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Michael Hiltzik: The Republican Plan to Dumb Down America’s Youth

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
24

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, finds a pattern in the Republican attacks on the schools and universities. Their hostility to teaching Black history, their encouragement of book banning, their strategic defunding of higher education, their treatment of teaching about race, gender, and climate change as “indoctrination”—together point to a goal: the dumbing down of American young people.

Republicans say they want to get rid of “indoctrination” but they are busily erasing free inquiry and critical thinking. What do they actually want? Indoctrination.

He reminds us of the immortal words of former President Donald J. Trump: “I love the uneducated.” Republicans do not want students to think critically about racism or the past. They do not want them to reflect on anything that makes them “uncomfortable.” They want to shield them from “divisive concerns.” They want them to imbibe a candy-coated version of the past, not wrestle with hard truths.

He writes:

For reasons that may not be too hard to understand, Republicans and conservatives seem to be intent on turning their K-12 schools, colleges and universities into plantations for raising a crop of ignorant and unthinking students.

Donald Trump set forth the principle during his 2016 primary campaign, when he declared, “I love the poorly educated.”

In recent months, the right-wing attack on public education has intensified. The epicenter of the movement is Florida under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, where the faculty and course offerings of one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges, New College, have been eviscerated purportedly to wipe out what DeSantis calls “ideological indoctrination.”

The state’s K-12 schools have been authorized to supplement their curricula with animated cartoons developed by the far-right Prager University Foundation that flagrantly distort climate science and America’s racial history, the better to promote fossil fuels, undermine the use of renewable energy and paint a lily-white picture of America’s past.

Then there’s West Virginia, which is proposing to shut down nearly 10% of its academic offerings, including all its foreign language programs. The supposed reason is a huge budget deficit, the harvest of a systematic cutback in state funding.

In Texas, the State Library and Archives Commission is quitting the American Library Assn., after a complaint by a Republican state legislator accusing the association of pushing “socialism and Marxist ideology.”

In Arkansas, state education officials told schools that they may not award credit for the Advanced Placement course in African American history. (Several school districts said they’d offer students the course anyway.) This is the course that Florida forced the College Board to water down earlier this year by alleging, falsely, that it promoted “critical race theory.”

I must interject here that I’m of two minds about this effort. On the one hand, an ignorant young electorate can’t be good for the republic; on the other, filling the workforce with graduates incapable of critical thinking and weighed down by a distorted conception of the real world will reduce competition for my kids and grandkids for jobs that require knowledge and brains.

Let’s examine some of these cases in greater depth.

Prager University, or PragerU, isn’t an accredited institution of higher learning. It’s a dispenser of right-wing charlatanism founded by Dennis Prager, a right-wing radio host. The material approved for use in the schools includes a series of five- to 10-minute animated videos featuring the fictional Leo and Layla, school-age siblings who travel back in time to meet historical figures.

One encounter is with Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist. The goal of the video is to depict “Black lives matter” demonstrations as unrestrained and violent — “Why are they burning a car?” Leo asks while viewing a televised news report. The animated Douglass speaks up for change achieved through “patience and compromise.”

This depiction of Douglass leaves experts in his life and times aghast. Douglass consistently railed against such counsel. Of the Compromise of 1850, which brought California into the union but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act — arguably the most detested federal law in American history — he stated that it illustrated how “slavery has shot its leprous distillment through the life blood of the nation.” In 1861, he thundered that “all compromises now are but as new wine to old bottles, new cloth to old garments. To attempt them as a means of peace between freedom and slavery, is as to attempt to reverse irreversible law.”

Patience? The video depicts Douglass quoting from an 1852 speech to a Rochester anti-slavery society in which he said “great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages.”

But it doesn’t include lines from later in the speech, reproaching his audience for prematurely celebrating the progress of abolition: “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; … all your religious parade and solemnity, … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Another video in the series parrots the fossil fuel industry’s talking points against wind and solar power: Standing over the corpse of a bird supposedly slain by flying into a wind turbine, the schoolkids’ interlocutor states, “Like many people … you’ve been misled about renewable energy, and their impact on the environment…. Windmills kill so many birds, it’s hard to track how many…. Wind farms and solar farms disrupt huge amounts of natural habitat.”

Acid rain, pollution, global warming — those consequences of fossil fuel energy aren’t mentioned. The video ends with a pitch for nuclear power, never mind the unsolved question of what to do with its radioactive waste products.

PragerU’s sedulous attack on renewables perhaps shouldn’t be much a surprise: Among its big donors is the Wilks family, which derives its fortune from fracking and which approved “future payment” of $6.25 million to PragerU in 2013.

As for New College, its travails under the DeSantis regime have been documented by my colleague Jenny Jarvie, among many others.

In a nutshell, the Sarasota institution possessed a well-deserved reputation as one of the nation’s outstanding havens for talented, independent-minded students. Then came DeSantis. He summarily replaced its board of trustees with a clutch of right-wing stooges including Christopher Rufo, known for having concocted the panic over critical race theory out of thin air and then marketed it as a useful culture war weapon to unscrupulous conservative politicians, including DeSantis.

Rufo and his fellows fired the university president and installed a sub-replacement-level GOP timeserver, Richard Corcoran, in her place. Faculty and students have fled. Students who stayed behind and were in the process of assembling their course schedules for the coming year are discovering at the last minute that the courses are no longer offered because their teachers have been fired or quit.

Instead of ambitious scholars committed to open inquiry, Corcoran has recruited athletes to fill out the student body, even though the college has no athletic fields for many of them to play on. According to USA Today, New College now has 70 baseball players, nearly twice as many as the University of Florida’s Division I NCAA team.

More to the point, the average SAT and ACT scores and high-school grade point averages have fallen from the pre-Corcoran level, while most of the school’s merit-based scholarships have gone to athletes. New College, in other words, has transitioned from a top liberal arts institution into a school that places muscle-bound underachievers on a pedestal. DeSantis calls this “succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission.”

Finally, West Virginia University. Under its president, Gordon Gee — who previously worked his dubious magic at Brown Universityand Ohio State University, among other places — the school built lavish facilities despite declining enrollments. The construction program at the land grant university contributed to a $45-million deficit for the coming year, with expectations that it would rise to $75 million by 2028.

But the main problem was one shared by many other public universities — the erosion of public funding. As the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy points out, “if West Virginia lawmakers had simply kept higher education funding at the same levels as a decade ago, West Virginia University would have an estimated additional $37.6 million in state funding for [fiscal year] 2024, closing the majority of this year’s budget gap.”

The decision on which programs to shutter at WVU points to a shift in how public university trustees see the purpose of their schools, trying to align them more with economic goals set by local industries rather than the goal of providing a well-rounded education to a state’s students. Trustees in some states, including North Carolina and Texas, have injected themselves into academic decisions traditionally left to administrators, often for partisan political reasons.

When it comes to interference in educational policies by conservatives, such as what’s happened in Florida, Texas and Arkansas, there’s no justification for taking these measures at face value — that is, as efforts to remove “indoctrination” from the schools. The truth is that the right-wing effort serves the purposes of white supremacists and advocates of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination — they’re moving to inject indoctrination that conforms more to their own ideologies.

Take the attack on critical race theory, or at least the version retailed by Rufo and his ilk. “The right has reduced CRT to an incendiary dog whistle,” the Black scholar Robin D.G. Kelley of UCLA has observed, by caricaturing a four-decade-long scholarly effort to analyze “why antidiscrimination law not only fails to remedy structural racism but further entrenches racial inequality” into “a racist plot to teach white children to hate themselves, their country, and their ‘race.’”

