Hopium: Get Ready to Resist Trump’s Efforts to Destroy Our Government

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2024 //
6

One of the best blogs is written by Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic political strategist. He has a determined sense of optimism and calls his blog “The Hopium Chronicles.” Even his free columns are chock full of information. He identifies and fund raises for significant candidates. His is the voice we need to see us through the midterm elections, when we can take back the House or the Senate or both.

Here is his latest, which was free. I finally gave in and subscribed after I finished reading it. I won’t copy in full so please open and read the rest.

It begins:

Good morning all. We start today with some very good news – Derek Tran declared victory in CA-45 last night. I know folks here have worked very hard on that race, and while it hasn’t been officially called yet we should be optimistic about where it’s headed. If you want to keep working to cure ballots in CA-45 and CA-13 (Adam Gray) sign up with our friends at Grassroots Democrats HQ. Here’s the current count in both races:

If we win both these races the House will be 220R-215D, and we will have picked up two seats net from the last Congress. With three vacancies due to House members leaving to join (or attempting to join – Gaetz) the Trump cabinet, House Rs will begin Congress next year at 217-215, a one vote majority in what has been a very factious and fragile Republican “Majority.” 

Here’s where our 15 endorsed House candidates stand today:

  • Flips (4) – Whitesides (CA-27), Gillen NY-4, Riley NY-19, Bynum OR-5
  • Too Close To Call/Still Counting (2) – Gray CA-13, Tran CA-45 (optimistic!)
  • Losses (9) – Shah AZ-01, Engel AZ-06, Salas CA-22, Rollins CA-41, Bohannan IA-1, Vargas NE-02, Jones NY-17, Altman NJ-07, Stelson PA-10

I remain very proud of the good we’ve done this past cycle. We made deeply strategic investments and got important wins in a tough year in AZ, NC, NE, WI and in these critical House seats. Of the 6 House seats Dems flipped this cycle, our community aggressively backed 5 of them – George Whitesides CA-27, Tom Suozzi NY-3, Laura Gillen NY-4, Josh Riley NY-19 and Janelle Bynum OR-5. 

If both Gray and Tran do win, the Hopium community will have played meaningful roles in electing 7 of the 8 House candidate who turned red seats blue this year. Great work everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

While We Are Tired, And Down, We Have To Fight – I’ve thought a lot about how this place is going to work in this second Trump era. As we’ve discussed it is going to be hard. Bad things are going to happen. And we are going to have to keep fighting through it all, not disengage or get too down, and forge ourselves into a ferocious and effective opposition. Some are going to need to take time off to rest, recover, regroup. That’s fine. Do what you need to do. But friends, if we’ve learned anything in the past few days, we are going to have to fight, and we are going to need everyone on board when they are rested up and ready to go. 

While I’ve maintained a very upbeat and optimistic outlook here at Hopium since we launched in March of 2023 I also have been very clear-eyed about who Trump was, and the threat he represented. Rapist, fraudster, traitor, 34 times felon. Or this passage, which I shared again and again: 

They want Putin to win, the West to lose. The border to be in chaos, and migrants to keep flowing into the country. Americans to lose even more rights and freedoms. The planet to warm faster. 10 year olds to carry their rapist’s baby to term, and for more women to die on operating room tables. Tens of millions to lose their health insurance. More dead kids in schools. Verified rapists in positions of authority. A restoration of pre-Civil Rights era white supremacy. Huge new tariffs which will raise prices on everything and wreck the global economy which has made us prosperous. Big new tax cuts for their wealthiest donors and tax increases for every day people. Books banned across the US. Seniors to pay more for insulin and prescription drugs. Foreign governments free to pollute our daily discourse and harass our citizens. Teenagers to work night shifts in meat packing plants and not go to school. The minimum wage to stay at $7.25. Mass arrests and mass deportations of immigrants long settled in the US. Insurrectionists to be pardoned. To end American democracy for all time. 

Or this one that I also repeated again and again: 

Trump is a Russian-backed wrecking ball who wants to end the American-led global economic system that has made us prosperous, end the Western alliance that has made us safe, and end American democracy that has made us free. 

