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Trump Appoints Vocal Critic of DEI to Lead Civil Rights Commission

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2025 //
9

Trump appointed Andrea Lucas, an outspoken critic of policies that acknowledge race or gender, to be chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC traditionally advocates for race-based and gender-based policies to monitor whether employers are trying to give all groups an equal chance. Lucas opposes the EEOC’s actions.

If the EEOC receives a complaint about racism in a workplace, it would collect data about the workforce. Its recommendations would be based on that data.

Lucas believes that hiring decisions must “colorblind,” so if the workforce is 100% white, there’s no problem.

Lucas opposes any enforcement that takes race or gender into account. She is also strenuously opposed to acknowledging that transgender people exist. She may think the same of gay people.

Lucas spoke at a Federalist Society meeting, where she made her views on gender clear:

“It’s important to say that biological sex is real and it matters, and it’s immutable and it’s binary. And from that premise we have, that’s the foundation on which we then proceed to have the various civil rights laws that have been enacted for the last 60 years.”

In short, don’t expect her to have any sympathy for discrimination against LGBT people.

There are five members on the EEOC, and she is the only Republican. Trump appointed her in 2020. There is a vacancy. Even with a 3-2 majority of Democrats, don’t expect much civil rights enforcement for the next four years.

Categories Bigotry, Equity, Ethics, Gender, Inequity, Race, Racism, Trump

Just Published: My Review of the Trump Education Agenda

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2025 //
5

This article just appeared on the website of The New York Review of Books.

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/01/11/their-kind-of-indoctrination/

It is my review of Trump’s plans for K-12 education.

NYRB is the most distinguished literary-political journal in the nation. It has a huge readership. It reaches a different audience than education journals.

If you subscribe to NYRB, you can open it in full. If you don’t, it costs $10 for 10 issues. Or, if you wait, I will post it in full in a few weeks.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, History, Ignorance, Inequality, Lies, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Segregation, Separation of church and state, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Mississippi: Segregation Academies Enjoying New Voucher $$$

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2024 //
12

Repeat after me: The school choice movement began in response to the Brown Decision of 1954.

School choice was a euphemism for using public dollars to fund segregation academies for whites, to enable them to escape anticipated desegregated schools.

Steve Suitts wrote an excellent book about the history of school choice, called Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Chhoice Movement.

I reviewed the book in The New York Review of Books. The review was titled “The Dark History of School Choice.”

Now, ProPublica reports, southern states are using voucher money to fund the same segregation academies founded in the 1950s and 1960s.

The latest ProPublica report begins:

On May 14, the final day for submitting new bills in the Mississippi Legislature, a bold new package of them landed on the desks of Mississippi lawmakers. The plans called for the creation of a voucher program that paid for students to attend private schools.

A few weeks later, in the heat of mid-June, the governor urged lawmakers to support the $40 million program, promising it “will bear the sound fruit of progress for a hundred years after this generation is gone.” Public school support would continue, he assured. But vouchers would “strengthen the total educational effort” by giving children “the right to choose the educational environment they desire.”

It was 1964.

Key backers of the move included a group of white segregationists that had formed after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled state-mandated public school segregation unconstitutional.

Across the South, courts had already rejected or limited similar voucher plans in Alabama, Louisiana, Virginia and Arkansas. But Mississippi lawmakers plowed forward anyway and adopted the program. For several years, the state funneled money to white families eager for their children to attend new private academies opening as the first Black children arrived in previously all-white public schools.

Now, 60 years later, ProPublica has found that many of these private schools, known as “segregation academies,” still operate across the South — and many are once again benefiting from public dollars. Earlier this week, ProPublica reported that in North Carolina alone, 39 of them have received tens of millions in voucher money. In Mississippi, we identified 20 schools that likely opened as segregation academies and have received almost $10 million over the past six years from the state’s tax credit donation program.

At least eight of the 20 schools opened with an early boost from vouchers in the 1960s.

“The origins of private schools receiving public funds were with the segregation academies,” said Steve Suitts, a historian and the author of “Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.”

Most private schools receiving money from the voucher-style programs exploding across the country aren’t segregation academies. But where the academies operate, especially in rural areas, they often foster racial separation in schools and, as a result, across entire communities.

