It’s a common complaint that the news media is trying so hard to be neutral that they are failing to warn the public about Trump’s efforts to make himself a fascistic emperor.
Trump has shattered norms and traditions by firing members of independent boards who were appointed to serve for a set term. He has cancelled funding authorized by Congress. He has taken control of Congress’s “power of the purse” by announcing draconian tariffs. He has bullied law firms, universities, tech giants, and the media. He ignores the law and the Constitution because no one will stop him. The Republicans who control Congress are hibernating. And they fear his base.
She describes “the Trump Doctrine” in blunt terms: “I can do anything I want to do.” A king? A dictator? An emperor? What other President has asserted his unlimited power to do whatever he wants? It remains to be seen, she acknowledges, whether the Supreme Court will reverse all these rulings against Trump’s overreach.
She writes:
Is Donald Trump tired yet of all the losing? During the past week alone, federal judges across the country have rejected some of the most important and far-reaching of Trump’s initiatives—from his efforts to reshape the global economy with tariffs and mobilize the military to act as police in American cities to his refusal to spend billions of dollars in congressionally appropriated funds. The President continues to cite nonexistent emergencies to justify his executive overreach and judges continue to call him out on it, issuing stern rebukes in the tradition of Judge Beryl Howell, who, during a case this spring about the firings of civil servants, observed that “an American President is not a king—not even an ‘elected’ one.”
I’m not sure that this week’s epic losing streak has received the attention that it deserves, no doubt in part because America had other things to worry about, such as whether Trump was actually alive, despite all the internet rumors. It speaks to the present moment that the President is not only very much still with us but has already started fund-raising off the social-media frenzy surrounding his supposed death over Labor Day weekend. (“These rumors are just another desperate attack from the failing left who can’t stand that we’re WINNING and bigly!” the e-mail pitch that arrived in my inbox on Thursday morning said.) But what does it say about the state of things that disputing rumors of his death turns out to be a welcome distraction from underlying political realities for Trump?…
The latest string of defeats began last Friday, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs imposing double-digit duties on key trading partners such as Canada, China, and the European Union were illegal. Over the holiday weekend, a federal district judge intervened to stop migrant children from being deported to Guatemala while some of them were already loaded on planes. On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reinstated a Federal Trade Commissioner, saying that Trump did not have the power that he claimed to fire her. Also that day, another federal judge ruled that, in sending hundreds of National Guard personnel to Los Angeles amid protests of Trump’s immigration crackdown, the President had violated a nineteenth-century law prohibiting the use of troops for domestic law-enforcement purposes. On Wednesday, yet another judge, in Boston, rejected billions of dollars in cuts to research funding for Harvard University, part of a broad war on liberal academia that Trump has made an unlikely centerpiece of his second term. And late on Wednesday night, a federal judge in Washington blocked billions of dollars in Trump-ordered cuts to foreign aid, saying that he was usurping Congress’s power of the purse in refusing to spend the money. This, I should add, is an incomplete list. If nothing else, it shows the extraordinary scope and scale of the battles that Trump has chosen to pursue—suggesting not so much a strategic view of the Presidency as an everything-everywhere-all-at-once vision of unchecked Presidential power.
It’s refreshing to read Glasser. She’s not shrill. She’s not ideological. She’s not afraid.
Greg Olear lays out the frightening parallels between the rise of Hitler and the rise of Trump, quoting from a book written by a German author. The article is longer that what I posted here. Please open the link to read it all. There is no paywall.
I. The United States: A Survey
In just a few months, a coarse, artless, criminal strongman has taken control of the entire federal government—including, as of yesterday, the nation’s capital (or “Capital,” as he writes it, capitalizing his nouns like a good German).
Trump owns the Supreme Court, the Republican Party, the Speaker of the House. Congress is powerless to stop him. The wealthiest tech-bros in Silicon Valley and most of the legacy media CEOs have lined up behind him. Colleges and universities have capitulated to his demands, as have white-shoe law firms and venerable broadcasting companies. He’s transformed U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement into his own secret state police. He’s using the FBI and the Justice Department to attack his enemies. He’s building concentration camps. He’s enriching himself on a grand scale. And every word that comes out of his puckered little mouth is a lie.
How did this happen?
While on vacation in Barcelona, I came across the most cogent explanation I’ve yet encountered. It was written, appropriately, by a German—a brilliant journalist named Sebastian Haffner. Here is an excerpt:
At rally after rally all through the summer and fall of 2024, Trump bellowed that he would win—his supporters didn’t even have to vote, because he had Elon’s help—and then heads would roll. Nothing happened. The white-haired attorney general did not think of changing his strategy, insisting instead on the preservation of “norms.” In the presidential election against Joe Biden, Trump had declared that victory was his, in any case. Nothing happened. When he said it again at his next rally, the audience tittered, as if it had been tickled. The House invested considerable time and energy investigating the coup attempt of January 6th, in which his supporters besieged the Capitol and policemen were killed, and concluded that Trump was responsible. Nothing happened. No, something did happen: the insurrectionists were pardoned.
