Indiana: New Law Requires Professors to Teach “Diverse” Views or Face Firing

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2024 //
31

Republicans have grown frustrated by their inability to get their views represented on college campuses, so they have grown more assertive in passing laws to ban ideas they don’t like (such as “critical race theory” or gender studies or diversity/equity/inclusion or “divisive concepts).

Indiana is imposing a different approach. Instead of banning what it does not like, the Legislature is requiring professors to teach different points of view.

The New York Times reports:

A new law in Indiana requires professors in public universities to foster a culture of “intellectual diversity” or face disciplinary actions, including termination for even those with tenure, the latest in an effort by Republicans to assert more control over what is taught in classrooms.

The law connects the job status of faculty members, regardless of whether they are tenured, to whether, in the eyes of a university’s board of trustees, they promote “free inquiry” and “free expression.” State Senator Spencer Deery, who sponsored the bill, made clear in a statement that this would entail the inclusion of more conservative viewpoints on campus.

The backlash to the legislation, which Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, signed March 13, has been substantial. Hundreds wrote letters or testified at hearings, and faculty senates atmultiple institutions had urged the legislature to reject the bill, condemning it as government overreach and a blow to academic free speech.

“The whole point of tenure is to protect academic freedom,” said Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Professors, who described the law as “thought policing.”

Under the Indiana law, which goes into effect in July, university trustees may not grant tenure or a promotion to faculty members who are deemed “unlikely” to promote “intellectual diversity” or to expose students to works from a range of political views. Trustees also may withhold tenure or promotion from those who are found “likely” to bring unrelated political views into the courses they are teaching.

Faculty members who already have tenure would be subject to regular reviews to determine if they are meeting all of these criteria, and if the board concludes they are not, they could be demoted or fired. The law also requires colleges to set up a procedure for students or other employees to file complaints about faculty members considered to be falling short on these requirements.

Boards are not, under the law, allowed to penalize faculty for criticizing the institution or engaging in political activity outside of their teaching duties. The restrictions do not apply to private university faculty members.

Will professors of science be allowed to teach about climate change or evolution without giving equal time to “the other side?”

Will professors of American history be allowed to teach about the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and institutional racism without introducing the Confederate point of view?

This law is a serious attack on academic freedom.

Categories Academic Freedom, Curriculum, Ethics, Higher Education, Indiana

Thom Hartmann: Was the Terrorist Attack in Moscow Akin to the Reichstag Fire of 1933? Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2024 //
16

Thom Hartmann wrote an ominous column about the possible origins and consequences of the terrorist attack in Moscow that killed scores of people at a concert.

He fears that Putin may use this horrific event as a pretext to step up his attacks on Ukraine and do to Ukraine what he did to Chechnya, which was to reduce the would-be breakaway region to a wasteland.

In his article, he recalls the Reichstag fire, which Hitler used as a pretext to initiate his dictatorship, crush democratic institutions, and round up dissidents.

He draws other analogies of leaders who were warned of pending catastrophes, but chose to ignore the warnings in order to solidify their hold on the population and secure their power.

In that group, he includes President George W. Bush, who ignored warnings about 9/11, and Benjamin Netanyahu, who ignored warnings about a likely attack by Hamas from the Gaza Strip. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has written about the IDF “spotters,” the young women who watched activity at the Gaza border and warned their superiors about the military exercises they observed; they were ignored. Almost every one of these unarmed 18-and 19-year-old women were killed or taken hostage.

Hartmann wrote:

Like Hitler, Netanyahu, and Bush all did, Putin just claimed that up is down, that the terrorist attack he knew was coming was an unprovoked surprise, and that it came from Ukraine, not ISIS-K…

Friday, a group of ISIS extremists claimed credit for the attack on a Moscow theater that killed at least 133 people and left the building a smoldering ruin. But Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his public comments today, didn’t mention ISIS-K: instead, he placed the blame on Ukraine….

We’ve seen this movie before, both here, in Israel, and Germany, and it never ends well…

Ukraine, of course, has denied any involvement or knowledge of the attack. But don’t be surprised if Putin uses this as an excuse to massively bomb Kiev the way he utterly destroyed Grozny the capital of Chechnya, to subdue that nation. The attacks could begin as early as this coming week.

