Ever since he served on the January 6th committee, along with Liz Cheney, two Republicans who cared more about their country than their party, I have admired Adam Kinzinger and faithfully read his blog.

Here is his roundup of the latest scandals surrounding the Trump administration. To hear his audios and see his videos, please open the link.

Hey everybody. Welcome back. Thanks for being here.

Our top story today: more corruption coming out of the White House. This one centers on a Venezuelan billionaire who needed a pardon. His family gave Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, a 50 million dollar job while she was still a U.S. attorney. Or at least still calling herself one. A judge had already ruled she was in that office unlawfully. Two weeks after she started working for the billionaire, he had his pardon. What a coincidence!

We’ll also get into Steve Witkoff calling Vladimir Putin a humanitarian, the president’s new round of election-season bribes, a look inside the obscure DOJ office greenlighting Trump’s worst ideas, and the president’s own son breaking with him over the Iran war.

So do me a favor. Like this video, share it with someone who needs to see it, and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Let’s get to it.

1. Habba’s $50 Million Pardon Payday

Julio Herrera Velutini is a billionaire banker from one of the oldest families in Venezuela. In 2022, he was charged with felony bribery for trying to get the governor of Puerto Rico to fire the regulator who was investigating his bank. In August 2025, his lawyer, who had been on Trump’s personal legal team, got that knocked down to a single misdemeanor campaign finance count. Career prosecutors were furious. Herrera wasn’t satisfied either. He wanted the record wiped clean.

So his 27-year-old daughter gave 3.5 million dollars to a Trump super PAC. Still no pardon. Then, in late October 2025, she registered a company in Florida called Concord Partners. Nobody seems to know what it does, including people inside the family’s own business empire. Within days, Alina Habba signed on as general counsel with a contract for ten million dollars a year for four years. The New York Times got a look at the terms. Once you add in bonuses, the total was around 50 million dollars. At that moment she was the acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, a job a federal judge had already ruled she was holding unlawfully.

She started the Concord job January 1st. By then she was a senior adviser to the Attorney General, overseeing U.S. attorneys, with an office at the Justice Department and a Marshals protective detail. So she was working for the Herreras and the Justice Department at the same time. Two weeks later, on January 15th, Trump gave Herrera a full and unconditional pardon. The governor he was accused of bribing and the former FBI agent who worked for him were pardoned the same day, right before they were due to be sentenced.

Habba says any suggestion her job had anything to do with the pardon is “false and defamatory,” and that the DOJ knew about the job and signed off on it. The department says she never spoke to anyone about a pardon. The White House says she had nothing to do with it. People who know the terms of her contract told the Times they believed she was hired to help get the pardon, and were surprised at the size of the number.

Look, maybe a 27-year-old started a company nobody can describe and decided the first thing it needed was a 50 million dollar general counsel who happened to be the president’s former lawyer, and the pardon two weeks later is just luck. That’s what Habba and the White House want you to believe.

But the Times reports there’s now a whole pardon industry in Washington, where wealthy criminals pay fixers big money to get the president’s attention. For Herrera, the person he paid just happened to be working inside the Justice Department when the check cleared. How convenient!

2. Witkoff Calls Putin Humanitarian

Before we get into the shameless flattery, some good news: Stephen Hubbard is free. In 2022, he was living in Ukraine when the Russians invaded. They accused the 74-year-old of being a mercenary and sentenced him to nearly seven years in a Russian jail. The State Department called it what it was: a blatant wrongful detention. But after a phone call between Trump and Putin, he’s finally on his way home.

This is a good thing, but it doesn’t make Putin a good person. It doesn’t erase the four years this man spent locked up. When terrorists release hostages, we breathe a sigh of relief. We don’t praise the captors. But that’s exactly what Steve Witkoff, the president’s point man on Russia, did today in St. Petersburg. Have a listen.

A humanitarian. If you’re a regular listener, you can probably guess what I have to say about that. But I’ll say it anyway. This is the man who constantly bombs Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. This is the man who has kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children. This is a man who runs a brutal authoritarian regime that captures dozens of Americans just like Hubbard as bargaining chips. And that’s all these people are to Moscow. Just two weeks ago, a top Russian official posted that the Kremlin needed to stock back up.

This time around, there wasn’t a prisoner swap. Trump bragged about that, claiming we gave up nothing. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that couldn’t be further from the truth. Trump has been on a gift-giving spree for Putin lately, and every one of those gifts is worth more to him than a hundred Russian prisoners. This is not a guy who cares about his own people. If he did, he wouldn’t be sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to die in Ukraine.

