Why Ukraine Will Win the War

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2025 //
8

Bernard-Henri Levy writes in The Wall Strett journal about Ukraine’s remarkable success in destroying about 1/3 of Russia’s long-range strategic bombers. These are planes that have been delivering death and destruction to civilian targets like schools, homes, and hospitals. Ukraine knocked them out with a single, brilliant strike.

He writes:

The Ukrainian operation on Sunday was a coordinated attack on four airports in Russia reaching as deep as Siberia. It neutralized 41 “strategic aircraft” and was a brilliant technical performance.

Over more than 18 months, hundreds of drones were smuggled deep into Russia. They were loaded onto civilian trucks with double-bottomed trailers, where they were concealed inside mobile boxes. The tops of those boxes—remotely controlled by operators in Ukraine but connected to the Russian telephone network—opened at the appointed time, allowing the drones to take off. All 41 targets were carefully studied for months by Ukrainian intelligence, and they exploded simultaneously without civilian casualties…

This achievement was a slap in the face to Russia—and not the first. At the beginning of the war, there was the Moskva cruiser, the flagship of its fleet, sunk off Odesa by two Ukrainian-made missiles. Then, the double strike on the Kerch Bridge, Vladimir Putin’s pride, the jewel of his cardboard crown and a symbol of the continuity he believed he was establishing between Crimea and Russia. Last year, half of Mr. Putin’s fleet in the Black Sea was destroyed. The other half retreated pitifully to Novorossiysk or the Sea of Azov. Also in 2024, Ukraine staged an offensive in Russia’s Kursk region.

Sigmund Freud spoke of the three humiliations on Western man—inflicted by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud himself. If Volodymyr Zelensky had the heart to laugh, he could speak of the five humiliations he has inflicted on that enemy of the West: Russia. Mr. Putin and his people stand exposed as braggarts, paper tigers. Ukraine is David to the Goliath of Russia, nearly 30 times its size.

Sunday’s operation is further proof that the Ukrainian army, through sacrifice and adversity, has forged itself into the boldest, brightest and best in Europe. I witnessed its evolution as I prepared my documentaries on the war.

I filmed its geeks tinkering, hidden in forest huts, their first makeshift drones. For another film, the drone battalions of Lyman and Kupiansk closed the sky in place of their overly timid allies. This winter, in Pokrovsk and Sumy, high-tech command rooms where battles were fought at a distance. I even heard—at the time without fully understanding—Mr. Zelensky announcing that his engineers were developing a new generation of drones capable of striking Russia up to the Arctic.

Today, all the cards are turned. Mr. Putin terrorized the world with his nuclear blackmail. There was an army capable of calling his bluff—and it did.

“Just say thank you,” Vice President JD Vance lectured President Zelensky during their February altercation in the Oval Office. All of us should thank Ukraine, a small nation that has grounded a third of the bombers that promised apocalypse to Warsaw, Berlin or Paris.

This weekend’s drone operation is a further step on the path to victory. I don’t know what form that victory will take, or whether it will be the front, the rear or its regime that will give in first in Russia. But the balance of power is increasingly clear.

On one side, a ridiculed general staff, an ultimate weapon that is greatly diminished and discredited, troops so demoralized that they fight only with the support of North Korean, Chinese, Ghanaian, Bangladeshi and Iranian mercenaries.

On the other side, a patriotic citizen army, motivated and knowing why it combats—an army that has proved its mastery of the most advanced military technologies, its excellence not only in trench warfare but also in the new remote and ghost warfare.

Categories Courage, Creativity, International

NPR Will Fight Trump’s Effort to Cut Off Funding

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2025 //
8

Oliver Darcy, media journalist, writes about NPR’s decision to fight the Trump administration’s efforts to shut it down.

Trump is directly infringing on freedom of the press, punishing NPR because it is not slavishly devoted to him and his views.

I listen to NPR for straightforward, unbiased news. I appreciate their long-form reports on a wide array of subjects. Many parts of the country are news deserts, where the only media available are the rightwing Sinclair radio stations and FOX News.

The nation needs NPR, just as the world needs Voice of America, which Trump is defunding.

As with so many of his decisions, I wonder who benefits? I have no answer.

Darcy writes:

When Trump signed an order to defund NPR, the network faced a choice over how it would respond—but CEO Katherine Maher made one thing clear from the start: there would be no backroom negotiations.

In the days following Donald Trump’s May 1 executive order to strip NPR of all federal funding, leaders at the public broadcaster began deliberating their options. But even before the network’s legal team got to work on the litigation, one decision had already been made. NPR chief executive Katherine Maher made clear that the outlet would not quietly negotiate with the White House—an approach other media companies have recently taken under immense political pressure. 

“As an independent media organization,” Maher told me by phone Tuesday, “we wouldn’t go ahead and have that conversation because that would be negotiating on editorial principle.” 

On Tuesday morning, NPR and three of its member stations in Colorado filed a federal lawsuitagainst Trump and his administration, alleging the executive order he signed was not only punitive, but also unconstitutional. In a 43-page complaint, the stations argued that Trump’s directive violated theFirst Amendment, usurped Congress’authority over federal spending, and more broadly, posed a threat to the editorial independence of public media nationwide. 