A central cause of my optimism that we would win this year came from my belief that our campaigns would have more to work with to disqualify and degrade Trump than any campaigns have ever had, as Trump/MAGA 2024 was far more dangerous, criminal, extreme than any previous iteration of Trump/MAGA. We had beaten the extremists in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023; the fascists had underperformed and been beaten in Europe and France this past summer; and I felt the conditions were such that we could once again prevail against this dangerous politics in the November election. 

We know what happened next. Despite his historic ugliness and threat to the country, we didn’t win. And it is clear now, within just a few weeks of Trump’s election, that he is not going to be just one of the guys, a country club Republican CEO, that nutty dude with a red hat doing bro-pods; and that he wasn’t just engaging in “locker room talk” about all those crazy things he rambled on about. Voters were fooled into believing Trump was just a wacky but successful business guy – again. What they – and we – got instead was a Russian backed monster seemingly intent on destroying the American economy and the country from his very first day in office. 

Consider the news from the past few days: 

  • “Trump plans tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China that could cripple trade” (NYT)
  • “Walmart says Trump tariffs could raise prices” (CNBC)
  • “Trump’s deportation vow alarms Texas construction industry” (NPR)
  • “US farm groups want Trump to spare their workers from deportation” (Reuters)
  • “Trump officials to receive immediate clearances and easier FBI vetting: president-elect’s team planning for background checks to occur only after administration takes over bureau” – The Guardian
  • “Kennedy’s antivax views and friends can cause real damage” (NYT)
  • “Trump Pentagon pick (Hegseth) had been flagged by fellow service member as ‘Insider Threat’” (AP)
  • “Tulsi Gabbard’s sympathetic views towards Russia cause alarm as Trump’s pick to lead intelligence services” (AP)
  • “Sexual misconduct allegations sank one Trump nominee and loom over Kennedy” (WSJ)
  • “Gaetz exit puts spotlight on other Trump nominees accused of sexual misconduct” (Reuters)

Here’s the Washington Post this morning on Trump’s new tariff announcement: 

President-elect Donald Trump said Monday he will issue executive orders imposing new tariffs on all imported goods from China, Mexico and Canada, the nation’s three largest trading partners, as one of his first acts upon reentering the White House. He said 25 percent tariffs would be imposed on Mexican and Canadian merchandise and 10 percent on Chinese goods as part of a plan aimed at stopping an “invasion” of drugs and migrants into the country. Economists have warned that American consumers would face higher prices on goods because of the proposed tariffs.

As we’ve been discussing here, we are not going to win every battle, and we have to be really smart about where we engage. But fight we must. Here are two things you can do right now, before Thanksgiving: 

  • Call your Senators and Representative to let them know your dissatisfaction with the rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert Kennedy; and to inform them of your expectation that they will leave it all out there on the playing field to block these profoundly dangerous nominations whether they have a vote on them or not.
  • Contact the White House and ask President Biden to order the FBI to begin background checks into Trump’s nominees immediately. 

Trump could have let us have a quiet Thanksgiving holiday. Instead, because he is mad, impulsive and a serial betrayer of the country, we get these wild threats of crippling, autocratic tariffs. Here is Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell on CNN last night talking about how these tariffs are going to drive up costs of so many of our every day goods: 

Rest up this long weekend my friends. Enjoy your time with family. Take long walks. Binge watch your favorite show. Read that book that has been sitting by your bedside table for months. Cure a few more ballots for Gray and Tran. Rest up, recharge and for those of you ready to jump back in next week get ready. We have a lot of work to do. 

Remember, Hopium is hope with a plan. We just don’t hope that things will turn out as we want. We do the work to make it so. And man do we have a lot of work ahead of us.

Please open the link and finish reading.

Categories Elections, Hope, Resistance, Shame, Trump

“Democracy”: Pam Bondi Will Weaponize the Justice Department Against Trump’s Enemies

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2024 //
13

Our reader “Democracy” always posts wise, deeply researched comments. In this comment, Democracy makes us wonder whether Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz was a deep fake that would make anyone else look better. Such as Pam Bondi.

Pam Bondi will be loyal to Trump. Loyalty is the trait that matters more to Trump than competence or experience.