This goes deeper than Witkoff. Flattery has been the strategy at every level of this administration from the beginning. If it was getting us somewhere, that would be one thing. But it isn’t. It’s been two years. There’s always just one more meeting. One more trip to Moscow. One more excuse for Witkoff and Kushner to dine at the Kremlin. Peace in Ukraine is always around the corner, but it never comes.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that peace really is around the corner. But as long as we’re calling Putin a humanitarian, I don’t have high hopes.

3. Trump Holds Veterans Hostage

We’ve already talked about the 5,000 dollar checks, and the 90 dollar bonuses to seniors on Medicare. We also talked about the 500 dollar Obamacare checks that came with letters bragging about Trump’s healthcare record. More recently there was the 8 billion dollar bailout for farmers suffering from the Iran war’s effect on diesel. Last night in North Carolina, Trump indulged in a little more shameless bribery. But this time was a little different. Have a listen.

He then said “We will never abandon the heroes who served America.” Unless the GOP loses, of course. We’re talking about Marines and their families who were poisoned by water contaminated with industrial solvents, and Trump is holding their rightful settlements hostage. It doesn’t get more shameless than that.

He used a similar strategy in Kansas, telling corn farmers he’d approve E15 sales year-round to boost their profits, but only if the Democrat lost. The farm bailout also came with a promise of more “when the Republicans win.” The handouts were bad enough. But now Trump is telling voters he’ll refuse to do his job unless the GOP keeps their majorities.

He’s clearly getting more desperate by the day. Considering the polls that have been coming out, it’s no wonder. The New York Times and Siena had another bruiser for the GOP this morning. Trump’s approval at a record low 36 percent. Democrats up 11 on the generic ballot. And a few very revealing questions.

Which party understands people like me? Democrats 53, Republicans 39. Which party is the party of the working class? 53 to 40. Which party can fix my problems? 51 to 40. Democrats had a small lead on these questions in 2024. In two years, those leads have expanded to huge gaps. On which party keeps its promises, voters flipped altogether. Democrats now lead 46 to 38.

Voters don’t trust Trump any further than they can throw him, which, thanks to those Big Macs, isn’t very far. That lack of trust has trickled down to the GOP at large. Nobody is buying Trump’s promises. But he’ll make them anyway, and disrespect our veterans in the process.

One thing I can promise him: that strategy isn’t going to turn out so well in November.

4. DOJ Rubber Stamp Exposed

Every president has a small team of about two dozen lawyers on the fifth floor of the Justice Department. It’s called the Office of Legal Counsel. And its job is to tell the executive branch whether what it wants to do is legal, especially when it’s never been tried before.

For decades, that office was a real check. Its legal opinions bind the entire executive branch. And since President Kennedy, it has reviewed executive orders before the president signs them.

That changed in Trump’s second term. His team never sent his day-one executive orders to the office for review. In fact, the office went months without anyone even leading it. And when reviews resumed, it could offer comments but no longer had the final word.

Jack Goldsmith, who ran the office under President George W. Bush, said sidelining it was part of a strategy to ensure the president “can do whatever he wants.”

That might as well be true, as far as the office is now concerned. The Washington Post reports that the office is now run by Elliot Gaiser. He’s a lawyer from Trump’s 2020 campaign and, to this day, he refuses to say who won that election. Asked directly, he said Biden was sworn in and certified. What he privately thinks, he said, is privileged legal advice.

That’s the man who decides what’s legal for this White House. And his answer is almost always yes.

According to the Post, his office has signed off on global tariffs, on blowing up boats in international waters, on refusing to spend money Congress appropriated, and on deploying the National Guard.

And that’s just the start. It declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional. It said the government can seize state voter rolls and hand them to immigration agents. And in August, it stretched executive privilege to cover outside advisers, shielding people who don’t even work for the government from having to testify.

A former lawyer in the office said its opinions are usually based on shoddy legal arguments. Under previous administrations, the lawyer said, “you have opinions that at least try to grapple with counterarguments.” Not anymore.

We’re two weeks away from the midterms, and the man in the White House has a history of refusing to accept election results he doesn’t like. If that happens again, this is the office that’ll tell him whether he can follow through on whatever crazy idea he comes up with. Which is a problem, because so far this office hasn’t told him no.

