When I first heard about the sex scandal swirling around Corey DeAngelis, I didn’t believe it. As I did more digging through links on the Internet, my disbelief turned to amazement. I never met Corey, but he used to harass me on Twitter until I blocked him.
How could someone who had inveighed against “the woke agenda” and urged the adoption of vouchers to escape that agenda have done what the rumors said? I didn’t think I would touch it with a ten-foot pole. I don’t care what others do in their private lives. I believe in Tim Walz’s credo: “Mind your own damn business.” But I was troubled by the hypocrisy.
Corey worked for Betsy DeVos and was her leading salesman for vouchers. DeVos and her family are rabidly anti-LGBT. For years, they have funded anti-LGBT organizations like the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and Alliance Defending Freedom. Yet the rumor was that Corey had performed in gay porn, and there were many videos online to prove it.
One of the alleged virtues of vouchers was that they enable students to escape pedophile teachers and to attend schools that ban LGBT students. I couldn’t make sense of these two lives.
Peter Greene wrote about Corey’s apparent double life.
Peter began:
I’m old enough to remember when you could have a reasonably civilized conversation with Corey DeAngelis on social media, and everyone is old enough to remember when his main social media function was to lead a small army of trolls against anyone who dared to oppose the right wing school privatizing culture panic crowd (we can all remember that because it was as recent as about a week ago).
Those days are gone, of course, now that DeAngelis has become the sixty-gazzilionth person to discover that the internet is not a private place, as he’s been outed as a featured performer in a bunch of gay porn under the name Seth Rose. Since the story was broken (in a far right website of all places), DeAngelis has been erased from several websites of the many thinky tanks and advocacy groups that employed this chief evangelist for choice.
The pro-public school crowd has been largely quiet about the news, and big time education media hasn’t picked it up yet. Andy Rotherham has a piece about it, which is appropriate– Rotherham and Bellwether have been unique in the right-tilted reformster edusphere in not jumping on the culture panic bandwagon.
There is no reason for any of us to care what an adult human person does. Lord knows we could have some more useful conversations right now if folks weren’t wasting so much time panicking over other peoples’ business.
And yet this parade of personal scandal– the Zieglers, Mark Robinson, Seth Rose–matters for several reasons….
I don’t wish DeAngelis ill, even though he so often wished people ill straight to their faces. At the same time, I don’t wish him to be spared the karma that he has so richly and ambitiously earned; he used cultural panic over LGBTQ persons to help him sell vouchers and troll armies to try to silence anyone who dared to disagree with him. He had a choice to pursue his ambitions without being awful to other human beings, and he chose being awful. And you can’t spread toxins all around you without getting soaked in it yourself.
You should open the post and read Peter’s measured views.
Kavitha Surana of ProPublica wrote the story of what happened to Amber Nicole Thurman. She died because it was illegal in Georgia to give her the care she needed when she needed it. She didn’t have to die. The anti-abortion Republican legislators in her state killed her. The “pro-life” movement killed her. The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court killed her. Governor Brian Kemp killed her. Shameful!
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.
The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.
Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.
Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.
There are almost certainly others.
Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.
Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans.
Doctors warned state legislators women would die if medical procedures sometimes needed to save lives became illegal.
Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.
The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.
“They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.
Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.
The availability of D&Cs for both abortions and routine miscarriage care helped save lives after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, studies show, reducing the rate of maternal deaths for women of color by up to 40% the first year after abortion became legal.
Such stories have been at the center of the upcoming presidential election, during which the right to abortion is on the ballot in 10 states.
But Republican legislators have rejected small efforts to expand and clarify health exceptions — even in Georgia, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal mortality and where Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.
When its law went into effect in July 2022, Gov. Brian Kemp said he was “overjoyed” and believed the state had found an approach that would keep women “safe, healthy and informed.”
After advocates tried to block the ban in court, arguing the law put women in danger, attorneys for the state of Georgia accused them of “hyperbolic fear mongering.”
Two weeks later, Thurman was dead.
Thurman and her son in a photo she posted on social media the year before her death Credit: via Facebook
Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media.
But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica. Thurman and her son had recently moved out of her family’s home and into a gated apartment complex with a pool, and she was planning to enroll in nursing school.
The timing could not have been worse. On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica.
Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court, Baker said. But as her pregnancy progressed to its ninth week, she couldn’t wait any longer. She scheduled a D&C in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal, and on Aug. 13 woke up at 4 a.m. to make the journey with her best friend.
On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect. Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment.
Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said.
At the clinic, Thurman sat through a counseling session in which she was told how to safely take the pills and instructed to go to the emergency room if complications developed. She signed a release saying she understood. She took the first pill there and insisted on driving home before any symptoms started, Baker said. She took the second pill the next day, as directed.
Deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare. Out of nearly 6 million women who’ve taken mifepristone in the U.S. since 2000, 32 deaths were reported to the FDA through 2022, regardless of whether the drug played a role. Of those, 11 patients developed sepsis. Most of the remaining cases involved intentional and accidental drug overdoses, suicide, homicide and ruptured ectopic pregnancies.
