Month: February 2023

A Trumper family goes down the rabbit hole

This is very sad. These people obviously had problems to begin with and ended up focusing on Trump’s Big Lie, leading to a suicide pact:

A Pennsylvania family found shot dead in their backyard last week in what police say appears to be a suicide pact, included a mother and daughter who loved bowling and were devout Christian conservatives, people who knew them said.

Morgan Daub, 26, and her parents, James Daub, 62, and Deborah Daub, 59, were found dead on the ground in the backyard of their home in York County, Pennsylvania, on the morning of Jan. 25, after police responded to a request for a welfare check from a neighbor. 

The West Manchester Township Police Department has since said that notes left inside the house indicate that the family recently made a “joint decision” to end their lives. Police believe Deborah Daub shot and killed her husband and then was shot and killed by Morgan, who died by suicide. Police said there were no signs of forced entry or struggle and no evidence that anyone else had been present.

An investigation into the deaths has been closed.

[…]

Stabley said the Christian, churchgoing family “was never shy about letting anybody know what their beliefs were” when it came to religion and politics. Morgan and Deborah “very, very huge” supporters of former President Donald Trump, Stabley said.

“They were just so hell-bent on Trump winning, like this could be in the end if he doesn’t,” Stabley said, referring to an instance when he saw them just before the 2020 election. He said he stopped seeing the two after that.

A neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of personal or professional retaliation in their town, said the family had a “preoccupation with religion, especially on the dad’s part.” The family’s front yard was also “littered” with Pro-Trump political signs during the elections, and anti-abortion signs when Roe v. Wade was overturned, the neighbor said.

Stabley said he was disturbed to see recent videos appearing to show Morgan on YouTube. In the videos, which the West Manchester Township Police Department has also said appear to show Morgan, the young woman speaks in stream-of-conscious fashion about God, the Antichrist and conspiracies about Trump and the 2020 election. Stabley said he is haunted by Morgan’s laughter in the videos.

It’s a death cult.

I'll keep repeating this ad nauseum, but here it goes again. GOP members recognize that hurting the economy is the most important thing they can do to bolster GOP chances in 2024. This is a party-wide consensus. https://t.co/aRG99zERpT

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) February 6, 2023

They’ve even dragged anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist out of his crypt.

This isn’t new. The quote below is from Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech in which he was describing the slave states’ threats to blow up the union.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose …

“A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you and then you will be a murderer!’” https://t.co/oMpXkHB4AX

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) February 6, 2023

Not bloody likely

If you need proof that the Republican Party is fully in the hands of far-right extremists, look no further than the case of Congressman Jim Jordan.

The Ohio Republican,  first elected in 2006, is the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Jordan has been a right-wing bomb thrower and ruthless partisan street fighter from the start. An early endorser of the Tea Party and a founder of the hardcore austerity crusaders the Freedom Caucus, Jordan was always at the center of the obstructionist tactics during the Obama years. He then ran interference for Donald Trump during his many scandals. From Tea Party to Freedom Caucus to MAGA, for the last 16 years, Jim Jordan has been the quintessential far-right Republican, in whatever permutation that is at a given time. 

Jordan was involved in the efforts to oust former GOP Speaker John Boehner as a member of the Freedom Caucus, causing Boehner to dub him a “legislative terrorist” which is a very accurate description of his tactics. And he led unsuccessful efforts to do the same to his successor Paul Ryan. Jordan was part of the plots in both 2011 and 2013 to shut down the government and hold the debt ceiling hostage in order to force spending cuts and repeal Obamacare. But his specialty has always been his vicious questioning of Democrats as a member of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees.

Back in 2015, for instance, he angrily harangued Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards about a formal apology she made on behalf of the organization insisting that it wasn’t good enough. And who can forget his grilling of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the famous 11-hour marathon interrogation about the Benghazi attacks in 2015? He accused her of lying, suggesting that she personally tried to cover up the attacks because the Libya mission was supposed to look like a big success. In both of those cases, the women he attacked more than held their own but Jordan was hailed as a hero on the right for doing it.

As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jordan will be leading a potential impeachment of the Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas simply because they just have to impeach some people and he seems to be the first in line. Jordan already issued subpoenas to Joe Biden’s administration demanding documents for an investigation into the government’s alleged treatment of parents as “terrorists” (which is completely nonsense) when it issued directives to look into people who were threatening school officials with violence over mask mandates and imaginary Critical Race Theory curriculum. (Republicans apparently believe such behavior falls under the rubric of “parental rights.”)