If that happens, it could provoke a stronger response from EU countries who see Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Moldova as being next on Putin’s menu: both he and his spokesmen have already said as much. 

And that could lead to a major escalation of the Ukraine war beyond the borders of Ukraine and into Poland or the Baltics, triggering Nato’s Article 5 mutual defense provision, which would instantaneously draw the US directly into the conflict.

All because Republicans have convinced Putin that they can prevent further US aid, so he believes now is a good time to use the time-tested “pretext of an unexpected attack” strategy to go from a “military operation” to an all-out war. 

In fact, just yesterday afternoon his official spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that the country is now officially “at war.”

That Ukrainian conflict, particularly if Putin-aligned Republicans like Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, Mark Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc. are able to continue to prevent the US from helping Ukraine push Russia into a stalemate, could make China’s dictator Xi Jinping think it’s a great time to attack Taiwan.

And that, particularly since we recently stationed troops on Taiwanese territory, throws us straight into WWIII, regardless of Republican obstructionism and isolationist rhetoric.

I hope I’m wrong. Praying, frankly, that I’m wrong.

Categories Corruption, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, History, International, Lies

Some of Trump’s Biggest Failures in the Business World

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2024 //
9

This is a video listing some of Trump’s biggest business failures.

What’s especially amusing about the video is the archival footage of Trump, boasting about the success of a venture he just launched and praising himself for his latest venture. It’s the best, the most, the greatest. Then it goes bust. As you watch, you realize that his greatest talent is as a pitchman, the guy who gets you to buy or invest in his latest moneymaking scheme. He is the guy selling snake oil to cure everything that ails you. They did not include “Trump University,” surely a major fraud and a financial disaster. Trump claimed that those who enrolled in his online “university” would learn how to get rich, learning his secrets. He hoodwinked widows and vets. Trump was ordered to repay $25 million to people who registered for his fake university.

Categories Character, Elections, Ethics, Failure, Fake, Fraud, Humor, Trump

North Carolina: Court of Appeals Rejects Removal of Confederate Monument

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2024 //
32

The North Carolina NAACP petitioned the state courts to remove a Confederate statue from the front of the Alamance County courthouse.

The News & Observer reported:

An appeals court has rejected the NAACP’s arguments for removing the Confederate monument standing outside the Alamance County courthouse, citing state law that prohibits its removal.

Both the state and Alamance branches of the civil rights group filed suit in 2021, arguing that the 30-foot rebel soldier’s statue is an enduring symbol of white supremacy and should be relocated to a “historically appropriate location.”

The suit followed a nationwide string of protests that saw Confederate statues pulled down in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, along with numerous Black Lives Matter protests in downtown Graham, including one in 2020 that saw demonstrators pepper-sprayed during a march to the polls.

In their lawsuit, lawyers for the NAACP argued that the monument in Graham violates the state Constitution by ”maintaining and protecting a symbol of white supremacy in front of an active courthouse.”

They further argued that Alamance officials kept the statue in its place out of a spirit of discrimination, which would violate the state’s equal-protection clause.

But the court brushed these arguments aside by invoking the Monuments Protection Law passed by the General Assembly in 2015.

“The record conclusively shows that the Monument is a monument located on public property which commemorates military service that is part of North Carolina’s history,” read the N.C. Appeals Court’s decision. “In so concluding, we note our federal government recognizes that service in the Confederate Army qualifies as “military service. … We conclude that, under the Monument Protection Law, (Alamance County and its commissioners) lack authority to remove the Monument.”

Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/article286861880.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Bigotry, History, North Carolina, Racism

The Atlantic: Private Equity Eyes Child-Care Industry as Profit Center

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2024 //
7

As the research has built up on the value of early childhood education, more states are directing money towards expanding access. Wherever money flows, the private equity industry turns its gaze and seeks to do what it does best: privatize and profit. In this age, private equity figures out how to maximize profit from services that used to be public.

The Atlantic has a story about private equity’s interest in childcare.

Last June, years of organizing in Vermont paid off when the state’s House and Senate passed landmark legislation—overriding a governor’s earlier veto—that invests $125 million a year into its child-care system. The bill expanded eligibility for state assistance to 575 percent of the federal poverty level, meaning that more than 7,000 new families are expected to receive money for child-care expenses. Funding will also become available to help day-care centers recruit and retain teachers and expand capacity; centers will also receive additional money for providing nonstandard hours of care.