Baker and Thurman spoke every day that week. At first, there was only cramping, which Thurman expected. But days after she took the second pill, the pain increased and blood was soaking through more than one pad per hour. If she had lived nearby, the clinic in North Carolina would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up, the executive director told ProPublica. But Thurman was four hours away.
On the evening of Aug. 18, Thurman vomited blood and passed out at home, according to 911 call logs. Her boyfriend called for an ambulance. Thurman arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge at 6:51 p.m.
ProPublica obtained the summary narrative of Thurman’s hospital stay provided to the maternal mortality review committee, as well as the group’s findings. The narrative is based on Thurman’s medical records, with identifying information removed. The committee does not interview doctors involved with the case or ask hospitals to respond to its findings. ProPublica also consulted with medical experts, including members of the committee, about the timeline of events.
Within Thurman’s first hours at the hospital, which says it is staffed at all hours with an OB who specializes in hospital care, it should have been clear that she was in danger, medical experts told ProPublica.
Her lower abdomen was tender, according to the summary. Her white blood cell count was critically high and her blood pressure perilously low — at one point, as Thurman got up to go to the bathroom, she fainted again and hit her head. Doctors noted a foul odor during a pelvic exam, and an ultrasound showed possible tissue in her uterus.
The standard treatment of sepsis is to start antibiotics and immediately seek and remove the source of the infection. For a septic abortion, that would include removing any remaining tissue from the uterus. One of the hospital network’s own practices describes a D&C as a “fairly common, minor surgical procedure” to be used after a miscarriage to remove fetal tissue.
After assessing her at 9:38 p.m., doctors started Thurman on antibiotics and an IV drip, the summary said. The OB-GYN noted the possibility of doing a D&C the next day.
But that didn’t happen the following morning, even when an OB diagnosed “acute severe sepsis.” By 5:14 a.m., Thurman was breathing rapidly and at risk of bleeding out, according to her vital signs. Even five liters of IV fluid had not moved her blood pressure out of the danger zone. Doctors escalated the antibiotics.
Instead of performing the newly criminalized procedure, they continued to gather information and dispense medicine, the summary shows.
Doctors had Thurman tested for sexually transmitted diseases and pneumonia.
They placed her on Levophed, a powerful blood pressure support that could do nothing to treat the infection and posed a new threat: The medication can constrict blood flow so much that patients could need an amputation once stabilized.
At 6:45 a.m., Thurman’s blood pressure continued to dip, and she was taken to the intensive care unit.
At 7:14 a.m., doctors discussed initiating a D&C. But it still didn’t happen. Two hours later, lab work indicated her organs were failing, according to experts who read her vital signs.
At 12:05 p.m., more than 17 hours after Thurman had arrived, a doctor who specializes in intensive care notified the OB-GYN that her condition was deteriorating.
Thurman was finally taken to an operating room at 2 p.m.
By then, the situation was so dire that doctors started with open abdominal surgery. They found that her bowel needed to be removed, but it was too risky to operate because not enough blood was flowing to the area — a possible complication from the blood pressure medication, an expert explained to ProPublica. The OB performed the D&C but immediately continued with a hysterectomy.
During surgery, Thurman’s heart stopped.
Her mother was praying in the waiting room when one of the doctors approached. “Come walk with me,” she said.
Until she got the call from the hospital, her mother had no idea Thurman had been pregnant. She recalled her daughter’s last words before she was wheeled into surgery — they had made no sense coming from a vibrant young woman who seemed to have her whole life ahead of her:
“Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”
Thurman and her son in a selfie she posted online in 2020, two years before her death Credit: via Facebook
Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, doctors warned having another baby could kill her.
But when the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditions, even those known to present lethal risks later in pregnancy.
At 41, Miller had lupus, diabetes and hypertension and didn’t want to wait until the situation became dire. So she avoided doctors and navigated an abortion on her own — a path many health experts feared would increase risks when women in America lost the constitutional right to obtain legal, medically supervised abortions.
Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions.
Due to Georgia’s harsh abortion law, she did not get the routine care that would have saved her life. She was killed by the law.
Candi Miller with her husband and her two children.
Trump says he will deport 11 million illegal immigrants. He says his deportation program will be unlike anything the nation has ever seen. He is right.
Actually, the deportations were started in 1930 and reached a peak in 1931, before FDR was elected. Estimates for the numbers of those deported ranged from 300,000-2 million, about half of whom were American citizens. President Herbert Hoover approved the deportation program on the belief that Mexicans were taking jobs from white people. Most of the deportation was implemented by local and state governments.
What would it look like to deport 11 million people?
First, they would have to be rounded up in massive raids. Imagine the terror as federal agents arrived at the homes of immigrants and raided them, carrying away families–men, women and children.
Where to put 11 million people?
Then, the federal government would have to build thousands, tens of thousands of detention camps. Every state would have detention centers. This would be a massive undertaking, because the camps would need to be constructed and supplied with beds, food, personnel, doctors and nurses.
Trump has suggested that the deportees would each have a serial number. Would it be tattooed on their arms?
Inevitably, families would be torn apart, people would die, women would give birth in the camps.
The images sent around the world of detention camps for millions of people would humiliate our country as a cruel, heartless place.