Despite the passage of decades, most segregation academies across Mississippi remain vastly white — far more so than the counties where they operate, federal private school surveys show. Mississippi is the state with the highest percentage of Black residents.

At 15 of the 20 academies benefiting from the tax credit program, student bodies were at least 85% white as of the last federal private school survey, for the 2021-22 school year. And among the 20, enrollments at five were more than 60 percentage points whiter than their communities. Another 11 were at least 30 percentage points whiter.

In 1964, the White Citizens’ Council was among those pushing for the voucher plan. The pro-segregation group was founded in the Mississippi Delta town of Indianola in the 1950s by Robert “Tut” Patterson, who sought to “save our schools if possible” from integration and “if that failed, to develop a system of private schools for our children.”

For Patterson, it was personal. His family, including a young daughter who would start school that fall, lived on what he called a “plantation” with 35 Black families. As he later told an interviewer, “We took care of them. We practically lived with them. We loved them. We tended to them, but I didn’t want to mingle my children with them.”

Vouchers. This is the education idea that Republicans have been pushing for 30 years. This is the policy that is now universal in half a dozen red states. This is the main policy idea of the next Trump regime.

Segregation returns, funded by the taxpayers.

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Extremism, Funding, Inequality, Injustice, Mississippi, Racism, Segregation

Peter Greene: A Tribute to 6-Year-Old Ruby Bridges

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2024 //
10

Peter Greene reminds us of an important anniversary that we should have commemorated: the arrival of 6-year-old Ruby Bridges at the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, where she was the first Black child. She had to walk through crowds of screaming whites, mostly women, who didn’t want her to integrate the school. She integrated the school, but the white children were gone. She was the only child in her class, and she developed a close relationship with her kind teacher.

He writes:

Things got busy here at the Institute this week, so I missed posting about this anniversary on Thursday. But I don’t want to overlook it for another year.

On November 14, Ruby Bridges was six years old, three months younger than the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education. Six years old.

She had attended a segregated kindergarten in New Orleans. The district gave Black children a test to see if they would be allowed to attend the all-white William Frantz Elementary School. Six passed. Two decided not to go through with it. The three other girls were sent to a different all-white school; Ruby Bridges would be the only Black student desegregating William Frantz.

Her father was not sure he wanted to put her through that. Her mother argued it had to be done for her daughter and “for all African-American children.”

This was three years after the Little Rock Nine were escorted into school by the National Guard. Conditions in the South had not improved. A crowd came out to hurl insults and threaten a six year old child. 

“What really protected me is the innocence of a child,” Bridges said at an event last Thursday.“Because even though you all saw that and I saw what you saw, my 6-year-old mind didn’t tell me that I needed to be afraid. Like why would I be afraid of a crowd? I see that all the time.”

But it is still shocking to see pictures of the protests. They made a picture of a coffin, with a Black baby in it, and paraded it around the school. Along with a cross. Bridges was the only child in her class– white parents pulled their children out, and many teachers refused to teach. The boycott was eventually broken by a Methodist minister, but Bridges still was shunned, her father fired, her family barred from some local businesses. 

It’s Ruby Bridges portrayed in the Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With.” one of his first works after he left The Saturday Evening Post. It earned him sackfulls of angry mail, calling him, among other things, a “race traitor.”

This week, many schools celebrated a Ruby Bridges Walk To School Day in schools all around the country.  

There is a common narrative, that in the sixties we pretty much settled all the racial issues in this country and that demands for equity ever since have just been a political ploy to grab undeserved goodies. “We fixed that stuff,” the argument goes, “so we shouldn’t need to be talking about it now. You sure you don’t have some other reason for bringing it up?” It’s the narrative that brings us to a President-elect who claims that since we fixed racism in the sixties, it’s white folks who have been the victims, and who need reparations.

But here’s what I want to underline– Ruby Bridges is alive. Not even old lady alive, but just 70. Presumably most of the children gathered around that coffin and cross are also alive, probably a few of those adults as well (Bridges’s mother died in 2020). 

