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Thom Hartmann on the Durham Report

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2023 //
64

In May 2019, Attorney General Bill Barr asked John Durham, the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut to investigate the origins of the FBI inquiry into Trump’s ties to Russia in 2016. In December 2020, Barr elevated Durham to Special Counsel so he could continue his inquiry into what Trump called a witch-hunt, the crime of the century. After four years, the Durham report was issued a few days ago.

Thom Hartmann reviewed the Durham report:

Imagine you’re in the FBI overseeing national security and a candidate for President for the United States hired to run his campaign a man who’d:

— taken $66 million from Russian intelligence services via Putin-friendly oligarchs,
— helped Russia install their own puppet government in Ukraine in 2010,
— was paid $1 million a year to help the corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) fight against democracy and maintain power,
— forced his party to remove references in their platform to defending Ukrainian democracy,
— gave a Russian intelligence agent top-secret insider campaign information about voters in 6 swing states so they could run an ultimately successful micro-targeted Facebook campaign to help the candidate,
— offered to run the campaign for free because he’d been well-compensated by Russian intelligence services,
— and then repeatedly lied to the FBI about his connections to Putin and Russia, leading to his being charged, convicted, and imprisoned until that candidate pardoned him.

Imagine that candidate had visited Moscow with his Soviet-citizen wife — whose father was a Soviet agent — and been groomed all the way back in 1987 by Russian intelligence (then Soviet intelligence, the KGB) to run for president.

— That he came back home from that 1987 trip to Moscow and spent $100,000 to run full-page ads in three major US newspapers urging America to abandon and leave defenseless its allies in Europe and Asia.
— That he then went to New Hampshire a month later and did a campaign rally to see if there was enough support for him to run for president.
— That US intelligence officers reported that the 1987 ad and campaign for president led toa champagne-laced celebration in Moscow, with Russian intelligence calling it one of their most successful infiltration/influence campaigns in decades.

Imagine if during his campaign for the White House that president — when only a candidate — had inked a secret deal with Russia to earn hundreds of millions of dollars by putting a hotel with his name on it in Moscow, and kept it concealed from the American public throughout the campaign.

Imagine that he made extensive use of his opponent’s emails that had been hacked by Russian intelligence services, who then ran a Facebook operation hyping that same information that reached 26 million targeted Americans in 6 swing states, helping him win the Electoral College vote.

Imagine that during the 2016 campaign an insider with Russian connections learned that Russia had successfully hacked this candidate’s opponent’s emails on behalf of the candidate before the hack was revealed on Wikileaks during the Democratic National Convention where his opponent was nominated for president…and that information came to you via an informant.

Imagine that candidate became president 29 years after his first Moscow trip and in his first weeks in office, presumably as thanks for their help, invited the Russian ambassador and the Russian foreign minister to a covert meeting in the Oval Office and gave them top-secret information on a spy about whom Russia had been concerned; that spy was then “burned.”

Imagine that this was nothing new for that president’s party: that two presidents before him had gained the White House by treasonous collaboration with openly hostile foreign powers (North Vietnam in 1968 and Iran in 1980). That congressional members of his own party would then go on to vote against compiling information about war crimes committed in Ukraine by Russia. That a senator from that party by the name of Rand Paul made a private trip to Russia to hand-deliver possibly stolen sealed “documents” to Putin’s intelligence service given him in confidence by that president.

Imagine that president had a series of nearly 20 secret telephone conversations with Putin (for which the records of what was said no longer exist) and then unilaterally — in defiance of both Congress and the law — blocked military aid to Ukraine while Russia was massing troops on its borders. And then followed those up with a years-long campaign to destroy NATO, which was Russia’s top military concern. And openly praised and deferred to Putin while trash-talking American intelligence services.

Imagine that the FBI worked with a special prosecutor named Mueller to determine the extent of Russian involvement in the 2016 election and:

— Found that Russian interference in the 2016 election was “sweeping and systemic.”
— Brought indictments against 37 individuals including six Trump advisers and 26 Russian nationals, secured seven guilty pleas or convictions, and found “compelling evidence” that the president himself had stonewalled or lied to investigators and “obstructed justice on multiple occasions.”
— Referred 14 criminal matters to the Justice Department, where the president’s hand-picked Attorney General — who’d helped President George HW Bush cover up the Iran/Contra Treason Scandal — ignored them and let them lapse.
— Uncovered five specific examples of the president criminally obstructing justice in ways that could easily have been prosecuted.

Imagine that when that president ran for re-election Russia again came to his aid by hacking his 2020 opponent’s family members, both looking for and trying to plant damaging information suggesting his opponent’s family was corrupt. That Russia then spread rumors across social media to that effect on the candidate’s behalf in the months before the election.

Imagine that when he nevertheless lost, Russian intelligence officers used social mediato amplify his claims the election was stolen, leading to an attempted coup conspiracy involving the assassination of the Vice President and Speaker of the House.

Imagine that the FBI — in part, during that president’s time in office — compiled material for a report concluding that:

“Throughout the [2020] election, Russia’s online influence actors sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud.”

So, if you were in the FBI and knew all that, how do you imagine you’d react?

Would you want to dig deeper, to determine if an agent of a hostile foreign power was trying to co-opt or even destroy America from within, a la The Manchurian Candidate?