It was strange to observe how the behavior of each side reinforced that of the other: the savage impudence that gradually made it possible for the unpleasant orange apostle of hate to assume the proportions of a demon; the bafflement of his tamers, who always realized just too late exactly what it was he was up to—namely, when he capped it with something even more outrageous and monstrous; then, also, the hypnotic trance into which his public fell, succumbing with less and less resistance to the glamour of depravity and the ecstasy of evil.
Besides, he promised everything to everybody, which naturally brought him a vast, loose army of followers and voters from among the ignorant, the disappointed, and the dispossessed.
Spot on, right?
Here’s the twist: Haffner wrote that in 1939—before the Nazis invaded Poland. He was reflecting on how the “unpleasant little apostle of hate”—I swapped “orange” for “little”—had come to power: how Hitler had bamboozled the German people into voting away their freedom, and how the German people had failed to meet the moment.
Obviously I modified the first paragraph to serve my rhetorical purposes, but the spirit of the original is unchanged: a loud, hateful psychopath keeps pushing and pushing and pushing, no one in a position of authority stops him, and the unthinkable comes true. This is what Haffner actually wrote:
Summoned as a witness before the highest German court, Hitler bellowed at the judges that he would one day come to power by strictly constitutional means and then heads would roll. Nothing happened. The white-haired president of the supreme court did not think of ordering the witness to be taken into custody for contempt. In the presidential elections against Hindenburg, Hitler declared that victory was his, in any case. His opponent was eighty-five, he was forty-three; he could wait. Nothing happened. When he said it again at his next meeting, the audience tittered, as if it had been tickled. One night, six storm troopers fell on a “dissident” in his bed and literally trampled him to death, for which they were sentenced to death. Hitler sent them a telegram of praise and acknowledgment. Nothing happened. No, something did happen: the murderers were pardoned.
The parallels are as obvious as they are disturbing.
Haffner—the pen name of Raimund Pretzel—was born in Berlin in 1907, the son of a Prussian government official. As a boy, he thrilled to the exploits of the Kaiser’s army during the Great War, like most of his contemporaries. He was not particularly “political.” He did not care for the Communists; if anything, he was more “right” than “left.” But he loathed Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He realized early on, in the years after the First World War, that political zealotry in Berlin was the province of “the more stupid, coarse, and unpleasant among my schoolfellows”—and all of those young, dumb bullies bought what the creepy watercolorist from Linz was selling. Haffner himself was “Aryan,” but he had a lot of Jewish friends, including his then-girlfriend, and he was morally outraged at the disgusting anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party.
As the situation grew more dire, Haffner fled Berlin, first to Paris, then to London, where, in 1939, he began a memoir—an account of how the Nazis had come to power. Unlike other works of this kind, his book is not an examination of what Hitler did, but rather how the German people, especially the ones who should have known better, reacted and responded to what Hitler did. He makes the case that his experience, as an individual German citizen living through the rise of the Third Reich, reflected the experience of hundreds of thousands of German citizens—the majority of whom, after all, had notvoted for the Nazis. The book is a chronicle of the political zeitgeist. It tracks the evolution of the emotions, the feelings, the vibes of the German nation, and explicates how and why Adolf Hitler, of all people, this nebbishy little weirdo, became not only chancellor but führer.
Published in German as Germany: A Survey, in English, the memoir is called Defying Hitler—a poor title, as it isn’t representative of the contents (there is not much defying of Hitler going on); plus, functionally, having HITLER emblazoned on the cover of a book makes it awkward to read at the airport.
Haffner abandoned the project in 1939, after the war started, “presumably because its theme is the question of how it was possible for the Nazis to come to power,” as his son and (wonderful) translator, Oliver Pretzel, explains in the introduction. “Instead he started another one, whose subject was the more urgent question of how to deal with Nazi Germany.”
The manuscript sat unread in a filing cabinet for decades. It was only published in 2001, two years after Haffner’s death, becoming a best-seller in Germany. While his original plan for A Survey was to chronicle his experiences through his emigration to England in 1938, he doesn’t get nearly that far. The action breaks off in 1933. I would have loved for it to continue—it feels like if Andor hadn’t come back for the second season—but he gives us more than enough insight to make his point.
January 30, 1933 The moribund president, Hindenburg—a “traitor,” Haffner rightly calls him—appoints Hitler as chancellor. Nazis are now in charge of Germany.
February 27, 1933 The Reichstag Fire—a “false flag” act of terrorism blamed on the rival Communists and used as a pretext for Hitler to crack down on his political opponents.
March 5, 1933 In the last free elections, the Nazis garner 43.9 percent of the popular vote—but exploit the parliamentary system and the feckless leaders of the German Nationalist People’s Party to remain in control.
March 22, 1933 The first concentration camp is established at Dachau, where dissidents and political opponents of the Nazis are sent after their arrests.
March 23, 1933 The Enabling Act grants Hitler dictatorial powers.