The language of the filing was unambiguous. It framed the executive order not as a routine dispute over funding priorities or media policy, but as a retaliatory strike designed to punish critical coverage and reshape the information environment in Trump’s favor. “The Order’s objectives could not be clearer,” the lawsuit stated. “The Order aims to punish NPR for the content of news and other programming the President dislikes and chill the free exercise of First Amendment rights by NPR and individual public radio stations across the country.” 

I asked Maher what it felt like to take a sitting president to court. She didn’t hesitate. “What did it feel like?” she rhetorically asked me. “It felt like recognizing that there are responsibilities that one takes on in running a media organization, and this was one of those.” She emphasized that the case wasn’t just about NPR’s national desk or morning programming—it was about the entire public media system: “We did this on behalf of our newsroom. We did this on behalf of our editorial independence. We did this on behalf of public media at large.”

Maher, who only took the helm of NPR in January 2024, told me that the legal option became increasingly clear as the organization studied the implications of the executive order. “We took a look at [the order] and wanted to be able to make sure that we really analyzed it,” she said. “We got to understand what avenues existed for us to be able to seek relief—and litigation was something that we came to once we realized that fundamentally this was a First Amendment issue.” The legal review moved quickly. “Obviously, it’s only been four weeks,” Maher added, “and so you can imagine it happened on a pretty quick timeline.”

The lawsuit was filed by not just NPR, but also Colorado Public Radio, KSUT Public Radio, and Aspen Public Radio. Together, they asked the court to block enforcement of the order and affirm that federal support for public broadcasting, which Congress has repeatedly approved, cannot be overturned by presidential fiat. For its part, NPR receives just 1% of its annual operating budgetdirectly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the private nonprofit that distributes federal funding. But local member stations across the country receive a much larger slice of their budgets from the $535 million in taxpayer funds CPB distributes. PBS, facing a similar predicament, said Tuesday it is also actively weighing a legal challenge of its own.

While Trump has long treated NPR as a proxy for elite coastal media (he’s referred to it as a “liberal disinformation machine,” among other insults), Maher declined to say in her own words why he despises the outlet with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. “I really couldn’t say what the president thinks or doesn’t think,” she told me. “It’s beyond my powers to get inside his mind.” At the same time, she acknowledged the broader context in which public broadcasting has become a partisan target. “I think that we recognize that there has long been pushback about public media,” she said.

In any case, the legal issue, she insisted, is separate from any political debate. When asked whether she worries that suing the president could further cement in the minds of the MAGA faithful that NPR has a bias against him, she pushed back. 

“I fundamentally reject the idea that defending the Constitution is partisan,” Maher told me. “We are taking this action on behalf of the First Amendment. We’re taking this action on behalf of the free press. Regardless of your political beliefs, we all benefit from that.” She added that the lawsuit should be viewed as an act of civic duty, not political retaliation: “I would much rather people saw this as an act of patriotic commitment to our Constitution on behalf of citizens rather than saying that this is somehow partisan or political.”

Of course, that’s not how her actions have been portrayed by MAGA Media, which—similarly to Trump–views NPR as a liberal mouthpiece of the so-called “deep state.” Maher seemed to acknowledge that reality, but said she would continue to work to get the outlet’s message out. She even said she would be willing to appear on outlets like Fox News to do so. “I’m always happy to talk to people who are happy to talk to us,” Maher said. “I think that we’d be open to having that conversation.”

What happens if the court doesn’t rule in their favor? Maher didn’t give the possibility of such an outcome any oxygen. “I’m really confident that we will [win],” she said. “I feel that we’re on very, very solid ground, so I’m not concerned about the downside.”

Categories Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Funding, Media, Resistance, Trump

Georgia: Brain-Dead Woman Kept on Life Support Because She Was 9 Weeks Pregnant

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2025 //
4

Several days ago, I posted this horrible story about a young woman in Georgia who is on life support. She is brain dead. Because she was nine weeks pregnant when her brain died, Georgia law requires that she be kept in a vegetative state until the fetus can be delivered at 36 weeks.

The political cartoonist Ann Telnaes posted this visual commentary on her Substack blog:

“The decision should have been left to us- not the state”, says her family

Telnaes quit her job at The Washington Post when her editor refused to publish a cartoon showing the tech billionaires bowing to Trump. Jeff Bezos, the owner of the newspaper, was one of them. Telnaes won a Pulitzer Prize for that cartoon.

Categories Cruelty, Education Reform, Gender, Georgia, Health

Jamelle Bouie: Don’t Be Fooled Again by the GOP Tax Plan

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2025 //
3

Jamelle Bouie writes an opinion column for The New York Times, and he is my favorite on that site. His insights are clear and sharp. In this column, he reminds us that Republicans have a long history of promises about tax cuts for the middle class that have ended up enriching the wealthiest and increasing inequality.

He writes:

It’s 1981. A Republican president and his allies in Congress are promising large, broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.

It’s 2001. A Republican president is promising broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.

It’s 2003. That same president is promising another round of broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.

It’s 2017. Yet another Republican president is promising broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.

With each new Republican administration, it is the same promise. With each round of tax cuts, it is the same result: vast benefits for the wealthiest Americans and a pittance for everyone else. There is little growth but widening inequality and an even starker gap between the haves and have-nots.