Yesterday we learned that Trump-humper John Durham, a former federal prosecutor who should know better, can’t imagine any of this.

He issued a 306-page report on his well-paid four-year investigation in a futile effort to salvage his reputation (or burnish it with Trump) claiming that the FBI really had “no basis” to investigate the possibility that the 2016 Trump campaign might have been infiltrated or corrupted by Russian intelligence.

Durham wrote there was “a complete lack of information from the Intelligence Community that corroborated the hypothesis upon which the [2016] Crossfire Hurricane investigation [of Trump’s connections to Russia and Putin] was predicated.” (I have to admit, I almost spit out my coffee when reading that line.)

During the course of his $6.6 million “investigation,” Durham pressed chargesagainst two people, costing each a fortune in legal fees and damaging their reputations, and in both cases the individuals were exonerated by a jury of their peers.

Durham later claimed he was “misunderstood” by the media, and that he brought the charges not because he thought he could easily win the cases but because he was interested in defining “the narrative,” apparently in a way that would be favorable to Trump:

“[D]efense counsel has presumed the Government’s [Durham’s] bad faith and asserts that the Special Counsel’s [Durham’s] Office intentionally sought to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool,” Durham wrote last year. “That is simply not true. If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated, or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the Government’s Motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the Government’s inclusion of this information.”

When Bill Barr and John Durham took multiple taxpayer-funded luxury trips to Italy to interrogate that country’s government about possible FBI wrongdoing in the Hurricane Crossfire investigation of Trump and Russia, they instead discovered evidence of specific “financial crimes” committed by Trump himself that were so serious they aborted the trip and Barr authorized himself to dig deeper.

The details of those Trump crimes aren’t mentioned in yesterday’s Durham report, and there’s no explanation for their absence. Barr’s “digging” was, perhaps, simply another cover-up like he did with Iran-Contra back in the day.

Apparently Durham’s imagination couldn’t extend to the possibility that Trump has been a Russian asset for at least 30 years and continues to be one to this day. After all, there’s obviously no connection between him and Russia, right?

Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, History, Republicans, Trump

Michigan: Evangelical Extremists Take Control of County Government and Launch Chaos

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2023 //
12

This is one of the most disturbing articles I have read in recent memory. A prosperous county in Michigan elected a slate of evangelical rightwing fanatics to run their local government. The new majority replaced a conservative Republican board that was known for fiscal responsibility and moderate politics. The spark that lit the rebellion was a mask mandate for children during the pandemic.

The article was written by Greg Jaffe and Patrick Marley in the Washington Post:

WEST OLIVE, Mich. — The eight new members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners had run for office promising to “thwart tyranny” in their lakeside Michigan community of 300,000 people.


In this case the oppressive force they aimed to thwart was the county government they now ran. It was early January, their first day in charge. An American flag held down a spot at the front of the board’s windowless meeting room. Sea-foam green carpet covered the floor.


The new commissioners, all Republicans, swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800. To run the health department, they voted to install a service manager from a local HVAC company who had gained prominence as a critic of mask mandates.


As the session entered its fourth hour, Sylvia Rhodea, the board’s new vice chair, put forward a motion to change the motto that sat atop the county’s website and graced its official stationery. “Whereas the vision statement of ‘Where You Belong’ has been used to promote the divisive Marxist ideology of the race, equity movement,” Rhodea said.


And so began a new era for Ottawa County. Across America, county governments provided services so essential that they were often an afterthought. Their employees paved roads, built parks, collected taxes and maintained property records. In an era when Americans had never seemed more divided and distrustful, county governments, at their best, helped define what remains of the common good.

Ottawa County stood out for a different reason. It was becoming a case study in what happens when one of the building blocks of American democracy is consumed by ideological battles over race, religion and American history.


Rhodea’s resolution continued on for 20 “whereases,” connecting the current motto to a broader effort that she said aimed to “divide people by race,” reduce their “personal agency,” and teach them to “hate America and doubt the goodness of her people.”


Her proposed alternative, she said, sought to unite county residents around America’s “true history” as a “land of systemic opportunity built on the Constitution, Christianity and capitalism.’”


She flipped to her resolution’s final page and leaned closer to the mic. “Now, therefore, let it be resolved that the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners establishes a new county vision statement and motto of ‘Where Freedom Rings.’”


The commission’s lone Democrat gazed out in disbelief. A few seats away, the commission’s new chair savored the moment. “There’s just some really beautiful language in this,” he said, before calling for a vote on the resolution. It passed easily.
A cheer went up in the room, which on this morning was about three-fourths full, but in the coming weeks it would be packed with so many angry people calling each other “fascists,” “communists,” “Christian nationalists” and “racists” that the county would have to open an overflow room down the hall.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Equity, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Freedom, Health, Michigan, Religion, Science, Trump

Robert Reich: Why Did CNN Do it?

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2023 //
49

Writing at Alternet, Robert Reich explains why CNN gave Trump an hour to peddle his vainglorious lies and narcissism. CNN has a new owner. He wants the network to be “centrist,” to bring on equal numbers of Democrats and MAGAnuts. And behind the new owner is an investor and board member who has given significant money to Trump.

