Kathryn Joyce is an outstanding journalist who has written several excellent articles about the far-right conspiracy to destroy public education. In this important article, published by both the Hechinger Report and Vanity Fair, she examines the rightwing takeover of public schools in Sarasota, Florida, by the extremist Moms for Liberty and their hero Governor DeSantis.
Joyce begins:
SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — On a Sunday afternoon in late May 2022, Zander Moricz, then class president of Sarasota County’s Pine View School, spent the moments before his graduation speech sitting outside the auditorium, on the phone with his lawyers. Over the previous month, the question of what he’d say when he stepped to the podium had become national news. That March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, quickly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law for its ban on all mention of gender identity and sexuality in K–3 classrooms and restriction of those discussions in higher grades as well. Moricz, a student LGBTQ+ activist, had led several protests against the act that spring and joined a high-profile lawsuit against the state. In early May, he charged on Twitter that Pine View’s administration had warned that if he mentioned his activism or the lawsuit at graduation, his microphone would be cut. (In a statement released last year, the school district confirmed that students are told not to express political views in their speeches.)
In the tumultuous weeks leading up to the ceremony, Pine View — Sarasota’s “gifted” magnet institution, consistently ranked one of the top 25 public high schools in the country — was besieged with angry calls and news coverage. Moricz stayed home for three weeks, he said, thanks to the rvolume of death threats he received, and people showed up at his parents’ work. When a rumor started that Pine View’s principal would have to wear a bulletproof vest to graduation, he recalled, “the entire campus lost their minds,” thinking “everyone’s going to die” and warning relatives not to come. His parents worried he’d be killed.
But after all the controversy, graduation day was a success. Moricz, now 19, delivered a pointedly coded speech about the travails of being born with curly hair in Florida’s humid climate: how he worried about the “thousands of curly-haired kids who are going to be forced to speak like this” — like he was, in code — “for their entire lives as students.” Videos of the speech went viral. Donations poured into Moricz’s youth-led nonprofit. That summer, he left to study government at Harvard.
Half-a-year later though, when Moricz came home, Sarasota felt darker.
“I’m wearing this hat for a reason,” he said when we met for coffee in a strip mall near his alma mater in early March. “Two years ago, if I was bullied due to my queerness, the school would have rallied around me and shut it down. If it happened today, I believe everyone would act like it wasn’t happening.”
These days, he said, queer kids sit in the back of class and don’t tell teachers they’re being harassed. A student at Pine View was told, Moricz said, that he couldn’t finish his senior thesis researching other states’ copycat “Don’t Say Gay” laws. (The school did not respond to a request for comment through a district spokesperson.) When Moricz’s nonprofit found a building to house a new youth LGBTQ+ center — since schools were emphatically no longer safe spaces — they budgeted for bulletproof glass.
“The culture of fear that’s being created is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do,” he said. And much of it was thanks to the Sarasota County School Board.
Over the last two years, education culture wars have become the engine of Republican politics nationwide, with DeSantis’s Florida serving as the vanguard of the movement. But within the state, Sarasota is more central still.
Its school board chair, Bridget Ziegler, cofounded the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty and helped lay the groundwork for “Don’t Say Gay.” After a uniquely ugly school board race last summer, conservatives flipped the board and promptly forced out the district’s popular superintendent. In early January, when DeSantis appointed a series of right-wing activists to transform Florida’s progressive New College into a “Hillsdale of the South” — emulating the private Christian college in Michigan that has become a trendsetting force on the right — that was in Sarasota too. In February, DeSantis sat alongside Ziegler’s husband and Moms for Liberty’s other cofounders to announce a list of 14 school board members he intends to help oust in 2024—Sarasota’s sole remaining Democrat and LGBTQ+ board member, Tom Edwards, among them. The next month, Ziegler proposed that the board hire a newly created education consultancy group with ties to Hillsdale College for what she later called a “‘WOKE’ Audit.” (Ziegler did not respond to interview requests for this article.)
The dizzying number of attacks has led to staffing and hiring challenges, the cancelation of a class, a budding exodus of liberals from the county, and fears that destroying public education is the ultimate endgame. In January, Ziegler’s husband, Christian — who chairs the Florida Republican Party — tweeted a celebratory declaration: “SARASOTA IS GROUND ZERO FOR CONSERVATIVE EDUCATION.”
It wasn’t hyperbole, said Moricz. “We say that Sarasota is Florida’s underground lab, and we’re its non-consenting lab rats.”
For as long as Florida has been grading schools and school districts — a late 1990s innovation that helped spark the “school reform” movement — Sarasota, with its 62 schools and nearly 43,000 students, has enjoyed an “A” rating. Perched on the Gulf Coast just south of Tampa, the county’s mix of powder-soft beaches and high-culture amenities — including an opera house, ballet and museums — have made it a destination for vacationers and retirees. And that influx has made Sarasota one of the richest counties in the state.
Since many of those retirees, dating back to the 1950s, have been white Midwestern transplants, it’s also made Sarasota a Republican stronghold and top fundraising destination for would-be presidential candidates. Both the last and current chairs of the state GOP — first State Senator Joe Gruters and now Christian Ziegler — live in the county. Sarasota arguably launched Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, thanks to Gruters’s early support. These days, though, Sarasota isn’t just conservative, but at the leading edge of Florida’s turn to the hard right.
Partly that’s thanks to the Zieglers, who have become one of Florida’s premier power couples, with close ties to both Trump world and the DeSantis administration and a trio of daughters enrolled in local private schools. As founder of the digital marketing company Microtargeted Media, Christian did hundreds of thousands of dollars of work for pro-Trump PACs in 2021, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. After being elected state GOP chair this February, he announced his goal was “to crush these leftist in-state Democrats” so thoroughly that “no Democrat considers running for office.” Although Bridget stepped down from Moms for Liberty shortly after its founding, she subsequently helped draftFlorida’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, which helped pave the way for DeSantis’s 2021 ban on mask mandates and ultimately last year’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. In 2022, the right-wing Leadership Institute hired her as director of school board programs, and built a 6,000-square-foot headquarters in Sarasota to serve as a national hub for conservative education activism. This winter, DeSantis also appointed her to a new board designed to punish the Disney Company for criticizing his anti-LGBTQ laws….