The Washington Post wrote about Bondi:

“Bondi said the Justice Department’s special counsel investigation into whether Trump associates coordinated with Russian interference in the 2016 election needed to be dissolved. She declared that the 45th president’s first impeachment in 2019 was a “sham.” And when Trump was indicted four times after leaving office, Bondi was blunt about who deserved legal scrutiny — and it wasn’t the former president.

“The prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Bondi declared on Fox News in 2023, soon after Trump’s fourth set of criminal charges. “The investigators will be investigated.”

Democracy writes:

Pam Bondi as Attorney General.

What could go wrong? Let’s see.

Bondi was never a supporter of the Affordable Care Act and tried to extinguish it. As of February of this year, Florida had more than 4 million people receiving health care through the Affordable Care Act, the highest ACA enrollment in the country.

Bondi has been a long-time opponent of LGBTQ rights and same-ex marriage. After the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, Bondi said she had OPPOSED same-sex marriage NOT for any personal beliefs or political partisanship but because of “the rule of law.”

Bondi took that $25,000 political donation from a Trump CHARITY and then dropped any participation by Florida in a lawsuit against the Trump University flim-flam scheme. She denied that she did anything wrong or that there was any connection between the moola and her decision not to participate in the suit against Trump’s crooked tactics. Indeed, as one Trump University official said in court testimony, enrollees in the courses were directed to

“call their credit card companies and raise their credit limits two, three, or four times so that they would be able to invest in real estate,” to “charge the course to multiple credit cards” or “to open up as many credit cards as they could.” 

Bondi is a 2020 election denier, parroting Trump’s false claims that the election was “stolen” by “fake ballots” — she could never provide any evidence of this — and that any investigation into Trump’s incitement of the violent January 6 insurrection was a weaponization of the Justice Department for political purposes. Just last year she said on Fox ‘news” that,

“When Republicans take back the White House, you know what’s going to happen? The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones — the investigators will be investigated.”

Kinda sounds like “weaponization” doesn’t it?

The mission of the Department of Justice is “to uphold the rule of law, to keep our country safe, and to protect civil rights.” According to its website, DOJ core values are

• Independence and Impartiality.

• Honesty and Integrity. 

• Respect.

• Excellence.

Obviously, the nomination of Matt Gaetz was laughably terrible. Pam Bondi may be a bit more palatable, but not by much. She is a liar, and a bigot, and a right-wing hack, and a seditious traitor…but with a “pretty” face. She’s the lipstick on the pig.

So what could go wrong? A whole lot.

Categories Accountability, Character, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Gender, Justice, Trump

Timothy Snyder: Trump’s Plan to Destroy Our Government

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2024 //
14

Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, is the author of On Tyranny. He writes and speaks frequently on television about the importance of defending our institutions against authoritarianism and resisting Putin’s quest to reclaim the Soviet Union.

He posted:

Each of Trump’s proposed appointments is a surprise.  It is comforting to think that he is simply a vengeful old man, lashing out this way and that.  This is unlikely.  He and Musk and Putin have been talking for years. And the whole idea of his campaign was that this time he had a plan.

We should be wary of shock, which excuses inaction.  Who could have known?  What could I have done?  If there is a plan, shock is part of the plan.  We have to get through the surprise and the shock to see the design and the risk.  We don’t have much time. Nor is outrage the point. Of course we are outraged. But our own reactions can distract is from the larger pattern.

The newspapers address the surprise and the shock by investigating each proposed appointment individually.  And we need this.  With detail comes leverage and power.  But clarity must also come, and quickly.  Each appointment is part of a larger picture.  Taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.  

In historical context we can see this.  There is a history of the modern democratic state.  There is also a history of engineered regime change and deliberate state destruction.  In both histories, five key zones are health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.  These people, with power over these areas of life, can make America impossible to sustain.

The foundation of modern democratic state is a healthy, long-lived population.  We lived longer in the twentieth century because of hygiene and vaccinations, pioneered by scientists and physicians and then institutionalized by governments.  We treat one another better when we know we have longer lives to lose.  Health is not only the central human good; it enables the peaceful interactions we associate with the rule of law and democracy.  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the proposed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, would undo all of this.  On his watch, were his ideas implemented, millions of us would die.  Knowing that our lives will be shorter, we become nasty and brutish.