This is not some episode from the distant past. It’s not about some form of schooling that belongs to some dead-and-gone generation. The anniversary is a reminder to do better, to be better, a reminder that it really wasn’t very long ago that a whole lot of people thought it was okay to threaten a six year old child with abuse and violence. White folks don’t need to hang their heads in shame and embarrassment, but neither should they say, “That was people from another time, long ago and far away,” as a way to feel better about the whole business. It can happen here. It just happened here. Pay attention and do the work to make sure it isn’t happening tomorrow.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Extremism, Louisiana, New Orleans, Racism, Segregation, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Shame

Peter Greene: This Election Taught Us a Lesson: Teach Truth

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2024 //
21

Peter Greene asks how teachers can insist on honesty and evidence when the new president exemplifies the success of their opposites. Please open the link and read the article in full.

He writes:

We are already talking about the worst, ugliest, most misogynistic and racist impulses that will be boosted by Trump’s election. But for all of us in general and teachers in particular, I’m concerned about one other feature that will be super-charged by this administration.

We are now fully entered into a post-truth society. Folks voted for a Trump who doesn’t exist to solve problems that aren’t happening.

Yes, I’m solidly on record arguing that there is no such thing as One Truth, but there are truths that have a basis in reality and evidence, and there are views that are based on nothing but fabrication divorced from reality. There’s point of view, and there’s spin, and then there’s just utter reality-divorced bullshit.

Yes, Democrats made all sorts of mistakes; Bernie Sanders pointing out the failure to reach working class people may be on the mark. But to think Trump is the working man’s friend requires a head stuffed firmly in an alternate reality. Treasonous Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, and to believe otherwise is to accept a big lie. To think he’s some kind of genius requires a stretch of miles and miles and miles. Trump stole classified documents and tried to weasel out of giving them back. He’s a felon, a man found guilty of sexual assault, a serial grifter, a misogynist, a racist, a man whose character so lacking in character and honor that the notion of him as a Christian champion makes no more sense than the idea of a great dane teaching advanced calculus. 

I get that some of his support is transactional, that he is such a weak man that he attracts people who figure he can be used by them for their own gains (e.g. I’d bet that much of his right-wingnut christianist support comes from people who see him as a brick that will open the door for True Believers). It’s a dangerous game, because Trump is in it for Trump, but at least these grifters have a reality-based picture of who Trump is.

But the vast majority of voters appear to have settled for the lies. Exit polls show they decided on issues like the economy, as if Trump’s universally-panned-by-experts plan will “rescue” a post-pandemic economy that is the envy of the rest of the world. They worried about trans athletes (because who wants to live in a country where you can’t harass young trans persons). And they believe in his victimhood, the idea that all these court cases and charges and all the rest are just Democrats “persecuting” the man who has “give up so much for this country.” 

Trump voters could overlook his flaws because they were standing atop a mountain of lies. 

And one lesson from the campaign is that disinformation works, that alternate facts work. And yes, I understand that this is not exactly news, but given our hyper-powered media and communications world, I think we’ve entered another level. This is a level where folks can decide that consensus reality, facts, standards, science–none of it– requires even lip service. 

I worried about this in 2016. Never mind the public examples being set about propriety and basic kindness– how do you teach when the nation’s leaders demonstrate that facts are for suckers. Make up your own and just keep repeating them. And it was bad back then, but it feels so much worse this time. The first Trump administration felt like a trial balloon, a first shot at pushing the limits of anti-factualism. But now they can look back at some of the biggest lies ever pushed on the country and see that not only were there no negative consequences, they have been rewarded for it.

There is no need to even try to be tethered to reality. Just pick what you wish was true, and sell it. It’s an epistemological collapse, a suspension of any need to have a path to knowledge, because there is nothing to know except what you (or dear leader) wants to know. 

Also, these are a lot of fancy ways to describe a simple thing– a lie.

In this context, teaching about things like finding text evidence to support an opinion seems quaint. Why discuss whether or not a body of Core Knowledge matters when knowledge itself has been cut loose? Why have reading wars about how to decode and define words when only suckers believe that words have meanings? Why worry about teaching scientific method and how to support an idea when it’s obviously simpler to just make up whatever you want to make up?

The answer of course is that all these things are doubly necessary in times like these, that society needs people raised and taught to function in reality based on real things. The Work of educators is now more important than ever.

