Archives for category: Safety

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist, flew to Israel to learn about the situation on the ground. The column that follows is an excellent summary, in my view, of the prospects for war and peace and what comes next. Most certainly, as the overwhelming majority of Israelis agree, Netanyahu has failed in his most basic responsilities to the people of Israel. The sooner he leaves, the sooner Israel can begin to plan for a lasting and just peace with its neighbors.

He writes:

People warned me before I came to Tel Aviv a few days ago that the Israel of Oct. 7 is an Israel that I’ve never been to before. They were right. It is a place in which Israelis have never lived before, a nation that Israeli generals have never had to protect before, an ally that America has never had to defend before — certainly not with the urgency and resolve that would lead a U.S. president to fly over and buck up the whole nation.

After traveling around Israel and the West Bank, I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any other time since its War of Independence in 1948. And it’s for three key reasons:

First, Israel is facing threats from a set of enemies who combine medieval theocratic worldviews with 21st-century weaponry — and are no longer organized as small bands of militiamen but as modern armies with brigades, battalions, cybercapabilities, long-range rockets, drones and technical support. I am speaking about Iranian-backed Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen — and now even the openly Hamas-embracing Vladimir Putin. These foes have long been there, but all of them seemed to surface together like dragons during this conflict, threatening Israel with a 360-degree war all at once.

How does a modern democracy live with such a threat? This is exactly the question these demonic forces wanted to instill in the mind of every Israeli. They are not seeking a territorial compromise with the Jewish state. Their goal is to collapse the confidence of Israelis that their defense and intelligence services can protect them from surprise attacks across their borders — so Israelis will, first, move away from the border regions and then they will move out of the country altogether.

I am stunned by how many Israelis now feel this danger personally, no matter where they live — starting with a friend who lives in Jerusalem telling me that she and her husband just got gun licenses to have pistols at home. No one is going to snatch their children and take them into a tunnel. Hamas, alas, has tunneled fear into many, many Israeli heads far from the Gaza border.

The second danger I see is that the only conceivable way that Israel can generate the legitimacy, resources, time and allies to fight such a difficult war with so many enemies is if it has unwavering partners abroad, led by the United States. President Biden, quite heroically, has been trying to help Israel with its immediate and legitimate goal of dismantling Hamas’s messianic terrorist regime in Gaza — which is as much a threat to the future of Israel as it is to Palestinians longing for a decent state of their own in Gaza or the West Bank.

But Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza entails urban, house-to-house fighting that creates thousands of civilian casualties —innocent men, women and children — among whom Hamas deliberately embedded itself to force Israel to have to kill those innocents in order to kill the Hamas leadership and uproot its miles of attack tunnels.

But Biden can sustainably generate the support Israel needs only if Israel is ready to engage in some kind of a wartime diplomatic initiative directed at the Palestinians in the West Bank — and hopefully in a post-Hamas Gaza — that indicates Israel will discuss some kind of two-state solutions if Palestinian officials can get their political house unified and in order.

This leads directly to my third, deep concern.

Israel has the worst leader in its history — maybe in all of Jewish history — who has no will or ability to produce such an initiative.

Worse, I am stunned by the degree to which that leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to put the interests of holding on to the support of his far-right base — and pre-emptively blaming Israel’s security and intelligence services for the war — ahead of maintaining national solidarity or doing some of the basic things that Biden needs in order to get Israel the resources, allies, time and legitimacy it needs to defeat Hamas.

Biden cannot help Israel build a coalition of U.S., European and moderate Arab partners to defeat Hamas if Netanyahu’s message to the world remains, in effect: “Help us defeat Hamas in Gaza while we work to expand settlements, annex the West Bank and build a Jewish supremacist state there.”

Let’s drill down on these dangers.

Last Saturday night, a retired Israeli Army commander stopped by my hotel in Tel Aviv to share his perspective on the war. I took him to the 18th-floor executive lounge for our chat, and when we got into the elevator to go up, we joined a family of four — two parents, a toddler and a baby in a stroller. The Israeli general asked them where they were from. “Kiryat Shmona,” the father answered.

As we stepped out, I joked with the general that he could dispense with his briefing. It took just 18 floors and those two words — “Kiryat Shmona” — to describe Israel’s wickedly complex new strategic dilemma created by the surprise Hamas attack of Oct. 7.

Kiryat Shmona is one of the most important Israeli towns on the border with Lebanon. That father said his family had fled the northern fence line with thousands of other Israeli families after the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia and Palestinian militias in southern Lebanon began lobbing rockets and artillery and making incursions in solidarity with Hamas.

When might they go back? They had no idea. Like more than 200,000 other Israelis, they have taken refuge with friends or in hotels all across this small country of nine million people. And it has taken only a few weeks for Israelis to begin driving up real estate prices in seemingly safer central Israeli towns. For Hezbollah, that alone is mission accomplished, without even invading like Hamas. Together, Hezbollah and Hamas are managing to shrink Israel.

On Sunday I drove down to a hotel on the Dead Sea to meet some of the hundreds of surviving members of Kibbutz Be’eri, which had some 1,200 residents, including 360 children. It was one of the communities hardest hit by the Hamas onslaught — suffering more than 130 murders in addition to scores of injured and multiple kidnappings of children and elderly. The Israeli government has moved most survivors of the kibbutz across the country to the Dead Sea, where they are now starting their own schools in a hotel ballroom.

I asked Liat Admati, 35, a survivor of the Hamas attack who ran a clinic for facial cosmetics for 11 years in Be’eri, what would make it possible for her to go back to her Gaza border home, where she was raised.