A modern democratic state depends upon the rule of law.  Before anything else is possible, we have to endorse the principle that we are all governed by law, and that our institutions are grounded in law.  This enables a functional government of a specific sort, in which leaders can be regularly replaced by elections.  It allows us to live as free individuals, within a set of rules that we can alter together.  The rule of law depends on people who believe in the spirit of law.  Matt Gaetz, the proposed attorney general, is the opposite of such a person.  It is not just that he flouts law himself, spectacularly and disgustingly.  It is that he embodies lawlessness, and can be counted upon to abuse law to pursue Trump’s political opponents.  The end of the rule of law is an essential component of a regime change.

The United States of America exists not only because laws are passed, but because we can expect that these laws will be implemented by civil servants.  We might find bureaucracy annoying; its absence, though, is deadly.  We cannot take the pollution out of the air ourselves, or build the highways ourselves, our write our Social Security checks ourselves.  Without a civil service, the law becomes mere paper, and all that works is the personal connection to the government, which the oligarchs will have, and which the rest of us will not.  This is the engineered helplessness promised by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are to head a black hole named after a cryptocurrency.  There are already oversight instruments in government.  DOGE is something entirely different: an agency of destruction, run by people who believe that government should exist for the wealthy or not at all.

In a modern democratic state, the armed forces are meant to preserve a healthy, long-lived people from external threats.  This principal has been much abused in American practice.  But never before Donald Trump have we had a president who has presented the purpose of the armed forces as the oppression of Americans.  Trump says that Russia and China are less of a threat than “internal enemies.”  In American tradition, members of the armed forces swear an oath to the Constitution.  Trump has indicated that we would prefer “Hitler’s generals,” which means a personal oath to himself.  Pete Hegseth, Trump’s proposed secretary of defense, defends war criminals and displays tattoos associated with white nationalism and Christian nationalism.  He is a fundraiser and television personality, with a complicated sexual past and zero experience running an organization.  

In a world of hostile powers, an intelligence service is indispensable.  Intelligence can be abused, and certainly has been abused.  Yet it is necessary to consider military threats: consider the Biden administration’s correct call the Russia was about to invade Ukraine.  It is also necessary to counter the attempts by foreign intelligence agencies, which are constant, to harm American society.  This often involves disinformation.  Tulsi Gabbard, insofar as she is known at all, is known as a spreader of Syrian and Russian disinformation.  She has no relevant experience.  Were she to become director of national intelligence, as Trump proposes, we would lose the trust of our allies, and lose contact with much of what is happening in the world — just for starters.  We would be vulnerable to all of those who wish to cause us harm.

Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States.  How could you do so?  The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.  From this perspective, Trump’s proposed appointments — Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard — are perfect instruments.  They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done.  These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.

I do not defend the status quo. I have no doubt whatsoever that the Department of Defense and the Food and Drug Administration require reform.  But such a reform, of these or other agencies, would have to be guided by people with knowledge and experience, who cared about their country, and who had a vision of improvement.  That is simply not what is happening here.  We are confronted instead with a group of people who, were they to hold the positions they have been assigned, could bring an end to the United States of America.  

It is a mistake to think of these people as flawed.  It is not they will do a bad job in their assigned posts.  It is that they will do a good job using those assigned posts to destroy our country.

However and by whomever this was organized, the intention of these appointments is clear: to create American horror.  Elected officials should see this for what it is.  Senators, regardless of party, should understand that the United States Senate will not outlast the United States, insist on voting, and vote accordingly.  The Supreme Court of the United States will likely be called upon.  Although it is a faint hope, one must venture it anyway: that its justices will understand that the Constitution was not in fact written as the cover story for state destruction.  The Supreme Court will also not outlast the United States.

And citizens, regardless of how they voted, need now to check their attitudes.  This is no longer a post-electoral moment.  It is a pre-catastrophic moment.  Trump voters are caught in the notion that Trump must be doing the right thing if Harris voters are upset.  But Harris voters are upset now because they love their country.  And Harris voters will have to get past the idea that Trump voters should reap what they have sown.  Yes, some of them did vote to burn it all down.  But if it all burns down, we burn too.  It is not easy to speak right now; but if some Republicans wish to, please listen.

