Trump’s Speech at Davos

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2026 //
5

Steel yourself. Here is Trump’s full speech at the annual World Economic Forum at Davos. This is the one where he confused Greenland with Iceland–not once, but four times.

World leaders convene in late January every year to meet and greet and confer about the future of the global economy.

Trump’s speech received muted applause. Some attendees opened their cell phones or walked out.

Richard Haas, former executive director of the Council of Foreign Relations, said this about Trump’s speech:

Making it all worse was Trump’s long, rambling, and indulgent speech delivered to the global good and great. It was filled with exaggerations and falsehoods, insults and threats, and more than a few strange detours and digressions. He confused Iceland with Greenland multiple times. The speech disparaged European leaders and Europe’s sacrifices and contributions to the common defense. (“We’ve helped them for so many years, we’ve never gotten anything.”) There was no mention of NATO invoking Article 5 in the aftermath of 9/11, and no mention of the more than 700 European soldiers who died alongside Americans in Afghanistan.

Trump was not content to target foreigners. He repeatedly criticized his predecessor. He also went after the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, a man he appointed. He announced his intention to prosecute individuals for rigging the 2020 election even though there is no evidence it was rigged. What came to mind was the title of the 1958 novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, The Ugly American.

One last point. The speech was isolationist as well as unilateralist. “What does the United States get out of all of this work, all of this money – other than death, destruction, and massive amounts of cash going to people who don’t appreciate what we do? They don’t appreciate what we do. I’m talking about NATO, I’m talking about Europe. They have to work on Ukraine, we don’t. The United States is very far away. We have a big, beautiful ocean separating us. We have nothing to do with it.”

Such thinking ignores the lessons of history, from World War II and the Cold War to 9/11, Covid-19, and climate change. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans are decidedly not moats. Growing disorder in other regions can and will affect U.S. prosperity and security alike. The United States may choose not to engage the world but the world will find us all the same.

The Guardian said that Trump’s speech was “racism-drenched:”

Donald Trump turned up in Davos wielding an insult bazooka. He mocked Emmanuel Macron’s aviator sunglasses, chided Mark Carney (“Canada lives because of the United States”), asserted that the Swiss are “only good because of us” and had a dig at Denmark for losing Greenland “in six hours” during the second world war.

But beyond the fractious rhetoric, the US president brought a deeper message on Wednesday that sought to unify the west rather than divide it. It was his most dark, insidious and sinister project of all.

Trump surmised: Yes, we might have our internal squabbles, but I am bringing tough love because we are all in this together. We are the standard bearers of western civilisation. We must resist the barbarian hordes. We must save the white man.

The ageing president, who in 2024 complained, “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” told the World Economic Forum that he was “derived from Europe”, namely: “100% Scotland, my mother; 100% German, my father. And we believe deeply in the bonds we share with Europe as a civilisation.”

He lamented that “certain places in Europe are not even recognisable, frankly, any more”, blaming culprits that included “unchecked mass migration”. Trump said: “It’s horrible what they’re doing to themselves. They’re destroying themselves, these beautiful, beautiful places. We want strong allies, not seriously weakened ones.”

What came next was pure racism as Trump reflected on immigration to his own country, where he has made the Somali community a special target of his deportation rhetoric after recent government fraud cases in Minnesota in which a majority of defendants had Somali roots.

“We’re cracking down on more than $19bn in fraud that was stolen by Somalian bandits,” he said. “Can you believe that Somalia – they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought. I always say these are low-IQ people. How did they go into Minnesotaand steal all that money?”

Then he got to the heart of the matter: “The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the west cannot mass-import foreign cultures which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own. I mean, we’re taking people from Somalia, and Somalia is a failed – it’s not a nation. Got no government, got no police, got no nothing.” (Somalia does, in fact, have a government, though not democratically elected.)

He launched a bitter tirade at Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born Democratic congresswoman who is a US citizen. Then he insisted: “The explosion of prosperity and conclusion and progress that built the west did not come from our tax codes. It ultimately came from our very special culture.