But now advocates are worried that the wrong people stand to benefit from the program’s generosity. Any time there is a windfall of public money, with few strings attached, unintended consequences are nearly certain to follow. Thanks to the new law, more Vermont families will have more to spend on child care, and centers will receive additional money without explicit rules around how to spend it. Both of those facts will make child care an attractive target for private-equity groups looking for an industry with lots of incoming revenue.

Private equity’s interest in child care has been growing in recent years. “While there has been corporate for-profit child care since the 1970s, private equity only got in starting in the early 2000s,” Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow who studies early childhood education at the nonpartisan think tank Capita, told me. Now four of the top five for-profit child-care chains—KinderCare, Learning Care Group, the Goddard School, and Primrose Schools—are controlled by private-equity funds, and private-equity-backed centers represent 10 to 12 percent of the market.

Private investors are intrigued by child care for the same reasons they became interested in nursing homes and other health-care services: intense demand, government money, and relatively low start-up costs. “Their goal is not long-term sustainability; their goal is to try to turn a profit,” Haspel said.

Private equity’s foray into child care could go a number of ways, but its introduction has largely not worked out well for other sectors—and certainly not for many people who rely on those sectors’ services. In his book, Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, Brendan Ballou, who investigated private-equity firms at the Department of Justice, posits that the private-equity business model has three basic problems. First, these firms buy a business with the intention of flipping it for a profit, not long-term sustainability, meaning that they are trying to maximize value in the short term and are less likely to invest in staff or facilities. Second, they tend to load businesses up with debt and extract a lot of fees, such as charging child-care providers for the privilege of being managed by the firm. And perhaps most important, their business structure insulates firms from liability.

In 2009, Annie Salley, a resident of a nursing-home chain purchased by the private-equity group Carlyle, died after an injury she sustained while going to the bathroom. Her family sued Carlyle, but a judge dismissed the case after the firm argued that it didn’t own the chain—instead, it said it advised a series of investment funds, such as Carlyle Partners V MC, L.P., that were the lone shareholders in the chain. Children get hurt in child care; children occasionally go missing from a care facility; every year, some children die in day cares. If private-equity firms can structure their relationship to day-care centers as they have nursing homes, families may have little recourse should they encounter a serious problem.

Though private-equity-backed child-care providers can—and often do—offer good services to families, their business model can also prove ruinous. In other sectors, private-equity groups have been notorious for extracting exorbitant fees from businesses they’ve acquired in leveraged buyouts; when they’ve had a chance to raise wages for workers or pay down their private-equity debts, they’ve regularly opted for the latter. Although Vermont’s bill sought to improve the wages of educators, it does not include a salary floor—which means that money that flows into centers may not necessarily go directly to staff—and without such a safeguard, what is stopping outside firms from taking the first, significant cut?

Miriam Calderón, the chief policy officer at Zero to Three, a nonprofit focused on babies, toddlers, and their families, hopes federal lawmakers consider these concerns as they begin to reimagine the federal footprint in child care. Calderón worked in the Biden administration during its first year and helped conceive the early-childhood-education components of the Build Back Better Act, which would have established a child-care entitlement program for a majority of families. Congress isn’t moving on the issue now, but Calderón and advocates told me it would be foolish to wait until Congress was working again to think about protections around public dollars. Private-equity-backed chains will likely continue to grow as a share of the market, and if they gain too much of it, they would have the power to fight back against policies that ensure that staff are fairly compensated and families aren’t paying even more exorbitant fees than they already are. “The work now is to really think through the right guardrails and the right policies so when we get to a moment, again, we’re ready,” Calderón said.

Open the link to finish the article. Or subscribe to The Atlantic.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit

NYC: Charter School of Dr. Steve Perry and Rapper “Diddy” Mired in Controversy

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2024 //
6

The Capital Prep Charter chain was created by Dr. Steve Perry. Dr. Perry hates teachers’ unions. He boasts that all the students in his charters graduate and go to college. His chain won the Yass Prize as a semi-finalist for its accomplishments. Jeff Yass is a billionaire in Pennsylvania who supports Trump, opposes abortion, and funds charter schools and vouchers. You may recall that Yass gave Texas Governor Greg Abbott $6 million to pass voucher legislation.