(The inclusion of Kelley’s work in the AP African American Studies course was cited as a “concern” by Florida officials in their rationale for rejecting the course; Kelley’s work was suppressed by the College Board in its effort to make the course more acceptable to the state Department of Education.)

These attacks are couched in the vocabulary of “parents’ rights” and student freedom, but they don’t serve the students at all, nor do they advance the rights of parents interested in a good, comprehensive education for their children, as opposed to one dictated by the most narrow-minded ideologues in their state.

Where will it end? Florida’s ham-fisted educational policies won’t produce graduates with the intellectual equipment to succeed in legitimate universities, much less in the world at large. The only university many will be qualified to attend will be Prager U, and that won’t be good for anyone.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Citizenship, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Higher Education, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Racism, Stupid, Trump

Fact-Checking the GOP Debate

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2023 //
23

I am reposting this because the first version was incomplete.

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post frequently fact checks claims by politicians. He was very busy during the Trump administration. He identified more than 30,000 outright lies by #45. He awards “Pinocchios” to lies. Four Pinocchios’” is for the worst lies.

This is his fact check of the first GOP debate.

Fox News aired the first GOP debate of the 2024 election cycle from Milwaukee on Wednesday night, featuring eight candidates. Not every candidate uttered facts that are easily fact-checked, but following is a list of 10 suspicious claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates. These claims are examined in the order in which they were uttered.

“We all need to understand Joe Biden’s Bidenomics has led to the loss of $10,000 of spending power for the average family.”

— Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.)

This seems wildly overstated. In April we had checked a claim by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that families have lost the equivalent of $7,400 worth of income. We tracked down the source of that statistic — E.J. Antoni, a research fellow in regional economics with the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. As of last week, he’d revised his estimate down to $6,800.

But, more to the point, economists we contacted were dubious about the math, which relied on a change in purchasing power and a change in borrowing power. The change in borrowing power relied on mortgage rates — and not every family is looking for a new home. As for Antoni’s reliance on average weekly wages, this measure does not follow the same workers across time, and consequently the economists said it was an imperfect basis for families’ income changing over time.

Several economists pointed to another metric — real disposable personal income per capita— as a better gauge. That figure is produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the Commerce Department.

Per capita income, after inflation, was $46,790 in December 2020 and $46,795 in June 2023 — an increase of $5. That’s basically flat — but a far cry from a $10,000 decline.

“A 15-week ban is an idea whose time has come — it’s supported by 70 percent of the American people.”
— Former vice president Mike Pence


Recent polling does not back up Pence’s claim of such support for banning all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, when people are directly asked about it, though in general, polls have shown majority opposition to second-trimester abortions.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll last year found that 36 percent supported and 57 percent opposed a law that would make abortions legal only in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.


Last month, a Marquette Law School poll found that 47 percent of those surveyed favored a ban after 15 weeks, compared with 53 percent who said they would oppose it.


Also last month, an AP-NORC poll found that about half of Americans say abortions should be permitted at the 15-week mark.


A Fox News poll in April found that 54 percent supported such a ban, while 42 percent opposed it. But that is still well short of 70 percent.


“We’re better than what the Democrats are selling. We are not going to allow abortion all the way up till birth, and we will hold them accountable for their extremism.”
— Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis


This is a common Republican talking point — that Democrats support nationwide abortion-on-demand up until the moment of birth. The implication is that late-term abortions are common — and that they are routinely accepted by Democrats.

The reality, according to federal and state data, is that abortions past the point of viability are extremely rare. When they do happen, they often involve painful, emotional and even moral decisions.


About two-thirds of abortions occur at eight weeks of pregnancy or earlier, and nearly 90 percent take place in the first 12 weeks, or within most definitions of the first trimester, according to estimates by the Guttmacher Institute, which favors abortion rights. About 5.5 percent of abortions take place after 15 weeks, with just 1.3 percent at 21 weeks or longer.


Increasingly, there is a period when premature births and late abortions begin to overlap. The CDC recorded almost 22,000 births between 20 and 27 weeks. Babies born before 25 weeks are considered extremely preterm, with vital organs such as heart, lungs and brain very immature. But the survival rate has climbed to 30 percent for 22-week babies and 55 percent for 23-week babies, according to a 2022 study.


Some states record whether a fetus was born alive during an abortion and whether efforts were made to save it. Seven were born alive in Florida in 2022, nine in Arizona in 2020, one in Texas in 2021 and five in Minnesota in 2021. A CDC study of 143 cases between 2003 and 2014 found that most died within hours, with only 4.2 percent surviving for more than 24 hours.


“Crime is at a 50-year low in Florida.”
— DeSantis


This statement is based on incomplete data, according to the Marshall Project, an online journalism organization that focuses on criminal justice issues.

“About half of the agencies that police more than 40% of the state’s population are missing from figures the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) used for a statewide estimation,” the news organization said.

Participation in national data collection is even lower, with less than eight percent of Florida’s police departments included in an FBI federal database. Many of the largest, such as the Miami Police Department, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and the St. Petersburg Police Department, are missing from the national numbers.

It is impossible, then, to compare Florida’s crime rate with that of other states. And in any case, the crime rate in Florida has been steadily declining for three decades.


“We have a crime wave in this country.”
— Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy

This is a bit out of date. Crime spiked during the pandemic, and though rates are still higher than before the pandemic, homicides are dropping in dozens of major cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Examining homicides in 30 cities that make homicide data readily available, an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice found that the number of killings in the first half of 2023 fell by 9.4 percent compared with the first half of 2022.

Moreover, gun assaults (-5.6 percent), robberies (-3.6 percent), nonresidential burglaries (-5 percent), larcenies (-4.1 percent), residential burglaries (-3.8 percent) and aggravated assaults (-2.5 percent) fell in the first six months of this year compared with the same period last year. However, car thefts continued to increase.

FBI data shows that the nationwide violent crime rate peaked in 1991 with 758.2 crimes per 100,000 people; in 2020, the rate was 398.5. The nationwide homicide rate reached a high in 1991, at 9.8 per 100,000 population. By 2019, it had dropped to 5.1.


“Not only weaponization in the Department of Justice against political opponents, but also look at the parents who show up at school board meetings. They’re called, under this DOJ, domestic terrorists.”
— Scott


This is a frequent GOP talking point but it’s false. Attorney General Merrick Garland has never equated parents to terrorists, and in fact he told Congress he “can’t imagine” a circumstance under which that would happen.


This all started with a Sept. 29, 2021, letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) that asked President Biden for federal resources to help monitor “threats of violence and acts of intimidation” against public school board members and other school officials. Five days later, Garland issued a memo addressed to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and federal prosecutors. He called for action within 30 days to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats” against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.


Garland’s memo never mentioned domestic terrorism, but the NSBA letter that prompted it included a line that asserted “these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” There was enough blowback to that language that on Oct. 22, the NSBA apologized for the letter, saying “there was no justification for some of the language included.” A new executive director for the association was installed, the letter was deleted from the NSBA website, and the association announced in February that it had launched an independent review of how the letter was created.

Nevertheless, the Justice Department never equated parents to domestic terrorists.
When questioned by Republicans in congressional hearings, Garland and other top Justice officials have insisted that they do not think concerned parents are terrorists. “I can’t imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor can I imagine a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorism,” Garland told the House Judiciary Committee.