5. Don Jr. Splits With Dad

Since the 2024 presidential campaign, Don Jr. has held a simple vision on foreign policy: keep America out of another war in the Middle East. That’s the same promise his father made on the trail. And a promise Don Jr. fully expected him to keep.

When Iran fired missiles at Israel in April 2024, Don Jr. posted on X: “Remember when they said Trump would get us into a full-blown war with Iran?” Then he added, “Times like these should make us all realize how lucky we were to have Trump, his strength and his resolve.” Nearly eight months since it began, President Trump’s war with Iran continues with no end in sight.

And Don. Jr. isn’t happy about it. The Atlantic reports that Don Jr. opposed the war from the beginning and even advised his father against it. One person close to him said, “Don Jr. has kept his views on the subject private, as he would never publicly break with his dad on an issue like this. But I can’t imagine anyone who knows Don would be surprised by his personal views.” Another remarked, “Don Jr. is the most MAGA of them all.”

That’s just the point. This isn’t a Never Trumper. This is the president’s son. The man who helped sell the movement on the idea that his father was the one who’d keep us out of a war. And it’s not just him. The Atlantic says Vance opposed the war privately. Meanwhile, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubted Netanyahu’s pitch that you could change the regime from the air.

Trump didn’t listen. And he broke the campaign promise he made again and again to voters. Now he owns the consequences. A Pew Research survey found that 65 percent of Americans disapprove of how he’s handled the Iran War. Nearly half think it drags on for more than a year. That’s far beyond the administration’s initial estimate of four to six weeks.

And every day it drags on, more of the people who believed his promise will turn against him at the ballot box. Which is bad news for Trump, but good news for the country.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Please Help This Candidate in Texas

By dianeravitch

October 22, 2026 //

Texas has a legislature with a Republican super-majority. Republicans endorse policies that benefit the wealthiest people and big corporations. That is why Elon Musk moved from California to Texas.

The only way to change the political climate in Texas is to break the hold of MAGA and help Democrats get elected to the legislature. On the education issue, Democrats are strong supporters of public schools. When Texas Governor Greg Abbott wanted school vouchers, he faced strong opposition from moderate Republicans, mostly from rural districts. With the help of Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, Governor Abbott funded hard-right competitors against the moderate Republicans. He defeated enough of them to get his voucher bill. It is available for all, with no income limit. As usual, most vouchers are now claimed by students who never went to public schools, most of whom are students in religious schools.

Here’s a candidate you should consider supporting, as described by Michelle H. Davis, whose blog is titled “Lone Star Left.”

She writes:

This series is called Meet the Candidates. Over the next three months, I’ll spotlight a handful of Democratic races each month, mainly in the Legislature and in Congress. These aren’t endorsements. They’re introductions, a way to understand who’s running, the districts they hope to represent, and what’s at stake for people across Texas.

Who is Cecilia Castellano?

Cecilia Castellano is a third-generation Texan from Atascosa County. Her family’s been on this land since before “flippable seat” was a phrase anybody used, as she watched good people in her community leave because there’s no work.

She runs AZTECA Designs & Construction, has been married for twenty-three years and counting, has two grown kids, three grandkids, and has taught Bible study at New Life Christian Center since 2014. Castellano is a small business owner and a churchgoing grandmother running on public schools, rural hospitals, and property tax relief.

Ken Paxton’s office sent search warrants to her home in 2024, as well as elderly LULAC volunteers in their seventies and eighties. This came from a referral from a district attorney who took campaign photos with Castellano’s own opponent. She’s maintaining innocence and running again regardless. The raid was intended to put fear in front of a community that already votes at abysmal rates, and put Castellano’s name next to the word “investigation” nineteen days before an election, as part of an attack ad the McLaughlin campaign paid for and Henry Cuellar’s sister starred in. That’s the environment she’s running in.

Think about that.

In 2024, weeks before what was supposed to be a competitive election, the Republican AG raided the homes of Democratic candidates, campaign staff, and elderly LULAC volunteers in their seventies and eighties, in one of the poorest areas in Texas. The referral came from a DA photographed campaigning with Castellano’s Republican opponent. Nineteen days out, that Republican opponent’s campaign funded an attack ad starring the sister of a sitting congressman, Rosie Cuellaer. In 2025, Castellano was indicted on two counts of vote harvesting. She pleaded not guilty. The charges are still active.

And she stuck out her chest (and maybe her middle finger), and she put her name on the ballot again in 2026.