Why did CNN give Trump this gift?

Reich writes:

The germ of an answer could be found last August, when Chris Licht, CNN’s new chairman and CEO, canceled Brian Stelter’s Sunday show, “Reliable Sources,” which had been a reliable source of intelligent criticism of Fox News, right-wing media in general, Trumpism, and the increasingly authoritarian lurch of the Republican party.

Licht also fired Stelter and his staff.

The show had been commercially successful. It was doing better than several of CNN’s prime-time shows.

Around the same time, Licht told CNN staff they should stop referring to Donald Trump’s “big lie” because the phrase sounded like a Democratic party talking point. Licht also told the staff he wanted more “straight news reporting,” along with more conservative guests.

This explains to me why CNN invited a female Trump lawyer on the air on the day that E. Jean Carroll won a civil judgment against Trump for $5 million for sexual abuse and defamation. I suppose I expected to hear from an impartial legal expert, but instead there was a beautiful angry Trump lawyer, speaking through clenched teeth. Her unconcealed rage undermined her credibility, but I was nonetheless surprised to see the network turn to someone so partisan.

Reich continues:

Follow the money. CNN’s new corporate overseer is Warner Bros. Discovery Inc, whose CEO is David Zaslav.

Zaslav has been pushing Licht to reposition CNN to be a network preferred by “everybody … Republicans, Democrats….”

How is it possible to report on Trump and not speak of the big lie, or say they’ve broken norms if not laws?

So, what’s motivating Zaslav? Keep following the money.

The leading shareholder in Warner Bros. Discovery is John Malone, a multibillionaire cable magnate. (Malone was a chief architect in the merger of Discovery and CNN.)

Malone describes himself as a “libertarian” although he travels in right-wing Republican circles. In 2005, he held 32% of the shares of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. He is on the board of directors of the Cato Institute. In 2017, he donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration.

Malone has said he wants CNN to be more like Fox News because, in his view, Fox News has “actual journalism.” Malone also wants the “news” portion of CNN to be “more centrist…”

When you follow the money behind deeply irresponsible decisions at the power centers of America today, the road often leads to right-wing billionaires.

We have known a long time. You never go wrong following the money.

Categories Billionaires, Media, Trump

Ex-Trump Advisor Chosen as New College Commencement Speaker; Graduates Plan Alternate Ceremony

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2023 //
14

A few months ago, Governor DeSantis engineered a takeover of Florida’s only progressive public college, New College. First he gained a majority of the board, then the board fired the president of the college and hired the unqualified Richard Corcoran, who had been a hard-right speaker of the House and state commissioner of education.

For the first commencement under the new regime, Corcoran invited Dr. Scott Atlas to be commencement speaker. Atlas was Trump’s coronavirus advisor. He frequently clashed with Dr. Anthony Fauci because Atlas believes in herd immunity, not public health measures.

The graduates are planning an alternate commencement.

Students at New College of Florida are planning their own graduation event after a conservative speaker with ties to former president Donald Trump and Governor Ron DeSantis was selected to give the college’s commencement address.

Dr. Scott Atlas was chosen by New College of Florida interim president Richard Corcoran to address seniors at a May 19 graduation ceremony in Sarasota.

The radiologist was appointed as Trump’s special coronavirus adviser in 2020.

He resigned after clashes with other public health leaders over his advocacy for herd immunity as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Students say the current administration is made up of new hires, who have only been part of the community for a handful of months.

They say the additional graduation event on May 18 will give them a chance to celebrate on their own terms.

A GoFundMe account set up to help pay for the separate commencement had raised nearly $20,000 by Wednesday afternoon.

Atlas is a senior fellow at Stanford University and a fellow in the Academy for Science and Freedom at the Washington, D.C., campus of Hillsdale College, the small Michigan Christian school DeSantis has said he wants to model New College after.

Atlas’s conservative ideology is in line with a month’s long process to change the culture at the small liberal arts college in Sarasota.

The overhaul began in January when DeSantis appointed six new conservative trustees to the college’s board. The trustees then fired the school’s president and appointed former state education commissioner Richard Corcoran as interim.

In the span of just a few months, trustees fired the school’s director of diversity, equity, and inclusion and abolished the school’s small DEI office. They fired the school’s librarian and dean of academic engagement and denied tenure to five faculty members. They also hired a director of athletics, although the college currently offers only intramural sports.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Creativity, DeSantis, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom, Health, Higher Education, Science, Trump

Charlie Sykes: He’s Back, Unrepentant, Still Lying

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2023 //
50

Charlie Sykes is a lead writer for the Never Trumper website “The Bulwark.” He watched CNN’s “town hall” with Donald Trump and shared his reactions. He was disgusted. I did not watch. I gather he called E. Jean Carroll, the woman who won a civil case against Trump the day before the New Hampshire town hall, a “wack job.” I wonder if she will sue him again.

Sykes wrote:

Critics had worried that giving the indicted, twice-impeached, coup-plotting, chronically lying sexual predator an unedited, live television forum might turn out badly.

The reality, however, was far ghastlier: a sh*tshow for the ages, and a moment that captured the thorough degradation of both our politics and the media. “It was a f**king nightmare,” remarked one savvy observer, “and it was programmed to BE a f**king nightmare.” 