“This is the precious inheritance that America and Europe have in common, and we share it. We share it but we have to keep it strong. We have to become stronger, more successful and more prosperous than ever. We have to defend that culture and rediscover the spirit that lifted the west from the depths of the dark ages to the pinnacle of human achievement.”

Trump’s speech had the fingerprints of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and architect of his draconian immigration policy, all over it. It chimed with an entire discourse of white identity politics festering on the US right.

It is there in the “great replacement” theory, a conspiratorial notion that demographic change is engineered to replace white majorities with non-white populations, undermining traditional culture. It is there in Trump’s decision to grant asylum to white South Africans because of a fictitious “white genocide” said to be taking place in their country. It is there in the rabid ideology underpinning Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) thuggish assault on immigrants in Minneapolis.

It is also there in Miller’s worldview, which has long promoted racist fears of demographic replacement of white people and civilisation decline. He has become the editor who turns Trump’s pub chatter into “Make America great again” scripture.

The Guardian said:

The message: I am still the great white hope.

Bear in mind that Davos draws leaders from around the world. Not only Europeans, but Africans, Asians, Hispanics, the Middle East, and everywhere else.

Categories Trump

Trump’s “Board of Peace” Hustle: Power-Grab and $$ Grab

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2026 //
4

https://open.substack.com/pub/coarsemannews/p/trumps-board-of-peace-the-billion?r=rls8&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Categories Hoax, Trump

Houston: Superintendent Mike Miles Helped Broker a $1 Million Deal with Charter Network

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2026 //
2

The Houston Chronicle exposed a scandal involving Houston’s state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles.

The Chronicle reported:

State-appointed Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles played a central role early in negotiations for a nearly $1 million contract between a Texas charter school network and a for-profit Colorado consulting firm, according to records obtained by the Houston Chronicle.

Miles used his private Gmail during those talks, emails show, sending a proposal with the consulting firm’s cost breakdowns; flagging a major price increase; and directing where contract documents should be sent.

The firm’s services — plus the free use of HISD’s curriculum and training by Miles himself — were intended to help the charter system replicate HISD’s controversial reforms and turn around several of its struggling campuses.

The mystery behind the scandal is why anyone would want to adopt Mike Miles’ top-down scripted curriculum. Its main effect is to drive away students and teachers. Test scores are up, to be sure. Miles’ greatest accomplishment seems to be raising a cohort of trained seals with higher scores who have never experienced love of learning.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Houston, Scandal, Texas

ICE Ignores Constitution

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2026 //
7

The Department of Homeland Security decided that ICE agents were exempt from the Fourth Amendment, which prevents police from entering homes without a warrant signed by a judge.

U.S. District Court judge Jeffrey Bryan ruled last Saturday in Minneapolis that ICE had to abide by the Fourth Amendment.

The Fourth Amendment says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This means that law officers can’t burst into your home without a judge’s warrant.

The Fourth Amendment underpins the phrase that “a man’s home is his castle.”

Recently, ICE decided that its agents did not need a judge’s warrant and that an “administrative warrant” would suffice. The administrative warrant would be signed by an ICE employee.

ICE decided that with an “administrative warrant,” it could batter down doors and enter homes to seize suspects.

Federal Judge Bryan said they could not.

Wired magazine summarized the situation:

A FEDERAL JUDGE in Minnesota ruled last Saturday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents violated the Fourth Amendment after they forcibly entered a Minnesota man’s home without a judicial warrant. The conduct of the agents closely mirrors a previously undisclosed ICE directive that claims agents are permitted to enter people’s homes using an administrative warrant, rather than a warrant signed by a judge.

The ruling, issued by US District Court judge Jeffrey Bryan in response to a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on January 17, did not assess the legality of ICE’s internal guidance itself. But it squarely holds that federal agents violated the United States Constitution when they entered a residence without consent and without a judge-signed warrant—the same conditions ICE leadership has privately told officers is sufficient for home arrests, according to a complaint filed by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group representing whistleblowers from the public and private sector.

