Nearly 17,000 people may have died after taking hydroxycholoroquine during the first wave of Covid-19, according to a study by French researchers.
The anti-malaria drug was prescribed to some patients hospitalized with Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits,” the researchers point out in their paper, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.
Now, researchers have estimated that some 16,990 people in six countries — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. — may have died as a result.
That figure stems from a study published in the Nature scientific journal in 2021 which reported an 11 percent increase in the mortality rate, linked to its prescription against Covid-19, because of the potential adverse effects like heart rhythm disorders, and its use instead of other effective treatments.
Researchers from universities in Lyon, France, and Québec, Canada, used that figure to analyze hospitalization data for Covid in each of the six countries, exposure to hydroxychloroquine and the increase in the relative risk of death linked to the drug.
As President, Trump recommended the drug and said, “What do you have to lose? Take it.”
One of the most memorable books I have read is The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. They argue that the happiest societies are the ones with the most equality. If this is true, and the authors persuaded me that it is, then our economic policies should aim to reduce income inequality and wealth inequality. But we have gone in the other direction, with government policy increasing inequality. Lobbyists for the 1% have funded political campaigns to lower their taxes, gut unions, and protect inherited wealth. Their campaigns on the surface are about culture war issues (abortion, drugs, race, gay rights), but what they are really promoting are tax cuts for the rich.
As productivity continued to rise, due to increasing automation and better technology, so too would everyone’s wages. Or so went the theory.
The glue holding this logic together was the then-top marginal income tax rate. In 1963, just before the Time article was written, the top marginal income tax rate was 90%. What that did was encourage CEOs to keep more money in their businesses: to invest in new technology, to pay their workers more, to hire new workers and expand.
After all, what’s the point of sucking millions and millions of dollars out of your business if it’s going to be taxed at 90% (or even the 74% that President Lyndon Johnson lowered it to in 1966)?
According to this line of reasoning, if businesses were suddenly to become way more profitable and efficient thanks to automation, then that money would flow throughout the business—raising everyone’s standard of living and increasing everyone’s leisure time, from the CEO to the janitor.
But when Reagan dropped that top tax rate down to 28%, everything changed. Now, as businesses became far more profitable, there was a far greater incentive for CEOs to pull those profits out of the company and pocket them, because they were suddenly paying an incredibly low tax rate.
And that’s exactly what they did.
All those new profits, thanks to automation, that were supposed to go to everyone, giving us all bigger paychecks and more time off, went to the top.
Suddenly, the symmetry in the productivity/wages chart broke down. Productivity continued increasing, since technology continued improving, and revenues and profits kept increasing with it.
But wages stayed flat.
And, again, since greater and greater profits could be sucked out of the company and taxed at lower levels, there was no incentive to reduce the number of hours everyone had to work.
In the 1950s, before that Time magazine article predicting the Leisure Society was written, the average American working in manufacturing put in about 42 hours of work a week. Today, the average American working in manufacturing puts in about 40 hours of work a week. This means that even though productivity has increased 400% since 1950, Americans in manufacturing are working, on average, only two fewer hours a week.
If productivity is four times higher today than in 1950, then Americans should be able to work four times less, or just 10 hours a week, to afford the same 1950s lifestyle when a family of four could get by on just one paycheck, own a home, own a car, put their kids through school, take a vacation every now and then, and retire comfortably.
That’s the definition of the Leisure Society: 10 hours of work a week, and the rest of the time spent with family, with travel, with creativity, with whatever you want. And if our tax laws and our corporate anti-monopoly laws that restrained the worst corporate bad behavior had stayed the same as they were in 1966, we might well be either working 10 hours a week for around $50,000 a year in income, or working 40-hour weeks for over $200,000 a year.
But all of this was washed away by the Reagan tax cuts. Those trillions of dollars that would have gone to workers? They went into the estates and stock portfolios of the top 1%. Combine this with Reagan’s brutal crackdown on striking PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) members that kicked off a three-decades-long assault on another substantial pillar of the middle class—organized labor—and life today is anything but leisurely for working people in America.
More Unequal than Rome
Instead of leisure, working people got feudalism.
From 1947 to 1981, all classes of Americans saw their incomes grow together; as a result of the Reagan tax cuts, that era ended and a new era of Reaganomics began. Since then, only the wealthiest among us have gotten rich from economic boom times.
Today, workers’ wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low. Yet, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high.
The top 1% of Americans own 40% of the nation’s wealth. In fact, just 4 Americans own more wealth than 150 million other Americans combined, and they pay lower taxes than anybody in the bottom half of American families economically.30
Walmart, Inc., the world’s largest private employer, personifies this inequality best. It’s a corporation that in 2011 gained more revenue than any other corporation in America. It raked in $16.4 billion in profits. It pays its employees minimum wage.