Someone should drape a hood over the Statue of Liberty, so that she does not see what is happening as she lifts her lamp “beside the golden door.”
On the base of the Statue of Liberty, “The New Collosus,” by Emma Lazarus.
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
No more. Stay home. We are full. No more room. Not at this inn.
Rex Huppke is a columnist for USA Today. He wrote on Twitter about two important tech bros who are his pets. Then he quoted his own tweet as “evidence” that it was true.
Given all the uproar over GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s baseless, utterly false and profoundly racist claims that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets in an Ohio town, I would like to make a public statement that is supported by an equal amount of evidence:
“Not long ago, billionaire Elon Musk ate my cat, Mr. Smushyface. Days later, Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, stole and then barbecued and ate my dog, Zoe. I remained quiet about these incidents for fear other tech bros like Musk and Vance might come for my hamster, Dennis. But after much thoughts and prayer, I have decided to honor the memories of Zoe and Mr. Smushyface by letting the world know what I claim to be the truth.”
For those fortunate enough to not yet be aware of the “immigrants are eating our pets” allegations that bubbled up from the right-wing fever swamps and got spouted by Trump during Tuesday’s presidential debate, here’s the deal: A random Facebook post, grounded in something along the authoritative lines of “I heard from a friend of a friend’s kid,” claimed a cat went missing and was (maybe) eaten by a Haitian immigrant.
It’s true that JD Vance ate my dog because I wrote it on the internet
There’s no evidence of that happening, of course. But xenophobic fearmongers saw it is a perfect way to monger some xenophobic fear. So Musk started trumpeting the ludicrous claim on X, the enormous social media platform he owns, and then Vance was babbling about it and then Trump spoke the words no presidential-debate-watcher ever imagined they’d hear, saying of Springfield, Ohio: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
OK.
If an actual former president who is also the Republican Party’s standard-bearer and its presidential nominee is so concerned about a fabricated story aimed at dehumanizing an entire swath of people, he damn well better be equally concerned about my story, which is true because I read it on the internet. (Granted, what I read on the internet was from my own social media post, but that’s not important.)
My brave admission that Elon ate my cat
Here’s how this real-because-I-say-it-is story of Vance and Musk being ravenous pet devourers developed.
On Monday, I bravely posted the following on X, the social media cesspool formerly known as Twitter ‒ “True story: Elon Musk ate my cat. Please share your own story of Elon Musk eating your pet.”
The response was overwhelming and revealed my pet was far from the only victim of Musk’s decidedly un-American appetite. Others came out of the we’ve-lost-our-pets-to-hungry-tech-bros closet, with posts that included:
“Elon Musk ate my precious bearded dragon Cupcake.”
“Elon Musk ate my worm farm!”
“True story: Elon Musk ate my ferret.”
“He ate my kitten. I was at a conference where he was one day, holding my kitten. He grabbed it from my hand, poured ketchup on it, and just started chomping into it. It was so scary.”
There’s as much evidence Musk ate my cat as there is immigrants ate pets
Posts on X containing false or inaccurate information are often corrected with a “community note.” No such note appeared on my post or on any of the replies, which I took as proof that it’s all 100% true.
I added: “I fear there is widespread pet-eating in the tech-bro community. They’re coming to our cities and towns, we don’t know much about them, they bring radical new ideas about what they view as ‘free speech,’ and they are apparently eating our pets. This has to stop.”
Support from others who say their pets were eaten by Musk and Vance
Again, the responses revealed that Vance’s consumption of my beloved Zoe was not a one-off.
“I caught JD Vance running away with my dog in his grocery wagon.”
“I walked into my house only to find Elon up to his shoulders in my fish tank, bobbing for them while JD chased my cat with a fork and knife! It was horrifying!”
“My Pugs, Montez and Pearl, may they rest in peace, were also consumed by Elon Musk and JD Vance. They had a Pug-B-Que. I grieve every single day for my Pug babies.”
What monsters.
I hope Donald Trump condemns his running mate’s pet-eating ways
Clearly there’s more than enough evidence here for Trump to loudly address the problem, condemn his running mate and Musk and imply there’s something scary, evil and unwelcome about wealthy tech dudes who incorrectly think they’re hilarious.
Nothing will bring back my precious Mr. Smushyface or my lovable dog Zoe. Nothing can bring back any of the wonderful pets I know were stolen and eaten by Vance and Musk because I read something somebody posted on the internet and declined to consider it might just be fabricated bull(expletive).
Something must be done about these rabid tech bros before all our pets wind up down their seemingly bottomless gullets.
I look forward to Trump making this a central part of his campaign in the weeks ahead.
Eighteen months ago, I described the case of law professor Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania. She had made statements that were deemed bigoted. I defended her speech, even though it was vile. That post began:
The question I posed to readers was whether they thought that her statements were protected speech or should be sanctioned. A lively discussion ensued.
The University of Pennsylvania just announced sanctions against Professor Wax but did not fire her or strip her of tenure. The student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported the decision:
Penn has upheld sanctions against University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Amy Wax following her history of discriminatory remarks and two years of disciplinary proceedings with little precedent.
“These findings are now final, following a determination by the Faculty Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility that the proper process was followed,” a University spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian.
