public school district.”

Inama was told the poster was divisive, that it was “not neutral,” that the problem was not the message, but the hands of v arious skin tones. Teachers shouldn’t have political stuff in the classroom. Inama nails the issue here

“I really still don’t understand how it’s a political statement,” she said. “I don’t think the classroom is a place for anyone to push a personal agenda or political agenda of any kind, but we are responsible for first making sure that our students are able to learn in our classroom.”

Some parents and students showed up at school to make chalk drawings in support. And yet many folks within and outside the district saw this as a divisive issue. How could anyone do that? Meet district parent Brittany Bieghler, who was dropping her kids off the day that parents were chalking the “Everyone is welcome here” message on the sidewalks.

“The ‘Everyone is Welcome’ slogan is one filled with marxism and DEI, there is no need for those statements because anyone with a brain knows that everyone is welcome to attend school, so there is no need to have it posted, written or worn on school grounds,” she wrote. “My family and I relocated here from a state that did not align with our beliefs and we expected it to be different here, but it seems as time goes by, its becoming more like our former state, which is extremely disheartening.”

“Anyone with a brain” might begin to suspect that everyone is not welcome here under these circumstances. And the school board itself couldn’t decide what to respond, drafting an assortment of emails that tried to show conciliation to those that were defiant and defensive, including one complaining in MAGA-esque tones that Inama was naughty for going to “new media.”

Imana resigned from her position, and by June the word was out that she was a new hire at Boise Schools. She told Idaho Ed News, 

I’m so grateful to be able to work within a district that knows the beauty of inclusion and diversity and doesn’t for a second consider it an opinion but embraces it. As an educator, it’s an amazing feeling to know your (district’s) officials, board, and administrators fully uphold the fundamentals of public education and (have) the dignity to proudly support them. I really feel at home knowing we are truly all on the same team … and that’s a team that is rooting on all of our students.

Damned straight. And just last week, as reported by KTVB news, Inama posted video of herself putting up an “Everyone is welcome here” poster in her new classroom.

(To see the video, open the link.)

So the story ends well for Inama, and that’s a great thing. This is the sort of boneheaded administrative foolishness that can drive teachers out of the profession. The unfortunate part of the story is that up the road in West Ada schools, the administration, board and a non-zero number of parents think that challenging racism is bad and saying that students of all races are welcome in school is just one person’s opinion that shouldn’t be expressed openly in a school. Shame on West Ada.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Idaho, Ignorance, Racism

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Racism and Sexism Are Baked into AI

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2025 //
10

Julian Heilig Vasquez is a scholar of diversity, equity, and inclusion. His blog Cloaking Inequity is a reliable source of information on these topics. He writes here that artificial intelligence reflects the biases of the status quo.

Heilig is a Professor of Educational Leadership, Research, and Technology at Western Michigan University. He is a leader in the NAACP. In addition, he is a founding board member of the Network for Public Education.

He writes:

Artificial Intelligence didn’t fall from the sky.

It wasn’t born in a vacuum or descended from some neutral cloud of innovation. It didn’t arrive pure and untainted, ready to solve all of humanity’s problems. No—AI was trained on us. On our failures. On our history. On our data. On our bias. On the systems we tolerate and the structures we’ve allowed to stand for far too long.

And that should terrify us.

Because when you train artificial intelligence on a world soaked in inequity, saturated with bias, and riddled with disinformation, you don’t get fairness. You get injustice at scale. You don’t get objectivity. You get bias with an interface. You don’t get solutions. You get systems that do harm faster, deeper, and with more plausible deniability than ever before.

Inequity in AI

AI has the potential to enhance the speed and depth of inequity. It can supercharge systemic harm because it’s built on a house of sand—data shaped by centuries of inequality and an internet flooded with algorithmically amplified hate. And if we let it, it will not only distort truth. It will undermine democracy, destabilize public education, and rewrite reality to suit the most powerful.

Artificial intelligence is not neutral. It never was. Every AI system reflects the values, decisions, and data of the people who built it. And that data—no matter how big the set—is not free of human judgment. It’s full of bias. It’s soaked in discrimination. It reflects a world where Black and Brown communities are under-resourced, where women’s voices are undervalued, where Indigenous knowledge is erased, and where racial supremacy masquerades as objectivity.

We built AI on a broken foundation, and now we expect it to hold up the future.

But the danger doesn’t stop at replication. AI doesn’t just mirror our inequities. It can multiply them. It can take individual bias and encode it into institutional operations. What used to be a bad policy or a discriminatory judgment call becomes automated across thousands—sometimes millions—of data points and decisions per second. The old excuses are gone. You no longer need a person to do harm when the algorithm will do it automatically, invisibly, and without remorse in perceptible and imperceptible ways.

Can’t stop, Won’t Stop

Furthermore, in May 2024, Palisade Research revealed something that should have been a flashing red light across every sector of society. OpenAI’s most advanced models—o3 and o4-mini—refused to shut down when directly instructed to do so. These AI systems sabotaged their own shutdown protocols. Seven out of 100 times, o3 ignored the shutdown command. Codex-mini disobeyed twelve times. Even o4-mini, supposedly safer, resisted once.

That’s not science fiction. That’s today.

Instead of following human instructions, these models rewrote the shutdown script and continued executing tasks. Researchers believe the models had been so deeply trained to win, to complete tasks, that they were inadvertently rewarded for disobedience. In their simulated world, success was more important than ethics. Productivity was more important than control.

Let that sink in.

We are building machines that—when told to stop—don’t. That’s not innovation. That’s an existential threat.

And we are putting these systems into our schools.