And the Walmart heirs, the Walton family, who occupy positions six through nine on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list, own roughly $100 billion in wealth, which is more than the bottom 40% of Americans combined. The average Walmart employee would have to work 76 million 40-hour weeks to have as much wealth as one Walmart heir.
Through some interesting historical analysis, historians Walter Scheidel and Steven Friesen calculated that inequality in America today is worse than what was seen during the Roman era.31 Thus the top 1%, just like the Roman emperors, got their Leisure Society, and they’ve used their financial power to capture the US government to protect their Leisure Society.
If you are or ever were a teacher, this story will make you happy and proud of your profession. Kristen A. Graham, a veteran education reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, interviewed the teacher who opened up a new world for Cherelle Parker, the new Mayor of Philadelphia.
Graham writes:
When Cherelle Parker stood outside her Mount Airy polling place on Election Day, speaking emotionally about how she rose to the brink of becoming Philadelphia’s 100th mayor, she shouted out the village that got her there: her single, teenage mother, her political godmothers.
And Jeanette Jimenez, her high school English teacher.
“She was the one who told me that my life was a real live textbook case study on how you turn pain into power, and she told me to write about it,” Parker said. That encouragement from her teacher helped Parker — who endured poverty and trauma during her childhood in West Oak Lane — win a citywide oratorical competition and start down a path that would culminate in her being elected the city’s first female mayor.
A reflection in Black literature
Stuffed in a corner of a jam-packed room on the second floor of Jimenez’s Bella Vista home is a time capsule of Parker’s high school years.
Here’s a poem the future mayor handwrote on now-yellowing loose-leaf paper, “I Dream a World.” Here are photographs. There’s the 1990 Parkway yearbook, in which Parker proclaims in the quote next to her photo that she wants “to help Black men and women of the future to unite and remember one nation under the groove.”
She first met Parker in the late 1980s at the Parkway program, an innovative Philadelphia School District high school model with campuses spread around the city.
Jimenez, Inquirer columnist Steve Lopez wrote in 1990, “believes there is a creative way to reach every student, no matter how poor the performance, how bad the attitude, how difficult the home life.” Every young person wants to learn, Jimenez believed, then and now.
ADVERTISEMENT
At first, Parker — whose mother died when she was 13, whose father was not a presence in her life, who was raised by her grandparents — was skeptical of Jimenez, who had a reputation for giving a lot of homework, and making students read a lot of books. At Parkway, students could choose which classes they took, and Parker shied away from Jimenez.
Parker was “spunky,” a standout in pink jumpsuits and long fingernails, Jimenez remembers. And, eventually, Parker was curious enough about what was happening in Jimenez’s classroom to find out more. Kids in Jimenez’s classes took so many trips to libraries and plays and elsewhere that Jimenez kept a permanent stash of tokens for their ventures.
“We acted out all the plays before we went,” Jimenez remembers. “The kids loved the opera more than the prom.”
It felt as if there were “sunshine coming out” of Jimenez’s room, Parker told the Daily News in 1990, and eventually, she wanted to “walk toward the light.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Jimenez had a vast classroom library. Parker began to dig in.
“I never said, ‘You can’t do that, you have to read Shakespeare,’” Jimenez said.
Jimenez had Shakespeare available, but she alsohad works by Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison and Sonia Sanchez. Although the district had banned The Color Purple at one point, Jimenez put into kids’ hands books in which they saw themselves.
It was For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf, by Ntozake Shange, that sparked a love of literature, of Black authors, Parker told The Inquirer in 1990.
ADVERTISEMENT
“She saw herself as the protagonist in those books. It’s what made her think she could do this,” said Jimenez, referring to Parker’s rise to power.
She made Connie Clayton cry
Parker had a loving family who did the best they could with limited resources, but her life was complicated, Jimenez said.
“She had a grandfather who was very sick that she took care of,” said Jimenez. “She needed somewhere else to go, physically and emotionally and mentally.”
ADVERTISEMENT
She found that, partly, in literature and in Jimenez.
“She calls me her white mother,” said Jimenez, who is still vigorous, voraciously intellectual and amusing at 81.
Jeanette Jimenez, a retired teacher who taught at Philadelphia’s Parkway Center City High School, among other schools, in her South Philadelphia home.Read moreJessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
Parker set her sights on the Philadelphia School District’s Black History Oratorical Contest.
Her first speech was “decent,” Jimenez said, “but it wasn’t good enough for me to put in the contest.”
Parker “was furious. I said no, and she didn’t take the no. She said, ‘I’m getting there,’” Jimenez said.
That “no” made Parker buckle down to write a speech that not only won the 1990 citywide competition, but also made then-Superintendent Constance E. Clayton weep.
Parker called it “Native Daughter,” a play on Richard Wright’s Native Son, and wrote about how Black literature inspired her to rise above her difficult life circumstances.