In a sworn declaration, Garrison Gibson, a Liberian national who has lived in Minnesota for years under an ICE order of supervision, says agents arrived at his home in the early morning on January 11 while his family slept inside. He says he refused to open the door and repeatedly demanded to see a judicial warrant. According to the declaration, the agents initially left, then returned with a larger group, deployed pepper spray toward neighbors who had gathered outside, and used a battering ram to force the door open.

The declaration was filed as part of a January 12 Minnesota lawsuit against Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem challenging federal immigration enforcement operations in the Twin Cities, which state officials characterize as an unconstitutional “invasion” by ICE and other agents that has roiled Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

Federal officials did not contest Gibson’s habeas petition.

Gibson, who reportedly fled the Liberian civil war as a child, says agents entered his home without showing a warrant. His wife, who was filming at the time, warned that children were inside, he says, and that agents holding rifles stood in their doorway. “One agent repeatedly claimed ‘We’re getting the papers’ in response to her demand to see the warrant,” he says. “But without showing a warrant, and apparently without having one, five to six agents moved in as if they were entering a war zone.”

Only after he was handcuffed, Gibson says, did the agents show his wife an administrative warrant.

One day after the judge ordered Gibson’s immediate release, ICE agents took him back into custody when he appeared for a routine immigration check-in at a Minnesota immigration office, according to his attorney, Marc Prokosch, who said Gibson arrived believing the court order had resolved the matter.

“We were there for a check-in, and the original officer said, ‘This looks good, I’ll be right back,’” Prokosch told the Associated Press. “And then there was a lot of chaos, and about five officers came out and then they said, ‘We’re going to be taking him back into custody.’ I was like, ‘Really, you want to do this again?’”

The re-arrest did not reverse the court’s finding that ICE violated the Fourth Amendment during the warrantless home entry, but underscores how the agency retains civil detention authority even if a judge rules that a specific arrest was unconstitutional.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Minneapolis

Obamas Issue Statement About Murder of Alex Pretti

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2026 //
11

Former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama released a statement about the murder of Alex Pretti.

Will we hear from former President George W. Bush?

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Justice, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Obama

Bill Clinton Issues a Statement About the Present Crisis

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2026 //
8

Former President Bill Clinton released the following statement about what’s happening in Minneapolis and other places, as Trump unleashes the armed, masked ICE agents to arrest, harass, and murder our fellow citizens in pursuit of undocumented immigrants .

Well said. Where are other retired Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Senators?

Please speak up, Former Presidents Bush and Obama.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Guns, Trump, Tyranny

Stephen Dyer: The Shameful History of Ohio’s Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2026 //
2

Stephen Dyer, a former state legislator, has been watching the performance of charter schools in Ohio for many years. Ohio has one of the worst charter sectors of any state in the country. Not only do the charters do worse than public schools, but they have been embroiled in scandals, especially the online charters.

Why does the Ohio legislature keep funding poorly performing charters? The majority of legislators are Republicans who love school choice, regardless of results. Some take money from the charter sector. Some, like Andrew Brenner, chair of the House Education committee, hate public schools.

Dyer reviews here the sorry record of Ohio’s charter school sector.

He begins:

Nearly 1/2 of all failing Ohio Report Card grades handed out since 2005 have been given to Ohio Charter Schools, even though more than 3 times as many grades have been given to Ohio Public Schools

After about 30 years of looking at Ohio Charter Schools, I kind of use a shorthand when describing them — notoriously poor performing. And I assume everyone understands what that means. 

However, I have come to realize that perhaps a portion of my readers may not be familiar with the Ohio Charter School Wars waged between 1999 and 2017. Since 2017, Ohio’s school choice warriors have focused primarily on exploding the amount of state taxpayer money being used to unconstitutionally subsidize wealthy parents’ private school tuitions.

But Ohio’s Charter Schools have continued receiving huge taxpayer investments — $1.56 billion this year alone, which dwarfs even Ohio’s $1 billion unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy. We now give more state money to Ohio Charter Schools than we give to all 8 of Ohio’s major urban school districts.