Trump was, of course, thrilled. 

For her part, Kaitlan Collins was poised, prepared, and determined, but she never stood a chance. She raised all of the key questions and tried (not always successfully) to ask followups. 

But Trump just rolled over her with a torrent of invective, jibes, and bullsh*t. The fact-checkers were reduced to asterisks. “He declared war on the truth,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper said afterward. “And I’m not sure that he didn’t win.”

Where to start?

  • Trump called a black law enforcement officer a “thug.”
  • He repeated baseless conspiracy theories about 2020.
  • He lied about losing the 2020 election. (CNN’s Oliver Darcy tweeted: “I’ve lost count of how many times Trump has lied about the election. Collins keeps fact-checking him, but he keeps lying.”)
  • He lied about calling for “terminating” the Constitution so he could be returned to power.
  • He lied about his role on January 6th.
  • He suggested that he would pardon many of the January 6th insurrectionists.
  • He insisted again that Mike Pence should have overturned the election.
  • He endorsed letting the country default on its debt, even if it would bring on an economic cataclysm.
  • He claimed that residents of the Chinatown neighborhood in Washington, D.C., “did not speak English as part of an allegation that Biden stored boxes there after his vice presidency because he had nefarious ties to Beijing.”
  • He refused to back Ukraine against Russia.
  • He lashed out at Collins as “nasty woman” — and the audience CHEERED.

But this was hardly the worst of it. Actually, not even close.

The day after a federal jury found that the ex-president had sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll, Trump turned the episode into a joke, mocking and insulting his victim.

And the crowd laughed.

The former president then turned Collins’ other questions about Carroll into his version of a comedy routine, cracking up the audience CNN assembled of New Hampshire Republicans and effectively independent voters. At many points, Trump appeared to repeat the same rhetoric that led to Carroll’s suit in the first place…

Trump went on to suggest that Carroll, who vividly recounted her allegation on the witness stand, was overly promiscuous.

The CNN audience loved it. 

“What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky panky in a dressing room? I don’t know if she was married then or not. I feel sorry for you John Johnson,” Trump said to a chorus of laughter.

It was a shocking moment, even for veterans of Trump-era politics.

But that was the moment we knew.

**

Even the folks at CNN seemed to recognize how bad it was. “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” Oliver Darcy, the network’s senior media reporter wrote in CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter. “It felt like 2016 all over again. It was Trump’s unhinged social media feed brought to life on stage.”

But let’s be clear about this: last night was not Kaitlan Collins’s fault. The decision to amplify Trump’s firehose of disinformation on live television doomed the whole thing from start. As Mehdi Hasan writes today, the “ridiculous town hall format and an audience seemingly recruited ‘from the Mar-a-Lago parking lot’, put its own anchor in a position to fail.”

Her bosses at CNN should have known that, but they made it clear last night that they had learned nothing. Or simply didn’t care.

Increasingly, Chris Licht is to CNN what Elon Musk is to Twitter.

The network’s defenses for all of this are bullsh*t on the surface. Of course, CNN needs to “cover” and report on the frontrunning GOP candidate. He’s news. 

But this was not journalism we saw on CNN last night: this was entertainment programming, the kind of reality television show that did so much to foist Trump onto the body politic. He owned last night’s format.

In a different format, Collins could have performed a flagrant act of journalism. She could have done an in-depth taped interview with the former president, the sort that Jonathan Swan has done. She could have been given the chance to ask detailed follow-up questions, like Mehdi Hasan might do. CNN could have edited the responses, rather than simply air one lie after another. 

Instead, well, you saw it… (via Rex Hupke):

Sexual abuse, like the kind a jury just found Trump liable of? That’s a laugh line for these folks. Literally. They laughed during CNN’s town hall as Trump continued to likely defame E. Jean Carroll, the woman he was just found liable of defaming. 

The Jan. 6 domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol? Trump said he’ll swiftly pardon most of the now-imprisoned attackers, possibly even some of the Proud Boys who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, because they’re “great people.” And that brought applause from the crowd.

A rat-a-tat-tat string of lies about the “rigged election”? The crowd chuckled.

A lie about “finishing” the border wall he barely started? You know, the one Mexico didn’t pay for. The crowd applauded.

Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. Laugh, applaud, chuckle, clap, cheer.

This was the moment we knew. 

We knew who Trump was of course. But last night showed us who we are and what’s about to happen. This is the GOP frontrunner. 

He is still the star who can do anything. And it will get worse.

“Listen,” wrote author Jared Yates Sexton, “if this town hall is any indication, and I think it is, the Trump Campaign of 2024 is going to be infinitely more disturbing and upsetting. I’ve spent a lot of time studying this man and his movement. I’m stunned by the depths here. This is . . . awful.”

**

More key reads:

Officer Michael Fanone:

Putting him onstage, having him answer questions like a normal candidate who didn’t get people killed in the process of trying to end the democracy he’s attempting to once again run, normalizes what Trump did. It sends a message that attempting a coup is just part of the process; that accepting election results is a choice; and that there are no consequences, in the media or in politics or anywhere else, for rejecting them.  