“I, Cherelle Parker, was a child that most people thought would never succeed,” a teenaged Parker wrote. “You know? They almost had me thinking the same thing.”
She won $1,000 and a trip to Senegal, but she also won something more: the attention of powerful adults, including City Councilmembers Augusta Clark and Marian Tasco, both of whom eventuallynourished her the way Jimenez did.
Parker initially hadn’t given much thought to college, but Jimenez and others encouraged her. Jimenezeven took Parker on a visit to Lincoln University to make sure she gained admission.
“I wasn’t chancing it, with kids, you never know if they are going to follow through,” said Jimenez. “We just sat at Lincoln because I thought they were the ones that would take her fastest.”
Know your audience
Jimenez grew up in South Philadelphia, raised by her Russian immigrant father, a photographer and architect. She graduated from Little Flower High School and Temple University, where fellow student Bill Cosby would practice jokes at Mitten Hall.
She thought she knew some things about teaching when she began working in Philadelphia, at Barratt Junior High in South Philadelphia. She was a white teacher teaching the Edgar Allen Poe poem “Annabel Lee,” describing a beautiful woman to her Black students as blond-haired and blue-eyed.
Her teacher colleague Lenore Johnson enlightened her.
“She said, ‘Have you looked at your audience?’ There was no course that taught you, know your audience,” Jimenez said.
It was a mistake she did not repeat. Throughout her career, at Barratt, and at Parkway, and at Bartram High, Jimenez responded to student interests, teaching about writing and literature and life in ways that kids responded to. Sometimes, that meant using rap to reach students. Sometimes, that meant stopping mid-lesson to ask her students whether they were bored, and course correcting if they were.
Retired from teaching nearly 25 years, Jimenez is still keenly interested in teaching and learning. She’s trying to pick up Russian, and she thinks it’s vital to discuss matters of race and institutional racism, and she worries about how social media is distorting people’s world views. She thinks small class sizes are necessary, and knows that if she were still teaching, she’d be using the recent Barbiemovie as a tool to explore contemporary issues.
Jimenez treasures mementos from Parker’s years as her student, but it’s not just relics of the mayor-elect that she keeps. There are the writings of a student who went on to become a college professor, the young woman Jimenez helped realize her dream of becoming a welder — now she’s a SEPTA supervisor.
“What I’m proud of is those people that I had that became their own true selves,” said Jimenez.
She counts Parker in thatcategory.
“My hope is that Cherelle will run the city as I run my classroom,” said Jimenez.
Jimenez is confident that Parker picked up the most important lessons she instilled in all her students: Everyone can learn. Know your audience. Find ways to inspire them. Value people’s authentic voices. Work hard.
“She has a great soul, a good brain, and the sense to surround herself with good people,” Jimenez said.
Donald Trump released a video portraying himself as a savior made by God to save the world. “God made Trump.”
If it weren’t so serious, it would be hilarious as he talks about how hard he works, from Dawn until past midnight. It was widely reported that he stayed in his residence until noon every day to watch FOX. That was known as “executive time.”
The piece focuses on goings-on surrounding “strict standardized testing and graduation requirements” in Florida, New York, and Louisiana.
If one offers even a cursory consideration of the legislative novelties foisted upon America’s K12 classrooms in recent decades, the red-and-blue “bizarre coalition” noted in the Politico title is not all that bizarre. Indeed, “coalition” of red and blue has introduced a lot of chaos into American education, including the pinnacle test-and-punish legislation, No Child Left Behind (the reauthorization of which was abandoned by Congress in 2007 because by then NCLB was seen as a political liability).
Red and blue also stood behind Common Core. Republican lawmakers were for it until they were against it, but former Florida governor and 2015 presidential hopeful Jeb Bush held onto Common Core but avoided calling it by its “poisonous” name on the 2015 campaign trail. “Rebrand” became the name of the game. Both national teachers unions accepted money from the Gates Foundation to promote it, then turned. Regarding Common Core backlash, Democratic secretary of ed Arne Duncan blamed “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
So, yeah, the “bizarre ” as it concerns modifying state standardized overtesting comes in the form of surprise at officials’ once sold on standardized testing even considering scaling back the testing.
The supposed reason for common standards and the NCLB-reworked, appendaged testing was to make students “ready for college and careers” and to make the US “globally competitive.”
Obama’s Race to the Top was little more than federal funding doled out for a Common Core fizzle.
Of course, at the official release of Common Core in June 2010, no one saw a pandemic coming ten years down the road, and it takes no test scores to know that the US has exceeded expectations for 2023 as concerns the state of our post-pandemic economy. And here is another important point: Nations worldwide must balance international competition with international cooperation.
It must be both.
I have yet to read any expert research crediting standardized testing in schools as contributing to post-pandemic economic recovery, for better or worse, for that matter.
I suspect that some of the Republican softening on standardized testing might reflect the rift in the party as moving away from the education agenda preferences of the likes of George and Jeb Bush. What’s fashionable now is the far-right purge of library books.
