From Brian Stelter’s bold-heavy Reliable Sources newsletter this morning:
Mark Zuckerberg just announced sweeping changes to the social internet, all in line with the desires of President Trump and Trump voters.
Out with the fact-checkers that conservatives deride. In with more permissive rules for posting opinions that conservatives hold dear.
The recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in a video that was shared first with Fox News.
That’s one of the reasons why Zuckerberg said big changes are coming to Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Because Meta is such a dominant force in the industry, the changes will resonate even more widely, reshaping whole swaths of the internet in MAGA-friendly ways.
Among the announcements:
>> Meta will “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He didn’t elaborate.
>> “Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.,” Zuckerberg asserted, so Facebook is cutting ties with third-party fact-checkers and moving toward an X-style community notes system.
>> “We’re bringing back civic content,” Zuckerberg said. “For a while the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.”
Overall, CNN’s Clare Duffywrites, the moderation changes are “a stunning reversal in how Meta handles false and misleading claims on its platforms.” Meta’s framing – in its PR blog post – is “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes.” An alternate title could be “More Lies and More Confusion.”
There’s a strong Ministry of Truth vibe here.
Stelter notes that with Zuckerberg giving the exclusive to “Fox & Friends,” perhaps this move is an attempt to derail Trump’s threat to send Meta’s founder to prison for “the rest of his life.”
Meta’s policy chief, Joel Kaplan, tells F&F, that eliminating fact checkers “is a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression,” and make their platforms places where lies, smears, and propaganda may flourish, he did not add. “[W]hat we’re doing is we’re getting back to our roots and free expression.”
[Checking on my supply of Tums.]
Stelter continues:
I am struck by a commonality between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk‘s recent announcements:
Zuck said “civic content,” i.e. political news, will be more prominently featured going forward, and Meta will work “to keep the communities friendly and positive.”
Musk said last week that X’s algorithm will be tweaked “to promote more informational/entertaining content,” citing “too much negativity” that hurts the user experience.
The X change seems like an appeal to advertisers, since sponsors don’t want ads next to conspiracy theories and hate speech. But consider the timing: Musk is pushing his “new ‘everything is awesome’ algo tweak just in time for the new administration. To reduce ‘negativity.’ Fascinating,” TPM publisher Josh Marshall remarked. And Zuckerberg wants more politics back in peoples’ feeds – but he wants to keep it “friendly and positive…”
Meantime, my follower count on Bluesky continues to mount.
The leaders of the incoming Republican administration share the same first and middle intials, just in reversed order: D.J. Trump and J.D. Vance. I’m trying to decide if they stand for Delayed Justice or Justice Denied.
On the delay and deny front, Juan M. Merchan, the New York trial judge overseeing Donald Trump’s “hush-money payment to a porn star” trial, denied a Monday request by Trump’s lawyers to delay his Friday sentencing, reports The New York Times:
Although Mr. Trump’s lawyers had implored the judge to postpone the sentencing, Justice Merchan dismissed their claims as “a repetition of the arguments he has raised numerous times in the past.”
Mr. Trump is now poised to escalate his effort, court filings show, turning to a New York appeals court in hopes that it will intervene in his case.
Late Monday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed a civil proceeding against Justice Merchan before the appeals court, challenging two of the judge’s recent decisions to uphold Mr. Trump’s conviction. Mr. Trump’s lawyers will argue to the appeals court that Mr. Trump is immune from criminal prosecution now that he is the president-elect.
The flurry of filings demonstrates the great lengths to which Mr. Trump will go to avoid his sentencing.
It is premature, of course, but bookmark that last sentence as a nominee for understatement of the year. Trump will go to any length to avoid accountability for his misdeeds. He’s made a second career of it.
With a change of administrations pending, Trump’s attorneys argue that Attorney General Merrick Garland should not release to the public special counsel Jack Smith’s draft report on his two investigations into Trump.
One investigation examines Trump’s alleged theft of classified documents and another his alleged participation in trying to overhrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. Department of Justice regulations dictate that “special counsels must submit reports explaining their legal decisions at the conclusion of an investigation,” The Washington Post reports. Garland has said he would release (with necessary redactions) any reports that reach is desk.
But Trump’s lawyers say releasing the two-volume report days before their client is again sworn in as president would be disruptive for his transition, according to a letter to Garland included in a motion filed in Florida federal court Monday evening.