The new ruling, first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer, comes after the Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility upheld sanctions that were initially recommended by a Faculty Senate hearing board on June 21, 2023 and strikes down an appeal filed by Wax and her lawyer, David Shapiro, this past February.
The sanctions mark the first time in recent history that a tenured University professor has been sanctioned through Faculty Senate procedures. Neither Wax nor her lawyer responded to requests for comment in time for the publishing of this article.
The DP previously reported that the recommended sanctions against Wax included a one-year suspension at half pay, the removal of her named chair and summer pay, and a requirement for Wax to note in public appearances that she is not speaking on behalf or as a member of Penn Carey Law.
Penn will announce the decision in Tuesday’s edition of the Penn Almanac. The decision will include a letter of reprimand from Provost John Jackson Jr.
“Academic freedom is and should be very broad. Teachers, however, must conduct themselves in a manner that conveys a willingness to assess all students fairly,” Jackson wrote in a copy of the letter obtained by the DP. “They may not engage in unprofessional conduct that creates an unequal educational environment.”
Interim Penn President Larry Jameson added that Wax must refrain from “flagrantly unprofessional and targeted disparagement of any individual or group in the University community … for so long as [she is] a member of the University’s standing faculty.”
In a June 2023 letter to former Penn President Liz Magill, the hearing board noted that they “do not dispute the protection” that Wax holds over her views, but said that the way she presents these views violate widely acknowledged “behavioral professional norms” when presented as “uncontroverted.”
The hearing board “unanimously” found that the facts presented throughout the hearing “constitute serious violations of University norms and policies,” according to the letter. The hearing board also concluded that Wax’s behavior “has created a hostile campus environment and a hostile learning atmosphere.”
When determining sanctions, the hearing board decided that the University should issue a public reprimand, but it did not suggest that Wax should be fired or stripped of tenure. Separate from the sanctions, the hearing board suggested that the University and Penn Carey Law should consider having Wax co-teach her classes with another faculty member, and that Wax teach her classes outside of Penn Carey Law buildings.
The board wrote that it found Wax “in dereliction of her scholarly responsibilities, especially as a teacher” in part due to her “reliance on misleading and partial information,” which results in her drawing “sweeping and unreliable conclusions.”
But the sanctions, which reportedly take effect for the 2025-26 school year, won’t have an impact on her teaching plans this semester — which, according to a course syllabus obtained by the DP, include an invite of American Renaissance magazine editor Jared Taylor to deliver a guest lecture at Dec. 3 meeting of LAW 9560: “Conservative and Political Legal Thought.” The invitation would mark at least the third appearance by Taylor at Wax’s class in four years, after his visit last fall sparked a protest outside Wax’s classroom and a rare schoolwide emailfrom Penn Carey Law Dean Sophia Lee addressing the “bounds of academic freedom.”
Weeks before Taylor comes to campus, Wax is scheduled to speak at a conference in Tennessee alongside multiple people who have reportedly espoused white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and racist views.
Tuesday’s Almanac will also include an Aug. 11, 2023 letter from Magill in which she accepted the sanctions initially recommended by the hearing board.
Jameson provided an introduction for Magill’s letter, summarizing the disciplinary process against Wax and confirming he was implementing Magill’s decision.
Magill wrote in her letter that the board considered arguments such as the “critical point” regarding academic freedom and used a “well-developed” factual record to make its decision.
While she said she was “mindful of the limit of my authority as established by our policy,” Magill accepted the major sanctions suggested from the board’s report.
The letter from Magill prompted Wax to file a Aug. 29, 2023 appeal to SCAFR, in which Wax’s lawyer argued that there were “several procedural defects” which gave the respondent the right to appeal.
Shapiro wrote that that the most significant “defect” was that the hearing board made the decision “about the breadth and extent of a tenured professor’s contractually guaranteed right to academic freedom,” rather than SCAFR.
The appeal also alleged that Magill and the hearing board applied an unfair speech standard. Shapiro wrote that Wax was punished under an “incoherent standard, never before articulated, or applied to any Penn faculty member.”
The standard used to punish Wax has drawn scrutiny from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a national civil liberties group which said on Monday that Penn had mustered “zero evidence” that Wax discriminated against her students.
“Faculty nationwide may now pay a heavy price for Penn’s willingness to undercut academic freedom for all to get at this one professor,” FIRE Vice President Alex Morey wrote in a statement. “After today, any university under pressure to censor a controversial faculty member need only follow Penn’s playbook.”
Wax’s history of discriminatory statements has included her claiming that Black students never graduate at the top of the Penn Carey Law class and that “non-Western groups” are resentful towards “Western people.” Wax has also faced criticism for hosting white nationalist Jared Taylor for a guest lecture and allegedly telling a Penn Carey Law student that she was only accepted into the Ivy League “because of affirmative action.”
In June 2022, former Penn Carey Law Dean Ted Ruger filed a complaint to the Faculty Senate recommending a “major sanction” against Wax. At the time, he cited numerous student and faculty accounts of Wax’s conduct that he believed warranted disciplinary action. Ruger asked the Faculty Senate to appoint a hearing board of five professors from across the University to evaluate his complaint, conduct a full review of Wax’s conduct, and impose sanctions in line with the University’s policy for punishing tenured faculty members.