Yet Ohio’s Charter Schools aren’t getting all that money because they’re killing it academically. In fact, the state’s current report card reveals pretty much what it always has revealed — Ohio’s Charter Schools perform far worse than Ohio’s public school districts. 

Charter advocates have always hated having their schools’ performance compared with Ohio Public School Districts. They have insisted that their schools’ performance should be compared solely with the performance of a handful of the most struggling public schools in Ohio’s urban core, despite the fact that Ohio Charter Schools take students from nearly every Ohio public school district — including Charter Schools in Ohio’s urban core. 

For example, Breakthrough Charter Schools in Cleveland (which at one time was the best-performing Charter School chain in the state) take about 75% of their kids from Cleveland Municipal School District. The rest come from surrounding suburban districts.

Charter schools don’t get to cherry pick their students, take funding from all Ohio public school students, be considered a “district” for federal funding purposes, then have their performance compared with a handful of the most struggling urban school buildings. 

Sorry. 

If you take $1.56 billion from every public school kid and 126,000 students from nearly every Ohio public school district, your performance will be compared with every Ohio public school district. 

You’re big boys now. Your students get more state funding than 97% of Ohio’s public school students. You’ve been around since 1998. You’re no longer the experiment; you’re the status quo. And, I’m sorry, but you guys are sucking something awful.

To read the abysmal facts about Ohio’s charter schools, open the link.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Ohio

Glenn Kessler: Lie After Lie After Lie

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2026 //
6

Glenn Kessler is a professional fact-checker. He served in that role for The Washington Post for many years. He left the Post and continues to do what he does best on his own Substack blog. In this post, he reviews the Trump administration’s flurry of lies about the murder of Alex Pretti.

He writes:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
—George Orwell (1984)


A contact who worked for Donald Trump in his first term once explained to me the White House dysfunction this way: “Everyone lies to each other. So no one can believe anything that they are told.” The standard was set by the president, whose constant lies are documented in the media, but few understood how pervasive lying was within the government, even among people who supposedly worked together.

The dynamic is even worse in the second term. Trump is surrounded by sycophants who provide no constraints and offer no contrary advice. And they understand that lying is not only expected but celebrated.

So, when Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, was shot in the back and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday — ten shots fired — the lie machine got to work. Department of Homeland Security officials had to lie to the president, who in turn would be happy to echo those lies. Within hours, a statement was issued:

At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here.

The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming.

Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene.

The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID—this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.

Almost every line in the statement was a lie, as subsequent video analysis and witness reports demonstrated — Pretti was holding a cell phone, not a gun; he was helping a woman who had been shoved to the ground by ICE agents; he was pepper-sprayed by the agents; he did not resist but was pummeled by agents; he was licensed to carry a gun under Minnesota law; an ICE agent removed the gun before he was shot; he was on his knees when he was shot; ICE kept shooting even after he fell to the ground; a doctor reported that ICE initially thwarted his efforts to provide medical aid.

Note what is missing in the statement — any sense of regret or concern about the loss of life. Nor is there any pledge to fully investigate the incident, which used to be the standard in any law-enforcement use of deadly force. (Radley Balko wrote in the New York Times recently about how different ICE statements are from typical police statements — what he called a “projection of power.”)

Instead, the lie was set in motion.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem then attacked Pretti as a domestic terrorist and sought to pin the blame on Democratic politicians in the state.

“When you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of domestic terrorism,” she said at a news conference. “This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism,” Noem added. “That’s the facts.”

These were faux “facts” — designed to serve the lie.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller went even further and called Pretti a “would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal law enforcement,” adding that he is a “domestic terrorist.”

President Trump posted a photo of Pretti’s gun — calling him a “gunman” — and also sought to blame local authorities.

“This is the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go –- What is that all about? Where are the local Police? Why weren’t they allowed to protect ICE Officers? The Mayor and the Governor called them off? It is stated that many of these Police were not allowed to do their job, that ICE had to protect themselves — Not an easy thing to do!”