President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, which inaugurated the pattern, slashed the top tax rate on investment income to 50 percent from 70 percent and the capital gains rate to 20 percent from 28 percent. “New tax benefits for business were so generous,” Michael J. Graetz writes in “The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America,” “that corporate tax receipts declined from about 15 percent to less than 9 percent of federal revenues.” The law, he continues, “substantially cut taxes on income generated from wealth, increased opportunities for tax-free savings by upper-income Americans and greatly expanded tax-shelter opportunities for high-income individuals and corporations.” It also “reduced taxes on transfers of wealth from the richest Americans to their descendants by exempting all but a small fraction of the wealthiest 1 percent” from the estate tax.

Over the next decade, Reagan and his successor George H.W. Bush were forced to raise taxes as a result of this profligacy. Reagan signed deficit-reducing tax increases in 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1987. Bush signed a significant tax increase in 1990, breaking his “Read my lips” election-year promise not to raise taxes.

George W. Bush rejected his father’s fiscal heterodoxy in favor of the unrepentant supply-side orthodoxy of Reagan’s first year. Sold as middle-class tax relief, the $1.7 trillion George W. Bush tax cuts — passed in 2001 and 2003 — were by and large a handout to the wealthiest Americans. As Graetz notes, they “reduced federal revenues from 20 percent of G.D.P. in 2000 to 15.6 percent in 2004,” and when all the changes were phased in, “they raised the after-tax incomes of people in the top 1 percent by nearly 6.5 percent — $54,000 on average — compared to about 1 percent, or an average of $207, for the bottom 40 percent.” In a 2017 analysis of the legacy of the George W. Bush tax cuts, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the top 1 percent of households received an average tax cut of over $570,000 from 2004 to 2012. Not surprisingly, it also found that these cuts “did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality.”

We can basically copy and paste this dynamic from Reagan and George W. Bush to Donald Trump, who sold his 2017 tax cuts as — you guessed it — middle-class relief. “Our focus is on helping the folks who work in the mailrooms and the machine shops of America,” he told supporters in the fall of 2017. “The plumbers, the carpenters, the cops, the teachers, the truck drivers, the pipe fitters, the people that like me best.”

Except — surprise! — a vast majority of the benefits of the $1.9 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went to the highest earners — millionaire chief executives and billionaire owners of large companies. Americans in the middle received an average tax cut of $910. Americans in the top 1 percent received an average cut of $61,090. The 2017 law also cut estate taxes and gave new advantages to real estate investors, direct benefits for Trump and his family.

We are now looking at another round of Republican tax cuts. Yet again the claim is that this will benefit most Americans. “The next phase of our plan to deliver the greatest economy in history is for this Congress to pass tax cuts for everybody,” Trump said in his March 4 address to Congress. But as Paul Krugman points out in his Substack newsletter, this latest package is both a shameless giveaway to the rich and a ruinous cut to safety net programs for lower-income and working Americans.

The tax and benefit cuts are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. To pay for the more than $1.1 trillion in tax cuts for people with incomes above $500,000, the House Republican framework would cut $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — snatching food assistance away from millions of low-income families — and $800 billion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, leaving an estimated 10 million or more Americans without health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The top 0.1 percent of earners would see their income grow; the bottom 20 percent would see it plummet.

It remains to be seen whether Republicans can pass their bill in the form they want. They have had some trouble moving it out of the House of Representatives and into the Senate. But if they can, it’s hard to imagine that there will be much appetite to kill the president’s “big, beautiful bill.”

Which is all to say that it’s 2025, and a Republican president has promised a broad tax cut that will help the middle class and strengthen the economy. I think we know what is going to come next.

Categories Ethics, Extremism, Hoax, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump and Musk Are Destroying the Government

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2025 //
14

Heather Cox Richardson demonstrates the negative effects of Elon Musk’s DOGS, which protected his interests and saved little, if any, money. With Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax plan, the deficit will increase by $4-5 trillion, so Musk’s chainsaw contributed nothing but demoralization and destruction of the federal workforce. She also summarizes the multiple ways in which Trump is sabotaging the rule of law. She includes footnotes, as usual. Subscribe to her blog to see them.

She writes:

In July 2024, according to an article published today by Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey in the New York Times, billionaire Elon Musk texted privately about his concerns that government investigations into his businesses would “take me down.” “I can’t be president,” he wrote, “but I can help Trump defeat Biden and I will.”

After appearing on stage with Trump on October 5, Musk texted a person close to him: “I’m feeling more optimistic after tonight. Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” About an hour later, he added: “This is not something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised. “‘Lasers’ from space.”

Musk invested about $290 million in the 2024 election and, when Trump took office, became a fixture in the White House, heading the “Department of Government Efficiency.” It set out to kill government programs by withholding congressionally approved funds, a practice that courts have ruled unconstitutional and Congress expressly prohibited with the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.

Musk vowed that his “Department of Government Efficiency” would cut $2 trillion from the U.S. budget, but he quickly backed off on those numbers. In the end, DOGE claimed savings of $175 billion, but that claim is unverifiable and CNN’s Casey Tolan says it’s probably wrong: less than half of it is backed up with any documentation.

Instead, as CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf reported today, since DOGE cut staffing at the enforcement wing of the Internal Revenue Service, for example, and cut employees at national parks, which also generate revenue, its cuts may well end up costing money. Max Stier, who heads the Partnership for Public Service, suggests DOGE cuts could cost U.S. taxpayers $135 billion because agencies will need to train and hire replacements for the workers DOGE fired. Stier called DOGE’s actions “arson of a public asset.”