“Academic freedom for a tenured scholar is, and always has been, premised on a faculty member remaining fit to perform the minimal requirements of the job,” Ruger wrote in his report to the Faculty Senate. “However, Wax’s conduct demonstrates a ‘flagrant disregard of the standards, rules, or mission of the University.’”
Joyce Vance is a lawyer. She served for eight years as US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, appointed by President Barack Obama. She blogs at Civil Discourse. This post could be subtitled “Ladies, Don’t Worry your pretty little head about ‘rights.”
She writes:
This is what was on Trump’s mind at 11:49 p.m. last night.
What did he intend? Were patriarchal family-man types supposed to read it to their wives and daughters while they did chores and prepared meals? It certainly reads that way. You can easily imagine Trump hoping these men would say to the women in their lives: You’re worse off and less healthy than you were four years ago; less safe, more depressed, less happy. Or maybe American women are just supposed to take Trump’s word for it.
Women celebrate in Washington DC after Joe Biden wins the presidency in 2020
Trump thinks women can be told that they are less confident about the future than they were four years ago and they will simply accept it. Women will get on Truth Social, read his post, and think, I don’t need to worry anymore because Donald Trump will fix all of that.
These women are looking pretty happy about not-Donald Trump
Donald Trump to women: If you will just listen to Donald Trump, the national nightmare you are enduring will be over.
Winning ticket
Donald Trump also wants you to know, if you’re a woman voter, that you won’t have to think about abortion anymore if he’s president. Why? Apparently, because abortion will be one less right to worry about since you won’t have it anymore. Say goodbye to what remains of your control over your health care. But it will be okay, Donald Trump tells you: It will make you happy.
Trump says in one breath that there are “powerful exceptions” to his abortion bans while also saying that the status of a woman’s right to an abortion is up to her state. Many of those states don’t have exceptions for the mother’s health or have passed laws criminalizing abortion so doctors are afraid to provide care to women until it’s too late. In some of those states, attorneys general are threatening to prevent women from leaving the state to obtain abortion care or to prosecute them for doing so.
“I will protect women at a level never seen before,” Trump concludes. “They will finally be healthy, hopeful, safe, and secure. Their lives will be happy, beautiful, and great again.” He writes it with all the fervor of a man envisioning a future that is part “Stepford Wives” and part “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Trump: You will be happy. Your life will be beautiful. It will be that way because I say so. It is not up to you.
That’s the future Donald Trump has in store for American women.
Donald Trump is a lunatic. I don’t say that casually. His post from last night was a stark reminder of what it’s like to live in Donald Trump’s America. I’m sure you all remember it—waking up in the middle of the night to check Twitter for news of unfolding disasters. Had he praised a dictator, enacted a Muslim ban, separated children from their parents at the border, called white nationalists “decent people”? What would be next? Don’t worry your pretty little heads about that, he’s telling women now.
We are 45 days away from the election. We all know the assignment. We are never ever getting back together with Donald Trump. Never ever.
In 2020, early exit polls showed Biden winning the votes of 57 percent of women. A majority of American women were eager to end Trump’s power over their lives. If the best argument Trump has to convince those women to vote for him is that they’ll lose more rights while he tells them to be happy about it, well, good luck with that.
Here’s some better advice for women:
It’s okay to vote for Kamala Harris, even if you’re a lifelong Republican voter.
If you don’t want to, you don’t have to tell anyone the truth about who you voted for.
Women should be able to make their own choices about their healthcare, and they shouldn’t have to watch their daughters suffer and even die because of Donald Trump’s abortion bans. Woman and their families should have access to IVF. Try telling men they can’t get lifesaving medical care, or even a prescription for Viagra, and see how far that gets you. Don’t vote for someone who treats you like a second-class citizen.
Donald Trump is losing women from inside of his fold. It’s not just Liz Cheney and the never Trumpers. Dawn Roberts, the Iowa state co-chair of the Nikki Haley’s campaign and a lifelong Republican, endorsed Kamala Harris, telling The Des Moines Register, “My husband, Steve, often questioned why the U.S. has never had a female president. I think the time is now and Kamala Harris is the person to lead our country into the future.”
Iowan Harris supporter Dawn Roberts, lifelong Republican
Donald Trump complains that Kamala Harris is too joyful, that she laughs too much. Trump thrives on a dark vision of America in chaos, casting himself in the role of faux superhero coming to save us all. He benefits from fearmongering. Trump made the deliberate choice to talk about “American carnage” in his inaugural address in 2020. As he loses votes among women, Trump resorts to telling us what to think and how to feel. It has nothing to do with our well-being and everything to do with helping him win the election. Sorry Donald. We are not going back.
In Ravenna, Ohio, the sheriff issued a stern and intimidating warning to anyone who placed a Harris-Walz sign in their yard. There was no official reprimand. In Ohio, it seems, voter intimidation by an official is not a problem.
Politico reports:
RAVENNA, Ohio — A local Ohio elections board says the county sheriff’s department will not be used for election security following a social media post by the sheriff saying people with Kamala Harris yard signs should have their addresses recorded so that immigrants can be sent to live with them if the Democratic vice president wins the November election.