To read more, open here.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Racism, Trump

Trump Calls Madison Square Garden Rally “an Absolute Love Fest”

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2024 //
11

The day after Trump’s Madison Square Garden, the media reacted with shock to the raw racism and misogyny on display. The New York Times reported:

Former President Donald J. Trump sought to head off the major speech Vice President Kamala Harris was planning to deliver Tuesday night by casting her as responsible for all of the nation’s ills while also attempting to draw attention away from bigoted and racist remarks at his rally in New York.

Two days after he hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden where several speakers made racist and vulgar statements, Mr. Trump accused Ms. Harris of running “a campaign of absolute hate.”

Mr. Trump then headed to Pennsylvania, a crucial battleground state, for two campaign stops. Ms. Harris is expected to speak at the Ellipse, the same park near the White House where Mr. Trump marshaled his supporters to descend on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The setting for Ms. Harris’s remarks will provide her campaign with a symbolic moment to go along with its increasingly blunt warnings about the dangers posed by Mr. Trump, who Democrats say is unstable and will run roughshod over democratic norms if he returns to the White House.

Mr. Trump’s allies have shown anxiety that the backlash to the Madison Square Garden event, and descriptions of him as a racist and a fascist, may be breaking through to segments of voters in battleground states. On Tuesday, however, the former president sought to attack Ms. Harris with the very accusations he himself has been facing, telling a group of supporters and reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida that her message “has been a message of hate and division.”

In his remarks, Mr. Trump continued to push back against criticisms of his rally — which he called, unprompted, “an absolute love fest” — mocking Democrats who have pointed out that a pro-Nazi rally was held at Madison Square Garden in 1939.

Election Day is one week from today. Here’s what else to know:

  • Madison Square Garden rally fallout: Republicans moved swiftly to distance themselves from remarks disparaging Puerto Rico made by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who was one of the opening speakers at Mr. Trump’s New York rally. The island’s Republican Party chairman is demanding an apology, and the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny stepped up his condemnation of the remarks on Tuesday.
  • Hinting at a vulgar taunt: An ad from Elon Musk’s PAC refers to Ms. Harris as a “C Word” — eventually calling her a “communist” — in an allusion to an insult against women that is one of the most obscene words in American English.
Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Racism, Trump

How Is It Possible that Trump and Harris Are Statistically Tied?

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2024 //
71

I have been puzzling over this question since the Democratic National Convention.

Like most people, I didn’t know much about Kamala Harris when she became Vice President. Now that I have seen her speak, now that I saw her debate Trump, I feel very energized to support her campaign for the Presidency.

She is smart, well informed, experienced, committed to the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law. She is thoughtful and composed. She laughs, she smiles, she seems like a kind and thoughtful person. She is well prepared for the presidency, having won election as the District Attorney of San Francisco, as Attorney General of the State of California, as U.S. Senator from California, and as Vice-President of the United States since Joe Biden and she were elected in 2020.

Her opponent is a bundle of equal parts narcissism and hatred. He likes men. He likes white men. He likes to play tough guy. He looks on women as sex objects and feather heads. He doesn’t respect women.

He is crude, vulgar, without a shred of the dignity we expect from a president. The language he uses to ridicule and insult others is vile.

He is a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, and a Christian nationalist (without being a practicing Christian).

He is a sexual predator. He is known for not paying people to whom he owes money for services rendered. He has gone through six bankruptcies.

He is ignorant. His former aides say he has never read the Constitution. He is driven by his massive ego. He wants everyone to say he’s the best, the greatest, and there’s never been anyone as great as him.

He is a convicted felon, convicted on 34 counts of business fraud in New York. He was found guilty by a jury in New York of defaming E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of sexually assaulting her many years ago. He was ordered to pay her more than $90 million for continuing to defame her. That judgment is on appeal.

Other trials are pending.

When he lost the 2020 election, he refused to accept his defeat. He schemed to overturn the election by various ploys. He summoned a mob of his fans to Washington on January 6, 2021, the day that Congress gathered for the ceremonial certification of the election. Trump encouraged them to march on the U.S. Capitol, “peaceably….(but) fight like hell.” They did fight like hell. They battered their way into the Capitol, smashing windows and doors, beating law officers, vandalizing the building and its offices, while hunting for Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The outnumbered law officers held them off to protect the members of Congress. Many of them were brutally beaten. Some later died. What if the mob had reached the members of Congress? What if they had captured Pence and Pelosi?