Last year, when Ziegler was up for reelection and two other board members were terming out, she ran as a unified slate with former school resource officer Tim Enos and retired district employee Robyn Marinelli. The candidates drew support from both DeSantis’s administration — which unprecedentedly endorseddozens of school board candidates across the state — and local members of the far-right. A PAC partially funded by The Hollow’s owner campaigned for the “ZEM” slate (a shorthand for the candidates’ surnames) by driving a mobile billboard around the county, calling one of their opponents a “LIAR” and “BABY KILLER” because she’d once worked for Planned Parenthood. Proud Boys hoisted ZEM signs on county streets and a mailer was sent out, castigating the liberal candidates as “BLM/PSL [Party of Socialism and Liberation]/ANTIFA RIOTERS, PLANNED PARENTHOOD BABY KILLERS, [who] WANT GROOMING AND PORNOGRAPHY IN OUR SCHOOLS.” (Enos and Marinelli did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)
Open the link and read all of the article. It is a devastating article about the takeover of the school board by hateful extremists whose tools are fear and divisiveness.
John Merrow reports on his ambitious birthday bike ride: he turned 82 and he successfully biked 82 miles! He was so exhilarated that he added another ten miles for good measure!
But, the bad news is that he was scammed in the process.
Jeff Bryant writes often about education. He lives in North Carolina. In this article, he tries to solve the mystery of why Democratic state legislator Tricia Cotham switched sides and joined the Republican Party, giving them a supermajority in both houses of the General Assembly?
Cotham was a Democrat who had campaigned in promises to oppose school vouchers; to defend LGBT rights; and support abortion rights.
Once she gave the Republicans the decisive vote in the lower house, the Republicans had a veto-proof majority and were in a position to override any veto by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.
Cotham, the new Republican, reversed her vote on everything she campaigned for or against. She supported Republicans’ efforts to reduce abortion rights; she endorsed school vouchers; and she sided with Republicans in their attack on trans youth.
In other words, she betrayed the people who voted for her and cast her lot with the hard-right Republicans who have aligned themselves with anti-progressive, anti-liberal, anti-Democrat policies.
Why? She said the Democrats were mean to her. She said they ignored her. She said she didn’t get the committee assignments she wanted. Are these good reasons to join forces with a party that has sought to destroy public education, demoralize teachers, and gerrymander the state to protect its advantages?
None of this made sense. A person doesn’t change their fundamental values because of hurt feelings.
Jeff investigated and determined that her decision was transactional. What did she get in exchange for double-crossing her constituents and her colleagues? Read his article to find out.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes here about the latest disturbing development in the charter school industry—the growth of charter schools that promote a Christian Nationalist perspective. Her article was published on Valerie Strauss’s blog The Answer Sheet at the Washington Post.
Valerie Strauss introduces Carol’s article:
The religious right scored a win this week when Oklahoma’s virtual charter school boardapproved the opening of the nation’s first religious charter school, which, if it is actually allowed to open as planned in 2024 for grades K-12, will weave Catholic doctrine into every single subject that students take. Given that charter schools are publicly funded, and public schools aren’t supposed to provide religious education (although they can teach about religion), you may wonder how this school could be given permission to exist.
The decision is no surprise to people watching the way some charter schools run by right-wing organizations have been operating in recent years, pushing the boundaries of the separation of church and state embedded in the U.S. Constitution even as Supreme Court decisions have chipped away at it. Details can be found in a new report entitled “A Sharp Turn Right: A New Breed of Charter Schools Delivers the Conservative Agenda.” (See full report below.) It was written by the nonprofit Network for Public Education, a group that advocates for traditional public school districts and opposes charter schools, and has written reports in recent years chronicling waste and abuse of public funding of charter schools.
The network’s newest report looks at charter schools that it says are designed to attract Christian nationalists with specific imagery and curriculum. The student bodies of these schools are largely Whiter and wealthier than in other schools — in the charter sector and in traditional public districts — and have deep connections to people within conservative Christian movements, the report says.
Former U.S. education secretary Betsy DeVos, a leader in the movement to expand charter schools and school vouchers — which use public funds for private and religious school education — has acknowledged that her work in the education sphere is driven by desire to advance school choice as a path to “advance God’s kingdom.” Her husband, Amway heir Richard DeVos, who worked with her for decades in the school choice movement, said he was sorry that public schools “displaced” churches as the center of communities.
The charter school movement moved into new territory Monday when the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved, on a 3-2 vote, an application for the opening of a virtual school to be named St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School and run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa. The vote will be challenged in court, and as attorney and education policy scholar Kevin Welner wrote on this blog last year, we can expect to see litigation around whether church-run charters can “successfully assert their Free Exercise rights in an attempt to run the school without restrictions on proselytizing and religiously motivated discrimination.” You can read here about howthe Supreme Court has been laying the groundwork for religious charter schools.
The new report by the Network for Public Education focuses on two types of charter schools: classical charters — which use the word “classical” in their names — and those offering “back to basics” curriculum. Diane Ravitch, an education historian and co-founder of the Network for Public Education, said in an introduction to the report that these charter schools are “the lesser-known third part” of a strategy by right-wing Christians to undermine secular public education; the others are vouchers and similar programs that use public funding for private and religious education, and book/curricular bans.
While private classical schools have a long history — emphasizing Eurocentric texts and the study of Latin and Greek — what is new is “the use of taxpayer dollars to fund them when they become or are established as charter schools,” the report said. Founders of classical charters generally reject modern instructional practices and accuse Progressive Era educational leaders such as John Dewey for removing Christian ideals from curriculum.
The Network for Public Education’s report notes that in classical private Christian schools, the curriculum focuses not only on the Western canon — Homer, C.S. Lewis and beyond — but also on scripture. “Classical charter schools emphasize ‘values’ or ‘virtues,’ which stand as shorthand for quoted scripture,” it says, which is especially true of classical charters that have opened since Donald Trump became president in 2017. “From videos posted on websites to crosses shown on the top of the school, we found example after example of charter schools presenting themselves as free private Christian schools,” the report says. It cited Liberty Common High School in Fort Collins, Colo., which celebrates “capstones” representing the “highest order of virtue and character,” including “prudence, temperance, and patriotism,” and the American Classical Charter Academy in St. Cloud, Fla., which promotes eight “pillars of character” and four “classical virtues.”