That is the first salvo in what Jordan has promised will be his mission. He plans to take on the Department of Justice, which the Republicans believe is a hotbed of woke liberal activists out to use the long arm of the law to silence conservatives wherever they are found. To that end, they have formed the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government which Jordan will personally oversee. They’ve already begun their investigations by interviewing a former FBI agent who was fingered by an unnamed whistleblower to have been at the center of a liberal cabal that’s out to get Republicans. According to CNN, Matt Gaetz was involved in the questioning which indicates how credible this investigation is already since he has personally been the subject of a serious DOJ investigation for which he asked former president Trump for a pardon.

This subcommittee will “be authorized to receive information available to the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,” giving it access to the most closely held secrets of the U.S. government, which is slightly terrifying. Considering the Republican proclivity for projection, it’s almost certain that they will do exactly what they are accusing the Department of Justice of doing.

Despite the crude partisanship and conspiracy-mongering that already defined the judiciary committee under Jordan, he is reportedly attempting to present himself as some sort of fair-minded moderate who is deeply committed to maintaining the committee’s credibility. CNN reported on the first meeting of the so-called “weaponization” committee:

Rather than issuing a series of partisan attack lines about the so-called “Deep State,” Jordan took a low-key approach – handing out binders of reading materials and cautioning members to be meticulous about who they haul in for interviews, a source familiar with the meeting told CNN. “We’re going to try to get all the facts on the table for the American people, because that’s always the first step,” Jordan told CNN after the Jan. 27 meeting.

Jordan can try to project the image of a serious investigation but it’s not going to work.

Consider what has just been revealed about the vaunted “investigation of the investigation” by Special Counsel John Durham. He and former Attorney General Bill Barr also set up the pretense of running a sober inquiry when it’s now clear they were on a snipe hunt to prove that poor Donald Trump was the victim of a Deep State conspiracy. Jordan and his henchmen are taking up the same mission — and it’s likely to fail in exactly the same way.

Before the election, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., spoke to Politico about what to expect from Jim Jordan in the new Congress. He said:

“Jim sort of had several roles: You know, point man for spreading right wing poison. You know, cheap underminer of prominent Democrats, character assassin. Those are his skill sets that he would bring to whatever the status of the Republicans is in the new Congress. But legislating, working across the aisle, are not among those skills.”

Being a serious, thoughtful leader of a credible bipartisan investigation are not among his skills either. The idea that he is suddenly transformed into a statesman along the lines of Frank Church, who led the investigations into the Intelligence agencies back in the 1970s, is simply ludicrous. But I suppose by today’s standards he’s probably the best they can hope for. Jim Jordan is now what passes as a respected member of the GOP establishment.

Salon

I have lived through some tiresome news cycles in my life but this Chinese balloon cycle was one of the worst. The hysteria was completely inane, particularly on the right but among the media as well. But it is a story and it’s bizarre enough that a little calm expertise is called for. James Fallows is not only a great journalist but also an aviator and a China hand so his analysis is particularly astute:

I. The Chinese Balloon

Q: Do we believe the Chinese government statement that this was just a science-oriented weather mission?

A: No.

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Q: Then what could the people who launched it conceivably have been thinking?

A: Who knows. At the moment I can imagine three possibilities, all bad.

-First, this could have been a screwup in the most basic sense. Whoever launched it thought the jet-stream winds would keep it over Canada, rather than dipping into the U.S. Of course that would still mean traversing airspace of a NATO member, and of course it would mean crossing Alaska before that.

This possibility is conceivable but not likely.

-Second, this could have been a screwup within the Chinese leadership. Some military hothead might have thought that sending the balloon would be a great way to poke the “declining” Americans, while prove his or her own “fighting spirit” initiative, and also demonstrating China’s technical and military prowess.

There’s a precedent. Back in 2007 it appears that some Chinese military hothead shot down a satellite, without letting the leader at the time, Hu Jintao, in on the plans. Maybe this has happened again?

-Third, this could have been a screwup in the grand-strategic sense. Perhaps the all-knowing, all-wise Xi Jinping approved the plans, as a way of demonstrating China’s technical and military prowess, and putting the Americans on guard.