“Releasing Smith’s report is obviously not in the public interest — particularly in light of President Trump’s commanding victory in the election and the sensitive nature of the ongoing transition process,” Trump attorneys Todd Blanche and John Lauro said in the letter.
Donald Trump — yes, that Donald Trump — on the anniversay of the Jan. 6 insurrection is concerned about actions that would be disruptive to the “sensitive” presidential transition process. Trump’s “commanding victory” hung on a handful of votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Trump’s lawyers have made a similar argument in their currently unsuccessful attempt to cancel the president-elect’s sentencing this Friday in his separate New York state criminal conviction for falsifying documents related to a hush money payment before the 2016 election.
May their tongues cling to the roof of their mouths.
It sounds almost Monty Python’s “inquisition” sketch. Among the ways the right attempts to rewrite the history of the attempted Jan. 6 coup….
We’ve already seen history repeat itself with the reemergence of white nationalist authoritarianism. A revival of the 1939 German American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden even.
Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield consider how insurrection denialism works. They suggest that misinformation is a sanitized description of how the internet warps reality. Conspiracy theories about 9/11 or Vince Foster were just warmup acts, either crude efforts at brainwashing or relatively harmless (The Atlanticgift link):
But there is another, more disturbing possibility, one that we have come to understand through our respective professional work over the past decade. One of us, Mike, has been studying the effects of our broken information environment as a research scientist and information literacy expert, while the other, Charlie, is a journalist who has extensively written and reported on the social web. Lately, our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one. This dynamic plays into a natural tendency that humans have to be evidence foragers, to seek information that supports one’s beliefs or undermines the arguments against them. Finding such information (or large groups of people who eagerly propagate it) has not always been so easy. Evidence foraging might historically have meant digging into a subject, testing arguments, or relying on genuine expertise. That was the foundation on which most of our politics, culture, and arguing was built.
There’s more on that and nothing on AI and deep fakes. But it’s worth a read. The fight to preserve a common reality is just warming up. Once again, our tech is running ahead of our ethics and undermining our cultural underpinnings.
I don’t have an answer for that. Except to remember.
You didn’t imagine it, the images and videos, the injuries and deaths. They were not “deep state” fakes. Those people weren’t tourists. They weren’t patriots. The violent Trump mob consisted of MAGA rioters and insurrectionists. After four years of a Democratic administration left with cleaning up, Americans inexplicably elected Donald Trump, now a convicted felon, to another term. It’s almost as if they mean to prove the Constitution a suicide pact.
Trump is preparing to pardon a large chunk of the Jan. 6 convicted as victims of political persecution, just as woe-is-ME is as innocent as a babe.
Trump said he would issue pardons to rioters on “Day 1” of his presidency, which begins Jan. 20. “Most likely, I’ll do it very quickly,” he said recently on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He added that “those people have suffered long and hard. And there may be some exceptions to it. I have to look. But, you know, if somebody was radical, crazy.”
His promise, made throughout his campaign for the White House, is shadowing events Monday as lawmakers gather to certify a presidential election for the first time since 2021, when Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol and temporarily halted the certification of an election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
And Trump did lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden. He’s spent much of his non-golf time since then trying to rewrite that history and will spend the next four doing so from the Oval Office.
More than 1,250 have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials in connection with Jan. 6, with more than 650 receiving prison time ranging from a few days to 22 years .
President Joe Biden speaks out this morning in the Washington Post, noting that his vice president, Kamala Harris, will faithfully fulfill her duty as president of the Senate to oversee certification of the election she lost [to Trump; Biden will not name him]. Americans must never forget the coup [Trump] attempted on Jan. 6, 2021 lest we see a repeat. Yet Trump and his MAGA followers will try to eradicate the memory:
An unrelenting effort has been underway [by Trump] to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand.
This is not what happened.
In time, there will be Americans who didn’t witness the Jan. 6 riot firsthand but will learn about it from footage and testimony of that day, from what is written in history books and from the truth we pass on to our children. We cannot allow the truth to be lost.
Does this look like a target? To Trump 2.0 it looks like a target.
Michael Podhorzer finds, as Digby posted on Saturday:
the defining feature of American politics this century is that neither party can “win” elections anymore; they can only be the “not-loser.”
