President Trump and Secretary Kristi Noem described her as a domestic terrorist. She was painted by them as a zealous provocateur, part of an organized conspiracy or group. They said she “ran over” an ICE agent.
She was a U.S. citizen born in Colorado and appears to never have been charged with anything involving law enforcement beyond a traffic ticket.
In social media accounts, Macklin Good described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and mom.” She said she was currently “experiencing Minneapolis,” displaying a pride flag emoji on her Instagram account. A profile picture posted to Pinterest shows her smiling and holding a young child against her cheek, along with posts about tattoos, hairstyles and home decorating.
Her ex-husband, who asked not to be named out of concern for the safety of their children, said Macklin Good had just dropped off her 6-year-old son at school Wednesday and was driving home with her current partner when they encountered a group of ICE agents on a snowy street in Minneapolis, where they had moved last year from Kansas City, Missouri.
Video taken by bystanders posted to social media shows an officer approaching her car, demanding she open the door and grabbing the handle. When she begins to pull forward, a different ICE officer standing in front of the vehicle pulls his weapon and immediately fires at least two shots into the vehicle at close range.
In another video taken after the shooting, a distraught woman is seen sitting near the vehicle, wailing, “That’s my wife, I don’t know what to do!”
Calls and messages to Macklin Good’s current partner received no response.
Trump administration officials painted Macklin Good as a domestic terrorist who had attempted to ram federal agents with her car. Her ex-husband said she was no activist and that he had never known her to participate in a protest of any kind.
He described her as a devoted Christian who took part in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland when she was younger. She loved to sing, participating in a chorus in high school and studying vocal performance in college.
She studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia and won a prize in 2020 for one of her works, according to a post on the school’s English department Facebook page. She also hosted a podcast with her second husband, who died in 2023.
Macklin Good had a daughter and her son from her first marriage, who are now ages 15 and 12. Her 6-year-old son was from her second marriage.
Her ex-husband said she had primarily been a stay-at-home mom in recent years but had previously worked as a dental assistant and at a credit union.
Donna Ganger, her mother, told the Minnesota Star Tribune the family was notified of the death late Wednesday morning.
“Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” Ganger told the newspaper. “She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate.”
The New York Timesreviewed videos of the incident from three diffferent angles and concluded that she was turning to avoid hitting the ICE agent when he began firing at her.
ProPublica published this article by Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards in October, but I somehow missed it. It’s still relevant because it nails the personnel that Trump and wrestling entrepreneur Linda MacMahon installed at the U.S. Department of Education. The common thread among them: they want to privatize public schools, and they want to emphasize the Christian mission of schools.
It starts:
The department is not behaving like an agency that is simply winding down. Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The department’s actions and policies reflect a disdain for public schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of other options — private, Christian and virtual schools or homeschooling.
Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500 million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that often draws children from traditional public schools. They have repeatedly urged states to spend federal money for poor and at-risk students at private schools and businesses. And they have threatened penalties for public schools that offer programs to address historic inequities for Black or Hispanic students….
To carry out her vision, McMahon has brought on at least 20 political appointees from ultraconservative think tanks and advocacy groups eager to de-emphasize public schools, which have educated students for roughly 200 years.
Among them is top adviser Lindsey Burke, a longtime policy director at The Heritage Foundation and the lead author of the education section in Project 2025’s controversial agenda for the Trump administration.
In analyzing dozens of hours of audio and video footage of public and private speaking events for McMahon’s appointees, as well as their writings, ProPublica found that a recurring theme is the desire to enable more families to leave public schools. This includes expanding programs that provide payment — in the form of debit cards, which Burke has likened to an “Amazon gift card” — to parents to cobble together customized educational plans for their children. Instead of relying on public schools, parents would use their allotted tax dollars on a range of costs: private school tuition, online learning, tutors, transportation and music lessons.
Although more than 80% of American students attend public schools, Burke predicted that within five years, a majority would be enrolled in private choice options. The impact of their policies, she believes, will lead to the closure of many public schools.
Accountability, once a watchword for conservatives, won’t be needed in the future that McMahon and Burke are building.
As tax dollars are reallocated from public school districts and families abandon those schools to learn at home or in private settings, the new department officials see little need for oversight. Instead, they would let the marketplace determine what’s working using tools such as Yelp-like reviews from parents. Burke has said she is against “any sort of regulation….
Advocates for public schools consider them fundamental to American democracy. Providing public schools is a requirement in every state constitution.
