Romeo and Julieta in Rio: A Beautiful Love Story

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2023 //
12

Every once in a while, I read a beautiful story that has nothing to do with education or politics, and I want to share it. This is one of those stories. It’s about two macaws. One is caged in an aviary. The other is wild and free. They are in love.

Terrence McCoy wrote in The Washington Post:

RIO DE JANEIRO — One recent afternoon, a smitten blue-and-yellow macaw grabbed a clawful of carrots and banana and took flight. He flapped to the top of the aviary at the Rio de Janeiro zoo and latched onto the netting. Just beyond, on the other side of the enclosure, was his love — the only wild macaw in a city that hasn’t seen a free one of their kind in two centuries.

She beckoned to him. He went to her. On opposite sides of the netting, they rubbed beaks. He passed her his food. They clung together, grasping claws, and wouldn’t let go.

Every day for more than two decades, zookeepers attest, the wild macaw has flown to the Rio de Janeiro zoo where dozens of her species are kept captive — including her partner.

In the animal kingdom, blue-and-yellow macaws are among the most faithful. They can live into their fifties, but when one finds a partner, it’s for life. The pair typically spend their days and nights together. They nibble, cuddle and even kiss. Whatever food they have, they share. If one dies, the surviving partner’s anguish is profound. Few ever couple again.

But even for such an animal, zookeepers and biologists say this Rio de Janeiro romance is nothing short of extraordinary.

Because it would violate Brazilian legislation to cage her, and because it would breach zoo policy and ethical standards to free him, the couple have only ever lived and loved on separate sides of the netting, unable to consummate their relationship.

Romeo and Julieta, zookeepers call them. An impossible love.

“I worked at the zoo for 28 years, and I never saw anything like this,” said Anderson Mendes Augusto. “There’s no explanation.”

The tale has long enchanted the city, dazzling visitors, prompting a poem by one of Brazil’s most celebrated poets — and giving rise to a series of interpretations. Some have seen a commentary on fidelity and companionship. Others have discerned the contemporary themes of conservation and environmentalism. And still more have gleaned an allegory for Rio de Janeiro itself, a city carved from a lush forest now grappling with its own loss of wildness.

But at the aviary, the relationship appeared simpler: just two birds in love.

As the zoo closed, they were still up there, holding onto one another. The only person left inside was zookeeper Daniel Miranda. Soon it was time for him to go home, too. So he finished his last duties, walked through the gate and left the aviary empty of all visitors — save one.

To finish the story, open the link. I hope it’s not behind a paywall.

Categories Joy

Newly Surfaced “Moms for Liberty” Video Shows Their Religious Extremist Agenda

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2023 //
11

Moms for Liberty pretends to be about freedom, idealism, and parental rights. What could be more American than respecting the right of everyone to practice the religious faith of their choice or none at all?

That’s not what M4L wants.

This recently discovered video reveals their religious agenda.

Jennifer Cohn reported in The Bucks County Beacon:

On February 14, 2021 (Valentine’s Day), Moms for Liberty (M4L) advisory board member Erika Donalds stood with her husband, Representative Byron Donalds (R-FL), on a brightly lit stage inside a darkened Florida church. Clutching a microphone, Erika declared that, “We will … rise up as the most powerful voting bloc and political force in the entire world as Christians!”

The event was hosted by Truth and Liberty Coalition, a Colorado-based Christian Right nonprofit that seeks to take over public school boards in Colorado and beyond. The video from the event (which I recently unearthed) began with an announcement: “We believe we have a mandate to bring godly change to our nation and the world through the seven spheres or mountains of influence.”

M4L is a nationwide “parental rights” organization. Like Truth and Liberty, M4L strives to take over and transform public school boards in their own Christian “conservative” image. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated M4L as an extremist group due to their anti-LGBTQ+ policies and ties to the Proud Boys, which led the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The organization’s ties to religious zealotry, however, have received less attention. 

“Truth and Liberty,” the nonprofit that hosted Mr. and Mrs. Donalds, was founded by pastor Andrew Wommack, who has said that gay people should wear warning labels on their foreheads. Its board of directors includes Lance Wallnau, a self-described Christian nationalist, who said in 2020 that America “must destroy the public education system before it destroys us.”

Wallnau also popularized the “seven mountains” mandate trumpeted by Truth and Liberty. The mandate is a supposedly divine strategy used by Christian supremacists in order to achieve societal dominion for God, as I’ve reported previously. They seek control over these seven “mountains” or “spheres”: business, government, family, religion, media, entertainment, and education.

In addition to Wallnau, Truth and Liberty’s board of directors includes David Barton, a “seven mountains” proponent with a dubious “doctorate” whose books and lectures teach that the separation between church and state is a myth. Barton had one of his books pulled in 2012 because the “basic truths just were not there,” according to the publisher.

Barton interviewed M4L co-founder Tina Descovich last year. His son, Tim Barton, spoke during M4L’s 2023 summit.

The younger Barton has said that “God never intended education to be secular.”

How does Tim Barton know what God intended?

Please open the link and read the article, then watch the video.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Pennsylvania, Religion, Separation of church and state

Commonweal: The Battle Against School Vouchers in Idaho

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2023 //
13

Commonweal is a liberal Catholic magazine. It publishes thoughtful articles without deference to Church dogma. This article is an excellent example; Luke Mayville of Idaho explains why vouchers are bad for the common good, bad for society. This is a bold stance to take in a Catholic publication. The usual deep-pocketed voucher advocacy groups pumped money into Idaho to promote universal vouchers (vouchers for all without income limits). They were unsurpringly opposed by the Idaho Education Association and the Democratic Party, which saw the danger to public schools. Even State Senate Republicans opposed them because of concerns about cost and accountability.

Luke Mayville explains the secret of Idaho’s success in rejecting vouchers: grassroots organizing.

Mayville writes:

Ever since Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” economic libertarians have dreamed of privatizing America’s system of public schools. In place of a school system that is publicly funded, democratically governed, and accessible to all, policy entrepreneurs have sought to transform American education into a commodity—something to be bought and sold in a free market.

In the push to privatize education, the tip of the spear has always been school vouchers—policies that extract funds from public schools in order to subsidize private-school tuition. Milwaukee established the nation’s first voucher program in 1990. In the following twenty-five years, voucher experiments were rolled out in fits and starts, often meeting with stiff public resistance. Voucher advocates gained significant footholds in Ohio, Washington D.C., Indiana, and elsewhere, but lacked the power to fundamentally transform the nation’s public-school system.