Donald Trump was the not-loser in November. (It’s just what he wanted for Christmas.) Trump “won the same share of the eligible population” in 2024 as he did in 2020 while the Democrats’ share dropped 3.5% from 2020.
Hurrah!The country did not turn more MAGA. That’s little consolation for the left and doesn’t change the facts on the ground. In an age where facts don’t seem to matter, those facts nevertheless could get suckier under Trump 2.0, writes Sam Levin for The Guardian:
Donald Trump could use a second term atop the justice department to gut enforcement of US federal voting laws and deploy an agency that is supposed to protect the right to vote to undermine it, experts have warned.
Trump has made no secret of his intention to punish his political enemies and subvert the American voting system. His control of the justice department could allow him to amplify misleading claims of voter fraud by non-citizens and others, as well as investigate local election officials.
It could also cause the department’s voting section to largely scale back its enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, returning it to the approach that it took under Trump’s first term.
Enter Pam Bondi of Florida fundraising infamy and Trump’s current nominee to lead the Department of Injustice. (Or has he now dropped that moniker?)
Trump harbors a gnawing need to prove somehow that he won the 2020 election and will task Bondi with delivering a verdict that contradicts all previous findings. He will endeavor to his dying day to bend objective reality to his will, no matter what he told “Meet the Press.”
Much of the discussion about Trump’s justice department has focused on the fate of its voting section, which is charged with enforcing the nation’s federal voting rights laws. Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who sought to overturn the 2020 election and has become a key figure in the election denial movement, has called for all of the lawyers in the voting section to be fired.
“They are all leftist activists and use taxpayer dollars and the power of the federal government to advance their leftwing legal theories,” she said in an email. “Their loyalty is not to the constitution and the rule of law. They should go back to the leftist advocacy groups they came from.”
Again, objective reality be damned. Levin continues, “Career attorneys in the justice department have apolitical jobs in which they are charged with representing the position of the United States, regardless of the administration.”
In the AfterBiden, you’re on your own
Trump has nominated “a sycophant loyalist to head the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division,” warns Democratic voting rights attorney, Marc Elias.
It is imperative that DOJ dismiss all of its pending voting rights cases and withdraw from those in which it has intervened. The Biden administration should not hand over cases in which Dhillon can have DOJ switch sides and undermine voting rights.We are on our own from here.
Buckle up. Losing the election sucked for Democrats. Things are about to get suckier still. Trump will likely see to it that Bondi et al. launch investigations “to help build the narrative that voter fraud is a problem in the US” despite failing in his first administration.
Among voter fraud theorists, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
On this Sunday morning, a question springs to mind: How much of an idiot is “Captain Underpants“?
Elon Musk is beside himself that President Biden awarded philanthropist George Soros the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his pursuit of “global initiatives that strengthen democracy, human rights, education, and social justice.” (Biden gave the award to 18 others, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.) Musk posted a meme mocked up to show Biden handing the medal to the evil Emperor Palpatine. “Must be the lighting,” he quipped.
Naturally, the right is as incensed that their liberal bogeyman received the award as it wasn’t when Donald Trump awarded one to Rush Limbaugh during a State of the Union Address in recognition of Limbaugh’s Three Decades Hate.
What draws attention to Musk besides his infantile sense of humor, his inability to string more than 10 words together in most of his tweets, and his turning Jack Dorsey’s world forum into a MAGA cesspool, is the contrast with a real genius. One of Musk’s users (a bibliophile, believe it or not) posted a delightful thread about physicist Richard Feynman:
I thought I was crazy until I found Richard Feynman.
Feynman was not only among the most brilliant people on earth, but he transmitted something I’ve never seen in others.
Thread with some lessons from his peculiar way of being:
Feynman never did anything for the prestige he might get out of it.
He didn’t even want to receive the Nobel Prize. Richard felt he had already gotten what matters.
The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.
People think beauty is only about aesthetics.
But Feynman believed that there’s something beautiful in depth, in understanding processes.
Knowledge contributes to beauty. It doesn’t subtract from it.
Richard Feynman embodied deep curiosity.
You don’t understand what “first principles” really mean until you listen to a physicist reasoning.
It’s about going to the end of the world chasing a chain of ‘whys’. “Where does fire come from?”