That tells us all who Cecilia Castellano is. She’s someone with a spine.

The district.

HD80 is across six counties (Atascosa, Dimmit, Frio, Uvalde, Webb portion, Zavala). Hispanic population is 83.2%, compared to 39.7% statewide. Anglo population is 14.0%. This is one of the most Hispanic districts in the state legislature.

Age skews young. 22.2% of the district is 5-17 years old versus 18.6% statewide, and only 11.7% is 65+ versus 13.4% statewide.

Language matters here more than almost anywhere else in the state. 65.6% of the district speaks a language other than English at home, and 11.2% doesn’t speak English well or at all.

This is one of the poorest districts in Texas. 23.9% of the district lives in poverty versus 13.8% statewide. Per capita income is $22,813 against a state average of $40,752, roughly 56 cents on the dollar.

Housing: 63.8% owner-occupied, average home value $201,508 (about 55% of the state average), average rent $1,033. Cheap housing, low equity, low wealth accumulation. 22.3% of owners are cost-burdened at 35%+ of income, actually worse than the state rate of 17.3%, despite the lower home values, which tells you incomes are dragging harder than housing costs are.

November 2024 results:

Now compare that to the top of the ticket in the same district, same election:

Castellano ran 2.5 points ahead of Harris and roughly in line with the down-ballot judicial Democrats, but 1.9 points behind Allred.

Trump is underwater with Hispanic voters right now, badly. Nationally, Democrats are running ahead on the generic congressional ballot by mid-to-high single digits, depending on the poll. Put that next to a district that’s 83.2% Hispanic, and you have one of the biggest swing opportunities available in this election cycle.

None of that means anything without turnout, and turnout is where HD80 has bled Democrats for a decade. In 2024, a presidential year, the district saw only 48.3% turnout. Turnout is the biggest problem this district faces. Total voter registration in HD80 sits at 116,791, and 73 percent of that roll is Spanish Surname Voter Registration, nearly triple the statewide share. Close even half that turnout gap in a district already trending back toward Democrats nationally, and Castellano’s 9,949-vote loss from 2024 starts looking very different.

Castellano is running into a shift that’s already underway in a district that overlaps TX23 and TX28, both of which are Talarico and DCCC targets (translation: it’s raining money). Castellano’s challenge will be to target the same Democrats and make sure they vote down-ballot.

The incumbent.

The day after 19 kids and two teachers were murdered at Robb Elementary, Beto confronted Greg Abbott when he was speaking and said, essentially, saying that Abbott’s inaction got those kids killed. He was right. Firearms remain the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in Texas.

McLaughlin, then Uvalde’s mayor, stood up and called him “a sick son of a bitch that would come to a deal like this to make a political issue.” McLaughlin later said that it wasn’t the place or the time. But notice what actually offended him. Not the deaths. Not the 77 minutes cops stood in a hallway while kids bled out. The politics of pointing out Republicans’ poor governance leading to that year’s mass death of children.

McLaughlin is the one on the left:

Before being elected, McLaughlin spent a lot of time on Fox News talking about the white supremacist “great replacement theory.”

Once elected, he signed the “Contract on Texas,” a pledge backed by donors with documented ties to Tim Dunn’s Defend Texas Liberty PAC, the same PAC that spent seven hours meeting with Nick Fuentes, promising to strip political power from “Democrats” in the Legislature. Of course, McLaughlin DID vote in favor of the racist mid-districting maps.

He told the Texas Tribune he wasn’t going to gut public schools. Then he signed on as a co-author of the voucher bill anyway.

McLaughlin spent two years savaging DPS for the Robb Elementary response. But when his own city commissioned a report, and it exonerated local police, he didn’t like that either; he said leadership failed and blamed the acting police chief. Meanwhile, when actual grieving fathers showed up to a city council meeting demanding real answers, he got into a shouting match with one of them, blamed the school board for stuff under his own authority, and dismissed another father with “I don’t know that man’s relationship with his daughter.” He called the slow release of the shooting footage “one of the most chicken things” he’d seen. Families in the room said the real chicken thing was the police response he’d spent two years defending politically while criticizing everyone else.

And nineteen days before the 2024 election, McLaughlin’s campaign funded an attack ad starring Rosie Cuellar, timed to a Paxton-office investigation referred by a DA who’d posed for campaign photos with him. He won by 19 points off the back of that. It happened for him, on schedule, funded by his own campaign, aimed at a district too poor and too worn down by a broken healthcare and education system to fight back at the ballot box the way a wealthier district might.