April 1, 1933 The Nazis impose a national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. This kicks off an incremental process of barring German Jews from the civil service, the legal profession, the armed forces, the arts, agriculture, journalism, and so on.
April 26, 1933 The Gestapo—a truncation of Geheime Staatspolizei; literally the secret state police—is established.
As you can see—and as any American paying attention to the news these days can attest—it does not take that long for a stubborn and dedicated strongman, however ridiculous he may appear, to acquire fearsome authoritarian powers.
Defying Hitler is jawdroppingly good: as a piece of writing, as a personal memoir, as a social history, as a political analysis. And it is eerily, uncomfortably, shockingly current. I lost track of how many times I gasped out loud as I was reading, noting the unpleasant similarities between Germany in 1933 and the U.S. right now. Insofar as Trump has modeled himself on Hitler, and MAGA on the Nazi Party, the book is instructive—terrifying, to be sure, but not unhopeful.
Because of the ticking-time-bomb urgency, I’m going to quote from the book at length in this two-part piece, and hope that Mr. Pretzel does not object. With that said, I urge everyone to buy Defying Hitler and read it. Haffner’s memoir is beautifully written, short, fascinating, and not as depressing as the subject matter suggests. His disappointment and disgust with his countrymen feels very familiar. Defying Hitler is the single most important work I’ve come across, in terms of understanding the here and now.
There are, to reiterate, an alarming number of parallels between Germany in 1933 and the United States today. But there are also subtle differences, which, I believe, and which I hope, augur a better future here now than there then. The key difference, of course, as I’ve said many times on various broadcasts, is that the Germans of 1933 did not have the benefit of knowing what happened in Germany in 1933. They were caught blindsided. We have no such excuse.
Especially given this historical hindsight, it is both shameful and depressing that Donald Trump was elected a second time. But the historical precedent for such national stupidity still exists, as Haffner shows.
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic published an article that explained why Trump is a laughing stock among other world leaders. The recent meeting of the leaders of China, Russia, North Korea, and India was convened to celebrate the victory over Japan in 1945. Trump was not invited. He proceeded to write whiny complaints on social media about being left out.
They laugh at him. They saw how Putin played Trump like a violin when they met in Alaska. The meeting was supposedly about Putin agreeing to a ceasefire in Ukraine. Trump rolled out a red carpet for Putin. Waited for him, clapped his hands in excitement as Putin approached. At the meeting’s end, Putin spoke first, which is not customary. Then he departed, skipping a lunch that Trump planned in his honor.
Putin made a fool of Trump.
The next night, Russia bombsrded Kyiv with an unprecedented number of drones and missiles, aimed at civilian targets.
Putin and the others know that Pete Hegseth is an empty suit. Trump busies himself redecorating the White House and its grounds. Trump is not a serious man. He can be ignored.
The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men. They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps. But they are, nevertheless, serious men, and they know an unserious man when they see one. For nearly a decade, they have taken Donald Trump’s measure, and they have clearly reached a conclusion: The president of the United States is not worthy of their respect.
Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider Trump a lightweight. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s maximum nepo baby, Kim Jong Un, gathered to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. (Putin’s Belarusian satrap, Alexander Lukashenko, was also on hand.) The American president was not invited: After all, what role did the United States play in defeating Japan and liberating Eurasia? Instead, Trump, much like America itself, was left to watch from the sidelines.
When I first heard that an American fighter plane had attacked a boat in international waters off Venezuela, my first thought was that there must have been a high-value target on that boat. I waited for the details, but they were never released. Eventually I heard that there were 11 people on the boat. Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth said that they were gang members and they had a boatload of drugs that they were intending to bring to the U.S.
I looked at that video released by the War Department, and I was struck by two anomalies. First, the boat wasn’t large enough to travel from Venezuela to the U.S. But more importantly, could a small boat with 11 people have room for a significant load of drugs? It didn’t seem so.
Where was the evidence that this boat was bringing drugs to the U.S. I never heard it. Secretary Hegseth would clarify the reason for the attack in the boat if he supplied facts and evidence. Does Trump plan to attack other boats and ships that may or may not be carrying a shipment of drugs.
When the Court says Trump is above the law, who speaks for the eleven dead on that boat? Their lives ended not in a battlefield crossfire or a clash between nations, but at the whim of one man emboldened by six justices who declared him untouchable.
Trump simply ordered human beings erased, confident the Court had given him immunity from any consequence and the leaders of his military would obey an illegal order. Eleven souls were sacrificed not just to his cruelty, but to a judicial betrayal that transformed the presidency into a license to kill.
For most of our history, American presidents have at least gone through the motions of cloaking lethal force in some form of legal justification.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War but sought Congress’s approval. Franklin Roosevelt went to Congress for Lend-Lease before escalating aid to Britain, and sought a declaration of war against Japan. George W. Bush and Barack Obama leaned heavily on the post-9/11 Authorizations for Use of Military Force to justify everything from Afghanistan to drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia to killing Bin Laden.