You have enough time to pursue other interests. Don’t listen to people who say you need to do only one thing to excel at it.
Feynman got a Nobel Prize in physics, but he still pursued other interests to a state worth of admiration.
Let’s explore a very peculiar one.
Richard didn’t know how to express a profound feeling about the beauty of the world through a set of equations, so he began drawing.
“It’s a feeling of awe — of scientific awe .. which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe”
Feynman drew for over 20 years and even sold some of his work.
Charles Darwin was a giant of a man who greatly advanced mankind. But he had one huge regret:
Not cultivating his appreciation for poetry and music. “The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.”
It might be more about imitating Feynman in this aspect.
There is another real loss in life: The loss of one’s sense of humor.
It doesn’t matter how many labels, prestige, and wisdom you may have. You don’t want to go through life without laughing.
Feynman was especially known for this. This book compiles some of his funny anecdotes.
How did he get away with all of this?
Feynman’s ethos was rooted in independent-mindedness. He developed great respect towards his mind and heart.
Not caring about what others think is a superpower.
Feynman was the real deal.
Update: VP-elect marked safe from being mistaken for a genius.
With deep irony, Phil Klay, a novelist and a Marine Corps and Iraq war veteran, describes Donald Trump as “the least hypocritical president of my adult life.” The flag-hugging con man holds nothing sacred, defends no American values or principles. Asked about the nation’s military policy in Iraq, Trump’s response was “take the oil.” Twice.
“A dumb answer, but a clear one,” Klay observes. “What a thing to ask soldiers to fight for.” But it was “bracing cynicism” that was “almost refreshing.” Even if it repudiates Americans’ belief, despite our failings, that when the country goes to war it must conduct itself and fight honorably.
Trump famously considers those who serve honorably “suckers.”
When I started Marine training, our instructors constantly harangued us candidates about the core military virtues and told story after story of past heroes who had lived them. For men and women to trust their lives to one another in combat, you need a shared set of values and commitments, which is why all great militaries teach their recruits something closer to religious devotion than business calculation.
[…]
So the incoming Trump administration isn’t offering our military a moral purpose. “People will not fight for abstractions,” Mr. Vance claimed at the Republican National Convention; they’ll fight only to defend their homeland. It’s a smaller vision, fitting for a country that has lost faith in itself.
Naturally, Trump’s Fox News choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, troubles Klay. Especially Hegseth’s advocacy with Trump on behalf of “three men accused or convicted of war crimes.”
Klay provides details you can read for yourselves about the case of Clint Lorance, whom Trump pardoned. Seeing Lorance’s depravity celebrated by right-wing media broke the faith of another veteran from his unit. Some of Trump’s skepticism of overseas military adventurism is justified, Klay believes, but “a military with neither moral purpose nor a commitment to moral conduct is a military that fights without honor.”
But what deepened the unsettled feeling in my stomach was a Klay statement that recalled the dystopian comedy Idiocracy(2006).
Yes, we’ve often betrayed our faith, “but that’s not the same as saying that it should be or that it always will be,” Klay explains:
I choose to believe in an America that might honor that faith…. How else to respond to an age of cynicism than to point out, steadily, without undue histrionics, that Americans have proved capable of more in the past and they can prove capable of more in the future?
Pvt. Joe Bowers: [addressing Congress] … And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn’t just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!
God help us. Yes, we can and should do better. But we’ll never get better without a reckoning over the Jan. 6 insurrection and other structural –isms, without a truth and reconciliation commission process, as some recommend (and not the sort Trump wants), that comes to terms with the dark place where Trumpism and its cultural underpinnings have led us.
Draft of Ann Telnaes cartoon killed by the Washington Post.
Perhaps you noticed?
C-Span operator swept their cameras about the U.S. House chamber on Friday during the vote to reelect Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as Speaker. A huddle of white Republican men gathered here. A diverse cluster of Democractic women gathered for a selfie there. The cameras opened up the proceding, untethered from their normally fixed gaze. This is typical during a State of the Union Address but not House business as usual.
Heather Cox Richardson took note in her Letters from an American substack:
Today a new Congress, the 119th, came into session. As Annie Karni of the New York Times noted, Americans had a rare view into the floor action of the House because the party in control sets the rules for what parts of the House floor viewers can see. Without a speaker, there is no party in charge to set the rules, so the C-SPAN cameras recording the day could move as their operators wished.