Tom Nichols in the Atlantic:

One might hope that Trump’s loss in New York would lead him to slink away in shame, but we now live in post-shame America. Instead, Trump will sit for a town hall on CNN tonight, where he will field questions as if he is a normal person running for office instead of a sexual abuser who incited sedition and violence against the government he is once again seeking to control.

Trump, of course, has the self-awareness of a traffic cone, and he is seemingly incapable of remorse. But CNN’s decision to move ahead with the event, as if nothing has happened, is disappointing. A more defensible position would have been to scrap the town-hall format and tell Trump that he is still invited to sit, one-on-one, with a CNN reporter. To present him to voters as just another candidate, however, is the very definition of normalizing his behavior.

Kara Swisher on Twitter:

A thread: As I said before, this was an impossible stage. But there were a few key moments where CNN could have taken back the con from Trump, even tho his cavalcade of lies made it very difficult and the audience was gamed in his favor. Here’s my quick thoughts as an interviewer.

In no particular order, you need to top Trump early and often, despite accusations of being unfair. For example, the obvious Nasty Woman retort would have been: “And a jury just yesterday unanimously called you a sexual predator. So here we are. Do you want to keep going here, because to quote Captain America, ‘I can do this all day.’” Make sure you can do it all day. (I can.)…

The Trump loving audience would jar anyone and it is easy to let it get to you. But it is also an opportunity to win some over, which is especially powerful if you are in someone’s home base. You only need one. 

So, when the crowd started snickering about E. Jean Carroll, for example, I would have stopped the interview cold, told Trump politely to sit still for a second, walked over to a man and a woman in the crowd who laughed and said: “Do you have a daughter? I do. She’s just three.”

Then, in the kindest tone possible, ask them if they said they did have a daughter or sister or wife, if they thought a man forcibly touching a woman’s genitals was actually funny, because I could not imagine they would since they did not look cruel. In any case, I would have interacted with the crowd a lot more, as most tend to fold when you pull individuals away from the mob. People don’t like to be found when they are acting badly and are usually embarrassed….

Amanda Carpenter in the Bulwark:

At times, it seemed like just another Trump rally. Even down to the moment where Trump turns the crowd against the press, as he did when he called Collins a “nasty person” to her face. (To her credit, she didn’t flinch.)

The event was a disaster for the reason that all of Trump’s live events are problematic: It’s much easier to spew lies on live television than it is for anyone to push back against them. Live coverage privileges the liar, no matter how nimble the interviewer.

But it all happened because CNN wanted a show. And they sure got one. No one should pretend it was some kind of public service.

The Daily Beast:

Throughout the 70-minute town hall, Trump refused to accept reality. When Collins tried to fact-check him, Trump just spoke over her and repeated his falsehoods. When she tried to correct Trump about his election lies, noting that Trump and his supporters lost more than 60 court cases, Trump simply kept lying.

“They found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes,” Trump falsely claimed.

Collins repeatedly tried to rectify the record, but Trump just kept forging ahead. When he said the “government cameras” showed “people going to 28 different voting booths”—something that never happened—Collins tried to correct him to no avail.

Halfway through the town hall, CNN staffers were acknowledging the event was a disaster for the truth.

“This is so bad,” one of CNN’s on-air personalities told The Daily Beast before the first commercial break. “I was cautiously optimistic despite the criticism… it is awful. It’s a Trump infomercial. We’re going to get crushed.”

“One of the worst hours I’ve ever seen on our air,” another CNN staffer told The Daily Beast.

Politico’s Playbook:

By the end of the night, the reviews were abysmal. The words “disaster” and “disgrace” were plastered all over Twitter….

Even network talent and talking heads participating on CNN panels following the event seemed shell-shocked. And sources inside the network confided their deep regrets.

“It was a complete disaster,” one CNN employee told Playbook, arguing that the format — specifically, stacking the audience with Trump supporters who cheered his lies — was a “strategic error.”

“It made it seem like CNN was endorsing that behavior,” the employee said. “Incredibly disappointing.”

Categories Democracy, Elections, Lies, Trump

Dan Rather: CNN Was Wrong to Let Trump Spew Lies on Air

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2023 //
25

Dan Rather has had an illustrious career as a journalist. He is now blogging at Steady. He was annoyed that CNN gave Donald Trump a platform to repeat his lies, to bulldoze the interviewer, and to play his usual demagogic role. After Trump was elected in 2016, CNN was widely criticized for giving Trump so much air time, more than any other network or cable station did. CNN sometimes covered his rallies live and at length, a courtesy not extended to other candidates. By some estimates, CNN gave Trump $2 billion of free on-air time.

He writes:

Donald Trump is a liar. He is a bigot, a misogynist, and a deadbeat. He has just been found by a jury to be a sexual abuser. He faces multiple other serious criminal investigations. He spurred a violent insurrection. He has repeatedly demonstrated complete disdain for the foundations of American democracy. The list of traits that makes this man unfit for the presidency fills pages.

And yet despite these debased qualities, or maybe (depressingly) because of them, he is immensely popular with many Americans. They cheer on his worst impulses. They bask in his hatred. They are fueled by the danger he poses to this nation. They have propelled him once again to be the favorite for the Republican presidential nomination.

And although many Americans don’t want to believe it, at this moment, he is a real threat to return to the presidency.