“Back to basic” schools use red, white, and blue school colors, patriotic logos and pictures of the Founding Fathers, along with terms such as virtue, patriotism and sometimes outright references to religion, the report says, citing as an example the website of the four-campus Advantage Academy in Texas, which boasts of educating students in a “faith-friendly environment.” The Cincinnati Classical Academy, another charter school, does not advertise its charter status on its website, while offering a free education with instruction in “moral character.” The American Leadership Academy in Utah posts videos its choir singing religious songs; one includes the note, “We want to help kids and adults turn to Jesus, or become Jesus people.
The fastest-growing sector of right-wing charters combines both a classical “virtuous” curriculum with “hyper-patriotism,” exemplified by charter schools that adopt the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum, which is centered on Western civilization and designed to help “students acquire a mature love for America,” its organizers say. The curriculum comes from Hillsdale College in Michigan, whose longtime president, Larry Arnn, is an ally of Trump’s and is aligned with DeVos. A Hillsdale K-12 civics and U.S. history curriculum released in 2021 extols conservative values, attacks liberal ones and distorts civil rights history, saying, for example: “The civil rights movement was almost immediately turned into programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders.”
The Network for Public Education said that it had identified 273 open charter schools that offer a classical curriculum and/or have websites designed to attract White conservative families with for-profit management corporations running 29 percent of them, a percentage nearly twice as high as the entire charter school sector.
The new report looks at Roger Bacon Academy charter schools, run by Baker A. Mitchell Jr., which prohibit girls from wearing pants or jeans to school in order, according to a lawsuit, to ensure they are regarded as “fragile vessels” that men are supposed to take care of and honor, based on a quote from the Bible’s New Testament. (A ruling in a lawsuit challenging the dress code is on appeal to the Supreme Court after a federal judge ruled in favor of Bonnie Peltier, who objected to the unequal treatment of her daughter.) Students are also required to recite a daily oath committing them to be “morally straight” and guard “against the stains of falsehood from the fascination with experts,” while also avoiding the “temptation of vanity” and “overreliance on rational argument.”
“A Sharp Turn Right” also says one purpose of these schools is “to raise the next generation of right-wing warriors” to fight culture wars. Kyle Shideler, a senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy, an anti-Muslim organization classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, wrote in a recent article in the Federalist that donors should fund boot camps to train right-wingers in “the political dark arts” of organizing. In the article, he praises Hillsdale College for “the growing Christian classical school movement … for the purpose of forming young minds.”
Shideler is referring to Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative, which stems from the Barney Family Foundation, established by Stephen Barney and his wife, Lynne, in 1998. The report says it identified 59 charter schools that are open or will soon open that claim affiliation to the initiative. While Hillsdale College’s mission is to maintain “by precept and example the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith,” the mission of their K-12 charter schools includes a call for “moral virtue.”
The foundation’s 990s tax forms show that in addition to its health and child-centered charities, it funds right-wing think tanks, foundations and organizations that create conservative legislation on various issued used as models by Republican-led states. One recipient has been Hillsdale College, where Stephen Barney is a trustee emeritus on the Board of Trustees. Between 2010 and 2019, the Network for Public Education identified more than $4 million earmarked for the college from his foundation. In 2010, the Barney Charter School Initiative began with a half-million-dollar contribution from the foundation, and contributions in that range have been recorded every year for which records are available, the report says.
“A Sharp Turn Right” discusses examples of Republican officeholders and party chairs who, like Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), aggressively push the conservative charter school agenda. Republican Heidi Ganahl, who lost to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) in the 2022 gubernatorial election, is a founder of the Golden View Classical Academy. She also advocates for one of the fastest-growing Hillsdale-affiliated charter chains, Ascent Classical Academies, which operates two schools in Colorado, with plans to open four more in South Carolina, three in Colorado and at least one in North Carolina.
John Merrow started a challenge to himself in 2011, on his 70th birthday. He set himself the goal of biking 70 miles, one for each year, and raising money for charity. He has done it every year since then. This year he turns 82. Can he bike 82 miles? I’m betting on John!
In a few days, Lord willing, I will turn 82, and that means it’s time for another attempt at biking my age. I began this exercise in putting off the inevitable in 2011, the year I turned 70. I’ve achieved my goal for 12 consecutive years, but the distance increases every year and I get a year older, so, as those financial ads warn, please remember that “past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
As I have in the past, I’m asking you to dig deep for a preferred good cause, which this year is World Central Kitchen, the remarkable charity founded in 2010 by Chef José Andres. WKC, a non-profit, is first to the frontlines–whether it’s Ukraine or countries like Haiti devastated by a natural disaster. WKC provides fresh meals in response to crises, while simultaneously working to build resilient food systems with locally-led solutions. WKC has served more than 250 million nourishing meals around the world. Charity Navigator makes it clear that 100% of your gift, which is 100% tax-deductible, will help WKC provide more meals to those in need.
Here’s an easy way to donate $820, or $82, or $8.20 to World Central Kitchen. Thank you.
Please open the link to finish reading the post.
I have sent several donations to WKC. I will send another to honor John.
If you read only one article today, read this one. It’s powerful and poignant. The article was written by Forrest Wilder and appears in the Texas Monthly, a terrific publication.
To understand why Republican legislators from rural districts helped to defeat vouchers in Texas, read this article about the schools of Fort Davis in Jeff Davis County in rural West Texas. The superintendent is a bedrock conservative who is dead set against vouchers. His schools are on the verge of bankruptcy due to the state’s Byzantine school-finance system. The state government doesn’t care. At the end, you will understand Governor Abbott’s long-term goal: to eliminate property taxes and completely privatize education.
Texas doesn’t have a mile-high city, but Fort Davis comes close at 4,892 feet. The tiny unincorporated town is nestled in the foothills of the Davis Mountains, where bears and mountain lions and elk stalk among pine-forested sky islands. Fort Davis is the seat of Jeff Davis County, whose population of 1,900 is spread among 2,265 square miles, 50 percent bigger than Rhode Island. The sparsely populated desert country of Mongolia has nearly seven times the population density of Jeff Davis County. Odessa, the nearest city to Fort Davis, is two and a half hours away. The state Capitol is six and a half.