Grind and Twohey reported that Musk’s drug consumption during the campaign—they could not speak to his habits in the White House, although he appeared high today at a White House press conference—was “more intense than previously known.” He was a chronic user of ketamine, took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, and traveled with a box that held about 20 pills for daily use. Those in frequent contact with him worried about his frequent drug use, erratic behavior, and mood swings. As a government contractor, Musk should receive random drug tests, but Grind and Twohey say he received advance warning of those tests.

It was never clear that Musk’s role at DOGE was legal, and the White House has tried to maintain that he was only an advisor, despite Trump’s February 19 statement, “I signed an order creating [DOGE] and put a man named Elon Musk in charge.” On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that 14 states can proceed with their lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” saying the states had adequately supported their argument that “Musk and DOGE’s conduct is ‘unauthorized by any law.’”

Trump posted today on social media: “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way. Elon is terrific!” In a press conference today, Trump reiterated that Musk “is not really leaving.”

Musk’s time at the helm of DOGE might not have saved taxpayer money, but it has changed the world in other ways. Musk has used his time in the government to end investigations into his companies, score government contracts, and get the government to press countries to accept his Starlink communications network as a condition of tariff negotiations. According to John Hyatt of Forbes, Musk’s association with Trump has made him an estimated $170 billion richer.

The implications of DOGE’s actions for Americans are huge. DOGE operatives are now embedded in the U.S. government, where they are mining Americans’ data to create a master database that can sort and find individuals. Former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper called it “a full-scale redirection of the government’s digital nervous system into the hands of an unelected billionaire.”

Today, Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik of the New York Times reported that Musk put billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir data analysis firm into place across the government, where it launched its product Foundry to organize, analyze, and merge data. Thiel provided the money behind Vice President J.D. Vance’s political career. Wired and CNN had previously reported how the administration was using this merged data to target undocumented immigrants, and now employees are detailing their concerns with how the administration could use their newly merged information against Americans more generally.

Internationally, Musk’s destruction of the United States Agency for International Development, slashing about 80% of its grants, is killing about 103 people an hour, most of them children. The total so far is about 300,000 people, according to Boston University infectious disease mathematical modeller Dr. Brooke Nichols. Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect reported today that about 1,500 babies a day are born HIV-positive because Musk’s cuts stopped their mothers’ medication.

In the New York Times today, Michelle Goldberg recalls how Musk appeared uninterested in learning what USAID actually did—prevent starvation and provide basic healthcare—and instead called it a “radical-left political psy-op,” and reposted a smear from right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos calling USAID “the most gigantic global terror organization in history.” Goldberg also recalls Musk’s tendency to call people he disdains “NPCs,” or non-player characters, which are characters in role-playing games whose only role is to advance the storyline for the real players.

Aside from DOGE, the focus of Trump’s administration—other than his own cashing in on the presidency—has been on tariffs and immigration. Like the efforts of DOGE, those show a disdain for the law in favor of concentrating power in the executive branch.

During the campaign, Trump fantasized that constructing a high tariff wall around the U.S. would force other countries to fund the national deficit, enabling a Republican Congress to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. In fact, domestic industries and consumers bear the costs of tariffs. Trump’s high tariffs, many of which he imposed by declaring an economic emergency and then using the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), created such havoc in the stock and bond markets that he backed off.

Yesterday, Sayantani Ghosh, David Gaffen, and Arpan Varghese of Reuters reported that although most of the highest tariffs have yet to go into effect, Trump’s trade war has cost companies more than $34 billion in lost sales and higher costs.

Trump has changed tariff policies at least 50 times since he took office, and traders have figured out they can buy stocks cheaply when markets plummet after a dramatic tariff announcement, and sell when Trump changes his mind. This has recently given rise to Trump’s nickname “TACO,” for “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

This moniker has apparently irritated Trump so much he has taken to social media to defend his abrupt dropping of tariffs on China, saying he did it to “save them” from “grave economic danger,” although in fact, China turned to other trading partners to cushion the blow of U.S. tariffs. Trump went on to suggest China did not live up to what he considered its part of the bargain, and he would no longer be “Mr. NICE GUY!”

On Wednesday a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs based on the IEEPA are illegal. The Constitution gives to Congress, not to the president, the power to levy tariffs. Trump launched a social media rant in which he attacked the judges, insisted that “it is only because of my successful use of Tariffs that many Trillions of Dollars have already begun pouring into the U.S.A. from other Countries,” and said that he could not wait for Congress to handle tariffs because it would take too long—in fact, most of Congress does not approve of the tariffs—and that following the Constitution “would completely destroy Presidential Power.” “The President of the United States must be allowed to protect America against those that are doing it Economic and Financial harm.”

Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit paused that ruling until at least June 9, when both parties will have submitted legal arguments about whether the stay should remain in place as the government appeals the ruling that the tariffs are illegal. White House senior counsel for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro, the key proponent of Trump’s trade war, said: “Even if we lose, we’ll do it another way.”

Today Trump said he will double the tariff on steel imports from 25% to 50%.

The other major focus of the administration has been expelling undocumented immigrants from the U.S. During the 2024 campaign, Trump whipped up support by insisting that former President Joe Biden had permitted criminals to walk into the U.S. and terrorize American citizens. Trump vowed to launch the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and often talked of deporting the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., although his numbers have ranged as high as 21 million without explanation.

The administration has hammered on immigration to promote the idea that it is keeping Americans safe. But its first target of arresting at least 1,200 individuals a day has fallen far short. In Trump’s first 100 days, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it arrested an average of about 660 people a day.