Families in small and rural communities tend to rely more heavily on public education. They are less likely than families in cities to have private and charter schools nearby. And unlike private schools, public school districts don’t charge tuition. Public schools enroll local students regardless of academic or physical ability, race, gender or family income; private schools can selectively admit students.
Karma Quick-Panwala, a leader at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, which advocates for disabled students, said she wants to be optimistic. “But,” she added, “I’m very fearful that we are headed towards a less inclusive, less diverse and more segregated public school setting.”
McMahon has welcomedeaders of extremist rightwing groups into the Department, like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education.
Little attention was paid to the conservative education activists in the front row [at McMahon’s confirmation hearings] from Moms for Liberty, which has protested school curricula and orchestrated book bans nationwide; Defending Education (formerly Parents Defending Education), which has sued districts to fight what it calls liberal indoctrination; and the America First Policy Institute, co-founded by McMahon after the first Trump administration.
Now two people who once served at Defending Education have been named to posts in the Education Department, and leaders from Moms for Liberty have joined McMahon for roundtables and other official events. In addition, at least nine people from the America First Policy Institute have been hired in the department.
AFPI’s sweeping education priorities include advocating for school vouchers and embedding biblical principles in schools. It released a policy paper in 2023, titled “Biblical Foundations,” that sets out the organization’s objective to end the separation of church and state and “plant Jesus in every space.”
The paper rejects the idea that society has a collective responsibility to educate all children equally and argues that “the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” It frames public schooling as failing, with low test scores and “far-left social experiments, such as gender fluidity…”
AFPI and the other two nonprofit groups sprang up only after the 2020 election. Together they drew in tens of millions of dollars through a well-coordinated right-wing network that had spent decades advocating for school choice and injecting Christianity into schools.
Ultrawealthy supporters include right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, who, through a super PAC, gave $336,000 to Moms for Liberty’s super PAC from October 2023 through July 2024.
Defending Education and AFPI received backing from some of the same prominent conservative foundations and trusts, including ones linked to libertarian-minded billionaire Charles Koch and to conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, an architect of the effort to strip liberal influence from the courts, politics and schools.
Maurice T. Cunningham, a now-retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, studied the origins and connections of parents’ rights groups, finding in 2023 that the funders — a small set of billionaires and Christian nationalists — had similar goals.
The groups want “to undermine teachers unions, protect their wealthy donors from having to contribute their fair share in taxes to strengthen public schools, and provide profit opportunities through school privatization,” he concluded. The groups say they are merely trying to advocate for parents and for school choice. They didn’t discuss their relationship with donors when contacted by ProPublica.
These groups and their supporters now have access to the top levers of government, either through official roles in the agency or through the administration’s adoption of their views.
Tiffany Justice, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, is optimistic about the plans of MacMahon:
Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward, Justice, who is now with The Heritage Foundation’s political advocacy arm, told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero….”
McMahon’s tenure also has been marked by an embrace of religion in schools. She signaled that priority when she appointed Meg Kilgannon to a top post in her office.
Kilgannon had worked in the department as director of a faith initiative during the first Trump term and once was part of the Family Research Council, an evangelical think tank that opposes abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
She has encouraged conservative Christians to become involved in what she’s described as “a spiritual war” over children and what they’re being taught in public schools.
The Associated Press reports that Republicans in Congress released a bipartisan budget bill that funds the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The bill ignores Trump’s efforts to rename it as the Trump Kennedy Center. The bill also ignores Trump’s desire to rename the Center’s opera house for his wife Melania. (Who knew Melania is a patron of opera?)
So Republicans are willing to stand up to Trump on small matters like name-change but not on major issues like his rejecting Congressional authority over going to war and kidnapping the President of another nation. Actually the name-change might mean more to the egotistical Trump.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump may have his name on the building, but it’s still the Kennedy Center to Congress.
A bipartisan spending package released Monday by House Speaker Mike Johnson includes $32 million for operating expenses at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts through Sept. 30, 2027.
Trump made a series of leadership changes at the center shortly after he took office in 2025 that ended with the Republican president’s handpicked board of trustees voting in December to rebrand the venue as the Trump Kennedy Center by adding his name to Kennedy’s on the exterior of the building and the website.
The Kennedy Center said the vote recognized Trump’s work to revitalize an institution he had criticized as being too liberal-leaning. But since he took over the center, numerous artists have canceled appearances, ticket sales and attendance have fallen, and viewership for December’s broadcast of the Kennedy Center Honors program — which he predicted would soar because he was the host — was down by about 35% compared to the 2024 show.