For Graydon Hicks III, the far-flunged-ness of Fort Davis is part of its appeal. He likes the high and lonesome feel of his hometown—the “prettiest in Texas,” he says. But these days, it has never felt further from the state’s political center of gravity.
For years, Hicks, the superintendent of Fort Davis ISD, has been watching, helplessly, as a slow-motion disaster has unfolded, the result of a flawed and resource-starved public-school finance system. Over the last decade, funding for his little district, which serves just 184 K–12 students, has sagged even as costs, driven by inflation and ever-increasing state mandates, have soared. The math is stark. His austere budget has hovered around $3.1 million a year for the past six years. But the state’s notoriously complex school finance system only allows him to bring in about $2.5 million a year through property taxes.
Hicks has hacked away at all but the most essential elements of his budget. More than three-quarters of Fort Davis’s costs come in the form of payroll, and the starting salary for teachers is the state minimum, just $33,660 a year. There are no signing bonuses or stipends for additional teacher certifications. Fort Davis has no art teacher. No cafeteria. No librarian. No bus routes. The track team doesn’t have a track to train on.
But Hicks can’t cut his way out of this financial crisis. This school year, Fort Davis ISD has a $622,000 funding gap. To make up the difference, Hicks is tapping into savings. Doug Karr, a Lubbock school-finance consultant who reviewed the district’s finances, said Fort Davis ISD was “wore down to the nub and the nub’s all gone. And that pretty much describes small school districts.”
“I am squeezing every nickel and dime out of every budget item,” Hicks said. “I don’t have excess of anything.” When I joked that it sounded like he was holding things together with duct tape and baling wire, he didn’t laugh. He said: “I literally have baling wire holding some fences up, holding some doors up.”
The district’s crisis comes at a time when the state is flush with an unprecedented $33 billion budget surplus. Hicks is a self-described conservative, but he thinks the far right is trying to destroy public education. For years, the state has starved public schools of funding: Texas ranks forty-second in per-pupil spending. And yet Governor Greg Abbott is spending enormous political capital on promoting a school voucher plan, which would divert taxpayer funds to private schools. Public education, Abbott has repeatedly said, will remain “fully funded,” though public-education spending is lower now than when he took office in 2015, and the Legislature recently passed a $321.3 billion budget with no pay raise for teachers and very little new funding for schools. Unable to get his voucher plan through the regular legislative session, Abbott is threatening to call lawmakers back to Austin until he gets his way.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, long a champion of vouchers, is backing legislation that would attempt to appease rural Republican legislators—a bloc long wary of vouchers—by offering $10,000 to districts that lose students to private schools. Hicks can barely contain his anger when he hears such talk. He has been lobbying state leaders for years to fix the crippling financial shortages that plague districts like his. “Take your assurances and shove ’em up your ass,” he says, before softening a bit. “I’m so tired. I’m so frustrated. We have tried. I have fought and fought and fought.”
With each passing month, his rural district inches closer to financial ruin. If nothing changes by next summer or fall, Fort Davis will have depleted its savings. He doesn’t know the exact day that his school district will go broke, but he can see it coming.
It’s easy enough to grasp the basic problem in Fort Davis. But what’s going on beneath the surface is another story.
During my twenty years of reporting on Texas politics, I’ve often heard that only a handful of people in the state understand the school-finance system, with its complicated formulas, allotments, maximum compressed tax rates, guaranteed yields, and “golden pennies.” A former colleague of mine, who once spent months trying to make sense of the topic, warned me against writing about it. Karr, the school finance consultant, compares the process of making sense of our public education funding to encountering a fire at a roadside cotton gin on some lonely West Texas highway. “You drive off into that smoke and you might never drive out,” he said. “You might end up getting killed.”
A thorough explanation of the system is the stuff of graduate theses, but the broad strokes are straightforward enough. How a school district is funded begins with two key questions: How much money is the district eligible for? And who pays for it?
Here it’s helpful to use a venerable school finance analogy: buckets of water. The size of a school district’s bucket—how much money it’s entitled to—is largely determined by the number of students in attendance. Every district receives at least $6,160 per pupil, an amount known as the basic allotment, an arbitrary number dreamed up by the Legislature and changed according to lawmakers’ whims.
At this point in the article, Wilder goes into the intricacies of school finance in Texas. Very few people understand it. All you need to know is that some districts are lavishly funded while others, like Fort Davis, are barely scraping by and may go bankrupt.
Hicks is not alone in thinking the opaqueness is intentional. “They make it just as complicated as they can,” he said of state officials. “Because how do you explain something so complicated to the average voter?” In other words, if constituents can’t easily grasp the perplexing and unnecessarily knotty framework, it’s tougher to hold officials accountable for budget decisions.
Though the spreadsheets may be head-spinning, they tell a story. In a state where some wealthy suburban communities build $80 million high school football stadiums, Fort Davis ISD is one of many rural communities literally struggling to keep the lights on.
I first heard from Hicks in March 2021, when he emailed state officials and journalists with a dire message: “What, exactly, does the state expect us to do? What more can we do? What more do our children need to be deprived of? At what point does our community break?” Hicks has received few answers, even as his situation has grown more desperate.
When I visited him in April, we met in his office, where he keeps a book on Texas gun laws, a photo of his West Point 1986 graduating class (which included Donald Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo), and a list of quotes from General George Patton (“Genius comes from the ability to pay attention to the smallest details”). Hicks, who’s stout and serious and talks in a sort of shout-twang because of partial hearing loss, wore a cross decorated in the colors of the American flag. He was eager to show me the fine line he walks between fiscal prudence and dilapidation. The first lesson came as he stood from his desk and I noticed the holstered handgun on his hip. The district, he explained, can’t afford to hire a school security officer, so he and eleven other district employees carry firearms.