Among other things, Trump is and always has been a performer, and performers, no matter how vile their message, crave and thrive in the spotlight.

Last night, CNN gave Trump not only a spotlight, but a platform and a rabid crowd of cheering supporters. He made the most of it, as chiling and distressing as that might be.

Those who have made up their minds on Trump — those who love him and hate him — undoubtedly found plenty of justification for their opinions watching, ignoring, or doom scrolling his performance.

But what about the casual observer, the disaffected, the persuadable? Trump knows how to command a stage. He knows how to go on the attack. And the format CNN gift-wrapped for him allowed him to score a mark.

There is a school of thought that Trump is so toxic that the more America sees of him, the less they like him. And there were moments last night that could easily be plugged into effective attack ads against him. But what we should have learned from 2016 and the years that followed is that people as shameless as Trump do not measure their success by metrics of civility. It’s about demonstrating primal dominance, and that instinct delivered him the presidency once before. And even though he lost reelection, he remade American politics in ways with which we are still contending.

Trump played the part CNN surely knew he would play. What did they hope to get from normalizing this demeaning and dangerous demagogue? Ratings? Relevance? A tack to the mythic “middle” in line with new ownership and direction? Trying to become some new version of Fox News? Is any of this worth endangering the health and security of our country?

When CNN announced that they would give Donald Trump more than an hour of free prime time for a “town hall” (more like a town maul), it was clear what was going to happen.

Trump would lie, and bully, and insult, and lie, and lie, and lie some more. That is who he is. It is who he has always been.

There is no moderating a discussion with Trump. It is nearly impossible to engage in dialogue by asking probing follow-up questions. Because he will just ignore them. And lie and lie and lie. And this is especially true when he has an audience that seemed hand-picked to double as a campaign rally — hooting and hollering with approval the more he launched into his mendacious invective.

The press will have to figure out how to cover Trump as he stomps his way toward renomination. Liars should not be given open mics in formats where they can filibuster falsehoods unchallenged. Edit what he says with context. Do not sugarcoat how untrue many of his rantings are.

America rejected Trump in 2020. He is further weakened by the court cases he faces. But he remains a potent force. He will get his message out. Let us hope the press will analyze it, not amplify it.

The future of not only American journalism, but of America itself, will be shaped by how Trump is covered going forward.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Trump

Michael Hiltzik: In Defense of Gerontocracy

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2023 //
51

Michael Hiltzik is a columnist for the LA Times. Although supposedly a business columnist, he writes about cultural topics that shape our world. In this column, he takes issue with media bias against older people. As a woman approaching her 85th birthday, I share his view. Fifty years ago, I was physically vigorous, not so much now. But I know so much more now than I did when I was 35. I dare say I’m less impetuous, less likely to be caught up in fads, less likely to be fooled. I would rather be led by a wise person than a relatively youthful fascist like DeSantis or an old liar like Trump. Age is of far less consequence than character and beliefs. (I was going to say “convictions,” but that word favors Trump, who is probably going to have at least one conviction by November 2024, an unenviable record.)

Hiltzik writes:

The cry is heard that America has become a “gerontocracy.” That’s supposed to be bad, it’s argued, because our superannuated political leadership is out of touch with the electorate and blocking younger and (theoretically) more vigorous and intellectually vibrant leaders from taking their hour upon the stage.

Earlier this year, CNN called President Biden’s age a “hot topic.” Leaving aside that news organizations such as CNN have helped make it a hot topic, the real question is whether it’s anything more than that. The answer is no….

The gerontocracy critique also threatens to deprive us of our most experienced leaders. Rather than remove poor performers from their sinecures, the current fixation on age could remove from our political and economic structures men and women who have spent decades learning about the world and offering the wisdom born of long professional experience.

The U.S. State Department, for example, requires its professional foreign service staff to retire at 65, “when they are at the height of their wisdom and knowledge,” publishing executive and author Michael Clinton observed recently, a rule he attributed to “toxic ageism.” Some corporations require their top officers to retire at 60 or 65, while most are still willing to make a professional contribution….

Claims that a political gerontocracy is somehow undermining American democracy — the theme of so much political navel-gazing— simply don’t hold water. They depend on the notion that as we grow older, our political outlooks coalesce into something at odds with the public interest. Where’s the evidence for that?

It’s widely noted that Biden and his likeliest presidential challenger, Donald Trump, would be the oldest president if either wins election in 2024. Biden would be 82 on inauguration day 2025 and Trump nearly 80. Does that tell us anything about how their administration would unfold? Obviously not.

Biden would almost certainly run on his record of creating remarkably inclusive and progressive White House policies and overseeing an economy of job growth and economic expansion in the wake of the pandemic; Trump, judging from his most recent speeches, would continue to flog personal grievances based on his groundless claims of fraud in his 2020 loss…

Some of our political leaders have notched their most outstanding achievement at an age decades later than when conventional wisdom holds that they should have retired.

The questions raised about the physical and mental capacity of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), 89, didn’t apply to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who compiled what might be the most successful record in House history by shepherding the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010 at 70 and Biden’s progressive policies to enactment after the age of 80….

As for whether older politicians are out of step with the younger members of the American electorate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) didn’t seem to have much trouble connecting with youthful voters when he ran for president in the run-up to the 2016 election, at age 75.