In a statement on the Portage County Democrats’ Facebook page, county board of elections chair Randi Clites said members voted 3-1 Friday to remove the sheriff’s department from providing security during in-person absentee voting.
Clites cited public comments indicating “perceived intimidation by our sheriff against certain voters” and the need to “make sure every voter in Portage County feels safe casting their ballot for any candidate they choose.”
A Ravenna Record-Courier story on the Akron Beacon Journal site reported that a day earlier, about 150 people crowded into a room at the Kent United Church of Christ for a meeting sponsored by the NAACP of Portage County, many expressing fear about the Sept. 13 comments.
“I believe walking into a voting location where a sheriff deputy can be seen may discourage voters from entering,” Clites said. The board is looking at using private security already in place at the administration building or having Ravenna police provide security, Clites said.
Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski posted a screenshot of a Fox News segment criticizing President Joe Biden and Harris over immigration. Likening people in the U.S. illegally to “human locusts,” he suggested recording addresses of people with Harris yard signs so when migrants need places to live “we’ll already have the addresses of their New families … who supported their arrival!”
Local Democrats filed complaints with the Ohio secretary of state and other agencies, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio accused Zuchowski of an unconstitutional “impermissible threat” against residents who want to display political yard signs. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine called the comments “unfortunate” and “not helpful.” The secretary of state’s office said the comments didn’t violate election laws and it didn’t plan any action.
Peter Greene examines a proposed amendment to the state constitution in Colorado and its whacko implications. He urges voters to say NO.
He writes:
While other states are stumbling over constitutional language that aims public dollars at public schools (e.g. South Carolina and Kentucky), voucher fans in Colorado have proposed a constitutional amendment that comes up for a vote soon. And it is a ridiculously ill-conceived and hastily crafted mess.
The language is simple enough– here’s the whole text, originally known as Initiative 138 and now as Amendment 40.
SECTION 1. In the constitution of the state of Colorado, add section, 18 to article IX as follows: Section 18. Education – School Choice
(1) PURPOSE AND FINDINGS. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF COLORADO HEREBY FIND AND DECLARE THAT ALL CHILDREN HAVE THE RIGHT TO EQUAL OPPORTUNITY TO ACCESS A QUALITY EDUCATION; THAT PARENTS HAVE THE RIGHT TO DIRECT THE EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN; AND THAT SCHOOL CHOICE INCLUDES NEIGHBORHOOD, CHARTER, PRIVATE, AND HOME SCHOOLS, OPEN ENROLLMENT OPTIONS, AND FUTURE INNOVATIONS IN EDUCATION.
(2) EACH K-12 CHILD HAS THE RIGHT TO SCHOOL CHOICE.
Why does Colorado, a state that has long offered many forms of school choice, even need this? Supporters of the amendment are arguing that they are trying to enshrine and protect choice, just in case those naughty Democrats tried to roll it back some day (Colorado’s Dems once tossed out the pro-choice, not-really-Democrats Democrats for Education Reform). And though they aren’t saying this part out loud, the amendment would be a great set-up for school vouchers.
The language proposed is, however, strictly bananapants. And I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the people who would most regret passing this amendment would be those who support it.
Let’s say I want to send my low-achieving, non-Christian child to a top-level Christian school. Let’s further presume that I can’t afford even a fraction of the tuition cost. Does this amendment mean that the school has to accept them, and that the state has to foot the entire tuition bill? Wouldn’t any answer other than yes be denying my constitutional to equal opportunity to access a quality education and my constitutional right to direct my child’s education? Does this mean that to have full access the state must also transport my child anywhere I want them to go to school?
What if East Egg Academy has far more applicants than it has capacity? Must it scratch its entire admissions policy and use a lottery instead?
The major obstacles to school choice are not state policies. The major obstacles are, and have always been, cost, location, and the school’s own discriminatory policies. Virtually all voucher policies are set up to protect those discriminatory policies. Wouldn’t an amendment like this require those to be wiped out?
Wouldn’t this language amount to a state takeover of all charter and private schools?
And that’s not all. Wouldn’t this amendment also allow parents to intrude into every classroom. If I have a constitutional right to direct my child’s education, does that not mean that I can tell my child’s science teacher to stop teaching evolution? Or start teaching evolution? Can I demand a different approach to teaching American history? How about prepositions? And how will a classroom teacher even function if every child in the classroom comes with a parent who has a constitutional right to direct their education?
You can say that’s silly, that “obviously” that’s not what the amendment means. But that’s what it says, at least until some series of bureaucrats and courts decide what exactly “direct the education of their children” means.
Kevin Welner (National Education Policy Center)has it exactly right— “It’s really a ‘full employment for lawyers’ act.”
Supporters say this doesn’t establish a right to public funding of private schools, and I suppose they’re sort of correct in the sense that this does not so much establish a right to public funding of private schools so much as it establishes an obligation for public funding of private schools as well as obliterating private school autonomy. Unless, of course, some judge steps in to find that the language doesn’t mean what it says, which is, I suppose, not impossible.