“The Biden administration wanted to put 87,000 people in the IRS instead of giving the money we need to our own Border Patrol.”
— North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum


“Let’s fire the 87,000 IRS agents and hire or double the number of Border Patrol agents.”
— Scott


This 87,000 figure is a common GOP talking point but it is wildly exaggerated to speak of “agents” as Scott did. When Congress passed a bill to provide the IRS with an additional $80 billion in funding over 10 years, that money was to be used in part to hire 86,852 full-time employees in the next decade. But many of those employees would not be enforcement “agents” but people hired to improve information technology and customer service. Treasury officials say that because of attrition, after 10 years of increasing spending, the size of the agency will have grown only 25 to 30 percent when the hiring burst is completed.

The administration’s strategic plan for the IRS, released in April, estimated that an additional 1,543 full-time employees would be hired for enforcement in 2023, or about 15 percent of newly hired staff. That would grow to 7,239 in 2024, or 37 percent of new staff.

Biden administration officials have pledged that enforcement efforts to collect unpaid taxes will concentrate on those earning more than $400,000.

“We secured the southern border and reduced illegal immigration by 90 percent.”
— Pence


Ninety percent is a cherry-picked number, apparently comparing May 2019, the highest month for border apprehensions during the Trump administration, with April 2020, when apprehensions plunged because of lockdowns at the start of the covid pandemic. Another complicating factor is that U.S. Customs and Border Protection changed the way it counted apprehensions during the pandemic, making apples-to-apples comparisons difficult because the numbers were inflated by people who were expelled for health policy reasons, not just enforcement actions. But generally, annual apprehensions increased during the Trump administration.


“We eliminated critical race theory from our K through 12 schools.”
— DeSantis


Critical race theory refers to an academic framework centered on the idea that racism is systemic, and not just demonstrated by individual people with prejudices. It is generally taught in higher education, such as law or graduate school, not at lower grade levels. So this is a bit of an empty boast. Educators, school officials and several Florida public school districts told PolitiFact that critical race theory wasn’t taught in Florida’s elementary, middle or high schools.
PolitiFact rated DeSantis’s claim as “mostly false,” saying that at most the state under DeSantis “rejected prospective teaching materials in recent years that it claimed was related to CRT. But questions remain about its rationale in several cases.”

“I did not grow up in money.”
— Ramaswamy


Earlier in the debate, Ramaswamy had said, “My parents came to this country with no money 40 years ago.” But then he went further later in the evening with the line “I did not grow up in money.” His parents did well enough, however, that in his book “Nation of Victims,” Ramaswamy wrote that by the time he was in sixth grade, he had a “comfortably middle-class family with two incomes.” His father worked for General Electric, which had a cost-cutting boss at the time, and he wrote that the fear of a layoff was ever present, so his father “tried to make himself indispensable” by becoming a patent attorney for the firm.


By the time he was 18, Ramaswamy had a stock portfolio significant enough that he earned $453 in dividends in 2002, according to his tax return. By his sophomore year in college, when he made about $3,500 in wage income, he earned $11,712 from dividends alone.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Lies, Trump

Jim Hightower: The GOP Plans to Eliminate Federal Programs to Mitigate Climate Change

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2023 //
6

Jim Hightower, an outspoken liberal voice in Texas, posts a warning about the Republicans’ strategy to wipe out environmental regulations if they regain the presidency in 2025. Despite the climate disasters occurring all over the world and in every corner of this nation, the GOP puts greed over survival.

Hightower writes:

When your political opponents push extremist public policies that would be disastrous for America, should you wring your hands in dread… or applaud?

Consider “Project 2025,” put together by former Trump officials and the Koch brothers’ network of billionaire plutocrats. Their strategy is to win the presidency next year by demonizing all environmental protections and promising to halt all national efforts to cope with the obvious crises of climate change. Their proposals include repealing regulations that curb fossil fuel pollution, terminating our nation’s transition to renewable energy, shutting down all environmental protection agencies, encouraging more oil and gas drilling and use, and promoting the deadly delusion that global warming is not a real problem.

Moreover, they intend to implement Project 2025 in the first 180 days of a right-wing Republican’s presidential term – obviously anticipating that Donald Trump will be that president. “We are not tinkering at the edges,” brags a far-out right-wing group that instigated the scheme, “We are writing a battle plan and we are marshalling our forces.” They’ve already drawn up a list of agencies and policies they’ll begin eliminating on Day One, and they’ve readied a list of some 20,000 right-wing henchmen to put on the federal payroll immediately to enforce their plan.

If this sounds ludicrous, it is. But it’s actually happening, for the Republican Party has decided to be ludicrous. As the director of Project 2025 told the New York Times, “[This is] where the conservative movement sits at this time.”

Maybe, but it damn sure won’t sit well with the American people, who’re presently suffering the hellish ravages of our rapidly overheating climate. Indeed, here’s a great chance for Democrats to demonstrate their bipartisan spirit by doing all they can to publicize the Republicans’ let-it-burn global warming policy.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Dark Money, Deregulation, Environment, Koch Brothers, Republicans, Stupid, Trump

Tom Nichols: Trump Should Skip All the Debates

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
29

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic thinks that it’s great that Trump will not join the Republican debates. Nichols thinks Trump should not participate in any debates.

Donald Trump has decided to skip the Republican presidential debates. That’s just as well: Debating Trump is demeaning to everyone involved, and it serves no purpose.

Contempt for the Electoral Process

Donald Trump confirmed on Sunday that he’s skipping the Republican-primary debates, the first of which is tomorrow night. His decision makes political sense: A candidate who is crushing the entire field has little incentive to walk into a lion’s den and take on eight challengers. Of course, a candidate who cares about politics, policy, and the voters might want to show courage and respect for the electoral process—but this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, so those are not real considerations.

Strange as it may seem, I not only support Trump’s decision, but I think both parties should seize the opportunity to make it permanent for this election. I love debates and watch theattentively, and in a normal political year with a normal election and a normal candidate, I would be thumping the desk and saying that every candidate should respect our grand tradition of debate.

But this isn’t a normal year. It’s not a normal election. And Donald Trump is not, in any way, a normal candidate. To allow Trump onstage in either the primaries or the general election is bad politics, an insult to our electoral process, and corrosive to American democracy. All of the 2024 candidates, including President Joe Biden, have good reasons to embrace Trump’s refusal to debate and to shun any further interactions with him.

First, as we should have learned in 2016 and 2020, Trump has nothing but contempt for the electoral process. (I’ll get to his open attack on the process in 2021 in a moment.) Trump benefits from arenas where his opponents are constrained by rules that he himself ignores, and so he treats debates like performance art. He insults, interrupts, babbles, and pouts. In 2016 he stalked Hillary Clinton around the stage and suggested that he’d toss her in jail. In 2020, he tried to suck the oxygen out of the room—oxygen that Trump (according to his own chief of staff) knew was carrying his COVID infection and thus was a very real threat to Joe Biden’s health. Exasperated with Trump’s stream of blather, Biden spoke for many of us when he finally said: “Will you shut up, man?”

Second, to allow Trump on the stage is to admit that he is a legitimate candidate for public office. He is not.

I agree with—and this is quite the list—two lawyers who are members of the Federalist Society and the joint view of the conservative retired Judge J. Michael Luttig and the liberal law scholar Laurence Tribe when they argue that the Fourteenth Amendment bars Trump from office. I also agree, however, with my friend Charlie Sykes that the issue of constitutional disqualification is irrelevant: No one is going to take the measures needed (including, probably, a trip to the Supreme Court) to remove Trump from the ballot.