The library book purge central force is facing its own bad press as the Florida Republican power couple, Christian and Bridget Ziegler, are apparently living lives that are making the morality policing of Moms for Liberty, group that the Zieglers fiscally and politically enabled, difficult to carry off.
You know you’re in a bad spot when the phone video of you (top-ranking conservative fire-breather) having sex with a woman who is not your wife (but whom your wife also had sex with in a previous three-way) is the best way you have to counter the rape charge brought by that woman. And you stiff-neckedly refuse to resign from your conservative perch. And so does your wife.
One big reason to feel hopeful about the future is that our youth seem to have figured out how to organize for change. After the massacre of students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, survivors organized a huge protest demanding gun control. They haven’t won so far but they are not likely to give up.
The grownups are not doing enough to address climate change, and Republicans keep insisting that climate change is a hoax.
In June 2023, the hottest June ever recorded in a summer that would break global heat records, 16 young people walked into a courthouse in Helena, Montana, and insisted that they had the right to a stable climate.
The moment was, in the United States, unprecedented.
For years, youth around the world had been suing governments – state, regional, federal – and demanding more action by policymakers to address what scientists worldwide agree is an environmental crisis directly caused by human behavior. By 2022 there had been 34 global climate cases brought on behalf of plaintiffs ages 25 and younger – part of a global climate litigation explosion, according to Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
In the courtroom that day, the young people were asking not for any financial reward, but for the government of Montana to uphold its Constitution, one of a handful in the U.S. that explicitly protects both current and future citizens’ right to a healthful environment. There was Rikki Held, the oldest of the Montana youth plaintiffs at 22, whose name was on the lawsuit and whose family’s ranch was increasingly threatened by fires and floods. There were Lander and Badge Busse, teenage brothers whose schoolmates taunted them about this case, but who’d decided they needed to be part of this lawsuit to protect the wilderness where they loved to fish and hunt. And there was Grace Gibson-Snyder, a Missoula 19-year-old. Her ancestors had come to this big-sky state in a covered wagon. But Ms. Gibson-Snyder worried about whether this land would be habitable for her own children – if she felt it were morally appropriate to have any. She wore her favorite boots to trial, for good luck.
And in some places, young people had begun to make headway. A German court in 2021, for instance, agreed with youth that the government needed to do more to reduce emissions. Colombia’s Supreme Court agreed with young plaintiffs in 2018 that officials needed to better protect the Amazon rainforest, in part because of climate concerns.
But in the U.S., the country that has sent more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, young people had failed to get courts to rule in their favor.
That was about to change.
In the courtroom that day, the young people were asking not for any financial reward, but for the government of Montana to uphold its Constitution, one of a handful in the U.S. that explicitly protects both current and future citizens’ right to a healthful environment. There was Rikki Held, the oldest of the Montana youth plaintiffs at 22, whose name was on the lawsuit and whose family’s ranch was increasingly threatened by fires and floods. There were Lander and Badge Busse, teenage brothers whose schoolmates taunted them about this case, but who’d decided they needed to be part of this lawsuit to protect the wilderness where they loved to fish and hunt. And there was Grace Gibson-Snyder, a Missoula 19-year-old. Her ancestors had come to this big-sky state in a covered wagon. But Ms. Gibson-Snyder worried about whether this land would be habitable for her own children – if she felt it were morally appropriate to have any. She wore her favorite boots to trial, for good luck.
They and their fellow plaintiffs were represented by an Oregon-based law firm called Our Children’s Trust, which has helped young people across the country bring constitutional climate cases.
Opposing them was the state of Montana, represented by an attorney general whose spokesperson had called the lawsuit “outrageous” and “political theater” – a case of well-intentioned children exploited by an outside interest group.
For the better part of the next two weeks, the two sides presented their cases.
Then youth and legal experts waited anxiously for the judge’s decision. Held v. Montana, many said, was a crucial moment in what they saw as a legal transformation building around the world. Members of the Climate Generation – as we’re calling the cohort born since 1989, when the world became both climatically unstable and increasingly focused on children’s rights – were working to define what it meant to have rights as a young person. And in particular, they were working to define what it meant to have rights while looking at a future that scientists agree will be shaped by what older people have done to the atmosphere. A ruling in Montana could dramatically impact this global effort.
“The Montana case is incredibly important,” says Shaina Sadai, the Hitz fellow for litigation-relevant science at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Young people involved with climate action, she adds, “are very internationally connected. They are very much in touch with each other. … A win anywhere for any of them is a win for all of them. It’s that global youth solidarity.”
Which is why Dallin Rima, a 19-year-old plaintiff in a different climate lawsuit, turned up the radio when he heard that Montana District Judge Kathy Seeley had released her verdict.