His family has been in the area since the 1870s, when federal soldiers still pursued Comanche and Apache from the town’s namesake garrison. His great uncle was one of the first superintendents of Fort Davis ISD. (At one point, Hicks showed me a copy of his great-uncle’s 1942 master’s thesis, “The Early Ranch Schools of the Fort Davis Area.”) Later, as we were walking around campus, Hicks’s ten-year-old grandson, a thin fourth-grader wearing blue-rimmed glasses and blue jeans tucked into a pair of cowboy boots, ran up to Hicks and gave him a hug.
Superintendent Hicks hugs his grandson in the hallway at Dirks-Anderson Elementary School in Fort Davis.Photograph by Maisie Crow
Both the elementary school and the high school—where Hicks graduated in 1982—were built in 1929, Hicks explained. Walking through their timeworn hallways is to step back in time. In places, the plaster is flaking off the original adobe walls. The elementary school gym floor is bubbling up because of a leak under the foundation. The wooden seats in the high school auditorium have never been replaced. The urinals in the elementary school are original too. The newest instructional facility, a science lab, was built in 1973. In the summer, Hicks mows the football field, the same one he played on five decades ago. “Every bit helps,” he said.
The funding challenges create all manner of ripple effects. Hicks has trouble recruiting and retaining teachers, and some students drift away from school without extracurriculars to hold their interest. “You lose teachers, then you start losing kids, and then your funding gets worse,” he said. “It’s a circle-the-drain kinda thing. And it’s really speeding up for Fort Davis.”
The first problem is the size of the district’s bucket. For the last decade, TEA has calculated that Fort Davis’s Tier I annual allotment is between $2 million and $2.5 million, well short of its already spartan $3.1 million budget.
And then there’s the matter of how that bucket is filled. In the 2011–2012 school year, the state covered two-thirds of Fort Davis’ entitlement, about $2.1 million. Today, it chips in about $150,000, a 93 percent decrease. How to explain that change?…
In June 2019, the Big Three figures in state government—Abbott, Patrick, and then–House Speaker Dennis Bonnen—gathered at an elementary school in Austin for an almost giddy bill-signing ceremony. As a bipartisan group of lawmakers watched, Abbott signed into law House Bill 3, an $11.6 billion package of property tax cuts and education funding that had received near-unanimous support in both the House and Senate, a rarity in the highly polarized Legislature. “This one law does more to advance education in the state of Texas than any law that I have seen in my adult lifetime,” said Abbott.
For almost a year, an appointed commission of experts had met to discuss how to overhaul the school-finance system, issuing a report in December 2018 that called on the Lege to “redesign the entirety of our state’s funding system to reflect the needs of the 21st century.” HB 3 was the by-product of that prompt. Lawmakers rejiggered many of the system’s outdated formulas, offered pay raises to teachers, fixed some of the most glaring inequities, and reduced the amount of money recaptured by the state from property-wealthy districts. Most important, HB 3 represented a much-needed infusion of cash for struggling schools. The basic allotment was raised from $5,140 to $6,120 per student.
But HB 3 also exacerbated disparities among property-wealthy and property-poor districts. Because of changes to the way Tier II enrichment funding works, some communities were able to cut tax rates and generate significant new revenues from their tax base. For others, a minority of districts, HB 3 actually created new problems. Around 10 percent of districts saw a decrease in formula funding. This year, Alpine has $220,000 less than it would have had under the old system, even as some of the richest districts in the state—tiny West Texas communities with lots of oil wealth—saw their funding explode. Rinehart contrasts Alpine, which has almost no mineral wealth, with Rankin ISD, 130 miles northeast in the Permian Basin oil patch. While Alpine’s funding went down 2 percent, Rankin’s went up 339 percent. Even though Rankin is projected to return close to $100 million in recapture payments to the state this year, the district is fabulously wealthy. “Alpine’s budget is $10 million,” Rinehart points out. “Rankin’s is $14 million. We educate a thousand kids and they educate three hundred kids. So they are a third of our size and have a budget 40 percent larger than ours.”
Rinehart doesn’t begrudge Rankin’s wealth—she recently served as assistant superintendent there—but uses the Alpine–Rankin comparison as a “wild” example of how HB 3 exacerbated inequities, making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Hicks, too, has noticed. “Rankin just built a whole new school,” he told me. “They got a new fieldhouse, a new gym. Two new science labs. A turf practice field, a turf game field. A new track, a new stadium. And my buildings were built in 1929.” Rankin is planning to build ten new “teacherages”—district-funded housing for teachers, important to attracting and retaining talent in areas with scant or affordable residences.
Jeff Davis County, on the other hand, has no oil and gas and very little industry; any school debt would thus be borne by homeowners through bonds. Hicks’s district has never issued a bond, in part because it would be unlikely to pass; the voters wouldn’t support a tax increase. The school’s ag barn was built in 2019 with local donations. The band program, suspended for nine years as a cost-saving measure, was only revived in 2023 after a philanthropist left his estate to the school.
To be sure, Alpine and Fort Davis are outliers. Most districts saw an immediate boost to their finances from HB 3, and advocates celebrated a meaningful investment in public education after $5.4 billion in devastating cuts in 2013. But even for those districts, the sugar rush from HB 3 didn’t last long. According to Chandra Villanueva, the director of policy and advocacy at the progressive nonprofit Every Texan, the $1,000 increase in the basic allotment was “roughly enough to cover one year of inflation….”
The property tax system and the school finance system are inextricably linked, Rube Goldberg–style. Twist a dial here and a light will come on over there. Slip a gear here and spring a leak there. As state lawmakers have prioritized tax cuts over public education funding, the trade-offs have grown clearer. This year represents a potential turning point. But rather than trying to solve the problem using the $33 billion budget surplus—a generational bonanza—Abbott and Patrick have overwhelmingly focused their attention on property tax cuts and a school-voucher plan loathed by almost everyone in public education, in part because it would threaten to strip even more funding from school districts.
The just-completed regular session was a bloodbath. The 88th Legislature began in January with the governor and lieutenant governor promising to pass a transformative voucher program and a record-setting $17 billion in property-tax cuts. Funding for public education, often a banner issue, was scarcely discussed. Even the House, the friendlier chamber toward public education, only proposed raising the basic allotment by $140, from $6,160 to $6,300 per student—far less than the $1,500 increase needed to keep up with inflation since 2019, according to the Texas American Federation of Teachers. But in the end, teachers and public schools got virtually nothing.