Andy Spears continues to raise the alarm about the drive by tech companies to replace teachers with some version of AI, or teaching machines. Think how much money can be saved after buying the machines! Machines don’t get salaries or pensions or healthcare.
The tech titans prefer to ignore the fact that humans learn best when they engage with other humans, who can express human approval or disappointment, can offer encouragement or a pat on the back.
I’ve written before about a network of private (and now charter) schools that use AI to drive instruction. To be clear: In these schools, students learn using laptops and AI, no teacher needed.
Katya Schwenk takes a deeper dive into this horror-scape.
Academic instruction in Price’s schools is delivered via a suite of online education apps for two hours per day, leaving the afternoons free for Cybertruck construction and tech CEO make-believe. This is the brand around which her work revolves: 2 Hour Learning, which is billedas an “AI tutor” that can entirely replace all classroom teachers via a few hours spent glued to a laptop screen.
Peter Greene takes a look at recent research on AI and young users. The findings should raise alarms about using AI as the primary source of instruction.
Since the moment that large language models (LLM) and chatbots became available for students who wanted them to churn out serviceable schoolwork, schools have been concerned about the effect of AI on academic integrity. But an assortment of studies suggest there are other concerns that schools must reckon with…
Aura found that kids use AI for companionship 42% of the time, and over a third of those interactions involve talk about violence. Half of those interactions combine violence with sexual role-play. A study by Common Sense Media finds larger numbers, with 72% of teens reporting they have used an AI companion and 52% saying they use AI companions a few times a month or more.
Humans are built for connection. With other humans.
Children crave companionship – and they are finding it in AI bots.
There are all sorts of issues with this, including the creation of a fantasy world in which one’s companion is always available and ready to meet the immediate needs of the human.
There’s also the inability to develop the skills that allow for real human connection – listening to understand, nonverbal interactions, and managing emotions when things don’t go your way.
Turning instruction over to AI means kids will spend even more hours of the day disconnected from other humans. It also seemingly increases reliance on AI tools to manage even basic tasks.
Greene highlights the potential pitfalls of turning over academic instruction to an AI bot. It’s not clear whether any perceived rewards from doing so outweigh these enormous drawbacks.
Stephen Miller is a case study in himself. He is a paradox. His family came to the U.S. over a century ago, for the same reason millions of other immigrants arrived: to find freedom, safety, and opportunity. Like so many other families from Eastern Europe, his family was impoverished. They worked and succeeded.
They were immigrants.
Surely Stephen knows his family history, but he is nonetheless hostile to immigrants today. He wants to kick out those that are here and bar those who haven’t made it inside the nation’s gates.
He isn’t just hostile to immigrants. He hates them.
Trump’s Chief Bigot, Stephen Miller, said on Fox News this month that immigrants to the United States bring problems that extend through generations.
“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller claimed. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
In fact, the data show just the opposite. The children and grand children and great grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in America.
In a new paper, Princeton’s Leah Boustan, Stanford’s Ran Abramitzky, Elisa Jácome of Princeton, and Santiago Pérez of UC Davis, used millions of father-son pairs spanning more than a century of U.S. history to show that immigrants today are no slower to move into the middle class than immigrants were a century ago.
In fact, no matter when their parents came to the U.S. or what country they came from, children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers.
Stephen Miller’s great great grandfather, Wolf-Leib Glosser, was born in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl in what is now Belarus.
For much the same reasons my great grandparents came to America — vicious pogroms that threatened his life — Wolf-Leib came to Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 in his pockets. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English.
The family settled in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a booming coal and steel town, where they rose from peddling goods to owning a haberdashery, and then owning a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores, run by Sam, and Sam’s son, Izzy (Stephen Miller’s maternal grandfather).
Two generations later, in 1985, came little Stephen — who developed such a visceral hate for immigrants that he makes up facts about them that have no bearing on reality.
In a little more than eleven months, Stephen and his boss have made sweeping changes to limit legal immigration to America.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring that children born to undocumented immigrants and to some temporary foreign residents would no longer be granted citizenship automatically.
The executive order, which was paused by the courts, could throw into doubt the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of babies born each year. Miller and his boss want the Supreme Court to uphold that executive order.
After the horrific shooting of two National Guard members on August 26, by a gunman identified by the authorities as an Afghan national, Trump halted naturalizations for people from many African and the Middle Eastern countries.