Capital Prep in Harlem is a Perry school that had the partnership and financial support of rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs. Things are not going so well for the students.

Students and families affiliated with Capital Prep, co-founded by Diddy, claim the entertainment mogul’s charter school did a disservice to children who attended.

Diddy co-launched the East Harlem school with Dr. Steve Perry in 2016, and in 2018 pledged $1 million for its expansion into the Bronx. However, last November Capital Prep cut ties with him amid his ongoing sexual assault lawsuits. 

Now adding to the mounting controversy around the Bad Boy Records founder, a new report from The Cut reveals many issues with Capital Prep, including the accusation that Diddy had no involvement with the school beyond photo ops, guest appearances, and the school’s grand opening in 2016.

Fourteen sources told The Cut about alleged frequent violence at Capital Prep, along with “unstable” leadership, and frequent teacher resignation. These issues were most apparent at the height of the pandemic during both virtual learning and when students, including those who were unhoused, returned for in-person classes in 2021. According to The Cut, teachers began to not show up for virtual classes, and by the end of 2020, 80 percent of teachers had left Capital Prep altogether.

When students did return to school after quarantine, some were enrolled in courses they had previously taken, or were “sitting in the cafeteria receiving no instruction for hours.” Dysfunction among teachers reflected on the student body, especially upperclassmen who were unable to transfer their credits or enroll in college due to ineligible transcripts.

“Darnell’s transcripts had classes he’d never taken, passing classes that he never took, failing classes that he was never in,” one parent, Shirley Payne, said about inaccuracies found on her son’s transcripts.

“I thought if Diddy is funding and attaching his name to something, it would be run very tightly, that he was going to give our kids what he didn’t have at that age,” parent Shakemia Harris said. Harris’ daughter Madison was enrolled at Capital Prep as an 11-year-old in 2017.

In addition to the many academic issues, violence during the school day was reportedly ongoing. Fights were rampant when the school nearly doubled in size, expanding to include a tenth grade, and again when Capital Prep relocated to 129th and Madison. Not only was the area more violent than its previous East 104th Street address, but Capital Prep began locking out students who were late, ultimately causing families to protest the disorderly conditions. In addition it violence between students, cops were called on students for things like uniform violations.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Hoax, New York City

Bob Shepherd: Gayle Green on How to Make a Human

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2024 //
74

Bob Shepherd, author, editor, assessment developer, story-teller, and teacher, read a book that he loved. He hopes—and I hope—that you will love it too.

He writes:

Like much of Europe between 1939 and 1945, education in the United States, at every level, is now under occupation. The occupation is led by Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation and abetted by countless collaborators like those paid by Gates to create the puerile and failed Common Core (which was not core—that is, central, key, or foundational—and was common only in the sense of being vulgar. The bean counting under the occupation via its demonstrably invalid, pseudoscientific testing regime has made of schooling in the U.S. a diminished thing, with debased and devolved test preppy curricula (teaching materials) and pedagogy (teaching methods).

In the midst of this, Gayle Greene, a renowned Shakespeare scholar and Professor Emerita at Scripps University, has engaged in some delightful bomb throwing for the Resistance. Her weapon? A new book called Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm.

OK. Maybe I’ve pushed the occupation/resistance metaphor to the edge of its usefulness. Let’s try another. If Gates’s test-and-punish movement, ludicrously called “Education Reform,” is a metastasizing cancer on our educational system, and it is, then Professor Greene’s book is a prescription for how to reverse course and then practice prevention to end the stultification of education and keep it from coming back. The book is a full-throated defense of the Liberal Arts and of traditional, humane, in-person, discussion-based education in a time when Liberal Arts schools and programs are being more than decimated, are being damned-near destroyed by bean counters and champions of ed tech. Here’s the beauty and value of this book: contra the “Reformers,” Greene details the extraordinary benefits of the broad, liberal educations that built in the United States people capable of creating the most powerful, vibrant, and diverse economy in history. She makes the case (I know. It’s bizarre that one would have to) for not taking a wrecking ball to what has worked. And best of all, she does so not at some high level of abstraction, but backs up any generalizations with concrete, vivid, fascinating, moving, delightful examples from her classrooms. How do you build a world-class human? Well, you give him or her the benefits of a broad, humane, liberal arts education that confers judgment, wisdom, vision, and generosity. Greene shows us, from her own classes over three decades, exactly how that happens.