None of these possibilities is great. They don’t represent a Chinese “threat,” as I’ll argue below. But they increase the China “problem.”

For the record, it’s also possible that the whole situation is a giant misunderstanding. Maybe it’s not a Chinese balloon at all? Unlikely, but conceivable. We’ll see.

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Q: Did China “lose face” from this episode?

A: Judge for yourself. The U.S. announced it was tracking the balloon. It shot the balloon down as soon as it knew that the payload would fall over the ocean rather than onto inhabited U.S. land—and managed the mission so the payload would end up within relatively shallow “U.S. territorial waters.” The balloon was bumbling along; the F-22s were purposeful and effective.

I don’t know how this is being conveyed within China’s media bubble. But in the rest of the world the media image is of fighter planes zooming up to take out a drifting balloon.

You don’t have to be Tom Cruise to judge the strength-vs-weakness in the optics thereof.

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Q: What might the Chinese have hoped to learn from a balloon, that they don’t already know from satellites, and spies, and TikTok?

A: Again I don’t know. I hope we’ll learn more once the balloon’s payload is fished out of the water and examined.

One thing the Chinese (or anyone else) would not learn much about concerns the placement of U.S. nuclear-deterrent forces. That information has been on the record for decades.

I, personally, have flown a little single-engine plane at 3,500 feet above U.S. nuclear-submarine bases—not 60,000 feet up, like this balloon. I have done this many times, above bases both on the East Coast and the West.

What I did is perfectly legal. It would have been equally legal for any Chinese citizen who was a passenger or pilot on a helicopter or small plane. The listings are publicly available on any aviation chart.

Below you see a sample. P-50 on this points to a major U.S. nuclear-missile submarine base, along the Atlantic coast. This image comes from official FAA charts on my iPad. Any American who cares can find out where the nukes are. Any Chinese spy who doesn’t already know isn’t trying.

As Brian Schweitzer, the former governor of Montana, recently told Jim Robbins of the New York Times, the location of ICBMs across the plains states is hardly a secret:

“I grew up in a little farmhouse a mile from an intercontinental missile,” he said. While the missiles are underground and not visible, Mr. Schweitzer said, you can drive up to the facility and take a photo. “Taking a rental car would be a lot cheaper than sending a balloon from Beijing,”

The exact Lat/Long locations for hundreds of the sites are freely available online. I’ll do my symbolic part for national security by not listing them here. Chinese or Russian spies would have found them many years ago.

Here is a sample image, freely available on Google Earth, of a ‘Little House on the Prairie’ in one of the Plains states. It happens to have a nuclear-warhead ICBM just down the road. The blue arrow points toward the house. The red arrow points to the nuclear missile that could be part of World War III. Anyone can find this, even without a spy balloon.

And here is another missile site, a few miles from a small farming community also in the plains.

Again, you can find hundreds of these on Google Earth. Did the balloon tell Chinese officials something the rest of the world didn’t already know? Cell phone signals, or something? Maybe, and we’ll wait for more info.

But the “menace” of flying over missile sites should be at the bottom of Americans’ worry lists.

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Q: Was the U.S. ever “in peril” during this flyover?

A: Not from the balloon. Again, conceivably there is some peril: We don’t know what we don’t know. But on current evidence, this seems like a gigantic screwup on the Chinese side. It reveals simultaneously how far they might be willing to push things, and how bad they might be at doing so.

I would not want to be the person who pushed this great idea within the Chinese leadership.

It looks like this wasn’t the new Cuban Missile crisis after all. Go figure.

“Statistically speaking, of course, it’s still the safest way to travel.” — Superman in Superman (1978)

Fly enough times and you’ll experience an aborted landing. I’ve experienced two or three. The first, in Minneapolis (1989?) in low-visibility conditions, resembled one this weekend.