The cause has gained unprecedented momentum during the past five years. In their book A Wolf at the School House Door (2020), Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider sounded the alarm about “an increasingly potent network of conservative state and federal elected officials, advocacy groups, and think tanks…backed by deep-pocketed funders,” all of them committed to dismantling public education as an institution. The new assault on public education intensified in the pandemic era, as voucher advocates seized the opportunity of mass school closures to propose—and in many cases enact—sweeping privatization schemes. In states across the country, the voucher agenda went hand in hand with efforts to sow distrust in public education by claiming, usually without evidence, that schools had become centers for critical race theory, “gender ideology,” and other forms of “social-justice indoctrination.” Meanwhile, voucher proponents were energized by landmark decisions of the United States Supreme Court, most notably Espinoza v. Montana in 2020 and Carson v. Makin in 2022, both of which appeared to remove constitutional obstacles to the use of public dollars for private religious education.

The nationally coordinated push to privatize public education is one of the most corrosive developments in American life. While Catholics and members of other faith communities have rightly cherished private parochial education, they, too, have strong reasons to support America’s public schools even if their own children do not attend them. It is an essential feature of the mission of public education to affirm the dignity of every child and to prepare each child to be a full participant in civic and economic life. As Berkshire and Schneider put it, public education “is our collective effort to realize for all young people their full human potential, regardless of circumstance.”

Fortunately, the coordinated attack on public education has met strong resistance from educators, students, parents, and citizens in several states across the country. During the 2023 legislative session here in Idaho, legislators presented a long series of voucher bills. One proposal sought to enact universal “education savings accounts” (ESAs) that would be available to every Idaho family—including the affluent. Other bills proposed tax-credit schemes or more targeted approaches. Every single proposal failed. Remarkably, Idaho remains voucher-free even as the voucher movement has enacted sweeping legislation in Arizona, Florida, West Virginia, Iowa, Arkansas, and elsewhere.

Grassroots organizing has been indispensable in Idaho’s fight against vouchers. A strong coalition of educators, parents, and advocacy organizations—including Reclaim Idaho, an organization I cofounded—has proved to be an effective counterweight to the voucher movement’s deep-pocketed lobbying efforts.

A recent poll by the Idaho Statesman found that public opinion in Idaho is dead set against vouchers, with 63 percent opposed and just 23 percent in support. The mission of organizers has been to translate widespread public opposition into effective political action. To that end, we’ve organized in communities across this vast state and helped citizens become defenders of public schools and sharp critics of voucher schemes. We’ve helped local advocates understand and articulate the arguments against vouchers that resonate most with the public: that vouchers are fiscally reckless, costing far more than advertised; that voucher programs tend to diminish student achievement and discriminate against students with disabilities; and that voucher programs are especially harmful for rural communities where no private-school options exist.

In local efforts to resist vouchers, grassroots organizing can harness the power of personal stories. The voucher movement has attempted to tell their own personalized story by evoking images of poor, marginalized children who’ve been “trapped” in failing public schools. The promise of “school choice” is to give struggling parents the choice to move their children into private schools that better fit their needs. However, as more states adopt voucher programs, the vast majority of voucher funds are flowing not to students who’ve left public schools but to private-school students who were never in public schools to begin with. A total of 89 percent of voucher funds in New Hampshire, 80 percent in Arizona, and 75 percent in Wisconsin have gone to students already enrolled in private schools, and these students disproportionately belong to affluent families living in suburban and urban areas.

The “school choice” story is mostly a fiction, and grassroots organizing can refocus the conversation on personal stories that paint the full picture. When people get organized on the voucher issue, the question can suddenly shift from “Do families deserve more choice?” to “Why would we pull scarce funds from our public schools—especially in rural areas—in order to subsidize tuition for affluent suburban families?” During testimony before the Idaho Senate Education Committee on a bill to create universal ESAs, a public-school supporter named Sheri Hughes phoned in to testify remotely from Challis—a mountain town of 922 people located 190 miles from the state capital. “I know the power and strength of consolidated public money for education, especially in rural Idaho,” Hughes said. She told the committee that her grandfather had served on the Challis school board and helped build the town’s first high school, that her mother—also a school-board member—helped get the high school rebuilt after the 1983 Challis earthquake. “Based on Arizona’s ESA Voucher experience,” Hughes went on, “the money proposed to be removed off the top of Idaho’s education funding budget would take an estimated 17–20 percent of funding away from Challis schools—in an area with no private alternative choices, and where home-school students still access public-school resources for proctoring, band, sports, special ed, and other extracurricular activities.”

Please open the link and learn how Idaho parents and teachers and citizens organized to beat back the out-of-state money behind vouchers.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Idaho, Vouchers

WSJ Reveals How Putin Got Rid of Wagner Chief

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2023 //
24

We have long known that Putin is a brutal dictator. Anyone who dares to oppose him mysteriously dies or disappears. His chief critic Alexei Navalny is currently “lost” in the Russian prison system; not even his lawyers know where he is.

Remember when the leader of the Wagner group staged a brief rebellion? Putin made peace with him and guaranteed his personal safety. Not long after, his plane crashed. Now we know why.

The Wall Street Journal reported today:

In the tarmac of a Moscow airport in late August, Yevgeny Prigozhin waited on his Embraer Legacy 600 for a safety check to finish before it could take off. The mercenary army chief was headed home to St. Petersburg with nine others onboard. Through the delay, no one inside the cabin noticed the small explosive device slipped under the wing.

When the jet finally left, it climbed for about 30 minutes to 28,000 feet, before the wing blew apart, sending the aircraft spiraling to the ground. All 10 people were killed, including Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner paramilitary group.

The assassination of the warlord was two months in the making and approved by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s oldest ally and confidant, an ex-spy named Nikolai Patrushev, according to Western intelligence officials and a former Russian intelligence officer. The role of Patrushev as the driver of the plan to kill Prigozhin hasn’t been previously reported.

The Kremlin has denied involvement in Prigozhin’s death, and Putin offered the closest thing to an official explanation for the plane’s fiery crash, suggesting a hand grenade had detonated onboard.

None of that was true.

Hours after the incident, a European involved in intelligence gathering who maintained a backchannel of communication with the Kremlin and saw news of the crash asked an official there what had happened.

“He had to be removed,” the Kremlin official responded without hesitation.

The dirty deed was done by Putin’s right-hand man.

And this is the man that wants to take control of Ukraine: a bloody, power-mad dictator who kills people the way others throw out trash.

Categories Accountability, Evil, International

Missouri: The Foundation that Wants to Replace Public Schools with “Christ-Centered K-12 Education”

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2023 //
9

This is a remarkable investigative article in the Missouri Independent by Annelise Hanshaw about the Herzog Foundation, which is spending its fortune on eliminating public schools and spreading “Christ-centered” schools.

Every state should have a journal like the Missouri Independent to sponsor independent investigative journalism.

The article contains some remarkable graphics about the linkages among rightwing groups, the foundation and the Republican Party. I won’t reproduce them, so please open the link and read the article and see the graphics. And read the story in full.