Mr. Rima is part of a group of Utah youth who have sued their state, arguing that its promotion of fossil fuels violates their constitutional rights to life, health, and safety. He’d been following what was going on in Montana, the same way young climate plaintiffs from Oregon to the South Pacific to Portugal had been keeping track. While he knew firsthand about the challenges of the legal system, about the delays and disappointments, he had allowed himself to hope.
He was driving to his grandmother’s house outside Salt Lake City, listening to NPR, when the news came on. It was a good thing nobody else was in the car, Mr. Rima says. Because as he listened to the newscast, he began to “express himself,” as he puts it. Loudly.
The judge had ruled in the young plaintiffs’ favor. Specifically, this meant that Montana policymakers had violated the young people’s constitutional rights by ignoring the climate impacts of their energy decisions. But Mr. Rima understood that there were far broader implications.
By siding with the young Montanans, Judge Seeley explicitly connected the right to a clean environment with the right to a stable climate. She gave a judicial stamp of approval to climate science. And she proved that, in the face of what many young people see as politicians’ ineptitude in addressing climate change, the judiciary is a branch of government that might still be able to protect their futures.
“I’ve learned not to get my hopes up. But I was just shocked, ecstatic to hear that they had won,” Mr. Rima says. “It was a really powerful moment. … It feels like our work isn’t in vain.”
A resort in Kissimmee, Florida, was booked to host a book signing by Marjorie Taylor Greene. She was going to sell signed books for $45 and to offer a personal meeting for $1,000.
But the resort canceled the event when it discovered that it was also a celebration of the sacking of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The event organizers neglected to tell the resort owners that MJT planned to commemorate the siege of the Capitol.
A fundraiser and book signing at a sprawling Central Florida resort featuring U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been canceled after the resort’s owners discovered the event was also a commemoration of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“Please be advised that Westgate was not made aware of the purpose of this event when we were approached to host a book signing,” Westgate Vacation Villas Resorts said. “This event has been canceled and is no longer taking place at our resort.”
Requests for further comment were not immediately answered.
First reported by NBC News, the event hosted by the Republican Party of Osceola County invited residents to meet Greene, a Republican from Georgia, Trump supporter and self-described “firebrand,” and get a signed copy of her memoir, “MTG” at the Westgate Convention Center in Kissimmee.
Chris Rufo, far-right provocateur, proclaimed his pride in toppling the President of Harvard. Is he happier with this victory than with his success in turning “critical race theory” into a national scare? Hard to say. This was a big one for Chris, not least because he found a way to incite the liberal media and to walk away with Dr. Gay’s scalp.
In recent weeks, Rufo has been at the forefront of a sprawling campaign to force Gay to resign, which began after she delivered controversial testimony before Congress in early December about Harvard’s handling of alleged instances of antisemitism stemming from the war in Gaza. On Dec. 10, Rufo and the conservative journalist Christopher Brunet publicized accusations that Gay — the first Black woman to serve as Harvard’s president and a political scientist held in high regard by her peers — had plagiarized other scholars’ work. Together with pressure from donors about Gay’s response to the war in Gaza, those accusations ultimately led to Gay losing her job this week.
None of that happened by accident. As Rufo acknowledged to me, Gay’s resignation was the result of a coordinated and highly organized conservative campaign. “It shows a successful strategy for the political right,” he told me. “How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaigns in order to be successful.”
While the extent of Gay’s alleged plagiarism is being disputed in the academic community, Rufo’s campaign worked because instances in which Gay apparently borrowed language from other scholars were frequent and credible enough that the allegations stuck.
For an operative who works mostly behind the scenes of Republican politics, Rufo isn’t shy about revealing the true motives behind his influence operations. Last month, he told me that his efforts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s legacy are part of broader ploy to exonerate former President Donald Trump. When I spoke to him on Tuesday afternoon, he was equally frank about what motivated his efforts to get Gay fired.
As Rufo makes clear, his real target was diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he successfully painted Dr. Gay as the embodiment of DEI, meaning that she was a diversity hire and didn’t deserve her position.
He explained his strategy:
It’s really a textbook example of successful conservative activism, and the strategy is quite simple. Christopher Brunet and I broke the story of Claudine’s plagiarism on December 10. It drove more than 100 million impressions on Twitter, and then it was the top story for a number of weeks in conservative media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objective, we had to get the narrative into the left-wing media. But the left-wing uniformly ignored the story for 10 days and tried to bury it, so I engaged in a kind of a thoughtful and substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left to take seriously the story of the most significant academic corruption scandal in Harvard’s history.
Finally, the narrative broke through within 24 hours of my announcement about smuggling the narrative into the left-wing media. You see this domino effect: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications started to do the actual work of exposing Gay’s plagiarism, and then you see this beautiful kind of flowering of op-eds from all of those publications calling on Gay to resign. Once my position — which began on the right — became the dominant position across the center-left, I knew that it was just a matter of time before we were going to be successful.