On Wednesday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who along with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is the face of the administration’s immigration policy, told the Fox News Channel that the administration is now aiming for “a minimum of 3,000 arrests…every day.” Administration officials hope to deport a million people in Trump’s first year in office.

CNN reported yesterday that those officials are putting intense pressure on law enforcement agencies to meet that goal. This means that hundreds of FBI agents have been taken off terror threats and espionage cases involving China and Russia to be reassigned to immigration duties. Some FBI offices are offering overtime pay if agents help with “enforcement and removal operations.” Officers from other agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) have also been deployed against immigrants in place of their regular duties.

Steven Monacelli of The Barbed Wire noted today that local law enforcement and state troopers have also been diverted to immigration, using a national network of cameras that read license plates. Joseph Cox and Jason Keobler of 404 Media reported yesterday that a Texas sheriff used the same system over the course of a month to look for a woman whom he said had a self-administered abortion, saying her family was worried about her safety.

Their attempt to appear effective has led to very visible arrests and renditions of undocumented migrants to prisons in third countries, especially the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador. The administration has deliberately flouted the right of persons in the United States to due process as guaranteed by the Constitution. The administration has met court orders with delay and obfuscation, as well as by attacking judges and the rule of law.

The administration continues to insist those it has arrested are dangerous criminals who must be deported without delay, but more and more reporting says that many of those expelled from the country had no criminal convictions. Today, ProPublica reported that the Trump administration’s own data shows that officials knew that “the vast majority” of the 238 Venezuelans it sent to CECOT had not been convicted of crimes in the U.S. even as it deported them and called them “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters,” and “the worst of the worst.”

ICE has increasingly met quotas by arresting immigrants outside of immigration check-ins and courtrooms: yesterday Dina Arévalo of My San Antonio reported that ICE arrested five immigrants, including three children, outside of an immigration court after a judge had said they were no longer subject to removal proceedings. The officers used zip ties on all five individuals.

At stake is the turn of the United States away from democracy and toward the international right wing. Yesterday the U.S. State Department notified Congress that it intends to use the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor to promote “Democracy and Western Values.” On Tuesday a senior advisor for that bureau, Samuel Samson, who graduated from college in 2021, explained that the State Department intends to ally with the European far right to protect “Western civilization” from current democratic governments.

It also plans to turn the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which manages the flow of people into the U.S., into an “Office of Remigration” to “actively facilitate” the “voluntary return of migrants” to other countries and “advance the president’s immigration agenda.”

“Remigration” is a term from the global far right. As Isabela Dias of Mother Jones notes, its proponents call for the “mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of immigration status or citizenship, and an end to multiculturalism.” Of the congressional report, a person who works closely with the State Department told Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket: “All of it is pretty awful with some pieces that definitely violate existing law and treaties. But institutionalizing neo-Nazi theory as an office in the State Department is the most blatantly horrifying.”

This concept is behind not only the expulsion of undocumented immigrants, but also the purge of foreign scholars and lawful residents. The Supreme Court blessed this purge today when, during the period that litigation is underway, it allowed the administration to end immigration paroles for about 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela admitted under a Biden-era program, instantly making them undocumented and subject to deportation.

The court decided the case on the shadow docket, without briefings or explanation. In a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote: “[S]omehow, the Court has now apparently determined…that it is in the public’s interest to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”

Jackson added a crucial observation. The court, she wrote, “allows the Government to do what it wants to do regardless [of the consequences], rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process.”

—

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Citizenship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom, Funding, History, Immigration, Musk, Elon, Propaganda, Trump

Secretary of ED McMahon Wants to Destroy US Education with Her Budget!

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2025 //
6

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon released her budget proposal for next year, and it’s as bad as expected.

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, reviewed the budget and concluded that it shows a reckless disregard for the neediest students and schools and outright hostility towards students who want to go to college.

We know that Trump “loves the uneducated.” Secretary McMahon wants more of them.

Burris sent out the following alert:

Image

Linda McMahon, handpicked by Donald Trump to lead the U.S. Department of Education, has just released the most brutal, calculated, and destructive education budget in the Department’s history.

She proposes eliminating $8.5 billion in Congressionally funded programs—28 in total—abolishing 10 outright and shoving the other 18 into a $2 billion block grant. That’s $4.5 billion less than those 18 programs received last year.

Tell Congress: Stop McMahon From Destroying Our Public Schools

And it gets worse: States are banned from using the block grant to support the following programs funded by Congress:

  • Aid for migrant children whose families move frequently for agricultural work
  • English Language Acquisition grants for emerging English learners
  • Community schools offering wraparound services
  • Grants to improve teacher effectiveness and leadership
  • Innovation and research for school improvement
  • Comprehensive Centers, including those serving students with disabilities
  • Technical assistance for desegregation
  • The Ready to Learn program for young children

These aren’t just budget cuts—they’re targeted strikes. 

McMahon justifies cutting support for migrant children by falsely claiming the program “encourages ineligible non-citizens to access taxpayer dollars.” That is a lie. Most migrant farmworkers are U.S. citizens or have H-2A visas. They feed this nation with their backbreaking labor.