Teachers and administrators were stunned. Zeph Capo, the president of Texas AFT, called it a “joke.” HD Chambers, the executive director of the Texas School Alliance, accused Patrick and Abbott of playing a “hostage game” with Texas’s teachers and public school students by tying education funding to vouchers. “It’s pretty simple. The governor and Senate says, ‘If you don’t give us the kind of vouchers we want, we’re not giving you any money.’” The House refused to budge, and the regular session concluded without a deal on property tax relief, vouchers, and other GOP priorities.
Now, the governor has promised to convene multiple special sessions to take up the unresolved issues. The first special session began three hours after the regular one ended, and effectively wrapped up less than 24 hours later, with the House rejecting the Senate property-tax plan, passing its own program consisting solely of property-tax compression, and then abruptly adjourning. Abbott threw his support behind the House plan. The message to the Senate was clear: take it or leave it. If the Senate yields, the House version would push some school districts down to as low as $0.60 per $100, with no new source of revenue to backfill for the reduced funding in case of a bad economy.
Abbott has said his goal is to completely eliminate the main school property tax. In such a scenario, Texas’s thousand-plus school districts would be at the mercy of the Legislature for funding—a troubling scenario, says Villanueva. She suspects vouchers would then become inevitable. “At that point, it’s like, ‘You know what, we don’t have the money to fund schools. Everyone take five thousand bucks, figure it out for yourselves.’”
That day, if it ever comes, may still be far off. But the education system is in crisis right now, and unlike previous hard times, the state is flush with cash. The pain, Chambers says, is being intentionally inflicted by Abbott and Patrick. “Because of this one pet project that the governor has”—vouchers—“they are purposely creating a financial environment where every school district in Texas is being set up to fail.”
The result is that Texas schools, already operating on “shoestring budgets,” will have a harder time attracting and retaining educators, said Josh Sanderson, the deputy executive director of the Equity Center, a nonprofit that represents six hundred Texas school districts. They will run up deficits. They may have to cut extracurriculars and athletic programs. Some, like Fort Davis, may become insolvent and be forced to consolidate with another district, an often painful process.
As we were sitting in his red pickup with the engine idling outside his office, Hicks told me that he’d given up on lobbying the Legislature. He mentioned again that Patrick and other GOP lawmakers are trying to destroy public education by using vouchers to privatize schools, and he said that most other politicians “don’t give a shit about West Texas.” But for the time being he was still fighting: writing op-eds, firing off plaintive missives, asking concerned citizens to contact their legislators.
Toward the end of our visit, I asked Hicks what’s going to happen to his schools. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not patient enough to spend time with assholes in Austin, and I’m not rich enough to buy any votes.” TEA has suggested consolidating with another district—most likely nearby Valentine ISD—but Hicks said this would harm both Fort Davis and the other district.
He seemed resigned to his role as a Cassandra warning of impending doom, destined to be ignored. He reminded me that his grandson goes to school here, and that the painful road ahead feels both personal and existential. “If you don’t have a school,” he said, “you don’t have a community.”
Two months later, Hicks called me with some news. He’d decided to resign this summer, joining the mass exodus of school leaders that have fled the profession in the past few years. To anyone who closely follows public education in Texas, his reasoning was tragically familiar: He said he was too tired to fight anymore.
Paul Cobaugh is a military veteran who retired as a Chief Warrant Officer who worked in special operations in communications and narrative strategies. He writes a blog about national security called “Truths About Threats.”
This is a short TAT. After all, it is the weekend. This morning, a friend posted on LinkedIn, a copy of the letter Jim Jordan sent to AG, Merrick Garland. That is what pushed me to my keyboard before resuming chores. Endless words will be written after the historical indictment of a former president. I will bring you a very different perspective on that indictment that very few will address, as I wade into this national security nightmare the beginning of next week. In the meantime… please consider my brief thoughts below, not for my sake but for all of ours. “All politics are local.”
Now Jordan, is the rep of one of the most gerrymandered districts in the country. When I lived in Urbana, Ohio in the late 60’s and early 70’s, our local congressman was exceptionally well liked and respected. Clarence, “Bud” Brown represented what the Republican Party could have been, had they not deviated to scorched earth politics under the leadership and tutelage of Newt Gingrich. America has never been the same since. Don’t see this as an endorsement of the so-called, “other side” but as a statement of clear-eyed facts.
Jim Jordan’s, Ohio 4th Congressional District
This letter by Jordan to the AG, Merrick Garland shows in detail and Jordan’s own hand, the level of false narratives and utter dishonesty that keeps today’s MAGA-controlled GOP afloat. For those who have been warning about this and other indictments based on reality, research, and the opinions of elite experts, this is just another “hail Mary”, mis/ disinformation campaign designed to empower those who’ve proved that they will believe anything, if it suits their political identity. My personal and professional opinion of Jordan sees him as one of the most unethical and dangerous members of Congress.
What I once knew as a community of hardworking mostly rural Ohioans with remarkable grace, compassion and honesty, is now burdened by the weight of being sold snake oil by traitors and conmen who can’t even spell, “American values.” They largely operate on the traitorous narratives of FOX news. Fortunately there is still a solid core of great Americans in my home town but sadly, they are a minority. Even the Trumpists are some of the nicest people you will ever meet. The manipulation of their political identity by unethical, professional influencers, some domestic and some foreign, has resulted in Seditionists like Jordan and his ilk, leading the worst threat to our democracy since the Civil War.
The pain I feel for my hometown, is being played out all across America in small and large towns. The extraordinary work by U.S. Department of Justice, has thrown a hand grenade into their political identity. Now, with DOJ’s meticulously assembled public case being the news of the day, Jordan is launching a full-scale mis and disinformation campaign to support a known traitor. Not one person in Urbana would have tolerated this in my youth, despite being in one of the most reliable Republican Congressional districts in the nation.
Yes, I would also love to scream the words, “I told you so” but that will not heal America. Many Americans who were victimized by foreign and domestic malign influencers, are beginning to realize that they have been badly duped. Give them an open invite back into reality without the derision. They are family, friends and colleagues. Tragically, those who resist reality will likely never recover, because the level of indoctrination that leads to public displays of extremism, more often than not, is like rabies, mostly incurable.