“The main thing for me to go back is to feel safe,” she said. “Before this situation, I felt I have trust in the army. Now I feel the trust is broken. I don’t want to feel that we are covering ourselves in walls and shelters all the time while behind this fence there are people who can one day do this again. I really don’t know at this point what the solution is.”

Before Oct. 7, she and her neighbors thought the threat was rockets, she said, so they built safe rooms, but now that Hamas gunmen came over and burned parents and kids in their safe rooms, who knows what is safe? “The safe room was designed to keep you safe from rockets, not from another human who would come and kill you for who you are,” she said. What is most dispiriting, she concluded, is that it appears that some Gazans who worked on the kibbutz gave Hamas maps of the layout.

There are a lot of Israelis who listened to the recording, published by The Times of Israel, of a Hamas gunman who took part in the Oct. 7 onslaught, identified by his father as Mahmoud, calling his parents from the phone of a Jewish woman he’d just murdered and imploring them to check his WhatsApp messages to see the pictures he took of some of the 10 Jews he alone killed in Mefalsim, a kibbutz near the Gaza border.

“Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews,” he says, according to an English translation. “Mom, your son is a hero,” he adds. His parents can be heard seemingly rejoicing.

This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’

The euphoric rampage of Oct. 7 that killed some 1,400 soldiers and civilians has not only hardened Israeli hearts toward the suffering of Gaza civilians. It has also inflicted a deep sense of humiliation and guilt on the Israeli Army and defense establishment, for having failed in their most basic mission of protecting the country’s borders.

As a result, there is a conviction in the army that it must demonstrate to the entire neighborhood — to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Houthis in Yemen, to the Islamic militias in Iraq to the Hamas and other fighters in the West Bank — that it will stop at nothing to re-establish the security of the borders. While the army insists that it is hewing to the laws of war, it wants to show that no one can outcrazy Israel to drive its people from this region — even if the Israeli military has to defy the U.S. and even if it does not have any solid plan for governing Gaza the morning after the war.

As Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told reporters on Wednesday: “Israel cannot accept such an active threat on its borders. The whole idea of people living side by side in the Middle East was jeopardized by Hamas.”

This conflict is now back to its most biblical and primordial roots. This seems to be a time of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. The morning-after policy thinking will have to wait for the mourning after.

Which is why I so worry about the leadership here today. I was traveling around the West Bank on Tuesday when I heard that Netanyahu had just told ABC News that Israel plans to retain “overall security responsibility” in Gaza “for an indefinite period” after its war with Hamas.

Really? Consider this context: “Accordingto Israel’s official Central Bureau of Statistics, at the end of 2021, 9.449 million people live in Israel (including Israelis in West Bank settlements), the Times of Israel reported last year. “Of those, 6.982 million (74 percent) are Jewish, 1.99 million (21 percent) are Arab, and 472,000 (5 percent) are neither. The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics puts the West Bank Palestinian population at a little over three million and the Gaza population at just over two million.”

So Netanyahu is saying that seven million Jews are going to indefinitely control the lives of five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — while offering them no political horizon, nothing, by way of statehood one day on any demilitarized conditions.

Early on the morning of Oct. 29, as the Israeli Army was just moving into Gaza, Netanyahu posted and then deleted a message on social media in which he blamed Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment for failing to anticipate Hamas’s surprise attack. (Netanyahu somehow forgot how often the Israeli military and intelligence leaders had warned him that his totally unnecessary coup against the country’s judicial system was fracturing the army and Israel’s enemies were all noticing its vulnerability.)

After being slammed by the public for digitally stabbing his army and intelligence chiefs in the back in the middle of a war, Netanyahu published a new post. “I was wrong,” he wrote, adding that “the things I said following the press conference should not have been said, and I apologize for that. I fully support the heads of [Israel’s] security services.”

But the damage was done. How much do you suppose those military leaders trust what Netanyahu will say if the Gaza campaign stalls? What real leader would behave that way at the start of a war of survival?

Let me not mince words, because the hour is dark and Israel, as I said, is in real danger. Netanyahu and his far-right zealots have taken Israel on multiple flights of fancy in the last year: dividing the country and the army over the fraudulent judicial reform, bankrupting its future with massive investments in religious schools that teach no math and in West Bank Jewish settlements that teach no pluralism — while building up Hamas, which would never be a partner for peace, and tearing down the Palestinian Authority, the only possible partner for peace.

The sooner Israel replaces Netanyahu and his far-right allies with a true center-left-center-right national unity government, the better chance it has to hold together during what is going to be a hellish war and aftermath. And the better chance that Biden — who may be down in the polls in America but could get elected here in a landslide for the empathy and steel he showed at Israel’s hour of need — will not have hitched his credibility and ours to a Netanyahu Israel that will never be able to fully help us to help it.

This society is so much better than its leader. It is too bad it took a war to drive that home. Ron Scherf is a retired member of Israel’s most elite special forces unit and a founder of Brothers in Arms, the Israeli activist coalition that mobilized veterans and reservists to oppose Netanyahu’s judicial coup. Immediately after the Hamas invasion, Brothers in Arms pivoted to organizing reservists and aid workers to get to the front — left, right, religious, secular, it didn’t matter — many hours before this incompetent government did.

It’s a remarkable story of grass-roots mobilization that showed how much solidarity is still buried in this place and could be unlocked by a different prime minister, one who was a uniter, not a divider. Or as Scherf put it to me, “When you go to the front, you are overwhelmed by the power of what we lost.”