The principle has always been that the United States does not simply kill people without some kind of legal process. It may be stretched, it may be abused, but it has been invoked.
What Donald Trump has now done with the strike on a small boat off Venezuela’s coast is to break that tradition in a way that is both lawless and unprecedented. He gave the order to kill eleven human beings with no congressional approval, no international authorization, and no visible evidence justifying it.
This was simply murder on the high seas. And the world knows it….
If America embraces this new Putin-like assertion of America’s power to bomb anybody, anywhere, on the whim of the president, we’ll have abandoned any claim to moral leadership.
Worse, we will have normalized the authoritarian logic that anyone the president labels an enemy can be eliminated without trial, without evidence, without process. We’ll have handed Xi a rationale to attack Taiwan; all he has to do is claim that a non-governmental gang within that nation is importing drugs into China (or something similar).
The international reaction has already been severe. America’s allies are horrified, our adversaries have been emboldened, and human rights groups are openly appalled.
But the real test is here at home. Do we still believe in the principle, famously cited by our second President John Adams, that America is a nation of laws and not of men? Do we still insist that presidents cannot kill at will? If Trump can strike a boat off Venezuela today, what is to stop him from ordering lethal force against dissidents, protesters, or political opponents tomorrow?
Mike DeGuire, veteran educator in Denver, fears that billionaires are paying the bills for a phony reform group that’s trying to buy the Denver school board. The billionaires find Denver an enticing target because its leading public officials are DFER Democrats: Michael Bennett is a Colorado Senator and a big supporter of charter schools when he was Denver’s Superintendent of Schools; Governor Jared Polis opened charter schools and is a charter cheerleader; Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a former TFA and state legislator, loves charters and evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores (he sponsored legislation to make teacher evaluation-by-value-added-scores state law).
Please note that the Dark Money groups use names intended to fool the public into thinking they represent parents and families. They don’t.
School board elections in Denver have become increasingly expensive, and the outcomes often hinge on the amount of money spent by competing groups. According to Chalkbeat, “In Denver Public Schools politics, pro-charter organizations like Denver Families Action are on one side and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association union is on the other.”
In the 2023 Denver Public Schools school board race, Denver Families Action spent nearly $1 million through its independent expenditure committee Better Leaders Stronger Schools, outspending “the Denver teachers’ union 5 to 1.” That election nearly tied the record for all-time spending in a DPS school board race at $2.2 million. For the first time, Denver Families Action also paid for TV ads with dark money that featured Denver Mayor Mike Johnstonsupporting their endorsed candidates.
The money paid off, and all three won.
The Denver Classrooms Teachers Association is rooted in a local, democratic labor process since its funding comes from nearly 4,000 educators.
Denver Families Action, however, is the “political arm” of Denver Families for Public Schools, an organization whose name might suggest local representation yet it is funded by billionaire donors from outside Denver.
The near-historic spending by Denver Families Action in 2023 has its roots in a national strategy spearheaded by billionaires Reed Hastings and John Arnold. In 2018, a leaked presentation described how their new organization, City Fund, planned to invest $200 million to “increase charter school representation up to 50% in over 40 cities.” Denver has been one of their prime targets.
City Fund’s investment highlighted the DPS “portfolio model” which closes or replaces neighborhood schools that fail to meet standardized test-score benchmarks and then reopens them as charter schools. Since implementing the portfolio model in 2007, DPS closed or replaced dozens of neighborhood schools. Today, DPS has more than 50 charters. The model also weakens union influence“by reducing the number of schools whose teachers belong to the union, diminishing the union’s membership — and thus its power and its money.”
City Fund’s strategy has met with some resistance. In 2021, school board members from six cities criticized City Fund and their locally funded “activist groups” writing they “present themselves as local grassroots organizations when nothing could be further from the truth.” They warned that the billionaire-driven privatization erodes local control, divides school districts, and undermines democratic ideals.
Denver’s experience reflects similar concerns. In Denver, financial backing from wealthy advocates of charter schools ensured that pro-charter school board members dominated the board for over a decade. But in 2019, three teacher union-backed candidates unexpectedly won. This raised alarm among charter school advocates who worried the new board might dismantle past reforms, and ongoing enrollment declines also raised concerns.
In response to these events, City Fund helped launch Denver Families for Public Schools with backing from four Denver charter networks: DSST, STRIVE Prep, Rocky Mountain Prep, and University Prep. DFPS’s executive director, Ray Rivera, acknowledged their goal was to elevate the “voices of families who attend these charter schools in Denver and making sure they’re part of the public policy that gets made.”
DFPS received nearly $4 million from City Fund’s political arm, Campaign for Great Public Schools, and in 2024, they merged with another activist group, RootED, which had received over $34 millionfrom City Fund for charter expansion and grants to community organizations. Their combined resources now total about $8 million, allowing DFPS to hire staff, fund charter schools and community groups, pay canvassers up to $36 an hour, and organize advocacy campaigns to elect pro-charter candidates.