And she shows us how, under the “standards”-and-testing occupation, all that is being lost.

Years ago, I knew a fellow who retired after a lucrative, successful career. But a couple months later, he was back at his old job. I asked him why he had decided not simply to enjoy his retirement. He certainly had the money to do so.

“Well, Bob,” he said, “there’s only so much playing solitaire one can do.”

I found this answer depressing. I wondered if it were the case that over the years, the fellow had given so much time to work that when he no longer had that to occupy him, he was bored to tears. Had he not built up the internal resources he needed to keep himself happy and engaged ON HIS OWN? Greene quotes, in her book, Judith Shapiro, former president of Barnard College, saying, “You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.” The French novelist Honoré de Balzac put it this way: “The cultured man is never bored.” Humane learning leads to engagement with ideas and with the world, to fulfillment, to flourishing over a lifetime, to what the ancient Greeks calledeudaimonia—wellness of spirit. Kinda important, that.

In a time when Gates and his minions, including his impressive collection of political and bureaucratic action figures and bobble-head dolls, are arguing that colleges should become worker factories and do away with programs and requirements not directly related to particular jobs, it turns out that the people happiest in their jobs are ones with well-rounded liberal arts educations, and are the ones who are best at what they do. And it turns out that people taught how to read and think and communicate and be creative and flexible, people who gain a broad base of knowledge of sciences, history, mathematics, arts, literature, and philosophy, are self-directed learners who can figure out what they need to know in a particular situation and acquire that knowledge. Philosophy students turn out to be great lawyers, doctors, politicians, and political operatives. Traditional liberal arts instruction creates intrinsically motivated people.

All this and more about the value of liberal arts education Professor Greene makes abundantly clear, and she does so in prose that is sometimes witty, sometimes hilarious, sometimes annoyed, sometimes incredulous (as in, “I can’t believe I even have to protest this shit”); always engaging, human and humane, compassionate, wise, authentic/real; and often profound. As much memoir as polemic, the book is a delight to read in addition to being important politically and culturally.

Gates and his ilk, little men with big money to throw around, look at the liberal arts and don’t see any immediate application to, say, writing code in Python or figuring out how many pallets per hour a warehouse can move. What could possibly be the value of reading Gilgamesh and Lear? Well, what one encounters in these is the familiar in the unfamiliar. As I have said numerous times elsewhere, all real learning is unlearning. You have to step through the wardrobe or fall down the rabbit hole or pass through the portal in the space/time continuum to a place beyond your interpellations, beyond the collective fantasies that go by the name of common sense. Real learning requires a period of estrangement from the familiar. You return to find the ordinary transmuted and wondrous and replete with possibility. You become a flexible, creative thinker. You see the world anew, as on the first day of creation, as though for the first time. Vietnam Veterans would often say, “You wouldn’t know because you weren’t there, man.” Well, people who haven’t had those experiences via liberal arts educations don’t know this because they haven’t been there, man.

Gayle Greene has spent a lifetime, Maria Sabina-like, guiding young people through such experiences. Her classroom trip reports alone are worth your time and the modest price of this book. At one point, Professor Greene rifs on the meaning of the word bounty. This is a book by a bounteous mind/spirit about the bountifulness of her beloved liberal arts. Go ahead. Buy it. Treat yourself.  

Categories Creativity, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Joy, Literature, Real Education

Why You Must See “The Program” on Netflix

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2024 //
27

One of the top-rated shows on Netflix is The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping.

It’s a three-part docuseries that tells the story of the abuse suffered by young people sent to a facility for troubled teens in upstate New York called the Academy at Ivy Ridge. It was produced by a young woman who spent time there, accompanied by other of the program’s unwilling participants.

The facility, now closed, is part of a national chain of similar ones. The brochure advertises a camp-like atmosphere, but once there, the teens are not allowed to speak to one another or to go outside. They are incarcerated in a brutal prison where they experience brainwashing and physical and mental abuse.