Categories Accountability, International, Safety

America Has Too Many Guns, Too Many Gun Deaths

By dianeravitch

September 10, 2023 //

The other day I was listening to the news on the radio, and there was a string of reports about gun violence across the country. It wasn’t a “special” on gun violence, it was just the morning news. Gun deaths have become normalized, like weather reports. And yet, because Trump stacked the Supreme Court with gun-rights justices, any effort to limit access to guns seems doomed.

The Los Angeles Times recently published an editorial that captured the gun insanity in which we are all now trapped. Why doesn’t this Court of Originalists limit gun ownership to the kind of weapons available when the Second Amendment was written? Muskets, primarily.

It was perfectly legal for the racist killer of three Black people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Fla., on Saturday to buy and possess the Glock handgun and AR-15-style rifle he used in the shootings, officials said.

A laptop belonging to Ryan Christopher Palmeter, the white 21-year-old killer, was filled with racist screeds. Officials said he had been briefly held for an involuntary psychiatric evaluation in 2017.

Two days before the Jacksonville massacre, Jason and Melissa Dunham and their three children aged 15, 12 and 9 were found shot to death in their Lake Township, Ohio, home in an apparent murder-suicide. The handgun used in the shooting belonged to Jason Dunham, police said, but it wasn’t yet clear whether he was the shooter. He and his wife both had permits to carry concealed weapons.

A day before that, retired Ventura police sergeant John Snowling shot his estranged wife and eight other people at Cook’s Corner, a roadhouse in Trabuco Canyon in Orange County. His wife, Marie Snowling, survived but three others died. Police shot the gunman to death. The killer lawfully acquired and possessed the .380 pistol, .38 revolver, .25 pistol and shotgun that were recovered at the scene.

A few days earlier, Orange County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Ferguson pleaded not guilty to murdering his wife, Sheryl Ferguson. He is charged with shooting her to death in their Anaheim Hills home during an argument. His lawyer said it was an accident. Law enforcement officers recovered 47 other weapons and about 26,000 rounds of ammunition from the judge’s home, all of which were apparently acquired and owned lawfully, although one rifle is unaccounted for.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Americans’ right to possess, carry and conceal weapons cannot be curtailed by laws that are not rooted in practices that existed in the late 18th century, when the 2nd Amendment was drafted and ratified. Gun advocates argue that the right to carry weapons makes Americans safer, and that any bad guy with a gun is now more likely to be stopped by a good guy with a gun — someone presumably like an armed parent, retired police officer or judge.

The targeted racist slayings understandably loomed larger in the news than the family violence. President Biden said, “We must say clearly and forcefully that white supremacy has no place in America.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said, “Targeting people because of their race has no place in the state of Florida.” Former Vice President Mike Pence, also running for president, said, “There is no place in America for racially inspired violence.”

They are wrong and they know it. The American people, their politicians, their courts and their culture have made this nation the planet’s preeminent place to target people for death because of their race — or for any other reason, such as their familial relationship, differing beliefs or reasons indiscernible to the rest of us. This country is exactly the place for hateful, murderous, suicidal gun violence, because this is the place for millions upon millions of guns, and the bizarre American delusion that the more of them we have, the safer and freer we are.

Pence added that his solutions include an “expedited federal death penalty for anyone engaged in a mass shooting.” It’s difficult to grasp how quick executions would alter the behavior of the Jacksonville killer, who shot himself to death. Or whichever member of the Dunham family pulled the trigger, the deranged Ventura cop who died at the scene or the judge who claims to have shot his wife by accident.

Firearms are the leading cause of death of juveniles in the U.S. Biden recently unveiled a plan to increase access to mental health care, including in schools, in part to address the causes of gun violence.

The far-right organization called Moms for Liberty said, in effect, don’t you dare. Mental health care “has NO place in public schools,” the group said in a social media post earlier this month.

At a special session of the Tennessee Legislature called in response to the slaying of three children and three adults at a Nashville elementary school in March, lawmakers last week rejected gun control proposals and instead introduced measures to allow more guns in schools.

Speaking of schools, a 16-year-old boy was shot to death at a high school football game Friday night in Choctaw, Okla. Several others were shot as well. Don’t confuse that incident with the one at the high school game the same night in Tulsa, in which a 16-year-old waved a pistol, causing a stampede and ending the game before it was finished. Or the game on the same night in Locust Grove, also in Oklahoma, where a deputy took a gun from a teenager.

Or high school football games the same night in Abington, Pa., Waterloo, Iowa, or Goodyear, Ariz., where other teenagers were disarmed before they could harm anyone with the guns they brought with them.

A week earlier, four teenagers were charged for carrying three loaded Glock 9 millimeter pistols at a high school football game in Canal Winchester, Ohio.

“Why bring those to a football stadium?” Madison Township Police Chief Gary York asked. “Why do these kids have them to begin with?”

Such a mystery. Where on Earth do kids get these violent ideas? And where do they get all those guns?

Categories Accountability, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Guns, Safety

Florida: Prepare for Carnage on July 1 When Gun Control Disappears

By dianeravitch

June 30, 2023 //

The Miami Herald editorial board published the following editorial about the end of meaningful gun control in Florida. Elect DeFascist and every American will be armed or fearful of leaving their home. This is a way to erode trust among citizens. Which lunatic bought a gun? Who’s packing heat? You? You? You?

Anyone with good sense in Florida is dreading July 1.

That’s the day when the state starts allowing people over the age of 21 to carry a concealed weapon without a permit and without any gun training — at all.

It’s the terrible law that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the complicit Legislature pushed through this session as they piled aboard the DeSantis-for-president train, intent on giving the governor the rightest of far-right of platforms to run on, in the hope of siphoning support from Donald Trump.