Trump is also threatening to strip U.S. citizenship from naturalized migrants “who undermine domestic tranquillity.” He plans to deport foreigners deemed to be “non-compatible with Western Civilization” and aims to detain even more migrants in jail or in warehouses — in the U.S. or in other countries — without due process.
In addition to the unconstitutionality of such actions, they stir up the worst nativist and racist impulses in America — blaming and scapegoating entire groups of people.
As they make their case to crack down on illegal and legal immigration, Miller and Trump have targeted Minnesota’s Somali community — seizing on an investigation into fraud that took place in pockets of the Somali diaspora in the state, to denounce the entire community, which Trump has called “garbage.”
Let’s be clear. Apart from Native Americans, we are all immigrants — all descended from “foreigners.” Some of our ancestors came here eagerly; some came because they were no longer safe in their homelands; some came enslaved.
Almost all of us are mongrels — of mixed nationalities, mixed ethnicities, mixed races, mixed creeds. While we maintain our own traditions, we also embrace the ideals of this nation.
You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. But … anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. A person becomes an American by adopting America’s principles, especially those principles summarized in the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Reagan understood that America is a set of aspirations and ideals, more than it is a nationality.
Miller and Trump want to fuel bigotry. Like dictators before him, Trump’s road to tyranny is paved with stones hurled at “them.” His entire project depends on hate.
America is better than Trump or his chief bigot.
We won’t buy their hate. To the contrary, we’ll call out bigots. We won’t tolerate intolerance. We’ll protect hardworking members of our community. We’ll alert them when ICE is lurking.
We will not succumb to the ravings of a venomous president who wants us to hate each other — or his bigoted sidekick.
The Wyoming Supreme Court overturned two laws that were intended to ban abortions. One of the overruled laws prohibited abortion. The other prohibited the abortion pill, which is used at home for DIY abortions. The court held that the two laws violated the state constitution’s guarantee that a woman has the right to make her own health care choices.
The Governor was outraged and said he will ask the legislature to amend the state constitution to prohibit all means of abortion. He would then have to hold a referendum to get public consent.
Mead Grover of the AP reported:
The Wyoming Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down the state’s near-total abortion ban and a first-of-its-kind prohibition on abortion pills, saying that the laws violated the state constitution.
In 2023, the year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Wyoming passed an abortion ban that included narrow exceptions for incest, sexual assault and cases where the mother’s health is at risk. Later that year, it became the first state in the country to explicitly outlaw abortion pills, setting fines and prison time for anyone found prescribing the drugs for an abortion.
But abortion remained legal in the red state because the bans were blocked in court as legal challenges played out. In the case decided Tuesday, Wyoming’s Supreme Court weighed whether the two 2023 laws violated a woman’s right to make her own health care choices as guaranteed in the state constitution.
The state argued that the laws did not violate that right because abortion is not health care. Even if it were, the state argued, the procedure could not be considered a woman’s own decision because it ended the life of the fetus.
The Wyoming Supreme Court disagreed. “Although a woman’s decision to have an abortion ends the fetal life, the decision is, nevertheless, one she makes concerning her own health care,” Wyoming Chief Justice Lynne Boomgaarden wrote in the court’s ruling.
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (R), who signed both of the contested abortion laws, derided the court’s decision. He pressed Wyoming’s Republican-led legislature to pass a constitutional amendment on abortion as soon as possible.
If the legislature passed such an amendment, it would then go before voters during the 2026 election.
“This ruling is profoundly unfortunate and sadly only serves to prolong the ultimate and proper resolution of this issue,” Gordon said in a statement. “This ruling may settle, for now, a legal question, but it does not settle the moral one, nor does it reflect where many Wyoming citizens stand, including myself.”
The state’s attorney who argued before the Wyoming Supreme Court did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The case decided Tuesday was brought by Wyoming’s lone abortion clinic, a nonprofit in the state that helps fund abortion services and a group of women who live there.
Like many of you, I sat glued to the television on January 6, 2021, and watched the terrible events unfold. I had seen Trump’s tweet a few weeks earlier, urging his followers to show up on January 6 and promising that it would be “wild.”
They did show up. Thousands of them. Some dressed in military gear, some in bizarre costumes, some armed. All eager to “stop the steal.” As Trump promised, it was indeed wild.
Trump had gone through 60 court cases, appealing the vote in different states. Every court ruled against him. Trump-appointed judges ruled against him. There was no evidence of fraud. The US Supreme Court ruled against his claims–twice. His closest advisors told him he lost. But he listened only to those who told him the election was rigged, like Rudy Giuliani, the My Pillow Guy, Sidney Powell, etc.