Those who follow James Fallows’s newsletter know the veteran pilot follows aviation news closely. He reported recently on a Jan. 13 “runway incursion” at Kennedy Airport in New York. But over the weekend, two aircraft had an even closer call in Austin, Texas:

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The short version of what happened is:

• The FedEx 767 was cleared for a “Cat III” landing, which means that the visibility is so bad that the pilots might not ever seen the runway until the plane’s advanced guidance system lets it automatically touch down.
• About 90 seconds before the 767 would have landed, the controllers in Austin cleared the Southwest 737 to roll onto that same runway, and begin their preparations for takeoff.
• At the last instant, the FedEx crew recognized what was about to happen. They warned Southwest over the radio; they aborted their landing; they headed off in one direction; and belatedly the controllers told Southwest to head the other way.
• At the closest, the descending FedEx plane came within about 150 feet of the Southwest plane, with its load of passengers. The FedEx crew’s awareness appears to have been the only thing that stood between this set-up and disaster.

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“For perspective,” writes Fallows, “around the world some 100,000 airline flights take off and land safely every day.” So there’s that.

A graphical recreation follows:

A friend just earned her multi-engine rating, so I hear aviation chatter from her as well. What strikes me about this Austin incident was how much it resembled my experience in Minneapolis years ago.

Our aircraft was arriving from Seattle early that morning. Visibility was so low that nothing was visible until the plane dropped below the clouds barely a couple of hundred feet above ground. As the plane crossed the runway numbers at about 75 feet, we were so close to touching down that out the left side of the plane I could see another jet awaiting takeoff clearance. The pilots’ faces were visible.

Suddenly, our pilot gunned the engines and began climbing to go around. A departing aircraft had not yet cleared the runway ahead. Collisions are rare, but they do happen.

My uncle died in the Park Slope plane crash in December 1960 when a TWA Super Constellation and a United Airlines DC-8-11 from Chicago collided over New York City:

It was the accident pilots and passengers in the still-new jet age had feared the most — a distinctly new kind of catastrophe, one that had never happened over a major urban area, one that would have seemed far less terrifying a few years earlier, when planes were smaller and slower. Two airliners feeling their way through a sloppy mess of fog and sleet collided over New York City, sending down a devastating shower of flaming wreckage.

The DC-8 fell into the streets of Park Slope, Brooklyn. The Constellation crashed onto Staten Island. It’s a thing a kid tends to remember from the days when a Chicago newsroom had someone manually scroll a typed casualty list in front of a black-and-white TV camera.

Don’t say a word about your Monday

Visual images of collapsing and collapsed buildings are horrible. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey and Syria before dawn Monday. A severe aftershock struck at midday. Early numbers (headlines keep shifting) are over 1,500 dead and climbing, per a Guardian report:

• At least 1,500 people have been killed after two powerful earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria within the space of 12 hours. The death toll is expected to rise, with search and rescue operations under way across the region as many buildings have collapsed and there are thought to be many people trapped in the rubble.
• Official figures from Turkey say 1,014 people were killed there, 5,383 were injured, and 2,818 buildings had collapsed. Syria’s health ministry said that more than 326 people had been killed and 1,042 injured. In addition to those figures, the White Helmets rescue service in the north-west of Syria in areas not controlled by the government put their death toll at 221, giving a total of 1,561 confirmed dead.

Horrifying…

Whole building collapsed because of the aftershock in Urfa #Turkiye #Turkey pic.twitter.com/aXbDJ8zPsH

— Nafiseh Kohnavard (@nafisehkBBC) February 6, 2023

CNN meteorologist Chad Myers explained what makes this type of quake different from those that strike the Pacific Rim:

The 7.5 aftershock was “an earthquake in itself,” Myers told CNN’s This Morning. “It would have been the strongest earthquake since 1999 in the region.”

We always talk about the epicenter, but in this case we should talk about the epi-line.

Two massive tectonic plates – the Arabian and the Eurasian – meet underneath Turkey’s southeastern provinces. Along this fault line, “about 100 miles from one side to the other, the earth slipped,” said Myers. 

Seismologists refer to this event as a “strike slip” – “where the plates are touching, and all of a sudden they slide sideways,” said Myers.

This is unlike the Ring of Fire, which runs along the west coast of the United States. In this zone, earthquakes and tsunamis are often caused by subduction – where one plate slides below another.

But in a “strike slip,” the plates move horizontally, rather than vertically.

“Why that matters is because the buildings don’t want to go back and forth. And then the secondary waves begin to go back and forth as well,” said Myers.

Help is on the way from across the globe. Aftershocks could last for weeks. And it’s winter. Not a word today about your Monday.

Death and destruction won’t stop conservative pundits from talking about the balloon, will it?