Florida isn’t the only state to do it. In fact, it’s the 26th, joining Kentucky, Alabama, Maine and Texas, among others.

But in a state that spawned the “Florida man” meme, lowering restrictions on guns is crazy. And scary.

You don’t have to look far to see why. Just a few weeks ago, on June 15, a Dunedin man emptied his assault rifle at a pool cleaner he thought was an intruder.

It was around 9 p.m., and the man and his wife were watching a movie when they heard noises coming from their patio and saw a man walking around their pool. They said they yelled at him to go away and told deputies that they didn’t recognize him.

The wife, sensibly, called 911. The husband got his gun. He saw a flashlight and fired into the back yard — from behind his couch, through closed blinds.

lIt was their 33-year-old pool cleaner who had been cleaning their pool for at least six months and was running behind schedule.

He wasn’t hit by a bullet, only glass and shrapnel. And of course, he ran. But the homeowner, with the blinds closed, thought someone was still outside. So, as video footage shared by the local sheriff shows, almost a minute after the cleaner ran from the pool deck, the man emptied the magazine of his rifle into the back yard. He shot a total of 30 rounds in about 90 seconds. Stray bullets were found on the shuffleboard court behind the couple’s home.

Will the homeowner face charges? Under Florida’s existing “stand your ground” law, which allows a homeowner to fire at someone he thinks is a threat, apparently not.

Sheriff Bob Gualtieri of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office offered the right assessment of the situation in a June 26 news conference: “It’s probably one of those things that I would call lawful but awful.”

And now we will have “permitless carry” in Florida. With it, no doubt, will come more “lawful but awful” situations. And deadly ones, too.

Can’t wait for July 1.

Categories DeSantis, Elections, Extremism, Guns, Safety

Gun Deaths per 100,000

By dianeravitch

June 14, 2023 //

We lead the world in gun deaths. Yet GOP-dominated states like Florida, Texas, and Missouri are making it easier to get and carry a gun. The GOP fights any form of gun control.

Categories Guns, International, Safety

Kathryn Joyce: How Sarasota County Became Florida’s Laboratory for Far-Right Extremism

By dianeravitch

June 13, 2023 //

If you read one article today, make it this one.

Kathryn Joyce is an outstanding journalist who has written several excellent articles about the far-right conspiracy to destroy public education. In this important article, published by both the Hechinger Report and Vanity Fair, she examines the rightwing takeover of public schools in Sarasota, Florida, by the extremist Moms for Liberty and their hero Governor DeSantis.

Joyce begins:

SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — On a Sunday afternoon in late May 2022, Zander Moricz, then class president of Sarasota County’s Pine View School, spent the moments before his graduation speech sitting outside the auditorium, on the phone with his lawyers. Over the previous month, the question of what he’d say when he stepped to the podium had become national news. That March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, quickly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law for its ban on all mention of gender identity and sexuality in K–3 classrooms and restriction of those discussions in higher grades as well. Moricz, a student LGBTQ+ activist, had led several protests against the act that spring and joined a high-profile lawsuit against the state. In early May, he charged on Twitter that Pine View’s administration had warned that if he mentioned his activism or the lawsuit at graduation, his microphone would be cut. (In a statement released last year, the school district confirmed that students are told not to express political views in their speeches.)

In the tumultuous weeks leading up to the ceremony, Pine View — Sarasota’s “gifted” magnet institution, consistently ranked one of the top 25 public high schools in the country — was besieged with angry calls and news coverage. Moricz stayed home for three weeks, he said, thanks to the rvolume of death threats he received, and people showed up at his parents’ work. When a rumor started that Pine View’s principal would have to wear a bulletproof vest to graduation, he recalled, “the entire campus lost their minds,” thinking “everyone’s going to die” and warning relatives not to come. His parents worried he’d be killed.

But after all the controversy, graduation day was a success. Moricz, now 19, delivered a pointedly coded speech about the travails of being born with curly hair in Florida’s humid climate: how he worried about the “thousands of curly-haired kids who are going to be forced to speak like this” — like he was, in code — “for their entire lives as students.” Videos of the speech went viral. Donations poured into Moricz’s youth-led nonprofit. That summer, he left to study government at Harvard.

Half-a-year later though, when Moricz came home, Sarasota felt darker.

“I’m wearing this hat for a reason,” he said when we met for coffee in a strip mall near his alma mater in early March. “Two years ago, if I was bullied due to my queerness, the school would have rallied around me and shut it down. If it happened today, I believe everyone would act like it wasn’t happening.”

These days, he said, queer kids sit in the back of class and don’t tell teachers they’re being harassed. A student at Pine View was told, Moricz said, that he couldn’t finish his senior thesis researching other states’ copycat “Don’t Say Gay” laws. (The school did not respond to a request for comment through a district spokesperson.) When Moricz’s nonprofit found a building to house a new youth LGBTQ+ center — since schools were emphatically no longer safe spaces — they budgeted for bulletproof glass.

“The culture of fear that’s being created is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do,” he said. And much of it was thanks to the Sarasota County School Board.

Over the last two years, education culture wars have become the engine of Republican politics nationwide, with DeSantis’s Florida serving as the vanguard of the movement. But within the state, Sarasota is more central still.

Its school board chair, Bridget Ziegler, cofounded the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty and helped lay the groundwork for “Don’t Say Gay.” After a uniquely ugly school board race last summer, conservatives flipped the board and promptly forced out the district’s popular superintendent. In early January, when DeSantis appointed a series of right-wing activists to transform Florida’s progressive New College into a “Hillsdale of the South” — emulating the private Christian college in Michigan that has become a trendsetting force on the right — that was in Sarasota too. In February, DeSantis sat alongside Ziegler’s husband and Moms for Liberty’s other cofounders to announce a list of 14 school board members he intends to help oust in 2024—Sarasota’s sole remaining Democrat and LGBTQ+ board member, Tom Edwards, among them. The next month, Ziegler proposed that the board hire a newly created education consultancy group with ties to Hillsdale College for what she later called a “‘WOKE’ Audit.” (Ziegler did not respond to interview requests for this article.)