DFPS is led by Pat Donovan, the former managing partner with RootEd, who also chairs the board of Rocky Mountain Prep, a charter network with twelve DPS schools. In addition, Donovan serves on the boards of the Colorado League of Charter Schoolsand KIPP Colorado. City Fund CEO Marlon Marshall also serves on the board of Rocky Mountain Prep. These overlapping roles highlight how interconnected the interests of City Fund and Denver Families for Public Schools are, and how DFPS is integral in the school privatizationmovement in Denver.
DCTA’s funding is transparent and tied directly to local educators. By contrast, DFPS’s money originates from a national network of wealthy donors whose priorities do not necessarily align with the entire Denver community. This imbalance means one side can dominate the narrative, drowning out authentic community voices.
When voters receive glossy mailers or see a targeted ad, they may believe they are hearing from grassroots “families” or “students.” However, the spending often comes from the billionaires who fund Denver Families for Public Schools. This is where democracy is at risk. Without transparency, voters cannot fully assess the motives behind the messaging.
Denver’s school board should prioritize issues like equitable funding, strengthening neighborhood schools, and supporting educators. If the dark money spending levels are repeated, or surpassed, in the 2025 races, local priorities risk being overshadowed by billionaire-backed agendas.
The question for Denver voters this fall is straightforward: Will they allow outside money to dictate the future of their public schools, or will they insist on authentic local voices leading the way?
Mike DeGuire, Ph.D., is the vice chair of Advocates for Public Education Policy. He has been a teacher, district level reading coordinator, executive coach, and a principal in the Denver metro area for most of his education career. He also worked as a leadership consultant for several national education organizations, and as an educator effectiveness specialist with the Colorado Department of Education. His writing is also featured on a4pep.org.
The Supreme Court on Monday backed President Donald Trump’s push to allow immigration enforcement officials to continue what critics describe as “roving patrols” in Southern California that lower courts said likely violated the Fourth Amendment.
The court did not offer an explanation for its decision, which came over a sharp dissent from the three liberal justices.
At issue were a series of incidents in which masked and heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulled aside people who identify as Latino – including some US citizens – around Los Angeles to interrogate them about their immigration status. Lower courts found that ICE likely had not established the “reasonable suspicion” required to justify those stops.
The decision deals with seven counties in Southern California, but it has landed during a broader crackdown on immigration by the Trump administration – and officials are likely to read it as a tacit approval of similar practices elsewhere.
A US District Court in July ordered the Department of Homeland Security to discontinue the practice if the stops were based largely on a person’s apparent ethnicity, language or their presence at a particular location, such as a farm or bus stop. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld that decision, which applied only to seven California counties.
But the Supreme Court disagreed with that approach.
The majority claim to be “originalists” who adhere to the letter of the Constitution and its original meaning.
But they are originalists only when it suits their political goals.
The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable search and seizure. It reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
To stop and search and seize people because they look Hispanic or they are not white is the very definition of “unreasonable search and seizure.”
Shame on the six members of the U.S. Supreme Court who joined this egregiously bad opinion.
Jay Kuo writes a delightful blog called The Status Kuo. He is a lawyer with a sense of humor, and he writes clearly for the public, not for other lawyers.
Trump’s losses in the federal courts continue to pile up, and this week saw a number of critical rulings go against him. Judges from D.C. to Texas to California rejected the Trump regime’s illegal overreach on tariffs, deportations, military law enforcement and even his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.
Let’s do a legal lightning round to summarize these rulings, any one of which frankly is important enough to have warranted its own stand alone analysis. Today I’ll cover
A major ruling from the Federal Circuit invalidating most of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs;
A long weekend emergency ruling stopping planeloads of unaccompanied children from being deported to Guatemala;
Trump’s big loss after a bench trial in California over his unlawful use of federal troops in that state; and
The Fifth Circuit smackdown of Trump’s invocation of the “Alien Enemies Act” to justify summary deportation of alleged gang members.
Make no mistake: These are big losses that carry major implications for Trump’s plans to isolate the U.S., impose a police state, and conduct mass detentions and deportations.
And if you’re now thinking to yourself, “What does it matter, the Supreme Court will reverse these?” or “Great, but Trump will just disobey the orders,” I want to hit pause and do a reality check. As I’ll explain toward the end of this piece, these arguments, while common and understandable, simply don’t match the facts on the ground….
At this point, Kuo discusses each of the above decisions. You should subscribe to read these analyses.
But these rulings don’t matter! SCOTUS will overrule! Trump will defy!
There’s an understandable tendency to hear about a big court victory for the good guys but then cynically dismiss it, claiming either that the Supreme Court will overturn it, or that the Trump White House will simply ignore the courts’s orders.
I want to encourage readers to not fall into this trap. True, the Supreme Court has intervened in a few cases to lift a few injunctions imposed by lower courts, and that admittedly has been awful to see. But it hasn’t ruled substantively on much of anything yet.
And that has allowed court victories by the good guys to produce some real progress.