They did. Limiting what the public can can see of the House chamber will return soon enough. Limiting what you can see is already happening elsewhere.
Over at The Washington Post, editors were deciding what their subscribers would see. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes announced her resignation after the opinions page rejected a cartoon depicting Post owner Jeff Bezos genuflecting with a sack of money before a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump. She’d worked at The Post for 16 years.
I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.
The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.
Figures in the sketch represent Meta founder, Mark Zuckerberg; Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of The Los Angeles Times; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI; Mickey Mouse, the official spokesmouse of the Walt Disney Company; and Jeff Bezos, The Post’s owner.
David Shipley, The Post’s opinions editor, told reporters he disagreed with her interpretation of events (The New York Times):
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Mr. Shipley said in the statement. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”
Owners of press outlets “are responsible for safeguarding that free press— and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” Telnaes counters:
While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.
Efforts are already afoot by Trump and MAGA Republicans to rewrite recent history the way Sourtherners spread the Lost Cause myth. The proliferation of disinformation via social media and gimlet-eyed lying into cameras by “Christians” like Johnson further threaten to dissolve external reality under Americans’ feet until “Democracy dies in darkness.”
Men like those Telnaes depicts are lining up to be accessories.
"Moses David" and his Children of God authoritarian cult were "lying for Jesus" when Mike Johnson was still an infant. Wonder where Johnson came by it? web.archive.org/web/20120325…
Snake Oil TV series (2023–): Contestants will present unique products to convincing entrepreneurs, some of which are real while others are “snake oil salesmen. With the help of celebrity advisors, they must determine which are real to win life-changing prize.
Since before the days of traveling medicine shows, Americans displayed a knack both for peddling bullshit and for buying it. Cultural touchstone: Dorothy’s Professor Marvel. Paradigm case: the 2024 presidential election. But the latter is simply a more visible instance of the phenomenon. Let’s look at two cases of Americans’ willingness to believe that private capitalism is always superior at delivering services over collective, government, not-for-profit programs. As with snake oil, it begins with a con man. With avarice and artifice.
Timothy Noah this morning considers efforts to privatize Medicare. Donald Trump claims he won’t. (Trump also makes claims about his height, weight, and net worth.) Noah cites a Wall Street Journal report from Wednesday (I don’t have access) that shows that despite widely touted claims that the private sector is more efficient at providing health care, well, it does not. In fact, private health care for seniors is an extraction industry where Medicare Advantage policies excel “in the filing of fraudulent claims.”
Insurance industry whistleblower, Wendell Potter, cautions that the real “Advantage” is for insurers, not the insured. And not for the taxpayer, Noah explains:
Medicare Advantage looks to people over 65 like a better deal because it covers things traditional Medicare doesn’t, such as visits to the dentist or the eye doctor. Some plans even cover acupuncture! But if you get seriously ill and need to be referred to a specialist, Medicare Advantage isn’t so great. An April 2022 study by the Health and Human Services department’s inspector general found that 13 percent of the referrals denied under Medicare Advantage would have been approved under traditional Medicare.
Medicare Advantage also shows that health care privatization is a lousy deal for taxpayers. Medicare Advantage costs the federal government 7 percent more per enrollee than traditional Medicare, according to an August 2024 study by the fiscally conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation. For enrollees with similar health profiles, Medicare Advantage costs 22 percent more, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
Perhaps that’s because, as the Journal’s investigations found, Medicare Advantage insurers routinely pad their government reimbursement requests with spurious diagnoses. For example, an astounding 66,000 Medicare Advantage patients were diagnosed with diabetic cataracts even after these patients had surgery to correct them, making that diagnosis, in the Journal’s words, “anatomically impossible.” In other instances, patients whom Medicare Advantage insurers reported as HIV positive received none of the recommended treatments. If a doctor failed to furnish a desired diagnosis, insurers dispatched a nurse to the patient’s home to find one. Medicare Advantage insurers also conned veterans into enrolling in the program even though they were already covered adequately by the Veterans Administration health system, which has repeatedly been demonstrated to be superior to private hospital care (something else the public is reluctant to believe).
But then there’s a future electorate born every minute. “The challenge with all privatization schemes is that private sector doesn’t aspire to save the government money,” Noah concludes. “Why should it?” That’s at odds with maximizing profit.