But as is the case with so much of our Constitution, the real check against someone like Trump is not black-letter law, but the inherent virtue and good sense of the American public. As James Madison long ago warned, if “there is no virtue among us” then “we are in a wretched situation,” and it is a continuing tragedy that millions of voters have failed to summon the basic decency to reject Trump and his assault on our values.

At the very least, the Republican Party (if it had a nanogram of spine left) would seize this moment to say that a candidate who bails out of the primary debates cannot run as a Republican and will get no assistance from the national party. The GOP under Ronna McDaniel (a woman who stopped using her family name of Romney professionally because of needling from Trump) is not going to take any such steps. But the failure of Republican voters and their cowardly leaders to exile Trump from their party—and from our public life—is no reason to treat Trump as if he is just another candidate.

Third, to allow Trump on a debate stage would, at this point, be an affront to the dignity of the Constitution and our republic. Trump’s antics would create yet another evening of both national and international humiliation and add more scar tissue to our already battered democratic norms. The United States—all of us—deserve better than to encourage such a demoralizing circus yet again.

And speaking of the Constitution and our political system: No candidate should have to share a stage and shake hands with a man who is credibly accused of multiple felonies for his efforts to overthrow the American constitutional order.

I am, even now, somewhat amazed even to write those words, but here we are.

Remember, Trump does not deny many of the things he is accused of doing. He (and at least some of his alleged co-conspirators) instead claim that what they did was not technically illegal. But we do not need a conviction to reach the conclusion that Donald Trump is a threat to our freedoms and the rule of law. We can shun him in public spaces, including the debate stage, for all of the acts to which he’s already admitted.

Think for a moment what it would look like if Trump showed up for any of the debates. You might not think much of Mike Pence, but no national purpose is served by asking Pence to walk onstage and smile and shake the hand of the man who supported a mob that was trying to hang him. And although it might be satisfying to watch Chris Christie strip the bark off Trump, a shouting match between two of the most obnoxious politicians in America would not help the voters, nor would it be a moment worthy of our democracy.

Likewise, it is beneath the dignity of President Biden—or any president of the United States—to stand next to Trump and have to pretend that the other podium is occupied by just another political contender instead of the leader of a party that has degenerated into a violent, seditionist cult. America knows both of these men, and knows what they stand for. The real question is whether a pro-democracy coalition will finally defeat Trump and his authoritarian movement, and we don’t need pointless and destructive debates to settle that issue.

Categories Elections, Politics, Trump

Thom Hartmann’s Debate Prep: Biden’s Accomplishments in Three Years

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
44

The Republican debates, starting tonight, will attack President Biden relentlessly. Thom Hartmann has compiled a list of Biden’s accomplishments to counter the lies and exaggerations of Republican contenders for the nomination.

He writes:

The first Republican debate of the 2024 election cycle is tonight, and while all the drama seems focused on whether or not anybody beyond Chris Christie will take a serious swing at Trump, odds are most of the evening’s time will be devoted to trashing President Joe Biden.

So, to help keep you sane through all the lies and BS — and the fog you may be in by the end of the debate if your drinking game involved the word “woke” — here’s a quick summary* of the things that Biden has accomplished (with a little help from Democrats in Congress) in his first two-and-a-half years in office.

First of all, Joe Biden has restored trust, confidence, and faith in the honesty, credibility, and integrity of America. He doesn’t suck up to dictators like Trump did, and doesn’t lie to Americans or our allies. He’s restored independence to the Department of Justice and funding and support to regulatory agencies like the EPA.

Over united Republican opposition, the Biden administration has succeeded in lowering most Americans’ cost of living. The Inflation Reduction Act has reduced inflation to a full point lower than it was when Reagan was running his “Morning in America” ads in 1984 (unemployment is several points lower, too!).

Because of that law, for the first time, Medicare is able to negotiate the price of certain high-cost drugs: a month’s supply of insulin for seniors is capped at $35, Medicare beneficiaries pay $0 out of pocket for recommended adult vaccines, and seniors’ out of pocket expenses at the pharmacy will be capped at $2,000 a year.

America has just completed the strongest two years of job growth in the history of our country. Nearly 11 million jobs have been created since President Biden took office — including 750,000 manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, and a record number of small businesses have started since Biden took office. Black Americans and Hispanic Americans have near record low unemployment rates and people with disabilities are experiencing record low unemployment.

We’re experiencing a boom in manufacturing and the construction of manufacturing facilities like we haven’t seen since before the Reagan Revolution began offshoring American factories and jobs. Companies have invested more than $300 billion in good jobs, many of them unionized, as America’s technical capabilities sharpen along with this job growth.

Biden has expanded services available to our veterans (after Trump cut them), including 31 new clinical sites and a comprehensive program to help the estimated 5 million veterans who, like President Biden’s son Beau, have been exposed to toxic chemicals as a result of their service to our country.

President Biden brought together Democrats and Republicans to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major piece of gun safety legislation in three decades. The law will save lives by:

— requiring young people ages 18 to 21 to undergo enhanced background checks; 
—narrowing the “boyfriend loophole” to keep guns out of the hands of convicted dating partners;
— funding crisis interventions, including extreme risk protection orders (“red flag”) laws; 
— making significant investments to address the mental health crisis in America, including in our schools; 
— clarifying who needs to register as a federally licensed gun dealer and run background checks before selling a single weapon; 
— and making gun trafficking and straw purchases distinct federal crimes.

Over ten years ago, President Biden announced his support for marriage equality, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. government official to do so. Building on his longstanding support and generations of civil rights advocacy, President Biden signed historic bipartisan legislation protecting marriage for same-sex and interracial couples.

And the President took historic steps to advance full equality for LGBTQI+ Americans, including reversing the discriminatory ban on transgender servicemembers in the military, strengthening non-discrimination protections in health care, housing, education, and employment, and ensuring that transgender Americans can access government support and services.

Biden has put a more diverse group of people on the federal judiciary than any president in history. Sixty-six percent of his nominees have been women and 65 percent were people of color, including the Supreme Court’s first Black woman justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson.

After Putin declared war on democracy and launched a terrorist invasion of Ukraine, targeting civilians and using rape as a weapon of war, President Biden has brought the world together to stand up to a fascist autocracy and defend Europe’s largest democracy.

Following Trump’s humiliating groveling before Putin and attacks on NATO, the European Union, and our democratic allies around the world, President Biden has rebuilt the American alliances that have, in some cases, stood for over two centuries. Sweden and Finland have joined NATO, and China appears to be re-thinking their belligerent attitude toward Taiwan after last week’s meeting and agreements between the leaders of the US, South Korea, and Japan.

After Trump unilaterally closed all but one of our air bases in Afghanistan to maliciously make his successor’s job more difficult, the Biden administration ended the war in Afghanistan that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had lied us into. He’s also decapitated the leadership of ISIS and El Qaeda.

Ever since six Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted American women’s right to abortion (and multiple Republicans are now trying to ban birth control), President Biden has stood up for women’s healthcare rights. He’s signed several Executive Orders to protect access to reproductive healthcare (including for our military). When 19 Republican state attorneys general demanded the healthcare records of women who’ve sought abortions in more than thirty states, Biden signed an Executive Order strengthening patient privacy.

The Biden administration rolled out a plan to cut as much as $20,000 from the debt carried by America’s student borrowers (student debt of these proportions, the direct result of the Reagan Revolution, does not exist in any other nation on Earth). When a Republican lawsuit before the Supreme Court blocked his efforts, he announced a plan to provide millions of borrowers with more affordable monthly student loan payments through changes to income-driven repayment plans.