When they try to tell their parents the truth, they are labeled manipulative liars.

The producer was taken from her home at 3 am in handcuffs, with her parents’ permission.

When boys break a rule—of which there are many—they are beaten by staff members.

If some of this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because it sounds like a “no-excuses” school.

It turns out that Ivy Ridge is staffed by untrained, uncertified locals working for minimum wage. The school is part of a Utah-based organization called the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP). It’s a very profitable business.

As the “troubled teen” industry has grown, it’s become politically powerful and fights efforts at regulation.

This expose is very important. You should see it.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Discipline, Education Industry, Evil, Fake, Fraud

Deconstructing Trump’s Fascist Speech: Victim, Martyr, Liar

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2024 //
23

Anand Giridharadas is a brilliant thinker who has a blog called The Ink. In his latest post, he prints whole sections of Trump’s incendiary campaign speech in Vandalia, Ohio, and gives a close reading to his language. (Something oddly appropriate about the location since Trump is the King of Vandals.)

Anand’s parsing of Trump’s words is incisive. I’m posting only part of it, and Anand has made this post available for free. I urge you to open the link and read it all.

He writes:

Former President Donald Trump’s fascist performance art this past weekend in Vandalia, Ohio, was ostensibly a stump speech for someone else. But you could be forgiven for forgetting that. In what was effectively his first real rally since clinching the GOP nomination, Trump offered a grim vision of America and a patchwork of unhinged tirades against his usual targets. Yet there was more to it than that.

There is little value in fact-checking the former president’s words, given that the great majority of them bore so little relationship to reality that you quickly realize their purpose could only be to destabilize reality altogether. They simply restate dozens of well-worn lies, from birtherism up through the Big Lie, interspersed with a smattering of playground insults, projection, and a stew of misunderstood economic schemes and xenophobic delusions that do the work of standing in for policy ideas. This is a hole of lies that cannot be filled with facts.

But that doesn’t mean the speech wasn’t worth paying attention to. And, being of the reading sort, we suggest there is value in reading the text, not just rage-consuming the viral videos everyone has been rehashing.

We think all Americans need to take Trump’s speech both seriously and literally as the what-you-see-is-what-you’ll-get messaging of a would-be dictator. These are things that are actually being said, in public, by a person who has already occupied the world’s most powerful position and seeks to occupy it again. It’s an advertisement for autocracy that — give it this at least — complies with the notion of truth in advertising. And as Masha Gessen has reminded us, “Rule no. 1 is to listen to and believe the autocrat.”

What we look at below is how Trump’s rhetorical performance works, how it functions. In many of these examples, the “meaning” isn’t important, and that’s why the goal here isn’t to question his command of the facts. He’s making these statements without much pretense to knowing the facts in the first place; rather, he’s looking for maximum emotional impact. He fights entirely on the battleground of emotion, and that, Ruth Ben-Ghiat has reminded us, is pretty much what autocrats have always done. 

Trump’s language here — from stabs in the back to dystopian visions of foreign nations seeking to flood the American body politic with their unwanted criminals — has plenty of precedent in the words of the strongmen of the past and present. He goes out of his way to praise Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, perhaps returning thefavor for Orban’s snub of the sitting U.S. government on his recent visit to the U.S. 

And it’s the fact that this speech follows that well-established playbook that demands we pay attention. His words may be murky. What he plans to do to us is clear.

We’ve made this piece free and open to all. We hope it will make you think about these critical issues in new ways, and give you a glimpse of the posts that go out to our supporting subscribers each week. We encourage you to join our community, and to share our work with yours! And we have a rare special offer to entice you: 20% off forever!

The Victim King

Because I’m being indicted for you and never forget our enemies want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom.

I’m being persecuted. I think more than anybody, but who the hell knows? You know, all my life…you’ve heard of Andrew Jackson. He was actually a great general and a very good president. They say that he was persecuted as president more than anybody else. Second was Abraham Lincoln. This is just what they said. This is in the history books. They were brutal. Andrew Jackson’s wife actually died over it, they say, died of a broken heart, but she died over it. He was never quite the same.

But they say Andrew Jackson, they say Abraham Lincoln was second, but he had a, you know, in all fairness, he did have a civil war. So you would think that would cause a problem, right? So you could understand it. But nobody comes close to Trump. 