Both inside and outside Congress, there will have to be simple defiance, joined with a rhetoric of a better America.  And, at moments at least, there will also have to be alliances among Americans who, though they differ on other matters, would like to see their country endure.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Health, Insane, Justice, Republicans, Trump

Mississippi: Segregation Academies Enjoying New Voucher $$$

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2024 //
12

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

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

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

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

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

The latest ProPublica report begins:

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

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

It was 1964.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Segregation returns, funded by the taxpayers.

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

Was Today the Worst Day in American History?

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2024 //
40

The blog known as “That’s Another Fine Mess” declared November 25 , 2024, the worst day in our history. Read on to know why.

Do you agree?

Donald Trump’s real reason for running for re-election in 2024 was to stay out of prison. He knew that only a return to the White House would prevent him standing trial for initiating the January 6 insurrection, and standing trial for the theft of top secret documents. Conviction in either case would mean he would end his days as a convicted felon, quite possibly dying in prison.


Mission accomplished.


November 25, 2024, will be remembered in American history as the day the constitutional rule that no individual is above the law was ended.


Whether this leads to the end of the democratic constitutional republic – that has existed because of that rule – being overthrown by Donald J. Trump is unknown at this point, but it is at a minimum a severe blow to the foundation of that republic that will be difficult if not impossible to repair.


This morning, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to drop both cases. This afternoon, that motion was granted in the case of the Seditious Insurrection by Juge Tanya Chutkan. The action was taken “without prejudice,” meaning that the charges could be brought again at some time in the future. Does anyone think that one of the first acts of Attorney General Pam Bondi will not be to drop the cases in such a way that they can never be reinstituted?


This is the worst defeat of the forces of democracy in the history of this country.


Two men are solely responsible for this outcome: President Joseph R. Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland.


As productive as his presidency has been, Joe Biden suffered from the fatal flaw of being unable to see that his bedrock belief in “go along to get along” congressional bipartisanship had been decisively overthrown over the 20 years before he took office as president – something he hold have learned from his botched handling of the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991 – and was no longer an operating philosophy that could be successful. His Irish stubbornness led to his inability to see modern Republicans as the deadly enemy of everything he believed in that they were – which he only began to clearly see in the final two years of his presidency, when it was too late – was directly responsible for this defeat. His inability to take the kind of decisive action against that enemy – commencing the investigation and prosecution of the criminal Trump and his fellow conspirators on Day One of his term of office – meant that the enemy would be able to use the rights and privileges of a defendant when the investigation and prosecution was finally authorized too late, and defeat the system by retaking power, using the rules of the system to defeat it.

Biden’s inability to understand the true nature of the threat he faced was compounded by his decision to nominate the exact wrong candidate to be his Attorney General. Merrick Garland did not and does not have the heart of a fighter, which is the quality that was most needed in whoever took that office at that time. His judiciousness would have been excellent had he been able to become the Supreme Court Associate Justice President Obama nominated him to be. It is tragic that neither Garland – the victim of the “conservative movement” that had consumed the GOP – nor then-Vice President Biden who took part in making the nomination and was an eyewitness to the treason of Mitch McConnell as President of the Senate – took the proper understanding from what they had been part of. 

Both men desperately held on to obsolete beliefs with the tenacity of French Generals who stared uncomprehendingly at the German panzers that thoroughly defeated them in 1940. They clung to the idea that they could “look forward” and ignore the Great Crime that had been committed, but this time papering over the recent past only made the defeat inevitable. How thorough this defeat will loom in the history of the United States cannot be known at this time, but it cannot be seen as anything other than the Major Defeat that it is. There is no argument to be made that it is anything other than a disaster.

Those who fail to understand when the knowledge on which they have based their lives becomes obsolete cannot end other than how Joe Biden and Merrick Garland have arrived at the end their careers. This failure will outweigh all their other successes, viewed with the 20-20 hindsight of history.