The attack continues for opportunity for higher education:

  • Pell Grants are slashed by $1,400 on average; the maximum grant drops from $7,395 to $5,710
  • Federal Work-Study loses $1 billion—an 80% cut
  • TRIO programs, which support college-readiness and support for low-income students, veterans, and students with disabilities, are eliminated
  • Campus child care programs for student-parents are defunded

In all, $1.67 billion in student college assistance is gone—wiped out on top of individual Pell grant cuts. 

Send your letter now

And yet, McMahon increased funding for the federal Charter Schools Program to half a billion dollars for a sector that saw an increase of only eleven schools last year. Meanwhile, her allies in Congress are pushing a $5 billion private school and homeschool voucher scheme through the so-called Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA).

And despite reducing Department staff by 50%, she only cuts the personnel budget by 10%.

This is not budgeting. It is a war on public education.

This is a blueprint for privatization, cruelty, and the systematic dismantling of opportunity for America’s children.

We cannot let it stand.

Raise your voice. Share this letter: https://networkforpubliceducation.org/tell-congress-dont-let-linda-mcmahon-slash-funding-for-children-college-students-and-veterans-to-fund-school-choice/  Call Congress.

Let Congress know that will not sit silently while they dismantle our children’s future.

Thank you for all you do,

Carol Burris

Network for Public Education Executive Director

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Community Schools, Cruelty, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Ignorance, Inequity, Injustice, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Privatization, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Vouchers

Pope Leo Will Send a Video Message to Chicago Mass on Same Day as Trump’s Parade

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2025 //
18

I said I wouldn’t post anything on Saturdays or Sundays, but this is too good to pass up.

Pope Leo will send a video message to Mass in Chicago at a large stadium on the same day that Trump ordered a military parade to celebrate his birthday.

The Pope will probably address one million people. How many will attend Trump’s multi-million dollar parade?

AlterNet calls this “Divine trolling.”

I like Pope Leo more and more every day. He is devoted to the message of the Biblical Jesus: love, mercy, compassion, devotion to the well-being of every person. Heal the sick, comfort the suffering, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger.

Republican Jesus has a different message: get rich by any means possible; ignore the sick and hungry; build your riches on the suffering of others; slam your door to the stranger; show no mercy to stragglers; love the unborn, inflict misery on the born; love your guns and keep them loaded.

I ❤️ Pope Leo!

Categories Chicago, Creativity, Ethics, Trump

Federal Judge Restores Visa to Russian Harvard Scientist

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2025 //
13

I wrote a post about this case a week ago. A scientist at Harvard, who left Russia as an anti-war dissenter, was detained at Logan Airport in Boston on her return from France because she had scientific samples that she did not declare. The samples–frog embryos on slides–posed no danger to anyone. She was immediately stripped of her visa, arrested, and sent to Louisiana to await deportation. A federal judge just granted her bail.

I recall that Trump campaigned on a pledge to deport rapists, murderers, “the worst of the worst.” This young woman is a scientist who is working to find the causes of cancer. Why does he want to deport her?

The New York Times reported:

A federal judge on Wednesday said she would grant bail to Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist employed by Harvard University, in an immigration case stemming from Ms. Petrova’s failure to declare scientific samples she was carrying into the country.

“There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions” in stripping Ms. Petrova of her visa on Feb. 16, Christina Reiss, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Vermont, said in a court hearing.

The judge said the available evidence suggested that the samples Ms. Petrova carried into the country were “wholly non-hazardous, non-toxic, non-living, and posed a threat to no one.” She also said that “Ms. Petrova’s life and well-being are in peril if she is deported to Russia,” as the government has said it intends to do.

Unlike other high-profile deportation cases involving academics, Ms. Petrova’s began with a customs violation. Returning to Boston from a vacation in France, she agreed to carry back samples of frog embryos from an affiliate laboratory at the request of her supervisor at Harvard Medical School.

When the samples were discovered during an inspection of Ms. Petrova’s baggage at Logan Airport, the customs official canceled her visa on the spot and started deportation proceedings. She was transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana, where she remained for more than three months.

“This is kind of a circular process, because it was the government that revoked her visa,” Judge Reiss said on Wednesday. “And it’s essentially saying, ‘We revoked your visa, now you have no documentation and now we’re going to place you in removal proceedings.’” 

She concluded that “what happened in this case was extraordinary and novel,” and that if she did not take action in the case “there will be no determination” that Ms. Petrova’s constitutional rights had been violated.

“Bail is necessary to make the habeas remedy effective in this case,” she said.

However, it is unclear when the government will allow Ms. Petrova’s release on bail, or whether it will pursue its plan to deport her to Russia. The case has attracted high-level attention from officials in the Trump administration, who took an unusual step earlier this month, after Judge Reiss indicated she planned to release Ms. Petrova.

Hours after that hearing, the Department of Justice unsealed felony smuggling charges against Ms. Petrova based on her failure to declare the scientific samples, and Ms. Petrova was arrested and transferred to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service in Louisiana, where she remains. 

Ms. Petrova’s next opportunity for release will come after she is transferred to Massachusetts to face the smuggling charges. But the government also issued a detainer on immigration charges, raising the possibility that, if a judge grants her bail in the criminal case, the government could ask ICE to detain her once again.

Judge Reiss asked Jeffrey M. Hartman, the attorney representing the Department of Justice at the bail hearing, whether that would happen. 

He said he did not think so, citing the recent releases of Mohsen Mahdawi, a student organizer at Columbia University, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University.