Hanshaw writes:

The headquarters of the Herzog Foundation sits on the edge of Smithville, in an 18,000-square-foot stone and glass building on a corner lot across the street from a cornfield on a gravel-lined highway.

Few Missourians have likely heard of the Stanley M. Herzog Charitable Foundation, or the organization’s namesake. But the unassuming locale masks what has been described as the “epicenter of the school-choice movement.”

Stan Herzog’s political largesse bankrolled a generation of conservative candidates and causes in Missouri, pouring through a constellation of political action committees and nonprofits. When he died in 2019, he set aside $300 million to start a foundation dedicated to expanding the reach of Christian education.

That mission kicked into overdrive in 2021, when Missouri lawmakers created a tax credit to support scholarships to help low-income students and those with disabilities attend private schools. Since then, a subsidiary of the Herzog Foundation has distributed almost half of the scholarships in the state.

And while the foundation thrives in Missouri, it also spreads its message nationwide.

It champions rallies across the country, holds workshops and bankrolls Christian-school-building packages. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos spoke at the Herzog Foundation’s launch, and former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a presentation at the foundation’s headquarters this February.

The foundation is barred from direct electoral activity because it is a charity, but businesses and political entities connected to Herzog continue pouring money into campaigns — spending more than $3.6 million on campaigns for state office since Herzog’s 2019 death , according to Missouri Ethics Commission filings.

It’s a recipe that gives the Herzog Foundation considerable stature in Missouri politics, as the push to expand Herzog’s education agenda continues to pick up steam.

“As far as education goes in Republican Party politics, they’re one of the major influencers in the state,” said Jean Evans, American Federation for Children’s Missouri state lead [Betsy DeVos’s organization].

“The Herzog family has been prolific donors to the Republican Party for a long time,” Evans added. “Stan Herzog passed away, but they’ve continued to support candidates and political causes. And now the Herzog Foundation is involved.”

But the foundation is not without its critics, who claim its real goal is the destruction of public education in Missouri and across the country.

“Herzog and other groups like Herzog have made it their goal to funnel money from taxpayers to private institutions,” said Rep. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Clay County Democrat who is running for a seat in the Missouri Senate.

“We’re going to continue to see more legislation pushed by groups like Herzog to dismantle public schools as we know them,” she said…

Herzog laid the groundwork for the Herzog Foundation in 2016, but it didn’t launch until after his death, when he set aside nearly $325 million for his mission, giving entrusted parties 20 years to spend his endowment.

Leading the foundation is Todd Graves, a former U.S. attorney and chairman of the Missouri Republican Party whose brother is U.S. Rep. Sam Graves.

Kristen Blanchard Ansley is the secretary and treasurer. She is a former executive director of the Missouri Republican Party, and over the years has been involved in numerous PACs and nonprofits that poured Herzog’s money into state and local campaigns.

In December 2021, the leaders of the Stanley M. Herzog Charitable Foundation established another nonprofit called the Herzog Tomorrow Foundation. It was created specifically to distribute tax dollars set aside by Missourians under the new scholarship program created by lawmakers.

The program works by allowing Missourians — both individuals and businesses — to donate to educational assistance organizations in return for a tax credit equal to the donation, as long as it’s 50% or less of their tax burden.

When the General Assembly passed legislation in 2021 to create the program, the fiscal note indicated that the tax credits would take up to $75 million from the state’s general revenue annually.

Herzog Tomorrow Foundation’s application to participate in the program says its goal is to “catalyze and accelerate the development of quality Christ-centered K-12 education.”

It is allowed to take a percentage of the scholarship funds to cover administrative costs: 10% of the first $250,000, 8% of the next $500,000 and 3% of funds raised thereafter.

But the administrative fees don’t appear to be the motivating factor for becoming an educational assistance organization. According to Chris Vas, scholarship director at Herzog Tomorrow Foundation, the organization donated $800,000 back to the program “to ensure that every eligible student who applied for a scholarship received one….”

Of the 1,313 students with scholarships in the first year, Herzog Tomorrow Foundation handled 598 of them, according to the treasurer’s office.

Vas testified in a House committee hearing in March that the foundation raised $3.1 million from 165 donors.

He said 20% of scholarship recipients had an individualized education plan, an accommodation plan and set of goals for students with disabilities. An additional 60% qualified for free or reduced lunch, and the rest were from families with incomes below 200% the free or reduced lunch threshold.

The foundation partnered with 80 schools statewide, of which 65 had a religious affiliation.

Influence

In the Stanley M. Herzog Charitable Foundation’s 2020 tax filing, the organization’s attorney stated that the foundation did not “attempt to influence any national, state or local legislation” and did not “participate or intervene in any political campaign.”

Vas said in an email that the foundation also “does not play any role in the legislative process.”

But while the foundation is prohibited from interfering in politics, Herzog’s money has long helped bankroll a web of politically active nonprofits and political action committees — most of which are tied to the foundation’s current leadership team.

Graves, in addition to being partner of a law firm that represented former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, Tea Party Patriots and witnesses in the federal January 6 probe, serves on three committees led by Leonard Leo, a Federalist Society co-chair that former president Donald Trump enlisted to help choose conservative judges.

Many of the political nonprofits and PACs funded with Herzog’s money list Graves’ law firm as their address.

[Open the link and see the graphic here identifying the connections.]

Ansley is a board member of Cornerstone 1791, which also goes by “Liberty Alliance USA.” Vas serves as Cornerstone 1791’s executive director.

Cornerstone 1791 has spent a majority of its expenditures paying Robidoux Services LLC. In 2020, it spent nearly $250,000 for “management, operations and consulting services.”

Robidoux Services has no online presence. Graves is its registered agent, and its office is the Graves Garrett LLC office, according to the business’s paperwork. Vas did not respond to a question asking what Robidoux Services is.

Other expenditures include a $1,105 contribution to “Don’t Tread on MO PAC,” a political action committee with Vas as treasurer, and $1,075 to “Excelsior PAC,” which Vas became treasurer of two years later.

In October 2022, Excelsior PAC spent $15,000 on mailers opposing state Rep. Ashley Aune. Axiom Strategies created the mailing, designing an image of Aune riding a bicycle with U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“Radical liberal Ashley Aune wants to bring AOC-style politics to Jefferson City,” the postcard says.

Aune told The Independent her Platte County seat was eyed by Republicans as a district that could turn red.

“I was really surprised because it was just so far-fetched and kind of funny,” she said, recalling when she saw the postcard. “It’s not lost on me that A.O.C. and I are two Hispanic-identifying women, and we were being demonized.”

Ansley, Vas and Elliot also sit on the board of the Missouri Alliance for Freedom, a political nonprofit that has spent $770,000 since 2017, and American Democracy Alliance, a nonprofit that mostly donates to other nonprofits connected to Herzog.