Now it’s Chris Christie’s turn in the barrel:

Christie says “shut up Donnie!”

I’m the target of Donald Trump’s new tantrum. None of his lies about me today bothered him when he asked me to prep him for every general election debate or offered me 3 different cabinet posts. He’s the only man to lose to Biden outside Delaware. That loss to Joe still stings.

— Chris Christie (@GovChristie) February 5, 2023

In case you are wondering why this is suddenly happening, Christie was on ABC this morning:

“I’ve said over and over again that [Trump] can’t win a gen election. That’s not speculation. That’s based upon polling I was privy to pre-the 2020 election, and what we saw actually happen in the 2020 election. And it’s only gotten worse since then” – Chris Christie to ABC News

— Politics1.com (@Politics1com) January 29, 2023

He also said “Biden didn’t win, Trump lost” which I’m sure made Trump’s head spin around on his shoulders like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist. “

Some people never grow up. These two certainly didn’t.

Joe Conason with a reminder of just who wrote it:

Down at Mar-a-Lago and anywhere else that former President Donald Trump is still venerated, he and his entourage are excited about a publication that has never before drawn his attention. The Columbia Journalism Review has just published a four-part, 24,000-word essay that purports to debunk the Trump-Russia “narrative” — and seeks to blame rising public disdain for the press, among other ills, on The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of that scandal.

Its author is Jeff Gerth, a reporter who worked at the Times for three decades. His former colleagues are said to be seething with fury at him. They have ample reason, not out of feelings of personal betrayal, but because Gerth has betrayed basic journalistic standards. Unfortunately, this is not the first time.

Very few people will persevere through Gerth’s prose (which the late press critic Alexander Cockburn once compared to “bicycling through wet sand.”). Yet because Trump is running for president again — and because Vladimir Putin is sure to continue “active measures” on his behalf — what happened in the travesty and tragedy of 2016 remains relevant.

Gerth’s account is fatally flawed by his omission of critical facts about Trump and Russia, not only in Pulitzer Prize-winning stories published by both newspapers, but in the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election as well as the voluminous detail of Russian interference chronicled in the Mueller Report, mendaciously maligned by then-Attorney General William Barr.

Like Trump, whom he interviewed twice and treats with kid gloves, Gerth falsely suggests that Special Counsel Robert Mueller somehow exculpated the former president. In fact, Mueller showed that Trump repeatedly obstructed justice to stymie the Russia investigation. And the special counsel indicated that Trump’s “dangling” of pardons to key witnesses like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone — who ultimately were pardoned — had cut off crucial avenues of investigation and testimony. Mueller cited 10 instances of obstruction of justice he could not prosecute because of the policy not to indict a sitting president for criminal activity. Here, Gerth is perpetuating the coverup.

Beyond any specific problems in Gerth’s deeply defective work, however, is the question of why the magazine made such an odd choice to fulfill this sensitive task. During his years at the Times, he gained notoriety for two major stories that looked impressive when first published — and then fell spectacularly flat.

In 1992, he wrote a front-page article on Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investment in an ill-fated real estate deal known as “Whitewater,” which spawned endless news coverage, congressional investigations and a special counsel probe mismanaged by Ken Starr that cost nearly $70 million. The erroneous headline on Gerth’s story— “CLINTONS JOINED S & L OPERATOR IN AN OZARK REAL ESTATE VENTURE” — was only the first of many regrettable errors. Multiple investigations failed to confirm Gerth’s insinuations of wrongdoing by the Clintons.

In 1999, Gerth and a fellow Times reporter published another bombshell, headlined “BREACH AT LOS ALAMOS: China Stole Nuclear Secrets For Bombs, U.S. Aides Say.” The article pointed a finger of suspicion at a Taiwanese American scientist named Wen Ho Lee, who was subsequently indicted and imprisoned — until he was released for lack of sufficient evidence to convict him of espionage. He ultimately pled guilty to a minor offense and received an apology from President Clinton. (The Times felt obliged to publish a note critiquing its own handling of the story after Lee’s prosecution fizzled.)