“My understanding of the Ozturk and Mahdawi cases is that the government has not re-detained those noncitizens, and I would expect the government to adhere to the same course of action,” Mr. Hartman said. 

Ms. Petrova, 31, the graduate of an elite Russian physics and technology institute, was recruited in 2023 to work at a laboratory at Harvard Medical School studying the earliest stages of cell development. The Kirschner Lab, where she worked, is exploring ways to repair damage to cells that lead to diseases like cancer.

Ms. Petrova has admitted that she failed to declare the samples. Her lawyer has argued that this would ordinarily be treated as a minor infraction, punishable with a fine. 

When Ms. Petrova told the customs officer that she had fled Russia for political reasons and faced arrest if she returned there, she was transferred to ICE custody to wait for an asylum hearing, a process that can take months or years.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Immigration, Science

NYC: ICE Snatches High School Student Who Entered Legally

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2025 //
18

Michael Elden-Rooney wrote in Chalkbeat about the arrest and detention of a public high school student in New York City, which has spurred protests on the student’s behalf. He was attending a school for students learning English. His earnings after school were devoted to helping his mother and two younger siblings move out of a shelter and into an apartment. He entered the country legally. Mayor Eric Adams, who is indebted to Trump for pardoning him, has remained silent.

The campaign pushing for the release of a Bronx high school student arrested by immigration authorities last week continued to escalate with a new legal petition challenging the validity of his detention.

Attorneys for Dylan, 20, a native of Venezuela, made several moves Thursday they hope will slow, and ultimately stymie, the government’s efforts to fast-track his deportation following his arrest last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents after a routine court date.

Dylan is the first known current New York City public school student to be detained by immigration authorities in President Donald Trump’s second term. In the days following Chalkbeat’s Monday report on Dylan’s arrest, his case has become national news and galvanized local efforts to oppose Trump’s immigration policies, including a rally Thursday on the steps of the city’s Education Department headquarters in lower Manhattan.

Dylan’s attorneys from the New York Legal Assistance Group, or NYLAG, filed a “habeas corpus” petition late Thursday night in federal court in Western Pennsylvania, where Dylan is being held, arguing that immigration officials violated his due process rights by preventing him from making full use of the court system. They assert that Dylan is ineligible for “expedited” deportation because he had legal permission to enter the country under a Biden-era humanitarian program.

Dylan’s arrest was part of a nationwide enforcement blitz where government lawyers move to dismiss migrants’ immigration cases, allowing authorities to arrest them on the spot and thrust them into a fast-tracked deportation process with fewer legal protections.

Officials from the Department of Homeland security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new legal petition. They previously criticized former President Joseph Biden’s policy allowing migrants like Dylan to enter the country and said “ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been.”

For the first week of his detention, Dylan’s lawyers could not reach him because he was shuttled so rapidly between four different states, according to a NYLAG spokesperson and his mother, Raiza, whose last name is being withheld at her request to avoid retaliation.

His lawyers finally managed to make contact Wednesday morning — just in time to prepare him for an interview with an asylum officer about whether he has a “credible fear” of returning to Venezuela — a hurdle Dylan must clear to avoid immediate deportation.

The interview took place early Thursday morning, with no advance notice to Dylan’s lawyers. They were only able to get a lawyer patched into the interview after Raiza alerted them shortly before, according to one of the attorneys….

“Dylan’s arrest and ongoing detention cause him enormous and continued harm,” the filing alleges. “He has been ripped away from his high school studies, his work, and his mother and young siblings who rely on him.” The full-time student at ELLIS Prep, which caters to older newly arrived immigrants, has also been working part-time as a delivery worker, helping his mom and two younger siblings move out of a shelter and into their own apartment. 

His attorneys argue that Dylan’s arrest and detention have curtailed his ability to access the court system — a violation of the due process rights guaranteed to anyone in the U.S., regardless of immigration status. In addition to his asylum claim, Dylan is applying for Special Immigration Juvenile Status, a type of legal protection for youth under 21 who can’t be reunited with both parents (his father passed away years ago), according to the petition.

Dylan was scheduled to have a hearing in family court for that case Friday morning but was unlikely to be able to attend from detention — endangering his case, according to his attorneys.

The lawyers argue that Dylan was never eligible for “expedited removal” in the first place, since the procedure is not meant for people who were “admitted or paroled” into the country like Dylan was, according to federal immigration law.

Adding to the urgency of the situation is the fact that Dylan is facing severe gastrointestinal issues that doctors were still trying to diagnose when he was detained. “These specialists are currently in the process of assessing whether Dylan’s symptoms are the result of cancer or [Crohn’s] disease,” and recommended an “immediate in-person follow up appointment,” the filing states...

Meanwhile, Dylan’s case has continued to pick up public attention. An online fundraiser that launched Wednesday to help Dylan’s mom with expenses related to his legal case and caring for her two younger children had collected more than $27,000 by Friday morning.

And hundreds of supporters — including elected officials and city schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos — rallied outside of the Education Department’s downtown Manhattan headquarters calling for his release.

Chants of “Free Dylan” echoed through the crowd of teachers union members, immigration advocates, students, and anti-Trump protesters.

“Dylan is a student, a worker, and part of our community. He did everything right, and still, ICE tore him away from his life and family in New York,” U.S. Rep. Nydia Velasquez said in a statement, the second federal elected official to publicly challenge Dylan’s detention.