Education Advantage
My friend Jeff Bryant, a public schools advocate, pointed on Thursday to The Progressive‘s critique of the movement to privatize public schools. Carol Burris begins with a 2017 “rightwing billionaire-funded documentary created by the late Andrew Coulson,” Schools Inc., which argued “that for-profit schooling, funded by parents without government involvement, is the best delivery model for education.” Detect a theme here?
The “school choice movement,” which Coulson’s documentary promoted, has always been a classic bait-and-switch swindle: Charter schools were the bait for vouchers, and vouchers the lure for public acceptance of market-based schooling. While narrow debates about accountability, taxpayer costs, and the public funding of religious schools raise important concerns, the gravest threat posed by the school choice movement is its ultimate objective: putting an end to public responsibility for education.
This goal is not a secret. The libertarian right has openly dreamed of ending public education for the past seventy years—the economist Milton Friedman advocated for school choice as early as 1955, and his acolytes have continued to do so ever since.
It’s a wonder that public school privatization advocates don’t call voucher schemes Education Advantage.
Burris continues:
The America First Policy Institute, where Trump’s Secretary of Education nominee Linda McMahon serves as board chair, states in its recent policy agenda that “the authority for educating children rests with parents.” As public responsibility for schooling shifts to parents, educational subsidies will be gradually reduced until Friedman and Coulson’s dream of a fully for-profit marketplace that competes for students is achieved.
The impulse among conservatives to privatize everything involving public expenditures – schools included – is no longer just about shrinking government, lowering their taxes and eliminating funding sources for their political competitors. Now it’s about their opportunity costs, potential profits lost to not-for-profit public-sector competitors. It’s bad enough that government “picks their pockets” to educate other people’s children. But it’s unforgivable that they’re not getting a piece of the action. Now they want to turn public education into private profits too.
School deserts
Donald Trump once said, “I love the poorly educated.” So does the Midas cult. They’ve offshored jobs to countries with lower labor costs where those countries’ taxpayers pay to educate them, not ours. Thomas Wilson, former CEO of Allstate, explained offshoring jobs bluntly, “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business …” Higher-skilled workers they can import. Ask Elon Musk.
Burris continues:
And what about those who refuse to pay? Former Arizona legislator Paul Mosley wanted to end compulsory schooling in his state, claiming that what was once a privilege was now “being forced down everyone’s throat.” The Cato Institute has similarly signaled its approval of “unschooling,” a practice of eschewing formal education altogether in favor of informal learning. If education is governed as a marketplace, they claim, you have the right not to shop at all.
The implications of this approach are profound. In a pay-as-you-go system, few families will have the financial means to educate a special needs child outside the home. What’s more, families in rural areas will be left with few options, if any: In the for-profit marketplace, why go where customers are few and nonaffluent? If your Muslim or Jewish child lives in a town where the majority “choose” a Christian school, there may be no secular option. Schools opening and closing based on profit margins will be commonplace—more than one in four charter schools already closes by its fifth year of operation.
Can you say school deserts? That’s how it works with groceries, eh? Poorly educated workers desperate to do menial, low-paying jobs are a corporatist’s wet dream. And a countryside filled with them is a stake in the heart of a democratic republic. It begins with a con man. It ends with oligarchy, or worse.
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) is still working to secure enough votes to re-up his speakership despite the endorsement of the president-elect. The House votes to elect a speaker for the 119th Congress at noon today (Friday). With the GOP’s razor-thin margin, more than two defections can sink him.
Massie was asked by former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a new host on One America News Network, if he would vote for Johnson if Roy would become the chairman of the influential committee.
“Oh no. You can pull all my fingernails out, you can shove bamboo up in them, you can start cutting off my fingers,” Massie responded late Thursday.
“I am not voting for Mike Johnson tomorrow, and you can take that to the bank,” he told his former colleague.
With Gaetz’s resignation last month, the GOP caucus has just 219 members, assuming they are all present. Johnson needs 218 votes if he expects to win on the first ballot. An acrimonous, weeks-long, Republican circus elected him to the post in October 2023.
Place your bets.
KILMEADE: “Do these Republicans realize how embarrassing and humiliating it was last time they couldn’t pick a speaker?” pic.twitter.com/Y3f1fQVr94