Nobody on any side of the school choice debate should be voting for this amendment. It’s exactly the kind of lawmaking you get from people who have wrapped meaning in particular rhetoric for so long that they have forgotten that the words of their rhetoric have actual meanings outside the meanings that they have habitually assigned them. Here’s hoping the people of Colorado avoid this really bad idea.
There has never before been a presidential candidate who used his position to make a profit. Usually all fundraising and sales of merchandise go into the campaign’s coffers. But now, Trump is turning his campaign into a major grift. He has been marketing products throughout the campaign, meant to enrich himself, not the campaign. What next? Selling locks of his golden mane for $50,000 a snip? Making money has been his lifetime preoccupation. Win or lose, Trump will still be selling stuff to unwary buyers.
Step right up! Be the first!
Just days ago, Trump announced a new business venture. He is going into the cryptocurrency business. Should he be elected, his new business will be regulated by whoever he appoints as head of the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). The new Trump business will be called “World Liberty Financial.” The possibilities for conflict of interest have never deterred Trump. During his Presidency, Trump owned the hotel closest to the White House, where foreign nations booked the most expensive suites to impress him.
On Saturday, Trump released a video of him hawking a $100 commemorative coin, which includes his “very beautiful face.” He assures you it is a “limited edition” coin. Don’t accept substitutes. Go to “PatriotTakes” on Twitter to buy your own Trump coin.
One of the defining characteristics of Donald Trump’s rallies is the emergence of an ad hoc marketplace of Trump-related merchandise. If it is made of cloth, is red and carries the name “Trump,” it’s there and it’s for sale.
A businessman like Trump might be expected to have mixed feelings about such a display. On the one hand, it’s a demonstration of the extent of enthusiasm of his supporters. On the other, it’s a lot of money being made from his name going into other peoples’ pockets.
But then, he’s still making a lot of money off his own name, too. In fact, he seems to be making an increasing amount of money selling the Trump brand — at the potential expense of the Trump candidacy.
On Tuesday, for example, Trump announced the fourth collection of his non-fungible token (NFT) trading cards — digital images that are theoretically constrained to increase their value. You may recall the flurry of excitement around NFTs a few years ago, with similar images inexplicably selling for thousands of dollars before plunging in value. Trump was late to this game, but he’s stuck with it, probably because Trump’s NFTs offer something more than a poorly photoshopped image of Trump dressed up as a cowboy: They offer access to Trump.
If you are one of the first 25 people to buy 250 of these new NFTs, the website proclaims, you get a staggering package of goodies: two VIP dinners with Trump and two cocktail receptions, as well as three pairs of signed sneakers (more on those in a second) and some actual physical trading cards, among other things. All for the low price of … let’s see, each card retails for $99, so: $24,750.
This package, mind you, does not include the commemorative card that is adorned with a piece of the suit Trump wore during his debate with President Joe Biden earlier this year. For that particular relic, you need to spend about $1,500 on 15 trading cards.
The money Trump is encouraging his supporters to spend doesn’t go toward getting him elected. The website insists that “these Digital Trading Cards are not political” — sure — “and have nothing to do with any political campaign.” The company simply “uses Donald J. Trump’s name, likeness and image under paid license from CIC Digital LLC, which license may be terminated or revoked according to its terms.”
CIC Digital LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, the entity established when Trump won the presidency to theoretically separate himself from his business interests.
CIC Digital LLC is different from CIC Ventures LLC, also a subsidiary of the Trump Trust. (The “CIC” here is presumably short for “commander in chief,” which would perhaps not be how the Founding Fathers expected that title to be used.) CIC Ventures is the partner of the aforementioned sneaker salespeople.
Want shoes showing a stylized image of Trump immediately after he was shot last month? $299. Want the gold ones, titled “Never Surrender” after Trump’s response to having been arrested in Georgia? $499. The Timberland-style boots are $199. The orange bitcoin/Trump shoes are apparently sold out; they went for $299 as well. (You will notice, as we go through all of this, that cryptocurrency is an undercurrent. That’s not a coincidence.)
Perhaps you’re simply looking to impress the guys at the frat house with your support for Trump. The sneaker people have an array of products designed for you: sandals/slides ($149), a cooler ($299) and Trump-branded cologne, titled “Victory” ($119).
Trump also recently plugged a Telegram channel for something called “World Liberty Financial,” a cryptocurrency-oriented group with an unclear goal. Among the sparse posts at Telegram, though, there was an offered warning: “Please be aware of scams and fake tokens claiming to be associated with ‘Defiant Ones,’ ‘World Liberty,’ or similar names. Do not engage with these tokens!” Scams? In crypto??
There are, of course, plenty of offerings for Trump’s more traditional base of support. There’s the Trump Bible, retailing for about $60. (The website also helpfully explains what to do if your Bible’s pages are sticking together.) And there are the other quasi-religious Trump books any true supporter will have to flesh out his or her library.