The lie began to unravel almost immediately, as videos and sworn witness statements emerged that contradicted the government’s account. But the lie had already taken root, echoed by the administration’s supporters, which is why the administration works hard to get a misleading version of the story out first.

They used the same tactics with the killing of Renee Good, asserting she tried to run over an ICE officer who shot her in self-defense. Witness videos established that was a lie, but the administration controlled the narrative for 24 hours before it all fell apart. (This is why ICE agents harass and intimidate people filing videos. They want to minimize potential evidence.)

The lie about Pretti was debunked within hours. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune produced an excellent fact check. The New York Times visual forensics team quickly assembled the footage. Witness statements emerged.

Here’s what a witness to the shooting — who filmed the encounter — filed in a sworn statement: “The agents pulled the man on the ground. I didn’t see him touch any of them—he wasn’t even turned toward them. It didn’t look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help the woman up. I didn’t see him with a gun. They threw him to the ground. Four or five agents had him on the ground and they just started shooting him. They shot him so many times.”

The witness added: “I have read the statement from DHS about what happened and it is wrong. The man did not approach the agents with a gun. He approached them with a camera. He was just trying to help a woman get up and they took him to the ground.”

Of course, this new evidence didn’t alter the administration’s lie.

Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol official appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” this morning to claim that the agents were the real victims. He blamed Pretti — “The suspect put himself in that situation” — and asserted that he aimed to “perpetrate violence, obstruct, delay or obfuscate border patrol in the performance of their duties in an active crime scene.”

A man was shot and killed by federal agents. No remorse. No regret. Remember: They lie to each other and then they lie to the American people. The truth is too dangerous to their plans.

Categories Education Reform

Alex Pretti: ICU Nurse and Patriot

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2026 //
0

Simon Rosenberg posted this video of Alex Pretti saluting a veteran who died at the Veterand Administration hospital in Minneapolis as an ICU Nurse. For those of you who haver been in an intensive Care Unit, it is a super-emergency room where parents are sent when they are in life-threatening situations. Some make it, some don’t. That’s where Alex Pretti worked.

Please watch the video of Alex thanking a veteran for his valor.

Categories Ethics, Evil, Goodness

Paul Krugman: Monsters

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2026 //
2

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, posted this message on his Substack blog. Having watched Trump apologists on TV today, explaining why it was just to kill Alex Pretti, it was refreshing to encounter simple truths: the murderers running our government, especially the Department of Himeland Security, have no souls.

Their first instinct is to lie.

Anyone who watched the videos saw that Alex had a cellphone in one hand and the other hand was empty. Everyone knows by now that Alex had a registered gun that he never drew, and that was removed by an Ice agent before he was slaughtered. Everyone could see that he advanced to help a woman throw to the ground by ICE and that he never posed a threat to ICE agents.

Krugman wrote:

I was working on another wonkish post about China’s trade surplus when the news about Alex Pretti’s murder broke. I’ll put that post up at some point, but not today.

It has been clear for a long time, to anyone willing to see, that the people running the federal government — Trump, Miller, Noem, Bovino and more — are monsters. It has been equally obvious that ICE and the Border Patrol are now filled with sadistic thugs. Yet many people — almost the entire GOP, everyone serving in the Trump administration, some Democrats, a significant part of the media — were too cowardly to admit the obvious.

At this point, however, there are no more excuses. In a way the cowards and opportunists enabling Trump are more to blame for where we are than Trump and company themselves: monsters are monsters and can’t help themselves, but the enablers have a choice. And they have chosen, again and again, to accommodate and facilitate evil.

I wish I could believe that the last few weeks will be the last straw, but I don’t. To be honest, I wish I believed in Hell, because if it did exist, the enablers would be going there along with the monsters.

What I do believe in is the courage and decency of millions of ordinary Americans, which have been so dramatically on display in Minneapolis. We can only hope that this courage and decency get us through this nightmare — and we must do all we can to make it happen.

Categories Education Reform
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