For example, the Blue State Attorneys General group has been successful at using lawsuits to claw back huge sums impounded by the White House. This has occurred even while the red states, which failed to challenge the illegal withholdings, were left starved of funds.
In his newsletter today, Robert Hubbell pointed to a chart with data from KFF Health News illustrating how successful lawsuits have spared the blue states from a great deal of the blow to public health infrastructure funding:
This helps show that the Supreme Court hasn’t been able to stop every lawsuit from succeeding. Indeed, many if not most have achieved their goals.
It’s also common to believe that the government is simply refusing to comply with every single court order. This misconception perhaps arose because so much attention was on a pair of lawsuits involving deportations, where the Justice Department and Homeland Security pretty much gave the finger to the courts.
But those are the only instances I’m aware of where court orders have been defied outright. And there are now major consequences for those involved with the plan to show open contempt. Judge Boasberg is now weighing bar disciplinary referrals for the lawyers involved.
In other cases, it is also true that the government has dragged its feet, delayed, deflected, misdirected and sought immediate appellate review of preliminary injunctions. But that is not the same as open defiance. And the courts have gotten much better at holding the government’s feet to the fire, as we just saw with Judge Sooknanan’s order followed by a demand for a series of status updates, all to keep the government on the straight and narrow.
The Department of Justice wants the American public to assume that none of the orders granted by federal judges are being heeded. They want us to believe that they, and not the judiciary, are in control. But this is simply not the case. As we saw this weekend, the Justice Department doesn’t have the appetite for another round of contempt proceedings, and it is even turning planes around when ordered to do so.
Zooming out a bit, we can understand why. The Justice Department is in disarray and demoralized, it has in some instances squandered the crucial “presumption of regularity” that is normally afforded to government functions, and the Trump regime is now losing the lion’s share of the most consequential lower court cases.
Sure, the Supreme Court may eventually weigh in with a set of terrible decisions. But that won’t stop, and hasn’t stopped, resourceful civil rights lawyers from finding new and novel ways to attack the White House’s policies and orders. For example, when SCOTUS found that litigants could not obtain nationwide injunctions against White House directives, plaintiffs adjusted quickly, moving for class certification so that the nationwide part got built into the definition of the class.
And who knows? Maybe even this SCOTUS majority will draw the line somewhere—perhaps by protecting the bright line independence of the Federal Reserve or by telling Trump he can’t order federal troops anywhere he wants for whatever mission he wants.
Until then, every win in the lower courts chips away at the MAGA fascist golem, and maybe with enough blows, we can take the entire monstrosity down.
Diana Lambert of Edsource reported that Jonathan Raymond, the former Superintendent of the Sacramento School District, agreed to take over the leadership of a “troubled” charter school called Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools. The school enrolls adults, many formerly incarcerated or new immigrants.
Wow, was it ever troubled!
Good for Raymond for taking on the challenge of fixing the school! The first thing he did was to dismiss the entire board.
The school owes the state $180 million dollars for money it should not have received or misspent. Most of the teachers were unqualified or were hired because they were friends or family of board members.
And on and on, demonstrating the need for the Legislature to establish oversight and accountability for charter schools, which the California Charter Schools Association has opposed for years.
Lambert wrote:
Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools opened in Sacramento in 2014 with high ideals — to help adult students, many formerly incarcerated or new immigrants, to earn a diploma, improve English language skills, or learn a trade.
Now, the school is one reason state legislators are considering increased charter school oversight.
Twin Rivers and other organizations did not provide adequate oversight.
Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools received more than $180 million in K-12 funds it was not eligible to collect and must now repay.
Graduation rates were so low they brought down the state’s graduation rate by half a percentage point.
Charter school leaders wasted taxpayer dollars on gifts and trips.
School leaders hired friends and family for jobs they weren’t qualified to hold.
Most teachers did not have the appropriate credentials to teach K-12 classes.
It wasn’t until the California State Auditor’s Office released a report in June, commissioned by state legislators, that the level of impropriety at the school became apparent.
The 80-page state audit found that the adult school received $180 million of K-12 funding for which it was not eligible, assigned teachers to classes they were not credentialed to teach, and avoided standardized testing by eliminating the 11th grade.
The audit also found that school leaders spent $1.96 million on a three-day trip for staff to San Diego for professional development, $80,000 on a leadership conference in Maui, $33,000 a month to lease a semi-professional ballpark, and more than $145,000 on gifts for students.
“The Highlands audit has underscored for us the need for greater accountability on the part of charter authorizers of all sizes, to conduct more thorough oversight that is not solely reliant upon a charter school’s annual audit or a charter school’s assertions,” said Cassie Mancini, legislative advocate for the California School Employees Association at a state Senate hearing on Assembly Bill 84, a charter oversight bill, in July.
Legislators, charter school advocates and charter school authorizers have been working to revise two competing charter school bills with the goal of merging them into one.