It’s time for all Americans to realize that our fellow citizens are not enemies because they have different beliefs. Our Constitution, based on our founding principles, guarantees our right to our own beliefs, false or not. It’s really up to those who are willing to debate over facts and reality, to heal this nation for America’s sake, not a politcal party. It will be those who adhere to what it means to be a truly patriotic American, left, right or otherwise to put our nation, back on the path of progress, respectability and strength.
Truism: If you vote for honesty, integrity and our true American, founding principles… folks like Jim Jordan would never be in office. However you vote, we can never again allow any extremist movement to have so much say in our government, that they can once again threaten what so many have died to preserve.
Welcome back to Lucid, and a big hello to all new subscribers. I started Lucid in 2021 to separate the signal from the noise in politics and provide big-picture thinking about authoritarianism and threats to democracy in the US and around the world. I use my skills as a historian to identify the patterns and dynamics at work in the news that comes at us every day.
In honor of the Department of Justice indictment of Donald Trump, which is only possible because we live in a democracy, for the next week I am offering a 50% discount on the first year of Lucid so that more people can have access to bonus content like this and to the community that has developed from my weekly live Q&As. You can subscribe or convert your current subscription to paid here: (open the link to see the offer).
The bare-bones conference room, with its ugly folding table and florescent lighting overhead. The standard-issue podium at which Jack Smith, Special Counsel at the Department of Justice, stood with his understated attire and not-made for television haircut. There was no glamour and no media buzz as Smith announced the unsealing of a historic indictment against former president Donald J. Trump for “violations of our national security laws as well as participating in conspiracy to obstruct justice.”
All of it moved me to tears.
Special Counsel Jack Smith press conference, June 8, 2023. C-Span.
As an American, I was outraged when I read the indictment. As a scholar of authoritarianism and one of the first people to label Trump as a threat to our freedoms, I was unsurprised at its content. Trump’s proprietary vision of governance was familiar to me, as was his supremely venal attitude. In the strongman world there are no boundaries between public and private. The leader believes it is his right to possess and exploit for personal benefit anything in the nation, from natural resources to economic assets to information—the latter being the most valuable currency.
“Forced out of the White House after his coup attempt failed, beset by financial worries and multiple investigations, how could Trump fail to cast his greedy eyes on the vast store of classified information available to him?” I wrotein Aug. 2022.
Democracy does not churn out telegenic images of demagogues commanding cheering crowds of fanatics. It does not produce dramatic images of coups, whether old-school takeovers with tanks on the streets or today’s radicalized civilian armies assaulting government buildings, as in the US and Brazil.
Democracy has its rituals and rites of passage, but the everyday work of democracy –a political system built on cultivating consensus, rather than lackeys implementing decisions by one man–can seem boring to those who crave theatrics. It entails endless discussions and careful deliberation in Congress and statehouses around the nation.
And so, Jack Smith appeared in his drab institutional surroundings to deliver a message of historic import. In just over three minutes, he informed the public of the status of the investigation he has overseen while also expressing support for some of the most foundational values of democracy and civil society.
Commitment to National Security
In healthy democracies both liberal and conservative politicians share a commitment to protecting their country’s national security. That’s no longer the case in America, where the GOP has left conservatism behind to become an autocratic entity. Republican lawmakers now align with far-right authoritarian parties and governments in Hungary, Russia, and Brazil that see democratic America as an enemy to be taken down.
Add in the GOP’s loyalty to a cult leader who will sell out anyone and anything for more power and profit, and we have a tragic situation: many Republican lawmakers are no longer committed to America’s national security. This shift is partly responsible for the Republican demonization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), America’s support for NATO (and Ukraine), and the Department of Justice.
Moreover, as Rep. Jim Jordan’s sham House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has made clear, Trump loyalists do not want the FBI to clean house of extremists, including those apparently loyal to Putin. That is why Jordan defended Steve Friend, an FBI agent who had his security clearance revoked. Friend refused to investigate Jan. 6 insurrectionists, transferred FBI documents to an unauthorized flash drive, and contributed to Kremlin propaganda outlets Russia Today and Sputnik.
This is why Jack Smith started his speech by recognizing the importance of protecting our national security and those who enforce it:
“The men and women of the US intelligence community and the armed forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people. Our laws that protect national defense information are critical for the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”
Rule of Law
Since today’s autocrats often keep elections going, elections are no longer the main metric of democracy. Instead, we look to accountability and the existence of an independent judiciary to measure democratic health. Both are fundamental to the principle of rule of law, which Jack Smith emphasized in his speech, identifying it as
“a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice. And our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone. Applying those laws, collecting facts, that’s what determines the outcome of an investigation. Nothing more, and nothing less.”
We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.This bears repeating because authoritarianism is about getting away with crime. When the judiciary has been neutralized, the press threatened into silence, and security services made into tools of the autocrat, then the leader becomes untouchable, no matter how many crimes he commits.
This indictment interrupts that trajectory. I know where that road leads, and how much we stand to lose. This is why Jack Smith’s speech moved me.
I thought I would ignore the story you have read about in every publication: the unprecedented indictment of a former President of the United States. Special Counsel Jack Smith released the indictment yesterday, and I read every word. It is a dramatic narrative of a man who was determined to hold onto state secrets, storing them in public spaces, hiding them when necessary, completely indifferent to the law governing classified documents. The irony, as the indictment points out, is that Trump repeatedly lambasted Hillary Clinton in 2016 for being careless with state secrets and promised to enforce the law if elected.
If you haven’t read the indictment, please do so. At the least, it may make you wonder how Republicans can bring themselves, even now, to echo Trump’s claims that he is the victim of a witch-hunt.
Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the events of the past 24 hours and the underlying issues: can a former President be forgiven for taking home highly classified documents and refusing to give them back when asked? For not only refusing to return them but hiding them from those authorized to collect them? What were his motives? Just to show them off to prove what a big man he is? Or to sell them to foreign agents? Vanity or greed?