Joe Biden should have listened to the counsel of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who said: “Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Injustice, Lies, Trump

Please Sign the NPE Petition Opposing Trump’s Appointment of Linda McMahon

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2024 //
12

The Network for Public Education urges you to sign a petition opposing the appointment of Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education. McMahon is committed to privatization of our neighborhood schools. Her background in the wrestling industry does not qualify her to lead the federal role in education.

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-your-senators-to-vote-no-for-linda-mcmahon-for-secretary-of-education/

Open the link. It will send your petition to your Senators on your behalf.

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

House Passes Legislation that Allows Trump to Shut Down Nonprofits on Flimsy Charges

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2024 //
16

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a dangerous bill–HR 9495– that would allow the Treasury Department to shut down nonprofit organizations that it believes are funding terrorism. Initially, it had strong bipartisan support, but after Trump won the election, most Democrats turned against the bill, realizing that Trump could use it to silence his critics. In a recent vote, 15 Democrats voted for it.

Trump could use this authority to shut down the ACLU or any other organization that criticizes him.

Please contact your Senators and urge them to oppose this horrible bill!

The Intercept wrote about it:

A BILL THAT would give President-elect Donald Trump broad powers to target his political foes has passed a major hurdle toward becoming law.

The House of Representatives on Thursday passed the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act in a 219-184 vote largely along party lines, with 15 Democrats joining the Republican majority.

The bill, also known as H.R. 9495, would empower the Treasury secretary to unilaterally designate any nonprofit as a “terrorist supporting organization” and revoke its tax-exempt status, effectively killing the group. Critics say the proposal would give presidential administrations a tool to crack down on organizations for political ends. 

The provision previously enjoyed bipartisan backing but steadily lost Democratic support in the aftermath of Trump’s election earlier this month. On Thursday, a stream of Democrats stood up to argue against the bill in a heated debate with its Republican supporters.

“Authoritarianism is not born overnight — it creeps in,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said Thursday on the House floor. “A tyrant tightens his grip not just by seizing power, but when he demands new powers and when those who can stop him willingly cede and bend to his will….”

A previous bill with the provision was initially introduced in November 2023, in the early days of Israel’s U.S.-funded devastation of Gaza, with the ostensible goal of blocking U.S.-based nonprofits from supporting terrorist groups like Hamas. Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., and other supporters of the bill touted it as a tool to crack down on pro-Palestine groups they claim exploit tax laws to bolster Hamas and fuel antisemitism…

It is already illegal for nonprofits or anyone else in the U.S. to provide material support to terrorist groups, and the federal government has means to enforce it, including prosecution and sanctions. Tenney’s bill, however, would sidestep due process. 

The bill includes some guardrails to ensure due process, but much of the language is vague on specifics, and critics fear that even if a group were to successfully appeal their designation, few nonprofit organizations would survive the legal costs and the black mark on their reputation.

Democratic Flips

While a previous version of the bill enjoyed broad bipartisan support and passed 382-11 in a House vote in April, many Democrats have withdrawn their support, citing a fear that the incoming Trump administration could weaponize the bill.

“The road to fascism is paved with a million little votes that slowly erode our democracy and make it easier to go after anyone who disagrees with the government,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., on the House floor Tuesday. “Donald Trump says you’re a terrorist, so you’re a terrorist. My friends on the other side of the aisle know it’s nuts, even if they don’t want to admit it.”

The GOP majority in the House made an initial attempt to pass the bill last week under a suspension of the rules, a parliamentary procedure that requires a two-thirds supermajority to pass. That effort foundered on November 12, when 144 Democrats and one Republican came out against the bill, just barely meeting the threshold to block it…

Despite a majority of Democrats coming out against it in last week’s vote, the bill still received the support of 52 Democrats on November 12. On Thursday, that number dwindled to 15, as Democrats flipped in opposition, including Reps. Angie Craig, D-Minn., and Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., both of whom cited Trump’s increasingly unhinged cabinet selections in their statements prior to the vote.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Funding, Trump

People Are Fleeing Twitter, Choosing BlueSky. I Am Too!

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2024 //
27

The day after the election, I opened an account at social media site BlueSky. I intend to abandon my Twitter account in a few weeks. I had over 140,000 followers on Twitter, but I don’t know how many are bots. On BlueSky, I have picked up 2,000 followers and expect to see the number rise. I know that every one of them is a real person.