It was the most shameful day of our national history. A President encouraging a mob to sack the Capitol and overturn the Constitution.

Ever since that disgraceful day, Trump has reiterated that the election was stolen from him, even though it wasn’t close. He has undermined faith in the electoral process, faith in the judiciary, faith in the law.

These are the two candidates: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Why is this election close?

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Kentucky, Nebraska, Racism, Trump

Democracy: Trump, the GOP, and Racism

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2024 //
2

Our reader who goes by the pen name “Democracy” left the following comment on recent events. We are familiar with Trump’s racist, enophobic outbursts. He has no problem with immigration from Europe but is apoplectic about immigration from nonwhite countries. The usual word for this is racism. How do other Republicans react to Trump’s overt racism?

Democracy wrote:

Here are the parts of the Heather Cox Richardson article that I found to be astounding:

“Since he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, Trump has trafficked in racist anti-immigrant stories. But since the September 10 presidential debate when he drew ridicule for his outburst regurgitating the lie that legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their white neighbors’ pets, Trump has used increasingly fascist rhetoric. By this weekend, he had fully embraced the idea that the United States is being overrun by Black and Brown criminals and that they, along with their Democratic accomplices, must be rounded up, deported, or executed, with the help of the military. 

Myah Ward of Politico noted on October 12 that Trump’s speeches have escalated to the point that he now promises that he alone can save the country from those people he calls ‘animals,’ ‘stone cold killers,’ the ‘worst people,’ and the “]’enemy from within.’  He falsely claims Vice President Kamala Harris ‘has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world…from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.’

When Trump said, ‘We have to live with these animals, but we won’t live with them for long, a person in the crowd shouted: ‘Kill them!’ “

Jennifer Rubin put it like this today in The Washington Post:

“Trump has consistently evidenced racism throughout his career. He might have flipped on abortion, but racial animus seems baked into his psyche. Whether being sued for refusing to rent to African Americans, demonizing the innocent Central Park Five, promoting the ‘birther’ conspiracy theory to delegitimize the first Black president, announcing his entry into politics by slandering immigrants as murderers and thugs, refusing to denounce white nationalists at a debate in 2016, referring to non-White-majority countries as ‘s—holes’ or preemptively blaming Jews for his defeat, Trump has never departed from a steady stream of racism, xenophobia and antisemitism. His exaggeration about crime in big cities is a racial dog whistle; his phony ‘immigrant crime wave’ is a racial bullhorn. This is who he is.

…for Trump, racism is crucial to his voter suppression and election denial. The spate of voter suppression laws following Jan. 6 disproportionately affecting non-Whites, the targeting of cities in swing states with large Black electorates in 2020 (Detroit, Philadelphia), the attacks on Black poll workers and the ongoing claims of millions of undocumented immigrants voting all have a common purpose. Trump and his followers aim to put non-Whites outside the American electorate (not ‘real Americans’) and cry foul based on unsubstantiated charges of fraud when the candidate loses. If non-Whites are not ‘real’ Americans or stand in the way of Whites attaining or retaining power, then making it harder to vote (or not counting their votes) — and removing immigrants on the mere suspicion that they are illegal — are justified.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/15/trump-racism-detroit-immigration/

Like Rubin notes, it’s NOT just Trump. It’s virtually the entirety of Republican politicians AND Republican voters.

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin was on CNN yesterday defending Trump’s racist rhetoric.

As Tom Nichols at The Atlantic described it,

“Tapper read Trump’s remarks verbatim, and then asked: ‘Is that something that you support?’ Youngkin replied that Tapper misunderstood Trump, who he said was referring to undocumented immigrants. No, Tapper responded, Trump clearly meant American citizens…Youngkin aw-shucksed his way through stories about Venezuelan criminals and Virginians dying from fentanyl. “’Obviously there is a border crisis,’ Tapper said. ‘Obviously there are too many criminals who should not be in this country, and they should be jailed and deported completely, but that’s not what I’m talking about.’ And then, to his credit, Tapper wouldn’t let go: What about Trump’s threat to use the military against Americans?