Last year, a political action committee called “Let’s Go Brandon” poured money into the county executive race in Jefferson County to defeat former state Sen. Paul Wieland.

Wieland had drawn the ire of Graves when he vocally opposed his nomination for the University of Missouri Board of Curators a year earlier. And the money Let’s Go Brandon spent attacking Wieland came from an attorney who has long been close to Graves named Michael Ketchmark and Herzog Contracting Corporation.

Vas served as treasurer of Let’s Go Brandon while also working as the Herzog Foundation’s content director. He did not answer The Independent’s question asking why his PAC campaigned against Wieland.

He is also treasurer of Don’t Tread on Missouri PAC and Excelsior PAC.

Herzog companies have contributed $2.16 million to Missouri committees since 2017, when the state established campaign contribution limits….

[Open the link and see the graphic here to see Herzog’s contributions.]

At the end of 2021, the Herzog Foundation had nearly $364 million in assets, up $7.4 million from the previous year.

Although Stan Herzog gave 20 years to spend his endowment, investment income should sustain the foundation beyond that timeline.

With a resume of training events, awards, podcasts and speaker series — the foundation is likely expanding its programs.

The Herzog Tomorrow Foundation, the nonprofit that distributes Missourians’ tax dollars as an educational assistance organization, filed a business name with the secretary of state: “American Christian Education Alliance.”

In January, the nonprofit applied for two trademarks. The trademark registration is intended to cover “charitable fundraising” and “financial administration of education grant programs developed for students seeking a Christian education.”

Vas said ACE Alliance is a “project of the Herzog Tomorrow Foundation.”

“Its focus is to build a nationwide coalition of Christian education supporters,” he said.

Even before Missouri’s tax credit program was implemented, lawmakers were considering expanding it. While those efforts stalled, proponents are expected to try again when the legislature reconvenes in January.

“The MOScholars program has allowed low-income students and students with (individualized education plans) to attend the school of their dreams. We are extremely proud to participate in the program and help the next generation achieve the education that they deserve,” Vas said. “Our only hope is that we can help more kids in the future.”

Categories Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Missouri, Privatization, Propaganda, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

California: Federal Judge Overturns Law that Bans Guns in Many Public Places

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2023 //
23

Governor Gavin Newsom and the California legislature crafted a gun law intended to limit the places where it was legal to have a gun. That law was struck down by a federal judge who said it was “repugnant” and stripped gun owners of their rights. The judge referred to the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision last year that overturned New York state’s strict gun laws.

Let’s get this right: Restricting guns is repugnant but mass murders are not. Or, maybe mass murders are less repugnant than restricting the right to carry a gun almost anywhere.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

A new California law that would bar licensed gun holders from carrying their firearms into an array of public places will not go into full effect on Jan. 1 as scheduled, after a federal judge blocked major parts of it as unconstitutional Wednesday.

The law, Senate Bill 2, was part of a slate of new gun control measures passed this year by California Democrats in response to two things: a sweeping U.S. Supreme Court ruling that reined in gun control measures nationally last year, and several high-profile mass shootings in the state this year — including in Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park.

In his decision to block the law Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney wrote that the law’s “coverage is sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who signed the bill into law and has called for tougher gun restrictions in the state and at the national level, immediately swung back with his own statement in defense of the measure.

“Defying common sense, this ruling outrageously calls California’s data-backed gun safety efforts ‘repugnant,’” Newsom said. “What is repugnant is this ruling, which greenlights the proliferation of guns in our hospitals, libraries, and children’s playgrounds — spaces which should be safe for all.”

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, in his own statement, said Carney “got it wrong,” and the state will appeal his decision to a higher court.

The law would have precluded licensed gun carriers from having their firearms on public transportation, at public gatherings and special events, in parks and at playgrounds, in stadiums, arenas and casinos, in medical facilities, religious institutions or financial institutions, anywhere that liquor is sold and consumed, in all other private commercial spaces where the owner has not explicitly posted a sign to the contrary, and in many parking areas, among other places.

Democrats had championed the law as a workaround to the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen last year, which held that sweeping restrictions on licensed gun holders to carry their weapons in public were unconstitutional, in part because they stripped those people of their constitutional right to self-defense.

The Bruen decision made certain exceptions, including for bans on guns in certain “sensitive places” that historically had been protected from gun holders — such as in schools and courtrooms. State Sen. Anthony Portantino (D-Burbank) introduced SB 2 as a means of extending the list of “sensitive places” under California law.

The law was to apply to concealed-carry permit holders in major metropolitan centers such as Los Angeles but also to open-carry permit holders in rural, less populated parts of the state.

In his ruling Wednesday, Carney, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said the new law went too far — as the “sensitive places” exception cited by the Supreme Court had to do with relatively few, historically restricted places, not most public spaces in society.

He said an injunction against the law taking effect as litigation in the case continues was warranted because those suing the state over the measure are likely to win their case and would suffer “irreparable harm” if they weren’t allowed to carry their firearms in the meantime.

That last line is rich. Gun owners will suffer “irreparable harm” if they can’t bring their gun to a hospital or church or a public park or a playground.

Categories California, Elections, Extremism, Guns

Maurice Cunningham on the Rise and Fall of Moms for Liberty

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2023 //
5

Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor who is a specialist in dark money in education politics, surveys the meteoric rise and fall of the rightwing group Moms for Liberty in The Progressive. First, the recently formed organization gathered plenty of publicity as a fearsome force censoring books, accusing teachers of “indoctrinating” students, attacking anything in the schools that acknowledged the existence of gay students or families, and opposing teachers unions. The Moms launched with a big budget, more than anyone could gather at a bake sale. But came the school board elections of 2023, and their candidates took a shellacking. Recently came news that one of their prominent co-founders, Bridget Ziegler, was caught in a sex scandal—a threesome—and the organization was publicly humiliated.

Maurice Cunningham wonders how this checkered organization will survive.

He writes:

On June 30, 2023, a Washington Post headline declared “Moms for Liberty didn’t exist three years ago. Now it’s a GOP kingmaker.” On November 10, 2023, after a raft of school board elections across the country, the Post ran another headline: “Voters drub Moms for Liberty ‘parental rights’ candidates at the ballot.” Moms for Liberty (M4L) not only didn’t make any kings, it didn’t even make many school board members. What happened?

The pre-election headline reflected the messaging skills that M4L has carefully honed to make itself more palatable. By November, however, the reality on the ground became clear.

To learn the origins and context of this group, open the link and read on. The article doesn’t mention the Ziegler sex scandal. Cunningham wrote about that in an article in the Tampa Bay Tribune, but it’s behind a paywall. The Moms are on a downhill slide as a result of their election losses, followed by Bridget’s bisexual tryst. Her ex-friends removed her name from the Moms website.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, DeSantis, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Freedom to Read, Gender, Hypocrisy

Stuck Between All Sides: A Young Woman Reflects on the War in Gaza

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2023 //
8

I discovered this post by a young Jewish woman about her reaction to the conflict in the Middle East. This was the post that helped me formulate my own views because I resonated with hers.