The dizzying number of attacks has led to staffing and hiring challenges, the cancelation of a class, a budding exodus of liberals from the county, and fears that destroying public education is the ultimate endgame. In January, Ziegler’s husband, Christian — who chairs the Florida Republican Party — tweeted a celebratory declaration: “SARASOTA IS GROUND ZERO FOR CONSERVATIVE EDUCATION.”

It wasn’t hyperbole, said Moricz. “We say that Sarasota is Florida’s underground lab, and we’re its non-consenting lab rats.”

For as long as Florida has been grading schools and school districts — a late 1990s innovation that helped spark the “school reform” movement — Sarasota, with its 62 schools and nearly 43,000 students, has enjoyed an “A” rating. Perched on the Gulf Coast just south of Tampa, the county’s mix of powder-soft beaches and high-culture amenities — including an opera house, ballet and museums — have made it a destination for vacationers and retirees. And that influx has made Sarasota one of the richest counties in the state.

Since many of those retirees, dating back to the 1950s, have been white Midwestern transplants, it’s also made Sarasota a Republican stronghold and top fundraising destination for would-be presidential candidates. Both the last and current chairs of the state GOP — first State Senator Joe Gruters and now Christian Ziegler — live in the county. Sarasota arguably launched Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, thanks to Gruters’s early support. These days, though, Sarasota isn’t just conservative, but at the leading edge of Florida’s turn to the hard right.

Partly that’s thanks to the Zieglers, who have become one of Florida’s premier power couples, with close ties to both Trump world and the DeSantis administration and a trio of daughters enrolled in local private schools. As founder of the digital marketing company Microtargeted Media, Christian did hundreds of thousands of dollars of work for pro-Trump PACs in 2021, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. After being elected state GOP chair this February, he announced his goal was “to crush these leftist in-state Democrats” so thoroughly that “no Democrat considers running for office.” Although Bridget stepped down from Moms for Liberty shortly after its founding, she subsequently helped draftFlorida’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, which helped pave the way for DeSantis’s 2021 ban on mask mandates and ultimately last year’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. In 2022, the right-wing Leadership Institute hired her as director of school board programs, and built a 6,000-square-foot headquarters in Sarasota to serve as a national hub for conservative education activism. This winter, DeSantis also appointed her to a new board designed to punish the Disney Company for criticizing his anti-LGBTQ laws….

Last year, when Ziegler was up for reelection and two other board members were terming out, she ran as a unified slate with former school resource officer Tim Enos and retired district employee Robyn Marinelli. The candidates drew support from both DeSantis’s administration — which unprecedentedly endorsed dozens of school board candidates across the state — and local members of the far-right. A PAC partially funded by The Hollow’s owner campaigned for the “ZEM” slate (a shorthand for the candidates’ surnames) by driving a mobile billboard around the county, calling one of their opponents a “LIAR” and “BABY KILLER” because she’d once worked for Planned Parenthood. Proud Boys hoisted ZEM signs on county streets and a mailer was sent out, castigating the liberal candidates as “BLM/PSL [Party of Socialism and Liberation]/ANTIFA RIOTERS, PLANNED PARENTHOOD BABY KILLERS, [who] WANT GROOMING AND PORNOGRAPHY IN OUR SCHOOLS.” (Enos and Marinelli did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

Open the link and read all of the article. It is a devastating article about the takeover of the school board by hateful extremists whose tools are fear and divisiveness.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Gender, Injustice, Lies, Parent Groups, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Safety, Shame, Students

Texas Tribune: 77 Minutes

By dianeravitch

May 24, 2023 //

Maria Mendez of The Texas Tribune summarizes what has been learned since the massacre of 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, one year ago.

What we know for sure: 376 armed officers converged on the school, knowing that a gunman was killing children and teachers inside two conjoined classrooms, where there were 33 children and three teachers.

For 77 minutes, none of the officers entered the classroom to confront the killer. They were afraid of the killer’s AR-15.

What we have learned since: there was a catastrophic breakdown in leadership and communications. No one was sure who was in charge.

Law enforcement across the nation has been trained to confront and neutralize the killer as quickly as possible. When one officer started to enter the killing zone, none of his colleagues backed him up. When a dying teacher called her husband, who was a police officer at the scene, he tried to rush to her aid but he was stopped and disarmed.

In two and a half minutes, before any police officer set foot inside the school, the gunman fired more than 100 rounds at students and teachers from point-blank range. Upon breach, 18 of the 21 victims were already dead.

Had the officers followed standard protocol and entered the classrooms immediately, some of those who were grievously wounded might have survived.

Inside the school, some police officers attempted to approach the classrooms the gunman took over, but they weren’t backed up by colleagues, according to records and footage reviewed by The Texas Tribune.

Another frustrated state trooper urged officers to enter but was told by a police officer that they hadn’t received those orders….

The disjointed medical response, which also included lapses in communication and muddled lines of authority, frustrated medics while delaying efforts to get ambulances, air transport and other emergency services to victims.

For example, medical helicopters with critical supplies of blood tried to land at the school, but an unidentified fire department official told them to wait at an airport 3 miles away. And only two ambulances were seen outside the school in police camera footage, while dozens of parked police vehicles blocked other ambulances’ paths.