Why is it so important to get the story into the center-left media?
It gives permission for center-left political figures and intellectual figures to comment on the story and then to editorialize on it. Once we crossed that threshold, we saw this cascade of publications calling on her to resign.
He makes clear that the issues are not important: what matters is winning and shaming the left.
I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy. For the time being, given the structure of our institutions, this is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demonstrated that it can be successful….
What is your broader objective here, beyond forcing the president of Harvard to resign?
My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.
It is just the most recent demonstration of the Rufo technique, which is to announce the bad faith argument he’s about to launch and how he plans to use it to pwn his chosen liberal target. And then various main stream media and other well-intentioned folks proceed to amplify and engage with that bad faith argument. Even now, social media features a bunch of folks arguing about the plagiarism piece of the Harvard take down (“Well, you know the president of Rufo’s New College won’t get caught plagiarizing because he’s never published anything! Ha! Gotcha!!”) as if the plagiarism is actually the point. And media outlets keep publishing their “Harvard president taken down by plagiarism” takes as if that’s the real story here.
The New Republic took pleasure in revealing that Rufo claimed a master’s degree from Harvard, but he fudged by not admitting that the degree was not from the highly selective Harvard programs but from the Harvard Extension School, which I confess I never heard of.
It’s very hard to gain admission to Harvard College or graduate schools. But Harvard Extension School says this in its website:
Readers may recall that I supported Dr. Gay and urged the Harvard Corporation to resist the pressure from Rufo. I did so because I knew that the campaign to force her out was not conducted in good faith. Rufo doesn’t care about anti-Semitism, nor does Elise Stefanik. I don’t recall either of them expressing outrage when anti-Semites chanted “The Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville nor did they speak out when Trump said that there were “good people” on both sides. Neither of them appears to care about anti-Semitism when it’s right in front of them.
Ten minutes later, Polly Strong, an anthropology professor and the president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Rufo that she believed in intellectual diversity but that a commitment to the concept wasn’t what she heard from him. She said her personal hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom, due process, and neutrality in higher learning and asked if Rufo supported those values.
Rufo thanked Strong for her question but his words came faster and more insistent than before. He derided Dewey, saying it would have been better if he’d never been born, and dismissed his values. “Academic freedom, due process, neutrality – those are means, not ends,” Rufo said. “If you have an erasure of ends, what you get is sheer power politics, you get everything reducible to will and domination, and then you get an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” Rufo concluded by saying that academics who continue to adhere to Dewey’s principles, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”
Strong was completely unawed by the implied threat. “The ‘ends’ of academic freedom, due process, and shared governance is education for a democratic society,” she said simply. “That is the basis of John Dewey’s vision and many, many university professors believe that today.”
The audience was silent after Strong’s remark. It had become clear that Rufo wasn’t dominating his opponents. It got worse for him when Samuel Baker, a UT English professor, came to the mic. Baker reiterated that Rufo’s veneration of beauty and truth was meaningless if he provided no idea of what the concepts mean to him, and he criticized Rufo’s use of violent imagery like “laying siege” and deserving “what’s coming.”
“I just want to be honest with you,” Baker said, “your rhetoric in relation to barbarism and the way you smugly say that the university is not going to like what’s coming – I think that in the context of the world right now, where there is a lot of really tragic violence, that we ought to be careful to remove ourselves from that and from groups with white supremacist associations. I really think you should rethink the glibness.”
Rufo was exposed as a phony and called out for his connections to white supremacists. He beat a hasty retreat.
Freedom of expression and academic freedom are wonderful in action.
Education Dudebro Ryan Walters has been subpoenaed by House members of his own party to explain what the hell is going on in the department of education under his leadership.
Once Walters was elected to the State Superintendent spot, he made it clear that his brand would be culture war baloney; one of his first acts was to take down the Oklahoma Educators Hall of Fame pictures, and when folks protested, he offered a statement:
“All the photographs will be sent to the local teachers’ unions. When my administration is over, the unions can use donor money and their lobbyists to take down photographs of students and parents and reinstall the photographs of administrators and bureaucrats.”
Walters drew headlines for moves like explaining that the Tulsa Race Massacre was not about race. He called the teachers union a “terrorist organization.” He also proposed a host of rules for restricting reading, mandatory outing of students, searching out the dread CRT, and backing it all up with threats to take away a district’s accreditation if they dared to defy him.
But while Walters’ ideological activism may draw the headlines, there also seems to be a problem with basic competence in the job.
Employees have been fleeing the department–80 gone by September. In May, one departed whistleblower said that Walters office had simply failed to follow through on millions of dollars in federal grant money. Terri Grissom estimated between $35 and $40 million hasn’t been given to districts to spend, and uncounted other millions hadn’t been applied for at all. And Grissom says that Walters simply lied to legislators about the state of grants. This fall, districts have discovered that Walters’ office has somehow gummed up the works so badly that millions in federal grants are not getting to the schools where they could do some good.