Elementary school historical analysis aside, this passage is a reminder that, more than anything, Trump relishes playing the role of the Victim King. He’s casting attacks on him as attacks on his subjects, and valiantly stepping into the breach to block the slings and arrows so his loyal supporters won’t suffer. It’s part of the personalization of leadership that’s always been at the center of cults of personality — the devotional, movement-building side of authoritarianism.

The notion that the leader acts as both weapon and human shield is a central rhetorical tool in the arsenal of autocrats. And of course he’s done this better — or maybe just “more” — than anybody. More than Lincoln; more than Jackson. 

Trump’s victimhood here is absolute. He’s devoted himself entirely to protecting his flock. An attack on him is an attack on them; a win for him a win for them.

We dig here more deeply into Trump’s pursuit of absolute power through his performance of weakness.

The Horst Wessel song

And you see the spirit from the hostages, and that’s what they are, is hostages. They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly. And you know that. And everybody knows that. And we’re going to be working on that soon. The first day we get into office, we’re going to save our country, and we’re going to work with the people to treat those unbelievable patriots, and they were unbelievable patriots and are. You see the spirit, this cheering. They’re cheering while they’re doing that. And they did that in prison. And it’s a disgrace, in my opinion. 

Here Trump returns the favor, in a sense, to his shock troops. The speech opened with a playback of “Justice for All,” the MAGA fundraising release by the “J6 Prison Choir” that interpolates Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance over a backing track of the inmates singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” 

The track is meant as a legal defense effort for the January 6 insurrectionists, but the role it plays here is to define those insurrectionists as true patriots, and to link Trump’s own persecution with that endured by his most devoted followers — the ones who’ve demonstrated their willingness to go into battle on his account. It’s a barter of martyrdoms.

This, as with the rest of the rhetoric here, is a classic authoritarian strategy. If you consider the insurrectionists cast in the role of Sturmabteilung(“SA,” the original paramilitary forces of the Nazi Party) martyr Horst Wessel (Ashli Babbitt specifically, though the group as a whole plays the same part generally here), this patriotic mashup recalls the Nazi anthem.

The Big Lie

I happen to think we won most of the country. You want to know the truth. If the voting…if the voting were real, I actually think we won most of the country.

Central to Trump’s identity is infallibility, and, given that, his mass popularity is without question. Again, this is classic autocratic positioning. Thus his obsessions with ratings, with polls, with casting primary victories that were never in doubt as fantastic triumphs.

Jokes about huge numbers aside (and the speech is rife with riffs on poll results), there is simply no way that he could have lost a legitimate electoral contest, and any such contest he might have lost would be, by definition, illegitimate. One need only look to Vladimir Putin’s “landslide” victory this week for an example of the way elections function in an authoritarian state.

The Big Lie is Trump’s truth, and it’s not just a boast. It’s key to the story he’s trying desperately to sell to the crowd, the story of a guy who can’t lose.

I was asking Jim Jordan about it because he was commenting that we have the largest crowds in the history of politics. Nobody comes close. If Ronald Reagan came to a place called Dayton, Ohio — have you heard of it? If he came to Dayton, Ohio, honestly, J.D., if he had three or 400 people in a ballroom, that would be great. We get 25-30,000 people for a small rally…We had 88,000 people show up in South Carolina.

An addendum: In his bid for recognition as the greatest of all Republicans, Trump is even willing to throw Ronald Reagan under the bus if it helps make the case.

Not even people

They’re very smart, very streetwise. And I would do the same thing. If I had prisons that were teeming with MS-13 and all sorts of people that they’ve got to take care of for the next 50 years, right? Young people, they’re in jail for years. If you call them people, I don’t know if you call them people. In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say…

We have so many people being hurt so badly and being killed. They’re sending their prisoners to see us. They’re sending and they’re bringing them right to the border and they’re dropping them off and we’re allowing them to come in. And these are tougher than anybody we’ve got in the country. These are hardened criminals. And we’ve got hundreds of thousands of them. 

If you take Trump at his word here — and we think you should — the leaders of countries around the world are conspiring to conduct an organized invasion, deploying their criminals to the United States in order to submerge it in violence. On one level, there’s nothing here but racism and xenophobia, but this works on the level of the conspiratorial ideas of mysterious foreign threats to the body politic that have long been part and parcel of the autocrat’s appeal. 