I’m not the only one. According to the New York Times, one million people joined BlueSky since the election. Twitter claims 50 million in the U.S., over 500 million worldwide. BlueSky, founded by Jack Dorsey, the Twitter pioneer, has 14.7 million.

BlueSky is growing now at the rate of 1 million new accounts daily.

The numbers go up every hour, as people seek a site that moderates content.

Elon Musk has changed Twitter for the worse. It’s overloaded with ads for Trump merch. His own tweets are ads for Trump. He has restored the accounts of Nazis, anti-vaxxers, and haters. Misinformation is rampant, especially since he fired all the content moderation group. “Let hatred and lies prevail” seems to be the Twitter motto.

I am now posting at BlueSky.

BlueSky is a welcoming community. The tone is friendly. Commenters are not angry. No nazis, racists, or misogynists. There are lots of historians, journalists, academics, familiar names.

People offer advice about how to navigate the site.

It has good vibes.

I don’t want to be part of Elon Musk’s world. I had to leave.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Media, Trump

Alexei Navalny: In a Russian Prison, Courage and Joy

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2024 //
14

Alexei Navalny stood up to Putin. He did so with humor and joy. His documentary about Putin’s wealth and lavish lifestyle infuriated the dictator. After having been poisoned by Putin’s secret police, he was air-lifted to Germany, where doctors saved his life. He could have stayed in the West, but he insisted on returning to Russia, where he knew he would be arrested as soon as he exited his flight. He never lost his equanimity or his sense of humor. He refused to be depressed or show anger. His writings from prison were just published in a book titled Patriot. The New Yorker printed excerpts from the book. They are powerful.

Alexei Navalny

n August 20, 2020, during a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, the Russian opposition leader and anticorruption campaigner Alexei Navalny thought he was dying––he was disoriented, and felt his body shutting down. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and Navalny was hospitalized. Two days later, thanks to the persistence of his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and international pressure, the Russian authorities allowed a German plane to take him to Berlin for treatment.

Navalny emerged from a coma on September 7th. A week later, he announced his intention to return soon to Russia, despite the obvious danger. Doctors concluded that Navalny had been poisoned with a deadly nerve agent called Novichok. While recovering in the German countryside, he began writing his memoir, “Patriot,” and investigating the attempt on his life. He had no doubt that it had been the decision of Vladimir Putin and the work of the F.S.B., the Russian security services, but he was determined to uncover the details. During an unforgettable telephone call, which was filmed for a documentary about his life, Navalny duped an F.S.B. agent into describing how agents had broken into his hotel room in Tomsk and dosed his clothing with the poison.

On January 17, 2021, Alexei and Yulia flew back to Moscow. Navalny was arrested at the airport. Despite international protests on his behalf, Navalny immediately entered a netherworld of trumped-up criminal charges (embezzlement, fraud, “extremism,” etc.), prison cells, and solitary confinement. By the end of 2023, he landed in the “special regime” colony known as Polar Wolf, north of the Arctic Circle. In captivity, he managed to keep a diary and even had his team post some entries on social media. In one Facebook post, he explained why he refused to live out his life in the safety of exile: “I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.”

2022

January 17th

Exactly one year ago today I came home, to Russia.

I didn’t manage to take a single step on the soil of my country as a free man: I was arrested even before border control.

The hero of one of my favorite books, “Resurrection,” by Leo Tolstoy, says, “Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.”

It sounds fine, but it was wrong then, and it’s even more wrong now.

There are a lot of honest people in Russia—tens of millions. There are far more than is commonly believed.

The authorities, however, who were repugnant then and are even more so now, are afraid not of honest people but of those who are not afraid of them. Or let me be more precise: those who may be afraid but overcome their fear….

Having spent my first year in prison, I want to tell everyone exactly the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the court when the guards were taking me off to the police truck: Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have.

The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children….