Adult charter gets K-12 funds
Many of the problems the audit found at Highlands Community Charter seem to stem from how the school leaders interpreted the rules around a unique federal program that allows adult charter schools, working in partnership with a Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act agency, to receive K-12 funding, which is significantly higher than adult education funding…
Highlands Community Charter had a graduation rate of 2.8% and its California Innovative Career Academy, or CICA, had a rate of 16.9%. Highlands opened CICA, an independent study school, in 2019…
A large number of underqualified teachers and large class sizes, averaging 51 students per teacher, may have contributed to the poor academic performance of the school’s students, according to the audit. The state has no limit on class sizes in charter high schools.
At the time of the audit, only 53 of the school’s 250 teachers had a K-12 credential, said Bill McGuire, who served as executive director of the school during the year of the audit. He blamed the lack of appropriately credentialed teachers on inaccurate information from credentialing officials.
The charter school owes $180 million to the state. It’s asking for some sort of write-off since the money is gone. The authorizer, Twin Rivers, collected $12.9 million in fees but didn’t seem to oversee much.
A scam? An error? A rip-off? Call it what you will. California and every other state needs to establish meaningful oversight and accountability for charter schools. A huge amount of money was spent since the school(s) opened in 2014, and very few people were educated.
I was born in 1967 in Chalmette, Louisiana (St. Bernard Parish), a suburb of New Orleans so close to the city that is is the actual site of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans.
I did not know that my father moved to Chalmette in the mid-1950s as part of the “white flight” from New Orleans.
I did not know why the St. Bernard-Orleans Parish line was so starkly white on the St. Bernard side and black on the Orleans side.
I did not know that the black teachers at my all-white elementary and middle schools were part of an effort for local officials to dodge federal mandates to racially integrate the schools (as in integrating the student body).
(I do remember seeing what I think was one black student in the special education, self-contained classroom of my elementary school– such an unusual, remarkable event that it puzzled my young mind to see him as a student assistant in the cafeteria, and the moment remains clearly in my memory to this day.)
I did not know that when I moved to a more rural section of St. Bernard Parish as I started high school that the African-American residents “down the road” knew full well of the dangers of trying to reside in certain sections of the parish (namely, Chalmette and Arabi).
I did not know that the school-superintendent uncle of one of my favorite teachers tried circa 1961 to create an “annex school” near the Arabi-New Orleans city line in order to enable white parents in the city to avoid racial integration by using school vouchers from New Orleans to enroll their children in an all-white public school just across the parish line.
I did not know that the proliferation of parochial schools in New Orleans was fueled by white flight from the New Orleans public schools.
I did not know that the reason I attended an all-girls public middle- and high school was for local officials to try to sham-integrate the St. Bernard public schools but to keep “those black boys away from our white girls.”
There’s a lot that I did not know and did not begin to learn until I was in my twenties and started asking questions.
But there were a lot of lessons that many white adults in my life tried to instill in me, lessons that indeed needed some serious questioning:
“You know property values will drop if the blacks start moving into a neighborhood.”
“It is better for a white woman to have a physically-abusive white boyfriend or husband than a black one, even if he does treat her well.”
“Interracial marriage is cause for a family disowning a child.”
“The city is a wreck because blacks are lazy and destroy everything.”
As I began reading about New Orleans officials’ cross-generational efforts to obliterate the black middle class in New Orleans (by, for example, by destroying multiple black owned businesses in order to build both the Desire housing project in 1956 and construct Interstate 10 in 1966), I felt like I had been lied to for decades– and my views as a white child and young adult repeatedly manipulated in order to purposely cement in me a sense of white superiority that no amount of personal maturity would ever shake.
Nevertheless, I am happy to say that such twisted, misplaced superiority is indeed and forever shaken in me and shown to be the mammoth lie that it is– the very lie that happens to fuel the white saviors who would impose themselves on black communities– including the center of the community:
The community school.
The community should be the final word on its schools, and when it is, those schools are successful, even in the face of racially-imposed hardship and intentional, multi-generational deprivation of basic resources, including physical space, current textbooks, and even ready supplies of toilet paper.
Such is the story of George Washington Carver High School in New Orleans– a school created as part of a school complex and housing project and build in New Orleans, Louisiana, to intentionally be a segregated school despite its opening post-Brown vs. Board of Education.
In her book, What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans School (2025, Beacon Press), Dr. Kristen Buras offers to readers a detailed history and daily life of G. W. Carver High School in New Orleans, from its inception to its white-savior closure in 2005, post-Katrina, when the state of Louisiana refused to grant the returning Carver community a charter to operate their own school. Buras details what no pro-charter, education reformer discussed at any length as regards traditionally-black New Orleans public schools: the repeated, intentional, multi-generational, systematic fiscal neglect of both the schools and the black community in New Orleans.
In contrast, Buras not only discusses these issues; she brings them to life through her numerous interviews with Carver faculty and staff, a life that begins even before Carver High School opened its doors in the 1958-59 school year.
Right out of the gate, the community served by Carver High School– families residing in the Desire Housing Project– had to face the reality that the project homes were poorly constructed and were starting to fall apart due to a lack of concrete foundations on swampland, no less.