Rose Win is a blogger and digital nomad. She recently settled in Boulder, Colorado after two years of writing and traveling solo around the country. She grew up in Seattle and lived in Israel as a child and young adult. She shares here her reflections on the state of the war in Gaza.

She writes:

I wrote in my last post that I have been plagued by writer’s block. That is true, to an extent. There have been a lot of stories in the past couple of months I’ve wanted to write about. My parents came for Thanksgiving. Karina visited. I went back to San Marcos to see Kasey and Evie. I joined a rock climbing gym. I got deathly ill. One subject, however, has stood in my way like a giant, impenetrable barrier. War.

I can’t get past it. Everything else seems ridiculous, and trivial, and out of touch in comparison.

Specifically, I’m talking about the war in Gaza. I don’t know how many drafts I’ve written trying to cohere my thoughts, distill my feelings. My head swims and my heart aches, but I can’t find ethical, or intellectual, or emotional clarity. I keep getting stuck in a labyrinth of contradiction, locked between layers of devastation. So this post is a mishmash, a dumping, a meandering reflection of the competing and overlapping circles in my head.

The foundational layer of devastation, as I wrote before, is the sadistic slaughter of Jewish lives. The maiming, the raping, the abducting, the wholesale massacring. From there emerge the layers wrought by the world’s response. The mindboggling, Orwellian universe where murder becomes a “justified act of resistance,” where killers are “victims of oppression,” and rapists are “freedom fighters.” Or maybe they’re not rapists at all, because for some reason, violence against Jewish women isn’t believable. For some reason, Jewish women need to make their own pathetic hashtag to be heard: #MeTooUnlessYoureAJew.

There’s a new layer of consciousness: the sickening realization that the antisemitism of the 20th century never went away. It just lay dormant, hidden under the surface – waiting for the right opportunity to shapeshift and rear its ugly head. “The Jews are parasites living on other people’s lands. They deserve to die,” said the antisemites of the 20th century. “The Jews are occupiers of other people’s lands. They deserve to die,” say the antisemites of the 21st century.

There’s the hubris of the left which, using the lens of intersectionality, casts the war in racialized terms, white people oppressing brown people. Never mind that more than half of Israel’s Jews are “brown,” hailing from Arab counties that expelled, or, “ethnically cleansed” their Jewish populations in the late 1940s and 1950s following Israel’s creation.

Today’s liberal college campuses preach “language is violence.” Students police speech to minimize “harm.” Except speech against Jews. Because for some reason saying “genocide to Jews” is not violent, or hateful, or harmful. For some reason, chanting genocide to Jews is okay “depending on the context.”

I watch people condemn Israel for committing genocide against Palestinians. I’d like to know why Hamas’ charter, which, in no uncertain terms calls for the annihilation of the Jews and the establishment of an Islamist state in Israel, is not also condemned as genocidal? Why are the Palestinians seen as the rightful, indigenous inhabitants of the land when the Jews, whose presence predates the Palestinians, are not? Why is it that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jews were the world’s refugees, but following the creation of the state of Israel, they are the world’s most reviled colonizers? Why is a Jewish state with a Palestinian minority deemed racist, but a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority deemed righteous?

The questions seem simple. The answers are anything but. I want to defend Israel. I want to rage at the hypocrisy and blatant double standards. But I’m stopped. I can’t. Because look at Gaza. Neighborhoods razed to the ground. Wholesale cities decimated. Thousands and upon thousands of women and children dead. Eighty percent of the population displaced – facing polluted water, starvation, overcrowding, flooding, freezing, and rampant disease.

Israel told over a million people in northern Gaza to flee to the south. Then they bombed the south. “Gaza becomes a graveyard for children” reads one headline. “Nowhere is safe” says the next. Here’s another: “We have the right to live.”

I want to demand “ceasefire now!” because this level of humanitarian catastrophe is so breathtakingly horrific it’s hard to even fathom. Because this level of collective punishment cannot be justified. Because this destruction, this sheer loss of civilian life, cannot go on.

I want to demand “ceasefire now” because I despise Benjamin Netanyahu and the thugs and zealots that rule his repulsive right-wing government. Netanyahu is cut from the same cloth as Putin. He knows Israel holds him responsible for the attacks on Oct 7. The end of the war spells his demise. So, the war will wage on. Because narcissistic demagogues never willingly cede power.

I want to demand “ceasefire now.” But I haven’t.

Does a ceasefire mean Hamas will remilitarize – rearm and resume its genocidal charter to wipe out the Jews? Does a ceasefire leave Hamas’ sprawling tunnel system – built underneath hospitals, grocery stores, schools, universities, private homes, and graveyards – intact so they can infiltrate Israel and terrorize its citizens again? Does a ceasefire condemn the remaining 115 Israeli hostages to death? Does a ceasefire send a message to other Arab countries, waiting in the wings, that Israel is weak, and the Jewish state can be destroyed?

Are any of these questions justifiable? I don’t know. I don’t know.

When the world accuses Israel of being an apartheid state, I want to push back. Apartheid refers to the brutal system of institutionalized racial segregation in South Africa. Israel, albeit flawed, is a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, muti-cultural democratic state, where a fifth of the population isn’t Jewish yet has the same civil and legal rights as every other citizen.

But. That only rings true for those living within Israel’s green line – the 1949 armistice border. Following the war of 1967, Israel gained the Golan Heights from Syria, Gaza from Egypt, and the West Bank from Jordan. With the exception of Gaza, where Israel pulled out in 2005, those territories have been occupied ever since (though Israel, along with Egypt, maintained control over Gaza’s borders).

Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal under international law. It never annexed the West Bank, because giving Palestinians Israeli citizenship would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. So one Israeli government after the next left Palestinians in stateless limbo, while sanctioning illegal Jewish settlement construction that zig-zagged through contiguous territory and punctured holes through the dream of Palestinian statehood. All the while Israel offered Jewish settlers – often messianic, often self-righteous, often violent – full rights of Israeli citizenship and subjected Palestinians to military rule.

So, yes, Israel can claim it’s the only pluralistic democracy in the Middle East. But also, no, it cannot.

In his book documenting bereaved families of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, author Colum McCann talked about his decision to title his book Apeirogon:

“Apeirogon is a weird word, I know. An apeirogon can’t really be drawn, it can only be suggested… But I loved it from the moment I heard about it. The idea that it had an infinite number of sides was attractive to me because I knew it wasn’t a two-sided situation, that it wasn’t balanced.”