When his supporters showed up on January 6, he gave a passionate speech, telling them that the election had been stolen. He urged them to march to the Capitol, where the ceremonial counting of the electoral vote was taking place, and said he would march with them.
He didn’t march with them, though he wanted to. He returned to the White Hiuse, where he sat back and watched his loyal fans attack the U.S. Capitol, smash its windows, break through its doors, assault Capitol police, and ransack the seat of our government.
It was the worst day in our history because never before had an American president rallied his passionate fans and called on them to attack the seat of our government. Never before had a mob of American citizens tried to overturn a free and fair election by violence.
Trump demonstrated that he is a sore loser. He was beaten by Joe Biden fair and square. He refused to accept that he lost. He continues to claim that he won.
He is either delusional or the world’s biggest crybaby and liar.
I will never forget that day of infamy. Yes, it was wise than Pearl Harbor. It was worse than 9/11. On those days, we were attacked by foreign powers and terrorists. On January 6, our democracy was attacked by Americans.
Trump rallying a crowd before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol: “You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen.”
A version of this article was posted in October behind a paywall as part of the “On Trump’s Bullshit” series. I am making it available to all subscribers on the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In October, Donald Trump posted on social media what appeared to be a message to Attorney General Pam Bondi: “The Biden FBI placed 274 agents into the crowd on January 6…What a SCAM – DO SOMETHING!”
When Bondi launches her investigation, she’ll soon discover an uncomfortable fact: Joe Biden wasn’t president on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump was — and he sought to block Biden from taking office. (And it was his government that deployed agents after the riot began.)
The post is emblematic of Trump’s most astonishing piece of bullshit — his effort to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that he orchestrated and encouraged.
Trump knew he faced criminal liability for his role in obstructing the peaceful passage of power after his 2020 defeat, so it’s quite possible he ran for president mainly to derail the investigation. As a tactic, it was successful. Through repeated legal challenges, he managed to delay the trial until after the November election. When he won, the Justice Department was required to drop the case because of an existing policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.
Then, as soon as he became president, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people convicted or charged in connection with the riot, while commuting the sentences of fourteen members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, two far-right groups.
Trump now routinely refers to the “January 6 hoax,” attempting to erase the event altogether.
Even more amazing, Trump has managed to convince many of his supporters that a riot that resulted in $2.7 billion in property damage, security expenses, and other related costs, according to the Government Accountability Office, was a “beautiful day” and “a day of love.” The rioters assaulted 140 law enforcement officers, while 123 people were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to law enforcement.
The reality is that Trump incited the brutal assault on the Capitol, starting with his lie that he won the 2020 election. His refusal to accept the election results, despite his convincing losses in key battleground states, set the stage for a day of outrage by his supporters.
The final report of Special Counsel Jack Smith documented how Trump tried to browbeat Republican state officials in battleground states to alter the results or nullify them. Thankfully, people such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger —who Trump demanded to “find 11,780 votes” — or Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey — who bluntly told Trump he lost because he had underperformed with educated females — refused to yield to his pressure.
So did Vice President Mike Pence. Trump wanted Pence, who had the ceremonial role of presiding over the Electoral College count, to overturn the election by rejecting votes for Biden from six battleground states. Pence knew he didn’t have the authority to do so, despite the theories offered by what he called Trump’s “gaggle of crackpot lawyers.”
But the most damning evidence of Trump’s misconduct are his own actions on January 6, after the crowd he urged to march on the Capitol turned into a mob.
As the scale of the attack became clear, Trump was reluctant to try to calm the situation, even as his staff pleaded with him to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol. Trump’s tweets were so inadequate, in the view of staff members, that many resolved to resign. Even his children Ivanka and Donald Jr. found the tweets to be inappropriate. Nearly three hours passed before Trump finally told the rioters to “go home.”
The House select committee report on the Jan. 6 attack shows that Trump learned only 15 minutes after he concluded his remarks on the National Mall at 1:10 p.m. that the Capitol was under attack. Less than half an hour later, the Metropolitan Police Department officially declared a riot. Minutes later, rioters broke into the Capitol andswarmed the building.
Yet it was not until 2:24 that Trump issued his first written tweet — and it made things worse.
Trump wrote: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”
According to the House committee’sreport: “Evidence shows that the 2:24 p.m. tweet immediately precipitated further violence at the Capitol. Immediately after this tweet, the crowds both inside and outside of the Capitol building violently surged forward. Outside the building, within 10 minutes thousands of rioters overran the line on the west side of the Capitol that was being held by the Metropolitan Police Force’s Civil Disturbance Unit, the first time in the history of the DC Metro Police that such a security line had ever been broken.”