While Red states still put people in prison for years for possessing a single marijuana cigarette, President Biden pardoned allAmericans who’ve ever been convicted of a federal pot offense. He’s more recently initiated a multi-agency review of the drug’s Schedule 1 status, with an eye to decriminalizing it nationwide.

After centuries of police violence against Black people and other minorities, Biden signed a landmark executive order on safe, effective, and accountable policing that mandated federal reforms such as banning chokeholds, restricting no-knock entries, creating a national police accountability database, and restricting the transfer of military equipment to local police departments.

Through over a hundred executive actions and the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden has finally put America on course to cut our emissions in half by 2030 and to get to net-zero by 2050. He also protected more lands and waters in his first year than any President since John F. Kennedy.

While Republicans continue to strip people off Red state Medicaid rolls in their pursuit of cruelty, Biden expanded the Affordable Care Act. Millions can now find healthcare for $10 a month or less, and most Americans will see an Obamacare saving of an average of $800 a year.

Since he took office, there has been a combined 50 percent increase in enrollment in states that use HealthCare.gov and the nation’s uninsured rate is historically low at 8 percent. Over 16 million Americans signed up for quality, affordable health coverage, the highest number ever produced in an Obamacare open enrollment period.

Perhaps the most important accomplishment of President Biden has been re-aligning the Democratic Party with its progressive base. Biden worked hand-in-hand with Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders to put forward a sweeping progressive agenda involving an investment of over $5 trillion in America and American working people.

Although united opposition from Republicans and a handful of sellout Democrats (including Manchin, Sinema, and the “corporate problem solvers”) forced him to cut the program back, it is still revolutionary given the past 40 years of bipartisan embrace of neoliberalism. 

Reversing the anti-organized-labor trend started by Reagan that continued through the Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, President Biden has aggressively promoted unions and unionization as essential to the future of working people in America.

President Biden also worked with and helped Nancy Pelosi pass through the House the For The People Act, which would have rolled back much of Citizens United and ended most Republican voter suppression by asserting Americans’ absolute right to vote. Had he not been betrayed by Manchin and Sinema, it would now be law.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (founded by Bernie) has gone from the handful of members (fewer than 10) it was when I did fundraisers for them more than a decade ago to being one of the strongest and largest in Congress (104 members right now). While this isn’t Biden’s doing and much credit goes to its members, Biden is the first Democratic president since LBJ to fully embrace progressives in Congress and fast-track their legislation. 

Biden has also:

— Set new policies to reduce super pollutants like HFCs and methane to protect communities and reduce emissions fueling climate change
— Advanced cutting-edge research on cancer and other diseases through the ARPA-H initiative
— Signed legislation to put more cops on the beat and invest in community policing
— Signed the Electoral Count Act, which takes long overdue steps to protect the integrity of our elections
— Lowered the cost of hearing aids by making them available over the counter
— Created more manufacturing jobs in 2022 than in any single year in nearly 30 years
— Signed an Executive Order to encourage competition across industries
— Took action to lower energy costs for families
— Lowered seniors’ health care expenses, including by capping out of pocket expenses on prescription drugs for seniors at $2,000 per year, ensuring that people enrolled in Medicare will not pay more than $35 for a month’s supply of insulin, and recipients will receive free vaccines
— Accelerated adoption of electric vehicles by reducing costs for families, jumpstarted the first national EV charging network, and made historic investments into EV batteries and materials
— Rejoined the Paris Agreement on day one to reassert the United States’ global leadership to combat the climate crisis
— Jumpstarted the American offshore wind industry and convened the nation’s first federal-state offshore wind partnership
— Set new policies to reduce super pollutants like HFCs and methane to protect communities and reduce emissions fueling climate change
— Lowered the deficit with the single largest annual reduction in American history
— Secured commitments from 20 leading internet providers to increase speeds and cut prices
— Signed legislation to reauthorize and strengthen the Violence Against Women Act
— Awarded the most ever federal contracting dollars to small businesses and disadvantaged small businesses
— Reignited the Cancer Moonshot with the goal of cutting the cancer death rate by at least half over the next 25 years
— Appointed a record number of women and people of color to serve in his Administration
— Hosted the first White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in over 50 years and released a National Strategy to end hunger and reduce diet-related diseases and disparities by 2030
— Awarded more than $1 billion to initiate cleanup and clear the backlog of 49 previously unfunded Superfund sites, over $250 million to clean up hundreds of contaminated brownfield sites, and $725 million for abandoned mine lands
— Restored protections for Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments and designated Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument to conserve our lands and waters, honor our nation’s veterans, protect Tribal cultural resources, and support jobs and America’s outdoor recreation economy
— Signed an Executive Order on Improving Public Safety and Criminal Justice for Native Americans and Addressing the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People
— Invested historic funding for Tribal governments and Native communities, and
— Mailed over 740 million free COVID-19 tests directly to tens of millions of Americans

Below are a set of handy memes you can copy and paste into social media if any of these accomplishments resonate with you or you want to back up claims you’re making online. Just right-click and choose to save, copy, or download them: they’re copyright free. 

Here’s to a fascinating (and, no doubt, infuriating) debate!

OPEN THE LINK TO SEE HARTMANN’S MEMES.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Funding, Health, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: How Biden Responded to the Tragedy in Maui

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2023 //
20

Remember when Donald Trump flew to Puerto Rico after that island was devastated by a major hurricane? He threw rolls of paper towels to people who needed food, water, electricity, and shelter. What Trump did was humiliating to the Puerto Rican people and cringeworthy.

What did Joe Biden do in response to the devastating tragedy in Maui?

Heather Cox Richardson answers the question.

The wildfires that raced across Maui, Hawaii, on Tuesday and Wednesday, August 8 and 9, driven by high winds across land that had been suffering a drought, have fed a familiar political narrative.

That firestorm roared into the 13,000-person town of Lahaina, killing a confirmed 114 people, with more than 1,000 still unaccounted for. It is the deadliest fire in modern U.S. history. While local officials had warned that such a fire was likely, emergency systems were either understaffed or unprepared, or failed for other reasons. Figuring out exactly what happened and why, mourning the dead and injured, and rebuilding, will take years.

President Joe Biden received notice of a brush fire on August 8 as part of his “daily extreme weather memo,” and over the next two days received additional briefings.

“Jill and I send our deepest condolences to the families of those who lost loved ones in the wildfires in Maui, and our prayers are with those who have seen their homes, businesses, and communities destroyed. We are grateful to the brave firefighters and first responders who continue to run toward danger, putting themselves in harm’s way to save lives,” President Biden said in a statement on August 9. He explained that he had ordered all federal assets on the island to help with the response, including the U.S. Coast Guard and the Navy’s 3rd Fleet, as well as the Department of Transportation to coordinate commercial airlines for evacuation.

The next day, August 10, Biden began a speech about the PACT Act in Salt Lake City by saying: “[L]ook, before I begin, I want to say a word about the devastating wildfires that have claimed at least 36 lives in Maui, in Hawaii. [W]e have just approved a major disaster declaration…for Hawaii, which will get aid into the hands of the people… desperately needing help now. [A]nyone who’s lost a loved one, whose home has been damaged or destroyed is going to get help immediately.”

He explained the moves the administration had already made and promised, “I just got off the phone, before I got here, for a long conversation with Governor Josh Green this morning and let him know I’m going to make sure the state has everything it needs from the federal government to recover…. In the meantime, our prayers are with the people of Hawaii, but not just our prayers—every asset we have will be available to them. And we’ve seen—they’ve seen their home, their business destroyed, and some have lost loved ones. And it’s not over yet.”