This is how I feel when I write and think about Israel. Sides upon sides upon sides upon sides. Overlapping truths. Overlapping contradictions. Questions without answers. Problems without solutions.

There’s a reason why I’ve written draft after draft after draft. Everywhere I turn I’m stuck. I want to take a stand, but every stand I take conflicts with another. That’s why I haven’t written. That’s why I must write.

Categories Injustice, International, Justice, Personal

On the War Between Israel and Hamas

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2023 //
58

I have been thinking for a long while about writing a post describing my views about the war in the Middle East. It’s not something I could toss off easily because my views are complicated.

As a Jew, I support Israel because I am painfully aware of the many centuries of Jew-hatred. My father’s father and mother fled Poland in the mid-19th century. All the Jews in their hometown (Lomza) were subsequently murdered by the Nazis. My mother and her immediate family (parents and sister) fled Bessarabia (now Moldova) in 1914 after a pogrom. Not one member of the families they left behind survived the Holocaust. Not one. Jews know in their bones that nowhere is truly safe from anti-Semitism.

After World War II, Israel became that one place where it was safe to be Jewish. A tiny speck of a nation but besieged by its neighbors, who were determined to destroy it on the first day of its existence. Surrounded by neighbors who did not believe it had the right to exist. Egypt and Jordan have made peace, and four others established diplomatic relations in 2020 (Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan), but other Muslim nations have not. Saudi Arabia was about to recognize Israel before October 7. Hamas does not accept Israel’s right to exist: that’s the literal meaning of “from the river to the sea.”

I was in Berlin on October 7. It was a horrifying day as news of the atrocities filtered out. First reports said that 70 people had been murdered, then the numbers grew, as did stories of parents murdered in front of their children, entire families slaughtered, women brutally raped and murdered, grenades thrown into bomb shelters where people were hiding, homes burned with their occupants inside, hundreds of young people murdered at a dance concert, scores of people—elderly people, even babies—taken hostage. It got worse by the minute. The killers videotaped their atrocities and their joy as they murdered.

As I watched the reports on television, I learned that one of my grandsons was in Israel, visiting friends at a dive resort in Eilat where he had worked for two years as a marine photographer. I worried about him getting out safely, and he did, a week later. He told me that he had plans to go to the SuperNova concert but the friends who offered him a ride had a quarrel and broke up, so he didn’t go. Thank God.

Hamas lured Israel into a trap. Hamas expected massive retaliation and was willing to accept mass casualties of their people. Hamas not only blocked Saudi recognition but managed to put the Palestinian cause on the front pages and make themselves the victims, not the Israelis. Days after the Hamas attack, Timothy Snyder warned that acts of mass terror are a trap and warned Israel not to fall into it.

He wrote:

Terror can be a weapon of the weak, designed to get the strong to use their strength against themselves. Terrorists know what they are going to do, and have an idea what will follow. They mean to create an emotional situation where self-destructive action seems like the urgent and only choice.

When you have been terrorized, the argument that I am making seems absurd; the terrorists can seem to you to be raving beasts who just need punishment. Yet however horrible the crime, it usually does not bespeak a lack of planning. Usually part of the plan is to enrage.

Netanyahu took the bait.

I hold Hamas responsible for the egregious atrocities that ignited the war.

I hold Netanyahu responsible for ignoring multiple warnings of an imminent attack, including those from the unarmed young women in the IDF who served as observers (“spotters”) at the border and saw Hamas militants practicing for the assault (most of the spotters were murdered in the first wave of attacks).

I hold Netanyahu responsible for imagining that Hamas had become moderates as they collected hundreds of millions from friendly Arab nations. Hamas spent the money building elaborate tunnels and stockpiling weapons, not on building a good economy and public services for the people of Gaza.

I hold Netanyahu responsible for placating Hamas to prevent the creation of a Palestinian nation, which is the only just solution to the endless subjugation of Palestinians by Israel.

I hold Netanyahu responsible for encouraging Israelis to build settlements in the West Bank on land that should be part of a Palestinian state and treating those settlers as superior to the native Palestinians.

I hold Netanyahu responsible for the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, which is killing thousands of innocent men, women, and children and reducing cities, towns, and communities to rubble. In the meantime, this ruthless campaign is making Israel a pariah state and endangering the remaining hostages.

Since October 7, I have subscribed to Haaretz and learned a great deal about the widespread antipathy towards Netanyahu. Most Israelis agree that Netanyahu must go. Close to 80% oppose him. I want him to resign or stand for election as soon as possible. I hope he is soon replaced by a leader devoted to pursuing peace with the Palestinians and a genuine two-state solution, as the UN envisioned 75 years ago. Genuine leadership would withdraw all the settlements from the West Bank, as they were withdrawn from Gaza in 2005. Genuine leadership would plan for a future of peace and prosperity for the region, not only for Israel.

The pursuit of peace requires both sides to negotiate in good faith. Spokesmen for Hamas have vowed to attack Israel again and again in the future. Hamas cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith. They are terrorists and proud of it. No Israeli government can endure a terrorist regime on its borders. Other Arab nations will have to commit themselves to stopping Hamas terrorism. They must stop funding Hamas and collaborate to build a functional government for any new Palestinian state, a government that forswears terrorism and is committed to providing security, economic development, and public services for its people.

I stand with Israel. I oppose terrorism. I hope for a day when the Jewish state lives free of the fear of terrorism and of war, side by side with neighbors that respect its borders and that share in regional prosperity. If that day ever comes, the people of the Middle East will enjoy a new world of peace.

Categories Personal

Matthew Schmitz: Trump Is a Pragmatic Moderate, Not an Extremist

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2023 //
118

A few days ago, the New York Times published an article that claimed that Trump is actually a political moderate—not an extremist— whose successes were attributable to the negotiating skills and insight that he learned as a successful businessman. The article was written by Matthew Schmitz, founder and editor of Compact, an online magazine, and a contributing editor to The American Conservative. The title of the article was “The Secret of Trump’s Success Isn’t Authoritarianism.”

At first, I thought the article was satire since Trump has recently been using Hitleresque language, referring to his enemies as “vermin” and warning that the current wave of migrants was “poisoning the blood of our country.” Even Mike Godwin, the guy who coined “Godwin’s Law” —about invoking an analogy with Hitler as a cheap rhetorical trick— said in an interview with Politico that “Trump is actively seeking to evoke the parallel” by his choice of language.

But then I wondered if the Times’ opinion page was responding to an article by James Bennett in The Economist, who was fired as the editor of the editorial pages for running a controversial article by conservative Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. Bennett complained that the Times’ staff was scornful of conservatives and had become increasingly illiberal and intolerant of hearing from the other side.

Maybe the decision to publish Schmitz’s article was a response to Bennett’s critique.