And my question: Why are Republicans stridently defending a man who knowingly put the lives of our military at risk and endangered our national security? Have they no shame? Why do they put their loyalty to Trump (or fear of him) above the nation’s security and their oath of office?
She writes:
At 3:00 today, Washington D.C., time, Special Counsel Jack Smith delivered a statement about the recently unsealed indictment charging former president Donald J. Trump on 37 counts of violating national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Although MAGA Republicans have tried to paint the indictment as a political move by the Biden administration over a piddling error, Smith immediately reminded people that “[t]his indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida, and I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.”
The indictment is, indeed, jaw dropping. It alleges that during his time in the White House, Trump stored in cardboard boxes “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.” The indictment notes that “[t]he unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”
Nonetheless, when Trump ceased to be president after noon on January 20, 2021, he took those boxes, “many of which contained classified documents,” to Mar-a-Lago, where he was living. He “was not authorized to possess or retain those classified documents.” The indictment makes it clear that this was no oversight: Trump was personally involved in packing the boxes and, later, in going through them and in overseeing how they were handled. The employees who worked for him exchanged text messages referring to his personal instructions about them.
Mar-a-Lago was not an authorized location for such documents, but he stored them there anyway, “including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.” They were stacked in public places, where anyone—including the many foreign nationals who visited Mar-a-Lago—could see them. On December 7, 2021, Trump’s personal aide Waltine Nauta took two pictures of several of the boxes fallen on the floor, with their contents, including a secret document available only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, spilled onto the floor.
The indictment alleges that Trump showed classified documents to others without security clearances on two occasions, both of which are well documented. One of those occasions was recorded. Trump told the people there that the plan he was showing them was “highly confidential” and “secret.” He added, “See, as president I could have declassified it….Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
This recording undermines his insistence that he believed he could automatically declassify documents; it proves he understood he could not. In addition, the indictment lists Trump’s many statements from 2016 about the importance of protecting classified information, all delivered as attacks on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, whom he accused of mishandling such information. “In my administration,” he said on August 18, 2016, “I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”
The indictment goes on: When the FBI tried to recover the documents, Trump started what Washington Post journalist Jennifer Rubin called a “giant shell game”: he tried to get his lawyer to lie to the FBI and the grand jury, saying Trump did not have more documents; worked with Nauta to move some of the boxes to hide them from Trump’s lawyer, the FBI and the grand jury; tried to get his lawyer to hide or destroy documents; and got another lawyer to certify that all the documents had been produced when he knew they hadn’t.
Nauta lied to the grand jury about his knowledge of what Trump did with the boxes. Both he and Trump have been indicted on multiple counts of obstruction and of engaging in a conspiracy to hide the documents.
Eventually, Trump had many of the boxes moved to his property at Bedminster, New Jersey, where on two occasions he showed documents to people without security clearances. He showed a classified map of a country that is part of an ongoing military operation to a representative of his political action committee.
Trump has been indicted on 31 counts of having “unauthorized possession of, access to, and control over documents relating to the national defense,” for keeping them, and for refusing “to deliver them to the officer and employee of the United States entitled to receive them”: language straight out of the Espionage Act. Twenty-one of the documents were marked top secret, nine were marked secret, and one was unmarked.
These documents are not all those recovered—some likely are too sensitive to risk making public—but they nonetheless hold some of the nation’s deepest secrets: “military capabilities of a foreign country and the United States,” “military activities and planning of foreign countries,” “nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” “military attacks by a foreign country,” “military contingency planning of the United States,” “military options of a foreign country and potential effects on United States interest,” “foreign country support of terrorist acts against United States interests,” “nuclear weaponry of the United States,” “military activity in a foreign country.”
Smith put it starkly in his statement, “The men and women of the United States intelligence community and our armed forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people. Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”
On Twitter, Bill Kristol said it more clearly: “These were highly classified documents dealing with military intelligence and plans. What did Trump do with them? Who now has copies of them?” Retired FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi noted that there is a substantial risk that “foreign intelligence services might have sought or gained access to the documents.”
There is also substantial risk that other countries will be reluctant to share intelligence with the United States in the future. At the very least, it is an unfortunate coincidence that the Central Intelligence Agency in October 2021 reported an unusually high rate of capture or death for foreign informants recruited to spy for the United States.
Since Trump supporters have taken the position that Trump’s indictment over the stolen documents is the attempt of the Biden administration to undermine Trump’s presidential candidacy, it is worth remembering that Trump’s early announcement of his campaign was widely suspected to be an attempt to enable him to avoid legal accountability. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith precisely to put arms length between the administration and the investigations into Trump. Smith noted today, “Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice. And our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone. Applying those laws. Collecting facts. That’s what determines the outcome of an investigation. Nothing more. Nothing less. “The prosecutors in my office are among the most talented and experienced in the Department of Justice. They have investigated this case hewing to the highest ethical standards. And they will continue to do so as this case proceeds.”
Smith added: “It’s very important for me to note that the defendants in this case must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. To that end, my office will seek a speedy trial in this matter. Consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused. We very much look forward to presenting our case to a jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida.”
Likely responding to MAGA attacks on the FBI and the rule of law, Smith thanked the “dedicated public servants of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with whom my office is conducting this investigation and who worked tirelessly every day upholding the rule of law in our country,” before closing his brief statement.
The indictment revealed just how much detailed information Smith’s team has uncovered, presenting a shockingly thorough case to prove the allegations. Trump’s lawyers will have their work cut out for them…although the team has shifted since this morning: two of Trump’s lawyers quit today. The thoroughness of the indictment also suggests that Trump and his allies might have reason to be nervous about Smith’s other investigation: the one into the attempt to overturn results of the 2020 election.
Some of Trump’s supporters are calling for violence. After Louisiana representative Clay Higgins appeared to be egging on militias to oppose Trump’s Tuesday arraignment, Democratic senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) issued a joint statement calling for “supporters and critics alike to let the case proceed peacefully in court.” Legal scholar Joyce White Vance noted that it was “extremely sad for our country that this isn’t a bipartisan statement being made by leaders from both parties.” — Notes: https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/special-counsel-jack-smith-delivers-statement https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/09/politics/walt-nauta-trump-indicted/index.html
Diane Ravitch's blog 