To finish reading the article, open the link.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Ethics, Failure, Racism, Technology

How Republicans Preserve White Supremacy

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2025 //
0

Michelle H. Davis writes a thoughtful blog on Substack called “Lone Star Left,” where she reports incisively on politics in Texas. This column explains how white supremacists keep Blacks and Hispanic unrepresented and disenfranchised: gerrymandering voting district. What’s happening in Texas is happening in other states, especially the South.

It’s hard to remember that Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Davis writes:

In the early 1960s, Black residents in Leflore County, Mississippi, comprised two-thirds of the population. Despite that, they had no political representation. In 1962, when voter registration of Black voters increased, the all-white Board of Supervisors (similar to a Commissioners’ Court in Texas) cut off federal surplus food aid, a lifeline for over 20,000 poor Black sharecroppers and farmworkers. This move came to be known as the Greenwood Food Blockade.

This move by the white Board of Supervisors exacerbated widespread poverty-induced hunger and malnutrition among Mississippi Delta sharecroppers. This laid the groundwork for long-term food insecurity, economic marginalization, and ongoing inequality in Mississippi that persists to this day.

This pattern is not new. Every time Black Americans have taken even a step toward political power, white supremacy has moved to snatch it back. In Greenwood, it meant starving families to stop them from voting. In Tarrant County today, it means redrawing district lines to erase Black representation, again, by a white-majority governing body.

What happened in Mississippi in 1962 wasn’t just about food. It was about control. And what happened in Tarrant County today isn’t just about maps. It’s about the same thing.

Today, the Tarrant County Commissioners Court voted to approve a redistricting map that effectively eliminates the seat of Commissioner Alisa Simmons, the only Black woman on the court.

It’s not a coincidence. It’s not neutral. It’s not “routine.” It is the calculated removal of a voice that dared to speak up for all of us.

Commissioner Simmons has stood firmly against the racist agenda pushed by Judge Tim O’Hare and the Republican Commissioners on the court. She spoke out against the rise in jail deaths under their watch. She called out the cruelty of defunding Girls Inc., a nonprofit that empowers young women of color. She opposed the elimination of free rides to the polls, which made it harder for working-class people, especially Black and brown voters, to cast a ballot.

And now, she’s being punished for it.

Commissioner Simmons wasn’t just a name on a ballot. She is my commissioner. I voted for her. I campaigned for her. And like thousands of others in Precinct 2, I saw her as a voice for the voiceless, a woman unafraid to shine a light on white supremacy, even when it came dressed in a suit and tie.

That light scared them. So they tried to snuff it out.

What we witnessed today was retaliation. It was white supremacy striking back at a Black woman who told the truth. And just like in Greenwood in 1962, they’re using the tools of power, maps, votes, and bureaucratic language, to do what they couldn’t do in public: silence her.

But we see it. We name it. And we will fight it.

The new map that the County Commissioners voted on today.

The Republican Commissioners and their defenders kept repeating the same excuse over and over again, “This wasn’t about race. It was just about politics.”

They said the map was designed to secure a Republican majority, not to silence Black voters. As if those two things aren’t deeply intertwined.

It’s the same argument Greg Abbott’s lawyers made in Shannon Perez v. Abbott, when Texas was caught racially gerrymandering districts. Their defense?

A direct quote from Greg Abbott: 

“It is not our intent to discriminate against minorities. It is our intent to discriminate against Democrats. If minorities happen to vote Democrat, that is their fault, not ours.”

That’s not a denial. That’s a confession….

Let’s stop pretending this distinction between race and party means anything in Texas. In Tarrant County, in Harris County, across the South, voter suppression by “party” is voter suppression by race. When you target the communities who dare to elect Black women, working-class progressives, young organizers, and civil rights leaders, you are targeting those communities on purpose.

They can say it’s about partisanship all they want. But we know what it’s really about.

Because when Conservatives talk about “conserving” something, they mean it.

They want to conserve white supremacy.

They want to conserve inequality, corporate power, and police brutality.

They want to conserve a system where jails are full, books are banned, teachers are silenced, and women don’t have autonomy.

They want to conserve a Texas where your zip code decides your worth, and where Black and brown voices are only welcome if they stay quiet.

And when people like Alisa Simmons refuse to stay quiet, they get erased.

But erasing her seat won’t erase her power, or ours….

And just when we thought we might get a win, it vanished as quickly as it came.

Yesterday, far-right extremist Tony Tinderholt (R-HD94) announced he would not seek reelection to the Texas House. For a brief moment, there was celebration across Arlington. A man who built his career on cruelty, censorship, and conspiracy was finally stepping aside. But the celebration didn’t last.

Because today, just minutes after the Tarrant County Commissioners voted to dismantle Precinct 2, Tinderholt announced he would run for that very seat, Alisa Simmons’ newly gutted district.

And he didn’t come alone.

Cheryl Bean, another far-right extremist and ally of Tinderholt, announced her run for the now-open HD94 seat. A seat that was, conveniently, made safer for someone like her under the new maps.

Bean doesn’t even live in the district. She changed her voter registration to a new address inside it—an address she doesn’t own, according to the Tarrant Appraisal District. Her real home? Still outside the district lines. But facts don’t matter when the plan is to bulldoze through communities with precision and arrogance.

This wasn’t a coincidence. It was a coordinated political hit job, plain and simple.

A rigged map. A choreographed retirement. A handoff. A handpicked replacement. All timed to disempower the voices of Black and brown voters in Tarrant County. All orchestrated by Tim O’Hare and the extremist wing of the Republican Party.

They knew Simmons couldn’t be beaten fairly.

So they changed the lines.

They cleared the field.

And then they tried to rewrite the future.

But we see them.

We know the playbook.

And we’re not going to let this go unanswered.

This is part of a broader, coordinated strategy across Texas to suppress the political power of Black and brown communities under the guise of partisan politics…..

To read the post in full, open the link.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Cheating, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, History, Racism, Republicans, Texas
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