Nor are there signs that the liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has lost the youth vote because of her age, 73. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) seemed to have little trouble getting reelected in the last election, when they were, respectively, 80 and 89….

Quite plainly, the best guides to politicians’ adequacy are their words and actual performance in office. Few reach the highest echelons of American politics without leaving a record to be examined.

Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor, recently took a swipe at Biden’s age, remarking that he would be unlikely to live to the end of his next term.

Does that tell you anything about what she has to offer as an alternative? No; for that you’d have to delve into her positions on gun control (after a deadly school shooting in Nashville, she called for more metal detectors at schoolhouse doors but not more gun legislation) or abortion rights (she’s against them).

Who shows more mental acuity? Joe Biden, who occasionally stumbles over his words (apparently an artifact of his youthful stuttering)? Or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who recently called for a “national divorce,” i.e., secession by red states, at the age of 48?

Does the age of Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott explain his boasting about signing a 2021 law allowing almost any Texan to carry a gun in public — “No license or training is needed,” he bragged in a tweet. Abbott was 63 at the time, a relative spring chicken. How has that worked out for his Texas constituents?

Categories Biden, Character, Democracy, DeSantis, Elections, Ethics, Fascism, Health, Trump

Colorado: What Happened When MAGA Extremists Gained Control of a School District

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2023 //
27

NBC News reported on the takeover of Woodland Park, Colorado, by rightwing extremists. Woodland Park is a mostly white district with 8,000 residents. Colorado is a bluish state. The governor is a Democrat, as are the two Senators. But the state, like other states, has deep red districts. The new board wasted no time in pushing their ideological agenda, which apparently concerns even some Republicans.

WOODLAND PARK, Colo. — When a conservative slate of candidates won control of the school board here 18 months ago, they began making big changes to reshape the district.

Woodland Park, a small mountain town that overlooks Pikes Peak, became the first — and, so far, only — district in the country to adopt the American Birthright social studies standard, created by a right-wing advocacy group that warns of the “steady whittling away of American liberty.” The new board hired a superintendent who was previously recalled from a nearby school board after pushing for a curriculum that would “promote positive aspects of the United States.” The board approved the community’s first charter school without public notice and gave the charter a third of the middle school building.

As teachers, students and parents began protesting these decisions, the administration barred employees from discussing the district on social media. At least two staff members who objected to the board’s decisions were later forced out of their jobs, while another was fired for allegedly encouraging protests.

These rapid and sweeping shifts weren’t coincidental — instead it was a plan ripped from the MAGA playbook designed to catch opponents off guard, according to a board member’s email released through an open records request.

“This is the flood the zone tactic, and the idea is if you advance on many fronts at the same time, then the enemy cannot fortify, defend, effectively counter-attack at any one front,” David Illingworth, one of the new conservative school board members, wrote to another on Dec. 9, 2021, weeks after they were elected. “Divide, scatter, conquer. Trump was great at this in his first 100 days.”

The leaders of the Woodland Park School District are enacting an experiment in conservative governance in the middle of a state controlled by Democrats, with little in the way so far to slow them down. The school board’s decisions have won some praise in heavily Republican Teller County, but opposition is growing, including from conservative Christians and lifelong GOP voters who say the board has made too many ill-advised decisions and lacks transparency.

“I think they look at us as this petri dish where they can really push all their agenda and theories,” said Joe Dohrn, a Woodland Park father who described himself as a staunch Republican and “very capitalistic.” “They clearly are willing to sacrifice the public school and to put students presently in the public school through years of disarray to drive home their ideological beliefs. It’s a travesty.”

Teachers grew particularly alarmed early this year when word spread that Ken Witt, the new superintendent, did not plan to reapply for grants that covered the salaries of counselors and social workers.

At Gateway Elementary School in March, Witt told staff members he prioritized academic achievement, not students’ emotions. “We are not the department of health and human services,” he said, as teachers angrily objected, according to two recordings of the meeting made by staff members and shared with NBC News.

Someone in the meeting asked if taxpayers would get a say in these changes, and Witt said that they already did — when they elected the school board.

Over the past two years, school districts nationwide have become the center of culture war battles over race and LGBTQ rights. Conservative groups have made a concerted effort to fill school boards with ideologically aligned members and notched dozens of wins last fall.

In Colorado, conservatives started making gains earlier because school board elections are held in off years. Woodland Park offers a preview of how quickly a new majority can move to reshape a district — and how those battles can ripple outward into the community. Some longtime residents say that the situation has grown so tense, they now look over their shoulder when discussing the school board in public to avoid confrontation or professional consequences.

David Rusterholtz, the board’s president, believes that chasm predates his election in November 2021.

“This division is much more than political — this is a clash of worldviews,” Rusterholtz said at a board meeting in January. He concluded his remarks with a prayer for the district: “May the Lord bless us and keep us, may His face shine upon us and be gracious to us…”

When asked to respond to criticism from school personnel and parents, Illingworth, the board’s vice president, replied in an email: “I wasn’t elected to please the teacher’s union and their psycho agenda against academic rigor, family values, and even capitalism itself. I was elected to bring a parent’s voice and a little common sense to the school district, and voters in Woodland Park can see I’ve kept my promises.”