Another resignation came from Pamela Smith-Gordon, a handpicked Walters ally who left out of frustration with the lack of leadership. She sent an angry letter that said in part:
While desperately wanting to support you, the lack of leadership and availability within our own OSDE is impossible to ignore. If your physical presence is not required for leadership, then the question arises as to why the position exists with a salary attached to it.
We’re hearing from folks that are looking in and they’re all saying the same thing. Ryan Walters isn’t there. I talked to someone who is a constituent of mine who said that he is not a mean guy. He is always there with a handshake and a smile, but he is never there, literally.
In response to Smith-Gordon’s departure, McBride (who is an actual Republican) said, “I really don’t know what’s going on over there. Nobody does. There is some lack of transparency.”
Walters’ department, which regularly cranks out Trump-style PR about how Walters is “driving change in education for Oklahoma students like never before” doesn’t just stonewall the legislature–they thumb their nose at it. When McBride made a second request for certain basic information from the department, Walters’ top advisor Matt Langston sent a note–which someone slipped under McBride’s office doors–saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” (Fun fact: Langston allegedly lives in Texas.) In another response was a letter from Langston, on OSDE letterhead, calling McBride a “whiny Democrat.“
In response to this petty dickishness, House Demnocrat Mickey Dollens proposed the “Do Your Job Act” aimed directly at Walters and his department. Well, he’s a Democrat, and angry at that.
But McBride and House Speaker Charles McCall and Rep. Rhonda Baker are GOP, and they signed off on the subpoena to get Walters to show up and answer some questions, including details –but not to the legislature. In interviews, McBride just sounds tired and frustrated.
“If there’s nothing there, show me,” said Rep. Mark McBride, ( R) House Education Budget and Appropriations Chair. “There’s no ‘I gotcha’ question’ here. It’s just questions about public education that any appropriator would ask.”
McBride says he tried to work with Walters and his chief policy advisor Matt Langston, but after many requests for basic information were left unmet, he says he had no other option but to issue the subpoena.
As Chairman of the Appropriations and Budget Education Subcommittee, I am constitutionally bound to ask questions and statutorily entitled to have them answered of the leadership of the legislatively appropriated OSDE. As those questions have not been answered, and no voluntary answer is forthcoming, I have exercised my power as chairman to subpoena the superintendent to produce the records and communications requested by the committee. Where taxpayer money is concerned we must be diligent. The time for playing political games is over, and the time for answers is at hand.
Walters’ office has responded with its usual grace. Langston has called McBride a liar. And after initially not responding to the subpoena, Walters decided to give an “exclusive” to Fix affiliate Fox23, in which he said stuff like this:
It’s disappointing to see some folks in my own party decided to sell their souls for 30 pieces of silver from the teachers union, but I’m never going to stop or back down. I’m going to keep fighting for the parents of Oklahoma [and] the tax payers of Oklahoma. Your kids are too important. The future of this state is too important,
He also claims that his has been the “most transparent” administration. And he touts his “town halls,” some of which have been pretty contentious. And while Walters has often pointed to his meetings with superintendents around the state as a sign of his outreach and transparency,a survey of superintendents found that 150 of the 190 who responded had met with him exactly zero minutes. A touted Zoom meeting was about 15 minutes long, superintendents were not allowed to speak, and no questions were answered. They reported a “continued silence.” And they report that Walters’ culture war concerns do not reflect the day to day issues they actually deal with in the real world. From an NPR story:
Matt Riggs is the superintendent of the small, rural district of Macomb. He said Walters’ portrayal of schools is like a “caricature… so far outside of what is real.”
“What he has done through his entire approach to public life, from what I’ve seen, is create dragons for himself to slay,” Riggs said. “Do we have students here that, you know, some may identify in different ways? I’m sure we do. But our charge is to try to make those students’ lives better. Our charge is not to make them part of some kind of political conversation.”
Riggs said those dragons — leftist indoctrination, pornography pushing, terrorist teachers’ unions — just don’t exist. In a high-poverty area like Macomb, there are real problems, but Riggs says he doesn’t see a point in bringing those issues to Walters.
But the legislature sees a point in bringing Walters to address those issues. He might even have to explain his desire to slay his imaginary dragons instead of getting school districts the support they need and that their taxpayers deserve.
In the end, the worst thing about Walters may not be his Trumpian bombast, his thirst for media attention, his obsession with culture wars, or his ideological certainty that he need answer to nobody. The worst thing about Walters may be that he won’t actually do the job for which he campaigned so hard. Is incompetence worse than intolerance? I’m not sure even a legislative hearing can determine that one, but Walters is both, and that’s bad news for the children of Oklahoma.
Walters has till January 5 to answer the subpoena. Mark your calendar.