What brings those episodes to mind is that in both instances, Gerth appeared to be heavily influenced by partisan figures on the Right with agendas that obscured the truth. His chief Whitewater sources were Sheffield Nelson, an embittered Republican businessman who had run against Clinton for governor two years earlier, and Clinton’s former Whitewater partner James McDougal, who was both dishonest and mentally ill. His principal source on Wen Ho Lee appears to have been an Energy Department security official named Notra Trulock III, a right-wing conspiracy theorist who was credibly accused by his colleagues of ethnic bias against Lee.

Gerth’s skewed reporting on Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee came under harsh criticism from other journalists. But the assessment that may now sting the most appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review months after the Lee prosecution had fizzled.

Writing about the Times‘ “painful” self-scrutiny, Michael Hoyt, who became the magazine’s editor, called the Lee story “hard to read… without thinking that readers were supposed to believe — from the way the facts were marshaled and supported by inferences and quotes — that Wen Ho Lee was a probable spy and that those in the government who doubted it were politically motivated.” The paper’s editors, wrote Hoyt, should have taken “a closer look” at Gerth’s main source as well as the political motivations of congressional Republicans pushing it, and “should have investigated hints early on that the legal case against Lee was not all that impressive.”

There’s some strange history with Columbia Journalism Review on the Russia scandal that predates this. It would appear that the editor may be a longstanding Russia apologist which after what we’ve seen in the past year would seem to be unsustainable if you have your eyes open at all. (It isn’t — there are some making the case that Ukrainians are evil Nazis and Russia is doing the world a favor by committing genocide, but they are nuts.)

In any case, Conason’s point about Gerth is 100% true. He’s a wingnut, obviously. And he has a long history of this sort of thing. Proceed with caution.

Greg Sargent makes the point that while GOP Governors are trying to turn their states into antediluvian hellscapes, Democratic Governors in the big blue states are moving forward:

Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, is fond of describing his state as the place “where woke goes to die.”

If so, perhaps Democratic governors can do more to advertise their states as places where Florida-style school crackdowns go to die.

Some Democratic governors — not just in coastal states but also in Midwestern ones — are beginning to test this idea. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has seized on DeSantis’s latest culture-warring — Florida’s decision to ban an Advanced Placement course in African American studies — to articulate a contrasting vision for what topics should be permitted in classrooms.

This week, Pritzker singled out DeSantis as an “extremist,” after the College Board introduced a revised AP course in Black studies in response to DeSantis’s attacks. Florida nixed the old version for including topics such as “intersectionality” and “queer studies,” and the new version removes explicit mentions of those or downgrades them to optional topics.

In response, Pritzker faulted the board from the other direction, slamming its move as “a weak attempt to please extremists.” Pritzker hammered DeSantis for fearing classroom discussion of “intersectionality, feminism and queer Black life,” explicitly defining them as “components of Black History.”

This comes after Pritzker told the College Board that Illinois might not use its new AP course in African American studies if it is modified to “appease extremists” and “fit Florida’s racist and homophobic laws.”

What happened with the AP class is complex. The College Board denies that the new version is a response to DeSantis’s criticism, insisting these changes were underway earlier. And the new version does require teaching some topics that would advance students’ understanding of structural racism — a concept targeted by the right — such as redlining and housing discrimination.

Still, the new version removes scholars that Florida criticized, such as civil rights scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, a DeSantis bogeywoman. As Crenshaw noted, at a minimum this creates the “appearance of bowing to political pressure in the context of new knowledge and ideas.”

In response,Democrats could explicitly declare that topics discouraged or banned in Florida classrooms will not be discouraged or banned in their states’ classrooms. Theycould model a liberal cultural agenda as an alternative to the reactionary culture-warring now underway in Florida and other red states.

In coming months, Pritzker will grow more vocal on this front, a source familiar with his thinking tells me. He will amplify the case that restricting classroom topics works against kids’ interests and risks stunting intellectual growth, and that a more open approach sharpens their arguments and thinking, making them more competitive in the quest for higher education.

Pritzker will also argue that Illinois prides itself on refraining from the kind of directives that seem designed to encourage school libraries to remove books to avoid running afoul of the law.

As the source told me, the message will be: “Illinois doesn’t ban books.”

Something similar is underway in Michigan, where Democrats just captured full control of state government. After getting reelected against a frothing culture warrior, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer immediately vowed a new push to protect LGBTQ rights, explicitly contrasting this with regressive measures in nearby Ohio and Indiana.