What’s happened since: Congress passed a bill introduced by Republican Senator Jon Cornyn of Texas. Texas has spent money on security.

Within weeks of the shooting, federal lawmakers passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn helped negotiate passage of the legislation, which contained modest provisions but which was also the most significant federal gun measure passed in nearly three decades. But rather than pass gun measures of their own, state leaders have largely focused on improving school safety and access to mental health care.

Texas Republicans hold a supermajority, and they oppose restrictions on gun ownership.

Abbott and other Texas Republicans have mostly ignored calls for increased gun restrictions since the Uvalde shooting, instead focusing on mental health funding and school safety.

In late June, Abbott and state leaders announced they would dedicate $100 million in state funds to boost school safety and mental health services through August 2023. Most of the funds went toward bullet-resistant shields for school police officers and for school districts to buy silent panic alert technology to alert police of an intruder.

Cornyn negotiated a federal bill signed into law last June with modest gun control measures that addressed a “boyfriend loophole,” which previously exempted some dating partners from a federal ban on firearm purchases for those convicted of domestic violence. The bill also included incentives for states to impose “red flag laws,” which allow for the temporary confiscation of guns from people found by a judge to be dangerous. Texas has not moved to impose such a law.

Texas lawmakers also appear unlikely to raise the minimum age to buy semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 from 18 to 21 after a bill to do so missed key legislative deadlines. But gun safety advocates say they still see incremental progress through two gun-related bills passed by both chambers of the Legislature.

Senate Bill 728 requires courts to report involuntary mental health hospitalizations of juveniles 16 and older for inclusion in the federal background check system to purchase firearms. The bill, sent to the governor’s desk, addresses a loophole exposed by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica following the shooting in Uvalde.

House Bill 2454 would restrict a person from buying a gun for another person not allowed to have one. It has passed both chambers, but the House must accept or negotiate amendments made to the bill by the Senate before the legislative session ends May 29.

Lawmakers have also advanced legislation to fund campus security upgrades, add requirements such as silent panic buttons in classrooms and create a new safety and security department within the Texas Education Agency. The department would have the authority to compel school districts to establish active-shooter protocols — something about half of the state’s school districts failed to have, according to an audit in 2020.

None of these changes at the state and federal levels would have prevented the Uvalde massacre. Children and teachers called 911, as they lay dying. Would a silent panic button have given the officers the nerve to enter the classroom sooner? Would the killer have signed up for mental health services?

Categories Accountability, Evil, Failure, Guns, Safety

Nikhil Goyal: Helen Gym Has a Plan to Make Philadelphia Safe

By dianeravitch

May 11, 2023 //

Nikhil Goyal works on the staff of Senator Bernie Sanders. His new book is about Philadelphia, which will hold the Democratic primary for Mayor on May 16. He writes in the Nation about why he supports Helen Gym.

Goyal begins by explaining why Brandon Johnson beat Paul Vallas in the Chicago mayoral election. He highlighted Vallas’ destructive record as a school privatizer in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities.

He writes:

A key critic of this scheme was Helen Gym, founder of Parents United for Public Education, who lamented the violence of underfunded, understaffed schools that were falling apart and mold-ridden and argued that children’s pronounced social and emotional needs were not served by zero-tolerance punishment. “We have policies to suspend, arrest, punish, and potentially imprison our children,” she wrote in the Philadelphia Public School Notebook in 2007, “but we can’t have a policy for reduced class size or textbooks or open libraries in our schools.… So what’s really violent here?”

Today, Gym is one of the leading candidates for mayor of Philadelphia and hoping to join a new class of progressive urban mayors: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. (Disclosure: I have known Gym for several years through organizing and policy work, and she is discussed in my forthcoming book about Philadelphia, Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty.)

A zigzag line can be drawn from social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter, teachers’ strikes, and Sanders’s presidential campaigns to the rise of these mayors. Together, with the backing of organized labor, they have an opportunity to reverse austerity, invest in public goods, reimagine and strengthen public safety, and save lives in American metropolises.

The next mayor of Philadelphia, the poorest large city in the country, will face daunting challenges: joblessness; poverty; gun violence; inequitable, unsafe publicschools; an opioid epidemic; and substandard, unaffordable housing. The past three years have been the deadliest in the history of the city, with some 500 killings annually—the highest per capita homicide rate among large US cities. Recently, the school district announcedthat 100 students have already been shot, including 20 killed, this year. A recent survey found that two-thirds of residents said Philadelphia is on the wrong track and identified crime as their top issue.

With election day next week, the first independent public poll shows a dead heat between the top five candidates. There’s ShopRite oligarch and chauvinist Jeff Brown, who owns a chain of supermarkets and was recently accused by the city’s ethics board of violating campaign finance law for colluding with an affiliated super PAC and a nonprofit. Real estate mogul and former city councilman Allan Domb is largely self-funded to the tune of more than $7 million. Former city controller Rebecca Rhynhart is running as a pro-charter technocrat, in the style of former mayors John Street and Michael Nutter, who have both endorsed her. Former city councilwoman and lobbyist Cherelle Parker, who backs stop-and-frisk policing, rounds out the top tier.

Like Brandon Johnson, Gym is a former public-school teacher and came of age organizing against the market-based urban school reform project. Pick virtually any social justice fight in the city since the 1990s: the closures and privatization of public schools, budget cuts, school funding lawsuits, the eviction crisis, the fight for a $15 minimum wage, the closure of Hahnemann Hospital, and the abuse scandal at the reformatory Glen Mills Schools, and one will find that Gym, who served as a city councilwoman for six years, was on the picket line, getting arrested for civil disobedience, building coalitions, testifying at or organizing hearings, or drafting and passing legislation.