One minute after the tweet, the Secret Service evacuated Pence to a secure location at the Capitol. According to Smith’s report, when an advisor at the White House rushed to the dining room to inform Trump, the president replied, “So what?”
Contemporaneous White House reactions were damning.
Deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger told the House committee that the 2:24 p.m. tweet convinced him to resign that day. “I read it and was quite disturbed by it,” he told the committee. “I was disturbed and worried to see that the President was attacking Vice President Pence for doing his constitutional duty. So the tweet looked to me like the opposite of what we really needed at that moment, which was a de-escalation. … It looked like fuel being poured on the fire.”
White House counsel Pat Cipollone, in his deposition with the committee, said: “My reaction to it is that’s a terrible tweet, and I disagreed with the sentiment. And I thought it was wrong.”
The committee report says that Trump’s daughter Ivanka rushed to the Oval Office dining room, where Trump was watching coverage of the riot on Fox News. “Although no one could convince President Trump to call for the violent rioters to leave the Capitol, Ivanka persuaded President Trump that a tweet could be issued to discourage violence against the police,” the report said.
At 2:39, Trump issued this tweet: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”
The tweet did not condemn the violence or tell rioters to leave the Capitol. As Trump well knew, the crowd was not peaceful at the time.
Even so, the committee’s report said that Trump had resisted using the word “peaceful.” It quotes Sarah Matthews, who was the deputy White House press secretary, about a conversation she had with Ivanka after Matthews expressed concern the tweet did not go far enough. “In a hushed tone [she] shared with me that the President did not want to include any sort of mention of peace in that tweet and that it took some convincing on their part, those who were in the room,” Matthews told the committee.
Trump rejected staff requests to urge people who entered the Capitol illegally to leave immediately. Instead, at 3:13 p.m., when he issued a third tweet, he still did not tell people to go home. “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful,” he said. “No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order — respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”
The violence continued.
Finally, at 4:17 p.m., almost three hours after the attack began, Trump posted a video that encouraged people to leave the Capitol — while repeating many of his lies about a stolen election. By then it was clear Trump had failed to derail Biden’s election.
“Down at the Capitol, the video began streaming onto rioters’ phones, and by all accounts including video footage taken by other rioters, they listened to President Trump’s command,” the report said. “ ‘Donald Trump has asked everybody to go home,’ one rioter shouted as he ‘deliver[ed] the President’s message.’ ‘That’s our order,’ another rioter responded. Others watching the video responded: ‘He says, go home.’ ”
Just after 6 pm, Trump offered one more tweet that appeared to justify the violence on one of the darkest days in American history: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
It was a sickening, celebratory tweet on a horrific day — convincing even more White House officials to quit — and no amount of Trump bullshit can erase his conduct from the annals of history.
Harvard University’s President Alan Garber said in a recent discussion that faculty activism in their classes chilled students’ free speech and created a repressive climate on campus.
An article in The Harvard Crimson reported on President Garber’s comments.
Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said the University “went wrong” by allowing professors to inject their personal views into the classroom, arguing that faculty activism had chilled free speech and debate on campus.
In rare and unusually candid remarks on a podcast released on Tuesday, Garber appeared to tie many of higher education’s oft-cited ills — namely, a dearth of tolerance and free debate — to a culture that permits, and at times encourages, professors to foreground their identity and perspectives in teaching.
“How many students would actually be willing to go toe-to-toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?” he said.
The remarks mark Garber’s most explicit public acknowledgement that faculty practices have contributed to a breakdown in open discourse on campus — and that he is committed to backtracking toward neutrality in the classroom…
Though Garber has carved some exceptions to the policy — notably when he, in his personal capacity, condemned a Palestine Solidarity Committee post marking the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack — he has increasingly emphasized restraint, particularly in the classroom.
“I’m pleased to say that I think there is real movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom,” he said….
In his responses, Garber echoed the sentiment of a Faculty of Arts and Sciences reportreleased last January, which affirmed professors’ right to “extramural speech” but warned that instructors must proactively encourage disagreement in the classroom to avoid alienating students…
Instead of relying primarily on punishment, Garber touted changes to University orientations — including the addition of a module on discussing controversial topics — alongside the expansive reports produced by Harvard’s twin task forces on combating bias toward Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian affiliates.
“It’s about learning how to listen and how to speak in an empathetic way,” he said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 