For me, I can think of a long list of reasons why Trump is no moderate. Here are a few: How is it “moderate” to incite a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol as it was voting to certify the results of an election he lost? What kind of “moderate” would devote four years to denying that he lost an election? What kind of “moderate” would undermine the most democratic of our institutions: the elections? As for Mr. Schmitz, it is indeed ironic that he ends his defense of Trump’s “moderation” with an appeal to the free and fair electoral process that Trump has belittled and besmirched. In Trump’s telling, every election is “rigged” unless he wins.

Judge for yourself.

If the presidential election were held today, Donald Trump could very well win it. Polling from several organizations shows him gaining ground on Joe Biden, winningfive of six swing states and drawing the support of about 20 percent of Black and roughly 40 percent of Hispanic voters in those states.

For some liberal observers, Mr. Trump’s resilience confirms that many Americans aren’t wedded to democracy and are tempted by extreme ideologies. Hillary Clinton has described Mr. Trump as a “threat” to democracy, and Mr. Biden has called him “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history.”

In a different spirit, some on the right also take Mr. Trump’s success as a sign that Americans are open to more radical forms of politics. After Mr. Trump’s win in 2016, the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin crowed that the American people had “started the revolution” against political liberalism itself. Richard Spencer declaredhimself and his fellow white nationalists “the new Trumpian vanguard.”

But both sides consistently misread Mr. Trump’s success. He isn’t edging ahead of Mr. Biden in swing states because Americans are eager to submit to authoritarianism, and he isn’t attracting the backing of significant numbers of Black and Hispanic voters because they support white supremacy. His success is not a sign that America is prepared to embrace the ideas of the extreme right. Mr. Trump enjoys enduring support because he is perceived by many voters — often with good reason — as a pragmatic if unpredictable kind of moderate.

To be sure, Mr. Trump’s wild rhetoric, indifference to protocol and willingness to challenge expertise have been profoundly unsettling to people of both political parties. His term in office was frequently chaotic, and the chaos seemed to culminate in the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. In the current presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has promised to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Mr. Biden; he continues to argue that the 2020 election was stolen and that America does not have “much of a democracy right now”; his fondness for incendiary language has not abated.

But it is worth remembering that during his presidency, Mr. Trump’s often intemperate rhetoric and erratic behavior ended up accompanying a host of moderate policies. On matters ranging from health care and entitlements to foreign policy and trade, Mr. Trump routinely rejected the most unpopular ideas of both political parties. Voters seem to have noticed this reality: When asked whether Mr. Trump was too conservative, not conservative enough or “not too far either way,” 57 percent of voters in a recent poll picked “not too far either way.” Only 27 percent of voters regarded him as too conservative.

Such characterizations may baffle Mr. Trump’s detractors. But even his most provocative comments since leaving the White House — that he would be a “dictator” for the first day of his second term; that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserves to be executed for “a treasonous act” — likely matter less to many voters than how he governed while in office. Inured to his braggadocio, they see him now as he was then: less an ideological warrior than a flexible-minded businessman who favors negotiation and compromise.

This understanding of Mr. Trump, more than any other factor, may explain why so many voters have stuck with him, and why, a year from now, we may be looking ahead to a second Trump administration.

Mr. Trump’s moderation can be easy to miss, because he is not a stylistic centrist — the sort who calls for bipartisan budget-cutting and a return to civility. His moderation is closer to that of Richard Nixon, who combined a combative personality and pronounced resentments with a nose for political reality and a willingness to negotiate with his ideological opposites. Mr. Nixon, an ardent anti-Communist, displayed his pragmatism most memorably by going to China. But his pragmatic nature was evident also in his acceptance of the New Deal order, which many conservatives continue to reject.

Likewise with Mr. Trump. Start with his stance on health care, which defies Democratic and Republican positions alike. When asked in 2015 whether he supported universal health care, he said, “Everybody’s got to be covered” and “The government’s going to pay for it.” In office, he proposed an alternative to Obamacare that conservative congressmen denouncedas a “Republican welfare entitlement.” Last month, when he again attacked Obamacare, he emphasized that he didn’t want to “terminate” the program but rather “replace it with much better health care.”

Mr. Trump’s views on Medicare and Social Security have a similar middle-of-the-road quality. “He and I fought about Medicare and entitlement reform all the time,” the former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan complained last year. “It became clear to me there was no way he wanted to embrace that.” In the current Republican primary race, Mr. Trump has attacked Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, as a “wheelchair-over-the-cliff kind of guy,” citing votes that Mr. DeSantis cast as a congressman for proposals to replace Medicare with vouchers for private insurance and to raise the eligibility age for Social Security.

On trade, Mr. Trump broke with the free-market orthodoxy popular among Democratic and Republican elites — but out of favor with much of Middle America. Accusing China of unfair trade practices, he placed tariffs on more than $300 billion worth of Chinese goods. Mr. Biden has maintained these tariffs, lending Mr. Trump’s act bipartisan legitimacy. Mr. Trump also pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement supported by the Obama administration. Mr. Trump’s economic record is now his main selling point in 2024. Voters may regard his businessman’s instincts as preferable to the formal training of economists, especially in the face of inflationary pressures that many economists understated.

On foreign policy Mr. Trump displayed a prudence and a willingness to negotiate that was at odds with the strident post-Sept. 11 tendencies of both parties. In 2019, for example, he defied hawks such as Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state, and John Bolton, his national security adviser, by calling off a planned missile strike in response to Iran’s destruction of a U.S. drone. Mr. Trump argued that an attack that could kill 150 people wasn’t “proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.”

Among Democrats and Republicans alike, the imperative of condemning adversaries as war criminals and terrorists has increasingly overtaken the conventional art of diplomacy. Mr. Trump, with his love of deal-making, has attempted to buck this trend. In July he rejected calls to prosecute Vladimir Putin as a war criminal, warning that politicians who endorsed this effort increased the risk of escalation by making it “impossible to negotiate peace.”

On social issues, Mr. Trump has also positioned himself as a kind of moderate. Though he championed the overturning of Roe v. Wade and has charged Democrats with supporting laws that make it legal to “rip the baby out of the womb” in the ninth month of pregnancy, he has also broken with abortion opponents. After Mr. DeSantis signed Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks, Mr. Trump called the move “a terrible mistake.” Mr. Trump’s critics on the right often accuse him of being insufficiently committed to conservative social views. That may be true — but it is hardly an electoral liability. By criticizing both late-term abortions and the most comprehensive restrictions on access, Mr. Trump has managed to reflect the muddled views held by much of the electorate.