As mayor, she pledges to advance an agenda that would “restore the village to our city.” Her policy platform is, naturally, centered on education, and she calls for turning every school into a community school with wraparound and trauma-informed supports; providing after-school and summer programming in schools, recreation centers, and libraries; modernizing school infrastructure; creating playgrounds for every school; and expanding youth employment. Not only will these investments improve educational outcomes, but research indicates that they will also reduce crime and other social dislocations. Gym released a comprehensive anti-violence plan that would invest in mental health crisis response units, violence interrupters, an improved 911 response system, more detectives to improve homicide clearance rates, and other ideas. She and Johnson share a recognition that the hackneyed tactic of simply hiring more cops cannot slow the bloodshed. Gym and several candidates are also pushing for place-based interventions, such as cleaning up vacant lots, rehabilitating abandoned houses, and improving street lighting, all of which have been found to cut down on crime.

Recently, hundreds of youth engaged in raucous flash mobs and violent skirmishes in downtown Chicago and Philadelphia. Immediately, there were calls to impose a curfew, despite little to no data validating the efficacy of the measure. Mayor-elect Johnson condemned the unrest while acknowledging that we should not “demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.” In Philadelphia, it was telling that Gym was the only mayoral candidate to firmly oppose the new ban on unaccompanied minors after 2 PM at the Fashion District shopping mall. “We cannot criminalize young people,” she said. “There is nothing for young people to do. We actually have to go out and create some of these things for young people to go to.”

The American Rescue Plan poured billions into Philadelphia, including historic sums for public education and before-school, after-school, and summer programs. Philadelphia’s next mayor must prepare for the imminent fiscal cliffs as those Covid-19 federal relief dollars dry up in the next year or two. Pennsylvania’s regressive uniformity clause mandates flat local and state taxes, where low-income earners are effectively charged higher tax rates than the wealthiest. So the mayor will need to be creative and bold to raise new revenue—push Harrisburg for fair funding, identify and divert wasteful spending into productive programs, and crack down on corporate welfare.

If Gym is also elected, the question will be: How can Johnson and Gym wield their power to benefit working people in the face of expected relentless obstruction by corporate interests, real estate, anti-public education billionaires, and police unions? Seventy years ago, Joseph S. Clark Jr., a postwar mayor of Philadelphia, describedNew Deal/Fair Deal liberalism as “utilizing the full force of government for the advancement of social, political, and economic justice at the municipal, state, national, and international levels.” This is the vision the next mayors of Chicago and Philadelphia should renew.

Categories Education Reform, Elections, Philadelphia, Safety

Mercedes Schneider: Jesus Loves the Little Children, So Let’s Put Them to Work.

By dianeravitch

April 10, 2023 //

For her Easter post, Mercedes Schneider wrote about the hypocrisy of those who loudly proclaim their love of Jesus, but also pass laws to put adolescents to work in dangerous low-wage jobs.

She writes:

The corporate world is short on workers, sooo, let’s see what states will pass legislation to loosen restrictions on child labor.

This drive reminds me of the blindside on K12 education that is Common Core– the justification (and assumption) being that the chief purpose K12 education is to “prepare students for 21st century jobs.”

Well, its the 21st century, and it seems that business is short on bodies, and any warm body will do.

So, on this Easter as I think of Jesus, who brought to the attention of his male-centric culture the importance of considering children as people valuable in their own right, I also think of the primarily-Republican push to feed children to the god of business and industry.

On March 14, 2023, journalist Jacob Knudsen published a piece in Axios, stunningly entitled, “Lawmakers Target Child Labor Laws to Ease Worker Shortage.”

Forget childhood. We must appease the god of business and industry.

Knudsen writes, in part,

Legislators in multiple states are invoking a widespread labor shortage to push bills that would weaken long-standing child labor laws.

Why it matters: Some bills go beyond expanding eligibility or working hours for run-of-the-mill teen jobs. They’d make it easier for kids to fill physically demanding roles at potentially hazardous work sites. …

Driving the news: A new Arkansas law signed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) last week makes it easier for teens as young as 14 to work without obtaining a permit.

Between the lines: The laws and proposals have largely been introduced by Republicans but received support from some Democrats in Ohio and New Jersey. …

Zoom in: Iowa lawmakers are considering Republican legislation that would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work in industrial laundry services and freezers at meatpacking plants. It’d also prevent many of them from receiving worker’s compensation if they are sickened, injured or killed on the job.

The Iowa law specifically excludes businesses who hire teens from any civil liability in the event they suffer harm or even death in the workplace.

Mercedes concludes:

This exploitation (make no mistake that this loosening of child labor laws in numerous states is exactly that) has at its center a lack of planning combined with the desire for a lower bottom line (and greater profits). Many of my teenaged students already drag themselves to school, only to fall asleep in class with the apology that “I had to close last night.” Therefore, making it easier for employers to squeeze even more out of school-aged employees even as society expects of them (and their schools) stellar academic results (dog whistle: test scores) is indeed speaking out of both ends of a hypocritical, corporate-adulating mouth.

Jesus loves the little children, sooo let’s exploit their labor potential, even for dangerous jobs, as we simultaneously absolve ourselves of any responsibility– even death.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Cruelty, Economy, Ethics, Health, Safety

Tennessee: GOP Threatens to Expel 3 Democratic Legislators Who Joined Anti-Gun Protest

By dianeravitch

April 3, 2023 //

The statehouse in Nashville, Tennessee, was surrounded by parents and students demonstrating in favor of gun control and against the GOP-controlled legislature’s protection of guns. The protest follows the murder of three children and three staff members at the Coventry School in Nashville.