Well, Youngkin shrugged, he ‘can’t speak’ for Trump, but he was certain that Tapper was ‘misrepresenting [Trump’s] thoughts.’ “

UVA political analyst Larry Sabato described the Youngkin Critical Race Theory strategy this way:

“The operative word is not critical.And it’s not theory. It’s race. What a shock, huh? Race. That is what matters. And that’s why it’s sticks. There’s a lot of, we can call it white backlash, white resistance, whatever you want to call it. It has to do with race. And so we live in a post-factual era … It doesn’t matter that [CRT] isn’t taught in Virginia schools. It’s this generalized attitude that whites are being put upon and we’ve got to do something about it. We being white voters.”

When Youngkin ran for governor in 2021, his entire campaign was overtly racist. Youngkin claimed – falsely – that Critical Race Theory permeated all of Virginia’s public schools, and that teachers were teaching to kids – white kids – that they were “racists.” Noe of this was true, but Youngkin turned out the low-education white cracker vote.

THIS is where we are now with Trump, and expect it to get even worse between now and November 5.

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Extremism, Racism, Republicans, Trump

Jonathan V. Last: Who Will Republicans in Springfield, Ohio, Vote For?

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2024 //
8

Jonathan V. Last is the lead editor of The Bulwark, the Never Trumper blog and one of the best political blogs.

He wondered whether Republicans in Springfield will vote for Trump after the venom he and Vance have directed at their town.He quotes from a Wall Street Journal article that dashed all of the spurious claims about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield. Yet Trump and Vance continue to spew their hateful lies about Haitians. On Twitter,

Jonathan Last wrote:

1. Cats and Dogs

Springfield, Ohio, is Trump country. In 2020, Clark County—of which Springfield is the major population center—went for Trump 61 percent to 37 percent.

The mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, is a Republican.

And today the Wall Street Journal has an extraordinary piece of reporting about the town’s interactions with the Trump campaign.

These bits include revelations that:

(1) The Trump campaign contacted the Springfield government on September 10 to ask if the cat/dog eating stories were true. The campaign was told, point blank, that they were not. That night, Donald Trump asserted them on the debate stage anyway.

(2) This entire conflagration began with neo-Nazis deciding to make Springfield a cause célèbre. Meaning that JD Vance is literally following a playbook put together for him by white supremacists:

On Aug. 10, a group wearing ski masks and carrying swastika flags and rifles marched in Springfield. The ADL identified them as Blood Tribe, which it describes as a growing neo-Nazi group claiming to have chapters across the U.S. and Canada.

On Aug. 27, during the routine public-comment portion of the Springfield City Commission meeting, a man identifying himself as a Blood Tribe member said: “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”

(3) Vance produced the name of one person he said had experienced a kidnapped pet cat. The WSJ decided to check the story out:

A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement. 

Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.

(4) The part of Vance’s assertion that “disease” was on the rise in Springfield? Also false:

Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023—the lowest since 2015. The tuberculosis case numbers in the county are so low (four in 2023, three in 2022, one in 2021) that any little movement can bring a big percentage jump. HIV cases did increase to 31 in 2023, from 17 in 2022 and 12 in 2021. Overall, sexually transmitted infection cases decreased to 965 in 2023, the lowest since 2015.

Read the whole thing.

Springfield’s Republican mayor said this to the Journal:

“We have told those at the national level that they are speaking these things that are untrue,” added Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, a registered Republican. But he said claims have been “repeated and doubled down on.” 

Here’s my question: How is Rue going to vote in November? 

And the same question goes for Ohio Governor Mike DeWine.

These guys are on the ground. They see what’s happening. They know the truth. And they understand that Trump’s and Vance’s lies—which are approaching the status of blood libel—are hurting their constituents. Not in some theoretical, possible-future-case way. But in a real way. Right now. Today.

Are they going to vote for Trump and Vance? I feel like someone should probably ask them. 

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I think we know what Anna Kilgore’s answer will be. The WSJ shows a picture of this nice cat lady. In her Trump shirt. And her Trump hat. In front of her Trump flag. It seems not to bother her at all that the Trump campaign used her to lie about the people she felt the need to apologize to.

How does that work? What’s the psychology?

No, really. Give me your most charitable explanation. Because what gets me here is that Ms. Kilgore felt bad enough about have accused her neighbors of stealing her cat that she apologized to them. So she knows the difference between right and wrong. 

Talk about this in the comments, please. And be kind. This is an exercise in understanding, not condemnation.