Migrants, in this account, aren’t fleeing refugees or people looking for a better life against all odds, but have been mobilized and directed against the U.S., a superhuman and yet subhuman army, “dropped off” by a shadowy cabal of foreign interests who aren’t content merely to sell us cheaper cars and fentanyl precursors.

Just insert “bankers” or “Jews” or “capitalist roaders” or even “globalists” here and you’re on the right track towards understanding what Trump’s trying to do.

Migrant crime

These are the roughest people you’ve ever seen. You know, now we have a new form of crime. I call it Biden migrant crime, but it’s too long. So let’s just call it migrant crime. We have a new category. You know, you have vicious crimes. You have violent crimes. You have all these. Now we have migrant crimes, and they’re rough. They’re rough. And it’s going to double up. And you see what’s happening. 

You know, throughout the world right now, I don’t know if you know this. Crime is way, way down. You know why? Because they sent us their criminals. That’s why. It’s true. It’s true. They sent, you know, Venezuela is down 66 percent because they sent us their gang members and gangsters. They sent us their drug dealers and their murderers. They’re all coming into our country. And Venezuela now, their crime is down 66 percent.

The supposed statistics here are just a “gish gallop,” in which the speaker simply overwhelms the opponent (or in this case the audience) with a flurry of inaccurate statements, knowing that the very attempt to correct them will both derail any reasonable argument and delay a response until the time has run out.

But this, again, is the story of the alien threat, here described as entering at the behest of their domestic collaborator, Joe Biden. It’s a “stab-in-the-back” accusation (there are several in the speech), in which a leader is identified as a secret traitor, betraying the nation to foreign interests.

The truth is that crime rates are down worldwide, and these statistics are pulled out of the air. The fear people have of the loss of control of the border, and of what it means to be “American” is real, however — even if Trump’s helped in its creation — and that’s what he’s playing to so effectively.

Please open the link and continue reading this insightful exegesis of Trump’s rhetoric. He is a talented orator. So was Hitler.

Categories Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fascism, Fraud, Ignorance, Immigration, Lies, Trump

Hindu “Statesman” Will Move to Florida if DeSantis Signs the Bill to Let Him Guide Students

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2024 //
14

The legislature in Florida passed a bill to allow school districts to hire religious chaplains to help students in need of counseling. The bill awaits DeSantis’ signature. Pastors, priests, imams, ministers, rabbis, and other spiritual counselors are standing by.

The Miami Herald reports:

Gov. Ron DeSantis has yet to sign a bill that would allow chaplains to offer counseling in public schools, but one colorful religious figure says he is already eager to volunteer.

He’s a self-described “Hindu statesman” from Nevada who says he would like to bring “the wisdom of ancient Sanskrit scriptures” to students — perhaps not exactly what Florida lawmakers had in mind when they approved a bill that supporters tout as a way to make up for a shortage of mental health counselors in many schools.

The offer from Rajan Zed, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, may amount to just his latest effort to raise his organization’s profile, but it also underlines concerns from critics. Mainly, that the bill’s vague definition of “counseling” will invite religious groups — whether they are Hindu, Christian or otherwise — to use it as a door to teaching their beliefs in secular school systems.

Florida has a shortage of guidance counselors, and the religious chaplains are supposed to replace the missing counselors.

“This is the beginning … of them trying to implement religion in some type of capacity back into our schools,” said Sen. Shevrin D. “Shev” Jones, D-Miami Gardens, referring to lawmakers who support the bill. “It just opens up the gate for other things.”

Jones, whose father is a pastor, said he’s concerned that the bill may lead to some schools allowing chaplains to preach to students who may not hold the same beliefs, putting them in uncomfortable situations. 

“In the words of one of my colleagues on the floor, ‘We need God back in our schools.’ But what about the child who doesn’t believe in God? What if some of the chaplains don’t resonate with the lives of those kids?” Jones said. 

He used an example of a chaplain dealing with an LGBTQ child or a child battling depression. “Has the chaplain been trained enough? Once they hear those concerns, where do they direct that child to go to?”

Categories DeSantis, Florida, Religion, Separation of church and state
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