On that day, August 10, Biden signed a disaster declaration, saying that a major disaster existed in Hawaii, and ordered federal aid to the state to supplement state and local recovery efforts. Federal funding helps with temporary housing and home repairs, some property losses, debris removal, and hazard mitigation.

By August 15, almost 500 federal personnel had been deployed to Maui, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had provided 50,000 meals, 75,000 liters of water, 5,000 cots, and 10,000 blankets and shelter supplies to six shelters run by the American Red Cross and Maui County for survivors who couldn’t go home. FEMA had also approved Critical Needs Assistance (CNA), which provides a one-time payment of $700 per household to those without housing to replace vital items like medication on an emergency basis.

The Small Business Administration had begun making low-interest federal disaster loans available to Hawaii businesses and nonprofit organizations. The Department of Agriculture approved Hawaii’s request for extra Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra declared a public health emergency retroactive to August 8, which gave Medicare and Medicaid greater flexibility in meeting emergency health needs for beneficiaries, then deployed disaster response personnel to Hawaii.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was on the island clearing roads, stabilizing the electrical grid, and working with the Environmental Protection Agency to remove hazardous waste. The U.S. Forest Service Incident Management Teams and Wildfire Liaisons worked with state officials to put the fires out and prevent flare ups, while the U.S. Fire Administration was working to support local firefighters. The Department of Defense was moving supplies across the state.

On August 17, Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida and Republic of Korea (ROK) president Yoon Suk Yeol arrived for Friday’s historic trilateral summit at Camp David, and Biden fell publicly silent about Maui. Promptly, the right wing insisted that he had done nothing for Hawaii. In fact, public documents suggest Biden was speaking daily with state officials in Hawaii and increasing the federal response there. By August 19 there were more than 1,000 federal personnel on the ground. “We’ve offered whatever support the governor needs,” General Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said.

Whether or not you agree with the level of response the Biden administration has provided to those suffering in the fires, the pattern of using the media to establish a narrative that the administration is ignoring Americans when it clearly is not is almost exactly what happened with the East Palestine, Ohio, railway disaster in February 2023. Then, pro-Russian accounts promptly began to argue that the Biden administration was ignoring a disaster at home—when emergency personnel were on the ground immediately—in order to fund Ukraine’s war against Russia’s invasion.

Now, behavioral scientist Caroline Orr Bueno, a specialist in disinformation, noted that the X (Twitter) account that seeded the “Hawaii, not Ukraine” narrative was created just last month and that accounts associated with both Russia and China are amplifying the narrative that Biden has neglected Maui. It seems telling that the same right-wing “independent journalist” who went to East Palestine has flown into Maui to attack Biden’s response, showing up on Trump ally Steve Bannon’s “War Room.”

Indeed, one of Biden’s strongest suits is his foreign policy initiatives, and as Republican presidential candidates have virtually nothing to offer on that front, some Republicans seem to be trying to use the Maui fire as a way to undercut Biden’s foreign policy triumphs. Increasingly, they are turning against aid to Ukraine as they back former president Trump, who boasted on Friday that he was “the apple of [Russian president Vladimir Putin’s] eye. Supporting Ukraine in its battle against Putin’s authoritarianism has been a key aspect of Biden’s attempt to protect democracy at home and around the world, and as the 2024 election approaches, House Republicans, at least, are reluctant to continue funding that effort.

Today the extremist House Freedom Caucus released a list of what it demands before it will agree even to a short-term measure to fund the government this fall; Ukraine funding is one of the things to which they object.

Today the president and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden visited Maui, where after seeing the devastation, President Biden said that “the country grieves with you, stands with you, and we’ll do everything possible to help you recover, rebuild, and respect culture and traditions when the rebuilding takes place.” He promised that we will “rebuild the way the people of Maui want to build.”

Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) said, “We in Hawaii have been through hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions—but we have never seen such a robust federal response. Thank you.”

—

Notes:

To read the footnotes, open the link.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Trump

Katherine Stewart: The Fascist Intellectuals and Crackpots of the Right

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2023 //
34

Katherine Stewart has written several important books about the insidious Right and their radical, racist views. In this article in The New Republic, she looks at an influential reactionary organization, the Claremont Institute, and traces its ideological forebears. From crackpots to intellectual gurus, she traces the Right’s fascination with manliness, racism, anti-Semitism, and its longing for a world led by a new Caesar, a strong man who will protect other men from rapacious women and immigrants.

It’s a long read but worth your time. Stewart looks at the Fascist underbelly of conservatism, and it’s repulsive.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Gender, Trump

The Notorious John Eastman Explains Why He Plotted a Coup

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2023 //
25

Laura K. Field writes about John Eastman, once a prominent lawyer, who advised Trump and his team about how to overturn the 2020 election. Her post appears at The Bulwark, a place created by Republican Never Trumpers. Eastman is involved in disbarment proceedings for his role in the failed coup.

FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS NOW, since he was revealed in September 2021 to be the author of the notorious “coup memos,” John Eastman has been walking a bizarre legal and political tightrope.

On the one hand, we have the man who filed a legal claim on behalf of President Donald Trump in Texas in December 2020 seeking to invalidate millions of votes. The man who was invited to join Trump’s unofficial legal team later that month, where he wrote the two elaborate memos delineating various paths that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence could take to delay or overturn the election count. Who tried in person to persuade Pence that, at the very least, he had the authority to delay the vote count; who spoke at Trump’s “Save America” rally on January 6th, repeating conspiratorial lies about election fraud; whose emails that same day reveal that during the siege of the Capitol that he blamed Pence for not acting as he had advised; who was caught on video (by an undercover activist) boastingabout working to overturn the election; who lost his academic appointments in the aftermath of these events; whom a federal judge concluded had “more likely than not” broken the law; who may soon be disbarred in the state of California; and who is so worried about being indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith that he has requested a postponement of those disbarment proceedings.

On the other hand we have a man who has tried to distance himself from his own memos, at one point calling himself “the white knight here, talking [Trump] down from the more aggressive position” in advance of January 6th. This other Eastman has consistently maintained that his recommendations to Pence and Trump were narrow, sensible, and moderate. That he had merely recommended “hitting pause” on the vote count on January 6th, so that the relevant election controversies could be adjudicated by the states. That to follow the other paths articulated in his memos would have been reckless.

The gulf between these two Eastmans—the eager-to-act conspiratorial Eastman and the reticent lawyerly one—shrunk a bit last week, with the release of the third and final installment of an Eastman interview with the Claremont Institute’s main financial backer, chairman of the board, and gonzo anti-woke warrior, Thomas D. Klingenstein. In this interview, Eastman comes close to saying that his own electoral shenanigans and legal wrangling have been a sideshow. In sentiments reminiscent of Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election” essay and subsequent writing, Eastman makes it clear—without fully dropping his lawyerly persona—that for him, the deeper reason for standing by Trump through his January 6th saga was that he thinks Democrats are destroying the country.

LAST WEEK, I WROTE about the first and second parts of Eastman’s interview with Klingenstein. In the first, they trot through a long list of disproven allegations of 2020 election fraud. The second is about January 6th and the question of Pence’s legal authority to delay or overturn the election.

Now comes the concluding installment, which begins by focusing on the question of prudence: Given all the complex considerations involved in the 2020 election, was it prudent for Eastman and Trump to pursue the course of action that they did?