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2. Immigrants: They Get the Job Done

I keep pointing you to Radley Balko because he’s wonderful and you should subscribe to his newsletter. He has a piece up about what immigration has done to Springfield.

First there’s the Haitian immigrant supply part of the story:

The sole claim Trump and Vance have made about Springfield that’s actually true is that since 2021, about 12,000-15,000 Haitian immigrants have moved to the city. But no one — not the Biden administration, not George Soros, and not Kamala Harris — “sent” them there. . . .

After the devastating Haiti earthquake of 2010, the Obama administration allowed displaced people from that country to come to the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a policy created during the George H.W. Bush administration for refugees from countries in crisis. Thousands of Haitians took advantage of the opportunity.

Donald Trump revoked that status in 2019, infamously calling Haiti one of those “shithole countries” from which the U.S. should never accept immigrants. Trump would later add that all Haitian immigrants “probably have AIDS,” and lament that the U.S. doesn’t get more immigrants from better countries like Norway.

Trump’s TPS revocation threatened the immigration status of tens of thousands of Haitians who came after the earthquake, many of whom by then had children who were U.S. citizens. The Biden administration then reinstated TPS protection in 2021. This is why Trump and Vance blame Biden and Harris for Springfield.

Then there’s the Springfield demand side:

[L]ike much of the Rust Belt, the manufacturing plants began to close in the 1980s and 1990s, and Springfield atrophied. The ornate Victorian homes that lined the city’s main streets fell into disrepair as those with means moved away. The city has lost about 25 percent of its population since 1970.

So in the mid-2010s, city officials embarked on a campaign to lure new businesses to the area, citing Springfield’s low cost of living and ideal geographical position for shipping and manufacturing. The plan worked. Factories started opening up. Other businesses followed.

But there was a problem: The population that remained in Springfield and surrounding Clark County was aging. There weren’t enough workers to fill the available jobs. So the companies looked to immigrants. This happened to be right about the time Haitians were coming to the U.S. under TPS. Word quickly spread in the Haitian immigrant community that there was a town in Ohio with a low cost of living and lots of well-paying jobs. So that’s where they went.

The companies did not turn to undocumented immigrants to pay “slave wages,” as some immigration opponents have claimed. They were documented immigrants with taxpayer ID numbers paid at a market rate (as noted below, wages have increased in Springfield since the Haitians arrived).

Haitians with TPS can live where they like. A large number settled in Springfield because that’s where they found jobs. . . .

This is a recurring pattern with immigration in the U.S. Immigrants settle in geographic clusters, close to other immigrants from the same country. This allows them to establish networks, find housing, and open and patronize restaurants and businesses that offer the comforts of home. This is why Patterson, New Jersey, has a “Little Lima.” In the mid-20th century, Peruvian immigrants settled in the city after taking jobs in area textile mills. It’s why Nashville has the country’s largest Kurdish community, and Minneapolis to large Somali and Hmong populations. Terre Heute, Indiana once had a thriving Syrian population; Lowell, Massachusetts has the country’s second largest Cambodian population. Rochester; New York has a large Turkish community; and Russian immigrants settled in places like Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

This is how immigration works.

When you put supply and demand together, good things can happen:

Income has gone up. In 2020, the median annual household income in the city was $39,344. Two years later — and the last year for which the U.S. Census has data — it was at $45,113.

Immigration opponents also claim that immigrants depress wages. But again contra Vance, that hasn’t happened in Springfield. The mean hourly wage jumped 18 percent between 2020 and 2023, from $21.33 to $25.16. That’s well above the 13 percent that wages increased nationally over the same period. . . .

Haitians have grown Springfield’s tax base. Because of TPS, they have Social Security or taxpayer ID numbers, so they pay all the same taxes any other resident pays. Those who have made enough money to buy a home now pay property taxes. Those who don’t own a home pay rent, which their landlords then use to pay property taxes. . . .

In a recent interview with CNBC, Vance said, “If the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low-wage immigrants then Springfield, Ohio, would be the most prosperous country — the most prosperous city in the world. America would be the most prosperous country in the world, because Kamala Harris has flooded the country with 25 million illegal aliens.”