Three Democratic members of the legislature joined the protest, chanting with the protestors.

The GOP leadership threatened to expel the Democrats. The speaker of the House absurdly claimed that the three Democrats were encouraging an insurrection.

Parents and children held signs and shouted chants during a large protest at the Tennessee capitol last week following a deadly school shooting. And while no one was arrested or injured, Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton is comparing the demonstration to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

During the House Floor session on Thursday — days after the Covenant School shooting — Reps. Gloria Johnson, D-Knox, Justin Pearson, D-Memphis, and Justin Jones, D-Nashville, stood up and chanted with protestors in the gallery.

Pearson and other Democrats attempted to acknowledge the large group of protesters during session, but were told to stick to the subject of the bill by Speaker Cameron.

“We listened to them and helped to elevate the issue that they are demanding justice for,” said Pearson.

House Speaker Cameron Sexton said their actions were more than a breach of decorum, comparing it to the January 6th insurrection in remarks to outlets.

“Two of the members; Representative Jones and Representative Johnson, have been very vocal about Jan. 6 and Washington, D.C., about what that was,” said Sexton. “What they did today was equivalent, at least equivalent, maybe worse depending on how you look at it, to doing an insurrection in the State Capitol.”

Sexton warned that there will likely be consequences for the trio.

“It could be removal of committees; it could be censorship; it could be expulsion from the General Assembly. Anywhere in between,” said Sexton.

Leaders in the Democratic caucus are defending their colleagues. Nashville Democrat John Ray Clemmons says he believes Speaker Sexton is exaggerating.

“You show me the broken windows, you show me anyone who went into the speaker’s office and put their chair up on his desk and trashed his office, you show me where a noose was hanging anywhere on the legislative plaza,” said Clemmons, citing damage committed during the Capitol riot, which resulted in five deaths before and after the event.

The three rebellious Democrats were stripped of their committee assignments. Their member badges were deactivated. Their telephones were disconnected.

In a press conference Monday, Jones says Sexton is more focused on politics than addressing last week’s mass shooting.

“We are members, who are standing in the well, telling our speakers and our colleagues that kids should not be murdered in school,” Jones said, “and rather than address that issue, the speaker has spent more time on Twitter this weekend talking about a fake insurrection than he did about the deaths of six people including 9-year-old children.”

It is not yet clear if the lawmakers will face expulsion. Sexton has not commented on whether they will face further discipline.

A tweet:

Three Tennessee Democrats have been stripped of their committee and subcommittee assignments by the Republican dominated legislature for speaking out against gun violence in the wake of the Nashville shooting that killed three children.

Democracy is dead in Tennessee.

@Sethaweitz

Rep. Gloria Johnson, one of the three Democrats, tweeted:

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Guns, Guns in Schools, Nashville, Parents, Republicans, Resistance, Safety, Tennessee

March for Our Lives: We Call BS!

By dianeravitch

April 1, 2023 //

March for Our Lives is the organization created by students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, after the massacre of 14 students and three staff members on February 14, 2018. The students organized massive rallies demanding gun control. Florida Governor Rick Scott signed gun control legislation: however, in the past few days the Florida legislature rolled back the post-Parkland gun control and made it legal to carry a gun without so much as a permit.

Please note that Rep. Andy Ogles, pictured below with his family, brandishing guns, represents the district in Nashville where the Coventry School is located. His district was created as a result of a gerrymander when the legislature split Nashville in two.

This Monday, we lost three children and three adults to gun violence in yet another school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee: Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, Michael Hill, 61, Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Hallie Scruggs, 9, and William Kinney, 9.

The perpetrator used an AR-15 rifle to kill three children and school staff, including a substitute teacher, custodian, and school head. Instead of using their power to act, two Tennessee Congressmembers are treating calls for gun safety legislation as a joke. Rep. Andy Ogles represents the district in Nashville where the Covenant School shooting occurred. Do you know what his response was? Thoughts and prayers. This is the same congressman who glorified guns with his family in this holiday photo:When reporters asked him if he regrets even sharing that photo, he doubled down by saying, “Why would I regret a photograph with my family exercising my rights to bear arms?”

Another Tennessee lawmaker, Rep. Tim Burchett, told reporters, “We’re not gonna fix it. Criminals will be criminals.” In other words, get used to it. Of course, both of these elected officials have accepted campaign contributions from the NRA.

When corrupt, pro-NRA legislators throw their hands up and claim there’s nothing they can do to stop this country’s rampant gun violence crisis, we call BS. It’s their JOB to come up with solutions to our country’s problems — especially the number one cause of death amongst children and teenagers.

Any politician who cares more about protecting the gun lobby’s profits than saving our children from gunfire does NOT belong in Congress.

We’re calling on these two clowns— Rep. Burchett and Rep. Ogles — to resign immediately. If you agree that failure and incompetence have no place in Congress, sign our petition today →SIGN PETITION

Politicians like Rep. Burchett and Rep. Ogles have grown too comfortable repeating thoughts and prayers instead of actually delivering solutions. But we’re paying attention to their empty words, and we are prepared to do the work to elect gun safety champions to replace them in office.Thank you for all your support.In solidarity,

March For Our Lives

(P.S. Our movement is powered by grassroots supporters committed to ending gun violence. Chip in to fuel our year-round organizing work→) DONATE NOWContributions will benefit March For Our Lives Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. Contributions or gifts to March For Our Lives Action Fund are not deductible for federal income tax purposes as charitable contributions.