Categories Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Immigration, New York City

Oliver Darcy: Don’t Fall for the Rightwing Attacks on Biden

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2025 //
16

Oliver Darcy is a media expert who reports on the media at his blog called Status. He here writes about the unwarranted jubilation of rightwing pundits who believe that their relentless attacks on Biden’s cognition were correct after all. This turns out to be a useful topic for them right now as Trump is hoovering up all the cash he can handle from his profitable dealings in real estate, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and other lucrative deals.

When you compare the two, it’s clear that Biden’s presidency was unblemished by corruption or scandal. The unemployment rate was low, inflation was dropping, and relationships with our allies in Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Asia were strong. The Economist said that the American economy was “the envy of the world.”

Now we are locked, as Rahm Emanuel wrote in The Washington Post, in a state of chaos, corruption, and cruelty. Every government agency has been ripped apart by Elon Musk’s DOGS, and our democracy is turning into an imperial presidency. Trump has assembled a Cabinet of billionaires and FOX News personalities. From day to day, we wonder which government responsibility will be cast aside.

I don’t know what Biden’s mental state was. But I liked his government far more than Trump’s cruel autocracy.

Darcy writes:

For years, right-wing media pushed a warped narrative of Joe Biden as a brain-dead puppet controlled by sinister, shadowy forces. Now they’re demanding vindication—but they do not deserve it.

Over the last week, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin,” has landed with a flurry of attention-grabbing headlines—not just for the reporting, but for what Tapper has said during the press tour. In an interview with Megyn Kelly on Tuesday, Tapper declared that “conservative media was right and conservative media was correct” about Joe Biden’s mental state. 

But that’s not quite true. Or rather, it simplifies a much more nuanced media and political reality. While it’s fair to argue that the press should have covered Biden’s age with greater urgency—and to acknowledge that Biden clearly lost a step during his presidency—that’s a far cry from validating the deeply irresponsible narrative right-wing media spun for years: that the president of theUnited Stateswas a mentally incapacitated puppet with dementia, unaware of his own surroundings, and propped up by a “shadow government” running the country in his name. 

That was never journalism. It was propaganda. Full stop.

Since the early days of the 2020 campaign, MAGA Media figures—particularly on Fox News—lobbed increasingly absurd claims about Biden’s mental faculties. They painted him as a senile old man who didn’t know what day it was, who couldn’t walk unaided, and who spent his presidency dozing off while Barack Obama or Ron Klain or some other shadowy liberal elite force secretly ran the country behind closed doors.

This wasn’t grounded in evidence. It wasn’t the result of deep reporting or careful observation. It was pure narrative warfare—an attempt to delegitimize Biden not just as a candidate but as a commander-in-chief. And the coverage became so cartoonish at times that no amount of fact-based reporting about Biden could pierce the right-wing media bubble.

None of this is to deny that Biden was aging. He was. By the end of his term, it was obvious to those around him—and to many voters—that he lacked the energy he once had. Even Democratic operatives privately acknowledged that he didn’t have his fastball anymore. But there’s a world of a difference between an 80-something president, who has always been prone to gaffes, showing his age and a man secretly suffering from debilitating dementia or worse. And conflating the two, as Fox News and its allies routinely did, wasn’t just misleading—it was malicious.

Yes, Biden’s debate performance on CNN was troubling. Yes, the press should have been more aggressive in scrutinizing his capacity to serve a second term. But reporters who refrained from joining the right-wing media hysteria were not negligent or part of a cover-up—they were simply cautious. They understood the weight of diagnosing a president with a serious neurodegenerative disorder without hard evidence. And they understood the cost of being wrong, particularly asDonald Trump ran on an authoritarian-like platform that he is now implementing in office.

MAGA Media’s goal was never honest diagnosis. It was political demolition. They weaponized Biden’s verbal gaffes, his slower gait, and his lower-energy demeanor to manufacture the idea that he was mentally vacant. Never mind that Biden managed the job without the chaos and confusion that has markedTrump’s second term. No matter what Biden did—whether it was biking, traveling, or delivering speeches—the same echo chamber smeared him with the same predictable attacks.

That wasn’t journalism. It was performance. And it came from people like Kelly and Sean Hannity, who weren’t doing reporting at all. They weren’t gathering facts. They were throwing mud, hoping some of it would stick. And in many corners of the country, it did.

That’s what makes the current revisionism so maddening. Now, with Tapper and Thompson’s book pointing to Biden’s visible decline, MAGA Media figures are claiming vindication. They’re demanding apologies from journalists who didn’t amplify their dementia narrative—insisting, once again, that they were “right all along.” 

It’s reminiscent of how right-wing media rewrote history around Robert Mueller’s Russia probe or the COVID-19 pandemic: flattening complexity, cherry-picking facts, and pretending their worst-faith speculation was truth from the start.

But they weren’t right. They were irresponsible. They didn’t try to understand what was happening behind the scenes—they invented a version of it that was politically convenient. And just because Biden aged, and struggled in the final days of his presidency, doesn’t make their years of bad-faith character assassination suddenly noble. Notably, while they maligned Biden, they let Trump—a man prone to deranged rants and wild conspiracy theories—off the hook entirely.

Biden didn’t have a perfect presidency, and his age became an unavoidable liability. But he was not an empty shell of a man, either. He governed. He made decisions. He passed legislation. And he did it while under constant attack from a media machine that acted not as a watchdog—but as an attack dog.

No one owes that dishonest machine an apology.

Categories Biden, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Trump
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