I knew from the outset that I would be imprisoned for life—either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of this regime…

I’m forty-five. I have a family and children. I’ve had a life to live, worked on some interesting things, done some things that were useful. But there’s a war on right now. Suppose a nineteen-year-old is riding in an armored vehicle, he gets a piece of shrapnel in his head, and that’s it. He has had no family, no children, no life. Right now, dead civilians are lying in the streets in Mariupol, their bodies gnawed at by dogs, and many of them will be lucky if they end up in even a mass grave—through no fault of their own. I made my choices, but these people were just living their lives. They had jobs. They were family breadwinners. Then, one fine evening, a vengeful runt on television, the President of a neighboring country, announces that you are all “Nazis” and have to die because Ukraine was invented by Lenin. The next day, a shell comes flying in your window and you no longer have a wife, a husband, or children—and maybe you yourself are also no longer alive….

I said it two years ago, and I will say it again: Russia is my country. I was born and raised here, my parents are here, and I made a family here; I found someone I loved and had kids with her. I am a full-fledged citizen, and I have the right to unite with like-minded people and be politically active. There are plenty of us, certainly more than corrupt judges, lying propagandists, and Kremlin crooks.

I’m not going to surrender my country to them, and I believe that the darkness will eventually yield. But as long as it persists I will do all I can, try to do what is right, and urge everyone not to abandon hope.

Russia will be happy!…

And now they’re trying me in a closed trial in a maximum-security penal colony.

In a sense, this is the new sincerity. They now say openly, We are afraid of you. We are afraid of what you will say. We are afraid of the truth.

This is an important confession. And it makes practical sense for all of us. We must do what they fear—tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it….

I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.

And, if you’re not prepared to do that, you have no convictions. You just think you do. But those are not convictions and principles; they’re only thoughts in your head.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone who’s not currently in prison lacks convictions. Everyone pays their price. For many people, the price is high even without being imprisoned.

I took part in elections and vied for leadership positions. The call for me is different. I travelled the length and breadth of the country, declaring everywhere from the stage, “I promise that I won’t let you down, I won’t deceive you, and I won’t abandon you.” By coming back to Russia, I fulfilled my promise to the voters. There need to be some people in Russia who don’t lie to them.

It turned out that, in Russia, to defend the right to have and not to hide your beliefs, you have to pay by sitting in a solitary cell. Of course, I don’t like being there. But I will not give up either my ideas or my homeland.

My convictions are not exotic, sectarian, or radical. On the contrary, everything I believe in is based on science and historical experience.

Those in power should change. The best way to elect leaders is through honest and free elections. Everyone needs a fair legal system. Corruption destroys the state. There should be no censorship.

The future lies in these principles.

But, for the present, sectarians and marginals are in power. They have absolutely no ideas. Their only goal is to cling to power. Total hypocrisy allows them to wrap themselves in any cover. So polygamists have become conservatives. Members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have become Orthodox. Owners of “golden passports” and offshore accounts are aggressive patriots.

Lies, and nothing but lies.

It will crumble and collapse. The Putinist state is not sustainable.

One day, we will look at it, and it won’t be there. Victory is inevitable.

But for now, we must not give up, and we must stand by our beliefs.

I ordered the book. I can’t believe that I lived on the earth at the same time as a man like Navalny. Putin is a sadistic criminal

Categories Courage, Hope, Humor

Should This Trans Man Use the Women’s Bathroom?

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2024 //
68

Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina is outraged at the prospect of a transgender woman using the women’s bathroom in the House of Representatives. Her anger is in response to the election of Sarah McBride, a transgender woman, who was elected to Congress by voters in Delaware. Rep. Mace proposed to require anyone who uses a public bathroom to use the one that corresponds to the gender on his/her birth certificate. Trans men (women who became male) would use the ladies’ room; trans women (like Sarah McBride) would use the men’s bathroom.

After some initial uncertainty, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson supported Mace’s proposal.

A reader who calls himself Teaching Economist posted this question and photo on this blog:

Would you feel comfortable with this trans male obeying the policy and using the women’s restroom?

This is Patricio Manuel, professional boxer, born in Santa Monica, CA, 39 years old. Born female, now a transgender man.

At present, there are no trans men in Congress. When the day comes that there is a trans man, this will be a problem for Nancy Mace, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other culture warriors.

How will they feel about having trans men like Patricio Manuel in their bathrooms?

Categories Gender
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