The interview is full of odd claims and intriguing revelations. For example, at one point Eastman says that in his considerations of prudence he did not take into account the possibility of mob violence, because he was working in “a different department,” that “Trump himself had authorized the call-up of 20,000 members of the National Guard for January 6th” (not true), and that Eastman just assumed that “those things were handled.”

Eastman also suggests in this segment that he believed there was a “fair prospect” that he would have been able to win “a majority of the [Supreme] Court” in support of Pence’s right “merely to delay,” or at least to get the Court not to touch the issue as nonjusticiable.

But the interview really gets disturbing in its last ten or so minutes, when it turns to the question of Eastman’s deepest motives. Why was it so important to Eastman to see Trump re-elected? Klingenstein suggests that the “biggest” factor motivating Eastman “is the current circumstances in the country, the political and social condition.”

Eastman agrees. After some discussion about how the legal situation surrounding the 2020 election was different from the legal situation in two other close elections, those of 1960 and 2000, Eastman makes clear that the more important distinction he sees among those three elections is that “the stakes” in 2020 were higher—that they were literally life or death:

Certainly not in 1960, but also not in 2000, were the stakes about the very existential threat that the country is under as great as they are.

We’re not talking about, you know, handing over to John Kennedy, instead of Richard Nixon, who’s gonna deal with the Cold War. We’re talking about whether we are going to, as a nation, completely repudiate every one of our founding principles, which is what the modern left wing which is in control of the Democrat party believes—that we are the root of all evil in the world and we have to be eradicated.

This is an existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world. That’s the stakes.

Obviously, when the stakes are this high, you do whatever you can to fight back. As Anton put it about the 2016 election, you “charge the cockpit or you die.” So when the opportunity came along to be part of a challenge to the normal election processes, Eastman was eager to join the fight.

The interview does not, it seems to me, involve a moment where Eastman fully “comes clean” about trying to overthrow a legitimate election (as Josh Marshall has suggested). Rather, what Eastman does is zoom in and out between what we might call the deeper cause of his actions—his belief, entirely consonant with Anton’s original “Flight 93 Election” bullshit, that liberals and the left pose an existential threat to the country and are traitors to the country’s founding principles—and the immediate rationale or pretext for his behavior, which is the premise of the stolen election.

In the very next part of the interview, Eastman zooms out:

Trump seems to understand that [i.e., the stakes] in a way a lot of Republican establishment types in Washington don’t, and it’s a reason he gets so much support in the hinterland and the ‘flyover country.’ People are fed up with folks, you know, get-along-go-along while the country is being destroyed.

And then Eastman zooms back in to argue that these high stakes justified his involvement in Trump’s post-election machinations:

And so I think the stakes are much bigger, and that means a stolen election that thwarts the will of the people trying to correct course, and get back on a path that understands the significance and the nobility of America and the American experiment is really at stake and we ought to fight for it.

Eastman and Klingenstein seem almost to suggest that stolen elections are a dime a dozen in American history, but only in this instance was it worth the fight.

At this point in the interview, Eastman all but drops the façade, and zooms out all the way. When asked by Klingenstein once again whether he maybe would have made a different prudential calculation in 1960 or 2020, Eastman says yes, “I may have come to a different conclusion.” Then he proceeds to explain:

Look, our founders lay this case out. The prudential judgment they make in the Declaration of Independence is the same one. There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that says, you know, a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable—or tolerable, while they remain tolerable—but at some point the abuses have become so intolerable that it is not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.

So that’s the question. Have the abuses and the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back.

This is an extraordinary thing to admit. For one thing, by the time you’re appealing to the Declaration of Independence in that way you are in effect admitting that you were trying to overthrow your government.

It may be obvious but it’s worth saying this out loud: Violence is implicit in this line of argument. Lincoln understood this when he spoke of Americans’ “revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow” their own government. The men and women who charged the Capitol understood this. Eastman and Klingenstein, sitting in their suits and ties in an elegant study lined with books, may deny having violent intentions, may even abjure the use of force, but implicit in their rhetoric in this interview and elsewhere (Klingenstein’s website: “The essential thing is for Republicans to understand we are in a war and then act accordingly”) is a justification for violence.

AS THE INTERVIEW CONCLUDES, Eastman goes on to maintain, again, that supposed Democratic election-stealing played a part in his prudential calculation. But he says plainly enough throughout that the more fundamental motive concerned the basic state of the country and his political and philosophical disagreements with Democrats. A few minutes after his appeal to the Declaration, Eastman will claim that Democratic efforts to destroy the country have accelerated rapidly—“it’s been an exponential increase in the last few years”—and as an example he quotes the culture wars: “You’re gonna let 50-year-old-men naked into teenage girls’ showers at public pools, or drag queens doing story hours to 6-year-olds.”

Of course. The trans people and drag queens left Eastman no choice. The Democrats made him do it.

The Klingenstein-Eastman interview is, in the main, situated squarely in the muck of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and obtuse speculative reasoning about the vice president’s proper role in the congressional counting of Electoral College votes. In this third installment, however, as Eastman goes on about Democratic bogeymen and the higher “stakes” of the 2020 election, it becomes quite clear that, at some point, for these men and in this fight, anything goes. Pretexts and premises be damned.

Given the overall sham quality of Eastman and Trump’s political and legal arguments to date, it seems quite likely that they both reached that point a long time ago. At this point the two men have gone all in. Nothing’s going to stop them now.

Except, maybe, in Eastman’s case at least, the American courts and rule of law.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Republicans, Scandals, Trump

Maureen Dowd: Trump Is a Sore Loser and a Fool

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2023 //
31

Maureen Dowd is a regular columnist for the New York Times. Here she reviews Trump’s ongoing coup. Dowd refers to Trump at the end of the article as an Amadán. Carol Burris, who is of Irish origin, sent the following explanation: “She calls him amadán at the end, which in Irish is a fool. But the full terminology, “amadán dubh,” comes from Irish folklore and refers to the “dark fool” or “dark fairy.” Amadán Dubh is a trickster fairy found in Irish folklore, and is the ‘bringer of madness and oblivion.’ That he is.”

Maureen Dowd wrote:

WASHINGTON — The man who tried to overthrow the government he was running was held Thursday by the government he tried to overthrow, a few blocks from where the attempted overthrow took place and a stone’s throw from the White House he yearns to return to, to protect himself from the government he tried to overthrow.

Donald Trump is in the dock for trying to cheat America out of a fair election and body-snatch the true electors. But the arrest of Trump does not arrest the coup.

The fact is, we’re mid-coup, not post-coup. The former president is still in the midst of his diabolical “Who will rid me of this meddlesome democracy?” plot, hoping his dark knights will gallop off to get the job done.

Trump is tied with President Biden in a New York Times/Siena College poll, and if he gets back in the Oval, there will be an Oppenheimer-size narcissistic explosion, as he once more worms out of consequences and defiles democracy. His father disdained losers and Trump would rather ruin the country than admit he lost.

The Trump lawyer John Lauro made it clear they will use the trial to relitigate the 2020 election and their cockamamie claims. Trump wasn’t trying to shred the Constitution, they will posit; he was trying to save it.

“President Trump wanted to get to the truth,” Lauro told Newmax’s Greg Kelly after the arraignment, adding: “At the end he asked Mr. Pence to pause the voting for 10 days, allow the state legislatures to weigh in, and then they could make a determination to audit or re-audit or recertify.”

In trying to debunk Jack Smith’s obstruction charges, Lauro confirmed them. Trying to halt the congressional certification is the crime.