As with much of what Vance has said since his abrupt MAGA conversion, almost nothing in that quote is correct. There are nowhere near 25 million undocumented people in the U.S. in total. Kamala Harris doesn’t set the Biden administration’s immigration policy. And all the data suggest immigrants have made Springfield more prosperous, not less.

Read the whole thing.

3. One More Springfield

Kevin Williamson went to Springfield and wrote a fantastic piece.

Poor people have been coming to Ohio in search of jobs in its factories and warehouses for centuries: From the original New Englanders who settled in the Northwest Territory to the Scots-Irish to the Irish and Germans in the 19thcentury to the Haitians today, that story has been repeated over and over. At the turn of the 20th century, a majority of Cincinnati’s population consisted of those who either were foreign-born or were the children of foreign-born parents, mostly German. Naghten Street in Columbus, on the other hand, became “Irish Broadway” in the middle of the 19th century. The J.D. Vances of that era didn’t much care for the whiskey-drinking, potato-eating papists invading their cities, but they made good use of the canals and railroads built by those illiterate exotics from distant lands. 

The guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy understood all that. This asshole who is running for vice president, on the other hand . . .

I fuel up and have the big 6.7L diesel spooled out and growling happily as I speed by the exit for Possum Hollow Road—honest to God, that’s the name of the place; you can’t make up details like that—way out here in the Blue Ridge Mountains where it is 40-odd degrees early in the morning in the last days of summer. The Appalachian Highlands are gorgeous this time of year, with all sunshine and sapphire skies and cool breezes, good green hills and splendid rivers, and pretty good asphalt that is, barring the occasional construction backup, wide open for RPMs. If you like to drive, it doesn’t get much better in the eastern half of these United States. There’s a lot of that gross, weird old leg-tattoo America out there, too, of course, including a guy with a leg tattoo of the Monster Energy logo, along with the inescapable herpetic rash of Dollar General stores and the strip-joint billboards sprinkled like pox along the highways and backroads from the fine vistas of southwestern Virginia to the alpine rivers of West Virginia to the literal amber waves of grain in Ohio’s cornfields.

It makes you wonder why they ever left—the Vances and the rest of those Appalachian folk who followed Steve Earle’s “Hillbilly Highway” up to Detroit or down to Houston or wherever else the Scots-Irish diaspora ended up. And then you remember why: need and desperation. There weren’t a lot of Dairy Queens or Walmarts out here, and even if there had been, there were no jobs to earn money to spend in them. It was a world—and a life—of subsistence agriculture and hustling, with very little in the way of rule of law or decent public administration, where the biggest business was organized crime and where politics vacillated between demagoguery and banditry, beautiful in some parts, hideous in others, and poisonously backward—you know: Haiti, but with white people.

Read the whole thing.

Categories Elections, Hoax, Immigration, Lies, Ohio, Racism, Trump, Vance, J.D.

Linda Ronstadt Endorses Kamala Harris and Tim Walz

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2024 //
17

Linda Ronstadt, one of the greatest singers of our time, posted her endorsement in the 2024 Presidential campaign.

“Donald Trump is holding a rally on Thursday in a rented hall in my hometown, Tucson. I would prefer to ignore that sad fact. But since the building has my name on it, I need to say something.

It saddens me to see the former President bring his hate show to Tucson, a town with deep Mexican-American roots and a joyful, tolerant spirit.

I don’t just deplore his toxic politics, his hatred of women, immigrants and people of color, his criminality, dishonesty and ignorance — although there’s that.

For me it comes down to this: In Nogales and across the southern border, the Trump Administration systematically ripped apart migrant families seeking asylum. Family separation made orphans of thousands of little children and babies, and brutalized their desperate mothers and fathers. It remains a humanitarian catastrophe that Physicians for Human Rights said met the criteria for torture.

There is no forgiving or forgetting the heartbreak he caused.

Trump first ran for President warning about rapists coming in from Mexico. I’m worried about keeping the rapist out of the White House.

Linda Ronstadt

P.S. to J.D. Vance:

I raised two adopted children in Tucson as a single mom. They are both grown and living in their own houses. I live with a cat. Am I half a childless cat lady because I’m unmarried and didn’t give birth to my kids? Call me what you want, but this cat lady will be voting proudly in November for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz .”

Categories Arizona, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Racism, Trump, Vance, J.D., Walz, Tim
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