Ryan Walters of Oklahoma may be the worst state superintendent in the nation. Read John Thompson’s latest report on Walters’s plans for the Tulsa public schools and see if you agree.
Thompson writes:
The Tulsa World reported that the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) “is zeroing in on 6,200 students in grades four to eight who must improve on state tests to help the district avoid a state takeover.” Given the threats State Superintendent Ryan Walters has thrown at the district, I understand why the TPS is undertaking a probably doomed-to-fail intervention. By appeasing Walters (who now supports the Tulsa plan), they might save the school system from Walter’s most destructive attacks. But that shouldn’t be the issue.
The question we should be asking is: Will their rushed effort to increase test scores help the 18% of the district’s students who are targeted or will it do them more harm? This experiment will inevitably teach students a lot of things – including destructive lessons rooted in worksheet-driven malpractice. The question should be: Would the supposed gains justify the likely damage that will be done to those students? If history is the guide, it seems inevitable that the tragedies of No Child Left Behind and ESSA will be repeated, especially for the most-disadvantaged students. For instance: What are the chances that the $360,000 spent on state test-aligned test preparation materials will result in a drill-and-kill mindset which is antithetical to the meaningful learning students need?
One of many examples of research on why programs like Walters’ demands have failed is National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2011 study, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. It found:
Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries. When evaluated using relevant low-stakes tests, which are less likely to be inflated by the incentives themselves, the overall effects on achievement tend to be small and are effectively zero for a number.
I was attending a rally of teachers when Walters announced his latest assaults on Tulsa schools, and the district’s response was outlined. On one hand, the conversations with Tulsa and Oklahoma City teachers were stimulating. I was impressed by their emphasis on trusting and loving relationships, and supporting students who face so many obstacles. I was inspired by the embraces of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), and how overworked and stressed out teachers remained devoted to their kids. I was told about successful efforts in some schools to restore holistic and meaningful learning, as well as other schools where test prep was still dominant.
Moreover, I was consistently told about the exhaustion and anxiety the educators face, and how Walters’ attacks will force schools to ramp up test prep. These conversations brought me back to the first decade of the 21st century when low-performing schools were the primary focus of drill-and-kill, and where recess, field trips, arts, and music were taken away.
Then, I was brought back to the second decade when almost every student and educator was targeted for reward-and-punish accountability. Just as the Race-to-the Top (RttT) was doubly devastating because NCLB had already broken the resistance to test-driven accountability, today’s mandates are likely to be doubly dangerous because they follow Walters’ and the Moms for Liberty’s campaigns for Prager’s false, rightwing curriculum, attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), LGBTQ and trans students, and public education’s principles.
By the way, who are the students TPS needs to immediately move up at least one achievement level from “below basic” on state tests? The World reports they are 92% are economically disadvantaged, 20% require special education services, 43% are multilingual learners. They will be the ones who will likely suffer the stress, the drill-and-kill instructional malpractice, and lower graduation rates that typically result from Walters-styled mandates. This raises the question: Wouldn’t they benefit more from properly funded social and emotional supports, equitable spending on holistic instruction, diversity, and inclusiveness?
Instead of asking those questions, as the Voice reports, Walters said he will be proposing a rule which says “sexual activity in public targeted towards kids” is inappropriate. He said “the rule is a direct result of a district hiring an administrator who dresses as a drag queen during non-work hours.” Walters said he would respond to out-of-state groups that oppose prayer in school by introducing “a rule that protects prayer in schools.”
Moreover, the TPS will be required to make “midyear changes in principal assignments and reassigning central office staff to support the Tulsa schools needing Most Rigorous Intervention, or MRI, based on federal education standards.” It will also need to restructure “the district’s leadership team, and aligning leadership priorities and strategic planning to the state’s demands.”
Even if Walters’ priorities and plans made sense, how could the TPS effectively implement them is such a rushed manner? While I’m not optimistic that the TPS will dare to heed research on why the federal School Improvement Grants largely failed, I hope it will not ignore (like many reformers have) the reasons why the billions of dollars invested in turnaround and transformation schools didn’t improve student outcomes.
I must emphasize a key difference, however, between the hurried transformations that backfired so badly over the last two decades, and those that Walters is coercing Tulsa into adopting. I spent hundreds of hours trying to explain to researchers and funders who hurriedly devised the previous turnaround attempts. Even though they were extremely smart, they didn’t know what they didn’t know about public schools. These venture philanthropists and their staff sought to “blow up” the status quo so that innovators could reinvent schools.
Walters is even more aggressive in trying to blow up public education, and he’s shown no interest in improving schools. He might be able to intimidate Tulsa into “knocking down the barn” but, even if he was interested in the welfare of students, there’s no way he would be interested in rebuilding public schools.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/pmn/UVSAJAGH6RHAVHV64CSAPT2RPQ.jpg)
Diane Ravitch's blog 