Indeed, the location of what was known as the “Carver Complex” was originally a Maroon colony for escaped African slaves in a backswamp area that 1973 Carver graduate describes as “really not made for residential living.”
Separate was not equal, but to the Carver community, it was theirs, and in the midst of profound racism, the faculty and staff at Carver High devoted themselves to their students and the students’ families, who also happened to be their neighbors.
What speaks loudly to the teacher commitment to Carver High students, as Buras notes, is their multi-decade commitment. Despite being chronically underfunded and under-maintained across its almost-fifty years pre-Katrina, Carver High School had a very low teacher turnover.
In What We Stand to Lose, readers are introduced to the precise and disciplined teachings of music teacher Yvonne Busch, who was known for offering free music lessons during summer break. Former student Leonard Smith produced a documentary about Busch, who retired in 1983 after a 32-years at Carver. We learn of the 38-year career of social studies teacher, Lenora Condoll, who wanted so much for her students to experience the larger world that she organized fundraisers to take her students on Close-Up trips to Washington, DC, and who, on a practical note, showed students that they could make a dressy wardrobe out of a few basic items, including her “black, cashmere skirt.” We meet Enos Hicks, head coach of track and football and athletic director once Carver High opened. By that time, Hicks had been teaching for twenty years already. When Hicks’ students saw “his bag of medals” for track and field, they believed that they, too, could excel and receive their own medals.
These are real teachers whose legacy is undeniable among Carver alumni. They inspired their students to hold their heads high in self-respect despite the cultural pressures and dangers to be pressed into a Whites Only mold of “forever less-than.”
Carver High School was at most 30 minutes from my own high school. I had no idea such quality against the odds was so nearby.
Tom Ultican, retired teacher in California, is a dogged researcher of school privatization. He recently examined the origins of the Oakland Public Education Fund” and found that much of its funding comes from Dark Money.
It’s worthwhile to remember that the public schools of Oakland, California, have been a Petri dish for privatizers and corporate reformers for years. Billionaire philanthropists took control of the district and named its superintendents. The charter sector mushroomed. Superintendents came and went, each one hailed as a savior.
Recently the Oakland Public Education Fund (OPEF) posted, “OUSD Board of Education Renews Long-standing Partnership with The Ed Fund.” OUSD is the Oakland Unified School District and “The Ed Fund” is the latest of many names used to identify OPEF. A quick look at OPEF’s tax forms (TIN: 43-2014630) reveals that they have assets of about $25 million and a yearly income of more than $15 million. The question becomes who is this wealthy group and do their purposes include something more than just good education?
OPEF, formed in 2003 and was originally called “Oakland Autonomous Small Schools Foundation Inc.” EdWeek reported that in 2000 and 2003 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided two grants totaling more than $25 million some of which was designated for small school incubators. It seems likely some of this money was used as seed money to establish OPEF.
The founding executive director of OPEF was Jonathan Klein, a 1997 Yale graduate who became a Teach for America (TFA) fifth grade teacher in the Compton Unified School District. After coming to Oakland in addition to founding OPEF, he went on to become CEO of GO Public Schools, became Bay Area executive director of TFA and chief program officer at the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation. In 2013, he was named Change Agent of the year by New Schools Venture Fund. In other words, he is an education profiteer closely associated with enemies of public schools.
According to the OPEF web-page, the organization relaunched as the Oakland Schools Foundation in 2012 and then relaunched again in 2014 as the Oakland Public Education Fund. Today they refer to themselves as the “The Ed Fund.” In 2016, they put in motion a corporate partnership with Salesforce which provided $2.5 million for middle school computer science and math. This raises concerns that “The Ed Fund” is inappropriately employing wealth to drive public school curriculum using other than democratic means.
Billionaires Finance OPEF
A change in the way data was reported appeared in the OPEF tax forms for 2024. Previously, their reporting on the contributor’s page simply stated “RESTRICTED.” The new report still hides the contributor’s names but provides the amounts given by seven individuals.
In addition to the contributors not listed above, the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation have granted OPEF a total of $785,833 (IN: 65-1202020), the East Bay Community Foundation contributed $557,760 (IN: 94-6070996) and the Silicon Valley Community Fund provided a whopping $8,349,085 (IN: 20-5205488). The Silicon Valley Community Fund is a dark money site where extremely wealthy people can provide money without their name being attached. It is worth noting that the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation has granted the East Bay Community Foundation $6,165,000 since its founding in 2003.
Since 2014, OPEF has averaged giving more than $5 million a year to the Oakland Unified School District for a total of $51,885,477. However, their other spending undermines public education and promotes privatization. Educate78 has received significant support from both the Hastings Fund and the City Fund, known enemies of the public school system. GO Public Schools has been a consistent advocate for expanding the charter school movement. TFA has foisted unqualified teachers with 5 weeks of training on classrooms throughout America. The New Teachers Center is a Bill Gates developed center in Santa Cruz.
Anyone working in a public school knows that charter schools directly compete with and undermine public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 