Consider, too, controversies over gender and sexuality. Mr. Trump did not hesitate to approve limits on transgender people in the military. But no one mistakes him for a Bible-believing evangelical or Midwestern moralist. His irreverent demeanor and promises to “protect our L.G.B.T.Q. citizens” are a reminder that life in New York’s real-estate and media worlds taught him a rough form of tolerance, however politically incorrect he may be. (Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was pointing to this reality in 2016 when he accused Mr. Trump of embodying “New York values.”) In this way, Mr. Trump represents a conservatism that has come to terms with the fact of diversity, even as it resists the left’s understanding of everything “diversity” should mean.

People on both sides of the political aisle, overlooking Mr. Trump’s moderation, have assumed incorrectly that his rise has been powered by appeals to fringe ideologies. The presidential campaign of Mr. DeSantis offers a vivid example of this mistake.

The campaign has boasted of Mr. DeSantis’s uncompromising conservatism and sought to deploy the quasi-ironic aesthetic radicalism of the online right. One video it created this year criticized Mr. Trump for promising to protect L.G.B.T.Q. people, and bragged that Mr. DeSantis had signed “extreme” and “draconian” laws. Another video made by a campaign aide superimposed a sonnenrad, a symbol associated with neo-Nazis, over Mr. DeSantis’s face. Mr. DeSantis’s subsequent slide in the polls reflects a host of factors, including his reserved personality, but his dead-on-arrival attempt to channel the energy of the online right suggests that its “meme magic” isn’t the reason for Mr. Trump’s success.

To be sure, Mr. Trump has had contacts with members of the bizarre right-wing fringe, most famously in a dinner last year to which the performer Kanye West (now known as Ye) brought Nick Fuentes, an outspoken racist and antisemite. But Mr. Trump differs in significant ways from the extremists with whom he is sometimes identified. For example, he has pushed for criminal justice reform, signing the First Step Act — a bipartisan measure denounced by Mr. DeSantis as a “jailbreak bill” — and explicitly promoting it as part of his outreach to Black Americans.

More recently, Mr. Trump shared on social media the results of a Reuters investigationthat found he was the only living American president who wasn’t descended from slaveholders. (“I hope that every African American in our country is reading this right now,” he wrote. “Remember!”) In the eyes of some conservative critics, Mr. Trump had lent credence to the case for reparations. It is well known that the left objects to Mr. Trump’s record on race, but — more quietly — so does the right. This underappreciated fact may help to explain why Mr. Trump has increased his support among Black voters.

How does one square Mr. Trump’s moderation with his frequent rhetorical excesses? In his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal,” he offers a clue. He describes his approach to negotiation with a story about preventing a bank from foreclosing on a widow’s farm. When Mr. Trump’s initial pleas are ignored, he threatens to accuse the bank of causing the suicide of the widow’s late husband. Faced with this unpleasant prospect, the bank relents. Mr. Trump observes, “Sometimes it pays to be a little wild.” Whether or not this story is perfectly factual, it illustrates what Mr. Trump aspires to be: a canny negotiator whose outrageous statements help to achieve reasonable settlements.

Of course, Mr. Trump has not been moderate at every moment or on every issue. Looking ahead to a second term, he and his policy team promise to use the U.S. military to attack drug cartels in Mexico and overhaul civil-service rules to allow him to aggressively reshape the federal bureaucracy. His vow to appoint “a real special prosecutor to go after” Mr. Biden should prompt a more serious consideration of the arguments some have made that special prosecutors are inconsistent with our legal traditions.

Claims from Trump campaign officials that some of the most ambitious of these proposals are “purely speculative” and “merely suggestions” may be an attempt to obscure the full extent of Mr. Trump’s ambitions. Or perhaps those proposals reflect his longstanding negotiating strategy of talking big before making more modest deals. A second Trump term may indeed be more radical and less pragmatic than the first; it’s a possibility voters can’t dismiss, but also one that his first term gives them reason to discount.

Immigration is the issue on which the promise and limits of Mr. Trump’s form of moderation will be put to the test. He now pledges a more comprehensive and effective crackdown on illegal immigrants than he achieved in his first term, including the construction of detention camps. According to a recent survey, 53 percent of registered voters trust Mr. Trump more than Mr. Biden on immigration, with only 41 percent preferring Mr. Biden.

Perhaps that disparity reflects a lack of knowledge about the extent of Mr. Trump’s plans. Or it may indicate widespread dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs. In October, staff members from Customs and Border Protection interactedwith more than 240,000 people who attempted to enter the United States along the southern border, and between October 2022 and September of this year, 169 people whose names matched those on the terrorist watch list were arrested while trying to cross.

Indeed, it is easy to overstate how radical Mr. Trump’s record is on immigration. Mr. Biden kept in place Title 42, a Covid-era measure that Mr. Trump had used to speed deportations, and expanded its use before ending it this year. In 2021, Mr. Biden declared that “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution,” but he has nonetheless extended Mr. Trump’s signature policy. Alejandro Mayorkas, Mr. Biden’s homeland security secretary, acknowledged in October “an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers” so as to “prevent unlawful entries.” Even Mr. Trump’s promise to construct detention camps is not entirely at odds with current policy: This fall, the Biden administration reopened two camps to house minors who have crossed the border.

It is also worth considering that many voters may not consider Mr. Trump’s excesses to be as unusual as his opponents do. They may regard the events of Jan. 6, for example, as comparable to the violence that occurred after the death of George Floyd (when protests outside the White House resulted in the injury of more than 60 Secret Service agents and more than 50members of the U.S. Park Police). They may regard Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results as not altogether unlike Mrs. Clinton’s statement that she “would not” rule out questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election over claims of Russian collusion. Whether or not such equivalences are warranted, they are available to voters who remain angry that Mr. Trump’s opponents, including elected officials, challenged the legitimacy of his presidency even before he first took office — and seem no less committed to the project today.

The idea that Mr. Trump poses an existential threat to democracy is now closely intertwined with taking certain extraordinary legal steps against him. Though the legal merits of the four criminal cases brought against Mr. Trump vary, their political effect, given their timing and Mr. Trump’s continued popularity, is the same: They imply that defending democracy requires burdening, shutting up or even jailing one of the two highest-polling candidates. This is also true of lawsuits filed in several states arguing that Mr. Trump is ineligible to hold office.

If support for Mr. Trump really did indicate an incipient radicalism in the American electorate, such legal actions would be more understandable. Their political costs, however grave, would be easier to justify. But even those who think that some of the indictments of Mr. Trump are well grounded might conclude that the costs of prosecution, given the possible appearance of a partisan motive, are too high — that they pose the sort of threat to democratic norms that they purport to guard against.

For those sincerely concerned to preserve our democratic traditions, there is no need to take such drastic measures. As disruptive as Mr. Trump can be, his success testifies to American voters’ desire for moderation and skepticism of extremist ideologies. In November, Americans may well decide that they again prefer Joe Biden to Donald Trump. But if the United States really is a democracy, they will be permitted to make that choice freely.

Categories Character, Elections, Trump
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