And Michigan state Sen. Dayna Polehanki, the new chairwoman of the chamber’s Education Committee, recently vowed that the panel will “listen to educators first” and “will not participate in the demonization of teachers.” Under GOP control, that committee wasted time chasing phantom pedagogical enemies, she says, but now it will pursue legislation making it more attractive for young people to enter the profession.

The misnamed “parents rights” movement in Florida and elsewhere often deliberately caricatures “woke” educators as the enemies of parents and vulnerable children. In places such as Michigan and Illinois, legislators will instead treat the professionalism of educators as a valuable asset.

And as I’ve said many times, good luck with trying to stop the revolution in “wokeness” (What the rest of us call social justice or maybe just “progress”) because they cannot keep the kids from learning about it and making it their cause. This is out of the old folks’ hands. Everyone is going to have to both teach and learn simultaneously and those who resist are going to be left behind, bitter and confused. It looks like that’s going to be centered in the conservative regions — as usual.

They’re getting in — against Trump

The Washington Post reports:

The network of donors and activist groups led by conservative billionaire Charles Koch will oppose Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, mounting a direct challenge to the former president’s campaign to win back the White House.

“The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” Emily Seidel, chief executive of the network’s flagship group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), wrote in a memo released publicly on Sunday. The three-page missive repeatedly suggests that AFP is taking on the responsibility of stopping Trump, with Seidel writing: “Lots of people are frustrated. But very few people are in a position to do something about it. AFP is. Now is the time to rise to the occasion.”

I think this actually works in Trump’s favor for two reasons. First, it allows him to run against the “establishment elite” (which he is actually at the center of) and pretend he’s the outsider. His followers are dim so they’ll buy it.

More importantly, the Koch network has a somewhat spotty record. Recall that they backed Scott Walker in 2016:

Koch support for Walker stems back to at least his 2010 election for governor. The money is difficult to trace because reporting donors is not required, but open governance groups in Wisconsin estimated that one Koch-funded group, Americans for Prosperity, spent about $3.7 million in television advertisements alone that benefited Walker, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. That doesn’t include the money spent on organizing efforts and other activities that AFP in that tangentially helps a candidate.

AFP, which has chapters in 44 states around the country, is highly active in Wisconsin and while it was engaged in Wisconsin prior, it became a prominent player there when Walker gutted collective bargaining for teachers and state employees in 2011, an action that led to his recall election.

After a successful run in Wisconsin, helping to promote Walker’s conservative policies, the head of AFP in Wisconsin at the time, Luke Hilgemann, received a nice promotion and is now the CEO of the groups national organization based in Virginia.

In more traceable political contributions, Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by Charles and David Koch, was the largest donor to the Republican Governors Association in 2014, giving more than $5 million. In 2012, the year of Walker’s recall election, Koch Industries gave more than $2 million to the group, which spent heavily in Walker’s recall and reelection. Koch Industries also donated $53,000 directly to Walker’s campaigns.

The Koch brothers have business interest in Wisconsin employing thousands of people, including an oil pipeline owned by its subsidiary Koch Pipeline Company and refineries operated by another subsidiary Flint Hills Resources. Georgia-Pacific, a paper and wood manufacturing company owned by Koch Industries, is home to numerous offices in the Badger State.

Walker has met with the Koch brothers. He attended a summit in Palm Springs, California earlier this year to meet with Koch donors. It was the same summit that hosted Senators Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, potential presidential rivals, but Walker didn’t speak at the portion that was covered by the press. Instead he spoke to donors in a closed door setting.

Walker also received criticism during the union protests for taking a phone call from David Koch. The call was leaked to the press because the caller ended up being a prank. In his book “Unintimidated,” Walker said his conversation with the prankster was proof that he had never spoken to Koch before because he didn’t know that it was not his voice. But Walker told the caller, whom he thought was Koch, “Thanks, thanks for all the support and helping us move the cause forward, and we appreciate it.”

At the luncheon in New York Monday, an attendee in the room said Koch told the audience, “My brother and I are going to take a neutral position as to who we are going to support until the primaries are over by the beginning of….. in the summer of next year…so when the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination, well then we will support.” The audience laughed.

That worked out well for them.

They have money and that certainly helps. But there’s a ton of money in politics these days and one group like AFP doesn’t have a deciding vote. The narrative is already being set that this spells a death blow for Trump. I wouldn’t count on it.