As the school year winds down, many of the Woodland Park School District’s employees are heading for the exit, despite recently receiving an 8% raise. At least four of the district’s top administrators have quit because of the board’s policy changes, according to interviews and emails obtained through records requests. Nearly 40% of the high school’s professional staff have said they will not return next school year, according to an administrator in the district.

The board’s critics have pinned their hopes on the next election in November — when three of the five school board members are up for a vote — to claw back control of the community’s schools.

“This is an active case study on what will happen if we allow extremist policies to start to take over our public education system,” said David Graf, an English teacher who recently resigned after 17 years in the district. “And the scariest part about it, they knew that this community would bite on it.”

The new board approved the district’s first charter school without any public notice. The approval of Merit Academy was listed on the board agenda as “board housekeeping.”

The district’s teachers union complained in an email to middle school staff that the board’s action was “underhanded, and at worst illegal.” A parent sued, aiming to force the board to follow open meetings law. A trial court judge did not rule on the legality of the board’s actions but ordered the board to list agenda items “clearly, honestly and forthrightly.”

In response to the teachers’ complaints, Illingworth accused the union of attempting to organize a “coup,” and instructed then-Superintendent Mathew Neal to make “a list of positions in which a change in personnel would be beneficial to our kids” and “help the union see the wisdom in cooperation rather than conflict.”

Illingworth’s emails spread after parents obtained them through open records requests. Subsequent board meetings attracted boisterous crowds, as teachers accused board members of creating a hostile environment, while other community members spoke in favor of the board for supporting “school choice” and quoted Scripture. A handful of parents, including some lifelong Republicans, tried to organize a recall, but failed to get enough signatures to force a vote.

The district’s superintendent resigned and was replaced by Ken Witt, who had been active in conservative politics in Jefferson County, CO., schools.

A week before Witt was hired, on Dec. 13, students in a class called Sources of Strength, which is part of a national suicide prevention program, asked their teacher what should they know about him as the sole finalist for the superintendent job.

Sara Lee, a longtime teacher at Woodland Park High School, responded, “You should Google him.”

The students did, and they didn’t like what they learned.

They discovered that Witt, as president of the school board in neighboring Jefferson County, supported a plan in 2014 to ensure the district’s curricula would promote patriotism and not encourage “social strife.” Witt said students who protested the board policies at the time were “pawns” of the teachers union. After he and two other conservative members of the board were recalled, Witt became executive director of an organization that oversees charter, online and other schools and helped launch Merit Academy.

The teacher, Sara Lee, had taught high school for 25 years, 18 of them in the district. The board reassigned her to an elementary school to punish her for sharing information about Witt. She resigned and was promptly hired by another district.

Please open the link and keep reading. The story gets worse. Parents and teachers tried to persuade Witt to reapply for mental health funds to support counselors and social workers. He refused, insisting that such problems should be handled by parents, not schools. The district’s mental health supervisor, unable to persuade him to ask for the funds, submitted her resignation.

Categories Censorship, Charter Schools, Colorado, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Ignorance, Teachers, Trump

Philadelphia: Charter-Loving Billionaire Jeff Yass Funds Attack Ads Against Helen Gym in Mayoral Race

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2023 //
22

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that billionaire Jeff Yass is behind a new super-PAC that is attacking progressive candidate Helen Gym in the closing days of the mayoral campaign.

ProPublica wrote about Jeff Yass and so did I.

Jeff Yass is a major funder of charter schools. Although he attended New York City public schools, he hates public schools and supports privatization. He is a MAGA Republican. He opposes abortion. He is a major funder for MAGA Republicans and grievances. The anti-public school lobby called the Center for Education Reform administers the annual Yass Award to charter schools (public schools need not apply).

I hope the Democrats who vote in Philly know who is behind the anti-Gym ads.

Vote for Helen Gym for Mayor of Philadelphia!

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Education Industry, Elections, Philadelphia, Privatization, Trump

Why Trump Is Unlikely to Run a Third-Party Campaign

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2023 //
59

I dare to dream that Donald Trump will lose the 2024 Republican nomination to someone even worse than him, like DeSatan, and then mount a third-party campaign, claiming that the primary election was rigged/stolen/whatever.

Such an event would split the Republican Party and give it four years to find its soul, heart, and brain, unless they are irretrievably lost. Even better, it would give the Democrats four more years in which to repair the damage done by Trump to the courts, every federal agency and democratic institutions.

But recently I have read several articles explaining why this is unlikely to happen.

I was not aware that many states have “sore loser laws,” which do not allow the loser of a primary campaign to run again in the general election.

These laws make it mathematically impossible for a “sore loser” to mount a winning campaign.

Google the term and you will see the implications for 2024.

Meanwhile, though I loathe Trump, he is the likely candidate in 2024. Unlike DeSantis, he has a fanatical national base. DeSantis has yet to face a withering barrage of insults by Trump, and we have seen that Little Ron has a fragile ego. That’s why he practices censorship. He can’t tolerate dissent or detractors.

With Trump as their candidate, the GOP will be saddled with a man who is likely to be under indictment in more than one state. Of course, his base loves him even more when he plays victim, so they won’t be deterred.

The next 19 months will be interesting.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, DeSantis, Elections, Lies, Republicans, Trump
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