Smith’s indictment depicts an opéra bouffe scene where “the Defendant” (Trump) and “Co-Conspirator 1” (Rudy Giuliani) spent the evening of Jan. 6 calling lawmakers attempting “to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” by sowing “knowingly false allegations of election fraud.” Trump melodramatically tweeted about his “sacred landslide election victory” being “unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.”

Giuliani left a voice mail message for a Republican senator saying they needed “to object to numerous states and raise issues” to delay until the next day so they could pursue their nefarious plan in the state legislatures.

Two words in Smith’s indictment prove that the putz knew his push for a putsch was dishonest: “too honest.” Bullying and berating his truant sycophant, Mike Pence, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, Trump told his vice president, “You’re too honest.”

The former vice president is selling “Too honest” merchandise, which, honestly, won’t endear him to the brainwashed base. Pence’s contemporaneous notes helped Smith make his case.

It’s strange to see Pence showing some nerve and coming to Smith’s aid, after all his brown-nosing and equivocating. He and Mother, who suppressed her distaste for Trump for years, were the most loyal soldiers; in return, according to an aide, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows saidTrump felt Pence “deserved” to be hanged by the rioters.

Pence told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump and his advisers wanted him “essentially to overturn the election.”“It wasn’t just that they asked for a pause,” Pence said, at odds with Lauro. “The president specifically asked me and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers asked me to literally reject votes.”

Ron DeSantis, another presidential wannabe who enabled Trump for too long, acknowledged on Friday that “all those theories that were put out did not prove to be true.” But Trump and his henchmen were busy ratcheting up the lunacy.

“IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Trump threatened on Truth Social on Friday.

On the same day and platform, he accused “the corrupt Biden DOJ” of election interference. Exquisite projection. In Trump’s warped view, it’s always the other guy who’s doing what Trump is actually doing.

Kari Lake told House Republicans to stop pursuing a Biden impeachment and just decertify the 2020 election because Biden is not “the true president.” Lake said of Trump: “This is a guy who’s already won. He won in 2016. He won even bigger in 2020. All that Jan. 6 was, was a staged riot to cover up the fact that they certified a fraudulent election.”

Before laughing off this absurdity, consider the finding from CNN’s new poll: Sixty-nine percent of Republicans and those leaning Republican believe Biden is an illegitimate president, with over half saying there is “solid evidence” of that.

While Trump goes for the long con, or the long coup — rap sheet be damned, it’s said that he worries this will hurt his legacy. He shouldn’t. His legacy is safe, as the most democracy-destroying, soul-crushing, self-obsessed amadán ever to occupy the Oval. Amadán, that’s Gaelic for a man who grows more foolish every day.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Lies, Pence, Republicans, Trump

Robert Hubbell: Lock Him Up!

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2023 //
31

Blogger Robert Hubbell explains why Trump will force Judge Tanya Chutkan in D.C. to lock him up. With his insults directed at judges, prosecutors, and potential witnesses, he is encouraging political violence.

He wrote:

Trump knows that a jury of his peers will convict him in a fair trial. He has therefore resorted to extra-judicial efforts to intimidate and prejudice the jury pool. His efforts are not only extra-judicial, they are undemocratic, thuggish, and illegal. Like a crime lord with feral instincts, Trump knows how to threaten without threatening and brutalize without leaving fingerprints at the scene of the crime. Instead, he grants permission to his followers to violate laws and norms, encouraging them to do the dirty work necessary to defend the indefensible.


Over the last several days, the breadth and viciousness of Trump’s assault on the legal system became manifest as MAGA extremists attacked the judge and jurors in Trump’s various criminal proceedings. Before reviewing the latest insults to the rule of law, let’s skip to the end to discuss the solution: We must recognize that Trump is engaged in political terrorism designed to frighten good people who are the backbone of democracy. We cannot let that happen. The solution is not to shrink in fear, but to swell in numbers, strengthen our resolve, and dispel the exaggerated fears created by a skulk of cowards who hide in internet shadows.


In America, there is an ever-present risk of violence that cannot be entirely dismissed. Law enforcement and prosecutors should, therefore, vigorously pursue and prosecute the small, frightened, impotent cultists who threaten jurors, judges, and prosecutors. But we must recognize that the business model of political terrorism is for a few individuals to instill outsized and unwarranted fear in the masses. Recognizing that truth should allow us to keep in perspective the fact that a few thousand online pseudo-terrorists vanish to nothingness compared to 335 million Americans.


America is bigger than Trump and his minions. We should not cower in fear but should pursue justice with confidence and righteousness. We are protecting the Constitution and our system of laws. We cannot fail in that task—and there is nothing that cowards with keyboards can do to deter us.


Against that background, let’s look at the events on the ground.


Abigail Jo Shry of Alvin, Texas, threatened Judge Tanya Chutkan in a voicemail message that began with racial slurs and ended with threats of violence. Shry was quickly questioned, arrested, and charged in federal court. The magistrate ordered that she remain in pretrial detention for at least 30 days pending a determination of her danger to the community. That is type of federal response that will deter future threats….

There have also been threats against members of the Fulton County grand jury that indicted Trump and eighteen other defendants on RICO charges. See NYTimes, Officials Investigate Threats Against Trump Grand Jurors in Georgia (accessible to all). The Fulton County sheriff issued an anodyne statement acknowledging the threats and stating that the sheriff was investigating. (The statement said the sheriff was “aware of online threats against grand jurors and was working with other agencies to track down their origin.”)

A stronger statement from the sheriff and the quick arrest of several perpetrators would go some distance to damping the false bravado of other beer-fueled couch terrorists. A stronger reaction is necessary because the online threats are directed not only against the grand jurors, but future jurors who will preside over Trump’s criminal trials.

But there is more.

Trump released a video in which he attacked special prosecutor Jack Smith as a “deranged lowlife” for obtaining Trump’s Twitter feed. See Forbes, Trump Attacks Jack Smith For Gaining Access To His Old Twitter Account. This is the type of statement that should cause Judge Tanya Chutkan to remand Trump into custody. At the very least, the statement should be added to the list of offenses that will finally cause Trump to be detained pending trial.

Detaining Trump before tria is not only inevitable but also necessary. Trump’s continued attacks are having a corrosive effect that seeps into the nooks and crannies of the justice system everywhere. Many readers have commented on the raid on a Kansas newspaper because of efforts by the newspaper to report on the failure of local police to enforce DUI laws against a local businessman. Based on a questionable search warrant issued by a local magistrate, police seized computers, cell phones, and files—a gross violation of federal protections granted to members of the news media.

The public outcry and obvious illegality of the seizure forced the police to return the seized items and the local prosecutor to withdraw the questionable warrant due to ‘insufficient evidence’. But the question remains, “How could this happen? How is it that local police and magistrate could ignore constitutional and statutory protections for the press?” Some of the sordid answers are detailed in this investigative piece by The Wichita Eagle, Judge Laura Viar, who approved newspaper raid, has DUI arrests.

Apart from the local magistrate’s questionable potential bias due to her own history of DUI troubles, another answer is that the police and magistrate are modeling themselves after a national GOP in which the rule of law is an impediment to power. In short, they thought they could get away with trampling the Constitution. Fortunately, they were wrong—and will likely be charged with crimes and serve time in jail. As should Trump.

If Americans see that Trump is punished for his attacks on the justice system pending trial, others will realize that they, too, must respect the justice system. We owe the Constitution nothing less.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Justice, Trump
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