The newest is “Save America,” which Trump touted as “a FANTASTIC new Book” for which he “hand-selected every Photo, from my time in the White House, to our current third Campaign for President of the United States.” It’s only $99 — unless you want it signed, which tacks on $400. For $399, you can get a signed copy of the book “Letters to Trump,” which is what it sounds like. The first book published by the firm responsible for these tomes, called Winning Team Publishing, was “Our Journey Together,” which is now only $74.99. If you want the full “Our Journey Together” bundle — including a special edition of the book, one of Donald Trump Jr.’s books and a “Make America Great Again” hat — you only need to shell out $999. (Donald Trump Jr. is a co-founder of Winning Team Publishing.) If you only want a MAGA hat, Winning Team has those, too, though it doesn’t appear that sales of these explicitly campaign-oriented hats actually kick anything back to the campaign. They retail for about $30, the same as the Donald Trump-shaped Bluetooth speaker also sold on the website.
Trump’s fancier supporters might be in the market for higher-end products. A standard-sized bottle of Trump wine, from Trump Winery, retails for as much as $94.99 — though the person who benefits would be Trump’s son Eric. For that same price, you can also buy (as of writing) almost five shares of Trump Media & Technology Group stock. Whether that stock or the NFTs are a better investment is a question better answered by economists, but it’s been an unalloyed boon for Trump himself.
Further along the income scale, the Trump Organization still offers memberships at its clubs and golf courses — more expensive than buying 250 NFTs but a better way to ensure face time with Trump on a regular basis. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club/home now welcomes new members for only $700,000 a year. But hurry; the price will reportedly jump to $1 million in October. No wonder profits at Mar-a-Lago have quadrupled since Trump left office.
Almost all of this — the NFTs, the sneakers, the memberships, the books — kicks some portion of what customers pay back to Trump in one form or another. (He made $300,000 from the Bibles, for example.) All while his campaign complains in fundraising emails to supporters about being outpaced by Vice President Kamala Harris. This is the contradiction that’s lingered around Trump since he announced his 2016 candidacy: He wants to be both a businessman and a candidate at the same time. Except Trump, it seems, doesn’t see it as much of a contradiction at all.
The Washington Post reported that Elon Musk has used Twitter to spread lies about our elections. He owns Twitter and is accountable to no one. Musk has 197 million followers on Twitter, he says. He has repeatedly posted lies and conspiracy theories about our elections that have been debunked by independent experts.
I follow Musk’s tweets, and I can attest that he regularly repeats lies about the election. He posts incendiary comments about non-citizens voting in large number. He seems to get his ideas straight from Donald’s mouth. He posted that some 2 million noncitizens had registered to vote in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Arizona. He has used his personal account to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about the integrity of elections.
Musk’s online utterances don’t stay online. His false and misleading election posts add to the deluge of inaccurate information plaguing voting officials across the country. Election officials say his posts about supposed voter fraud often coincide with an increase in baseless requests to purge voter rolls and heighten their worry over violent threats. Experts say Musk is uniquely dangerous as a purveyor of misinformation because his digital following stretches well beyond the political realm and into the technology and investment sectors, where his business achievements have earned him credibility.
After Musk bought Twitter, he made deep cuts in staff responsible for maintaining standards on the site, courted major conservative figures, and reoriented the platform to boost the reach of his account, which frequently spreads false statements without being subject to the kinds of fact checks that previously existed on the site. He reinstated accounts previously banned for violating the platform’s rules, including Donald Trump’s, and promised to usher in a less restrictive era…
Musk, who bought Twitter in November 2022, has repeatedly claimed without evidence that Democrats are “importing” undocumented people to vote in the coming election, a popular 2024 iteration of the Great Replacement Theory, which holds that a global elite is replacing European-descended populations with non-White people. He has falsely asserted that electronic voting machines are unreliable and that the country should return to hand-counting ballots. And he has promoted deepfakes and other deceptive images aimed at undermining politicians he doesn’t support.
Between his purchase of Twitter and Thursday, Musk’s 52 posts or reposts about noncitizen voting — one of the main topics of false or misleading election claims he made in that time period — drew almost 700 million views, according to a Post analysis.
A separate analysis found that 50 of Musk’s false or misleading claims about the U.S. election between Jan. 1 and July 31 were debunked by independent fact-checkers and still generated almost 1.2 billion views, according to a recent study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. None displayed community notes, X’s term for user-generated fact checks that Musk has promised serve as an “immediate way to refute anything false” that is posted on the platform…
His frequent amplification of election untruths has spurred typically low-profile election officials to publicly fact-check him. His immense reach far outstrips theirs, so they say they attempt to blunt the damage of his false posts by piggybacking on them with truthful fact checks of their own.
But in their effort to spread accurate election information, they are up against a formidable adversary. “The great risk in a privatized public sphere,” said Sophia Rosenfeld, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Democracy and Truth: A Short History,” is that the owner, in this case, Musk, “can control both the flow of information and the content of that information to suit their own needs, whether financial, ideological, or both.” Musk’s control of X and his large following mean a single post from him can effectively take fringe election-denial falsehoods mainstream, experts say.
In Michigan, Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said her office tracked a direct correlation between Musk’s inaccurate tweets about elections and subsequent waves of harassment of local and state election administrators.
Musk is an enthusiastic supporter of Trump. They share hostility to the most basic activity in our democracy: voting for our leaders. Discredit elections, and the ground is set for authoritarianism.
Diane Ravitch's blog 