That’s the case against Don McLaughlin. A pattern of cruelty when it’s politically convenient, absence when it’s not, and a comfortable relationship with whoever’s willing to do his dirty work for him.

In Cecilia Castellano’s own words.

Below are some questions I asked Castellano, based on previous reader polls, along with her answers.

Q: Should Texas end tax subsidies and abatements for large corporations?

Yes. Large corporations should invest in the communities where they do business and pay their fair share. Texas taxpayers and small businesses should not have to subsidize large corporations that have the resources to pay their own way. Economic development should benefit the community, create good-paying jobs, and strengthen local infrastructure—not shift corporate costs onto taxpayers.

Q: Do you oppose school vouchers and efforts to privatize public education?

Yes. I oppose school vouchers and efforts to privatize public education. Public tax dollars should remain in our public schools, where they can support teachers, classrooms, special education, school safety, and student programs. Our priority should be fully funding and strengthening Texas public schools, not diverting limited resources to private institutions.

Q: Should Texas guarantee free school meals to all K–12 students, regardless of income?

Yes. No child should have to learn while hungry. Texas should guarantee free school meals to all K–12 students so every child has access to nutritious food without stigma or unnecessary paperwork. Feeding students helps them focus, learn, and succeed in the classroom.

Q: Do you support closing or downsizing state prisons and redirecting that funding to community-based alternatives like mental health care, housing, and youth programs?

Yes, where appropriate. I support reducing our reliance on incarceration for nonviolent offenses and investing more in mental health care, substance-use treatment, housing stability, and youth programs that can prevent crime before it happens. At the same time, Texas must maintain secure facilities for individuals who pose a serious threat to public safety.

Q: Do you support publicly financed elections to reduce corporate and PAC influence?

Yes. I support reforms that reduce the influence of corporations, PACs, and wealthy special interests in our elections. Public financing can help qualified candidates compete without being dependent on large donors, while giving everyday voters a stronger voice. Any system should be transparent, voluntary, and include strict accountability for how public funds are used.

Bonus Question: What does being a Democrat mean to you in 2026?

Being a Democrat, to me, is not about a party label. I believe people are tired of politics being divided into red versus blue while the issues affecting their families continue to go unresolved. Housing affordability, veterans’ services, water infrastructure, public education, healthcare, wages, and the rising cost of living are not Democratic or Republican issues—they are Texas issues.

I am especially concerned when government decisions benefit powerful interests while communities are left carrying the consequences, whether that involves data centers placing additional demands on our water and electrical infrastructure or BESS facilities being developed without adequate safety protections.

I believe we need to get back to talking about the things that matter to people and creating real pathways to opportunity—quality education, skilled trades, good-paying jobs, affordable healthcare, reliable infrastructure, and stronger communities. My goal is to help build a Texas that works for everyone, regardless of political party, income level, or ZIP code.

That’s the choice in front of HD80.

On one side, a legislator who found his voice in a hallway full of grieving parents and used it to call a concerned citizen a “sick son of a bitch,” who’s spent four years managing the optics of a massacre instead of the aftermath of it, who took the voucher money and signed the pledge and voted for the maps, and who benefited, whether he ordered it or not, from a Republican AG’s office turning a search warrant into a campaign ad nineteen days before an election.

On the other side, a woman who watched her own community get hollowed out for lack of work and decided to run for office anyway. She had her phone taken and her home raided, and her name dragged through an indictment, and she filed for the seat again regardless. You don’t have to guess what Cecilia Castellano is made of. The state already tried to find out, and she’s still standing.

The math says this district is winnable. Trump’s underwater with the exact voters who live here. Democrats are running ahead nationally. HD80 sits inside the same map as TX23 and TX28, both drawing national money and attention this cycle. And the district didn’t lose in 2024 because voters rejected Castellano, it lost because less than half the registered electorate showed up. That’s a door-knocking problem, a ride-to-the-polls problem, a somebody-asking-you-twice problem.

Cecilia Castellano is on the ballot again. Whether HD80 flips depends on whether the rest of us do our part.

You can learn more about Cecilia Castellano from her website, Facebook, and Instagram.

Open the link.

Categories Education Reform, Elections, Politics, Supporting public schools, Texas, Unions

Russian Bots Are at It Again, Trying to Sway Our Elections

By dianeravitch

October 22, 2026 //

Google posted the following unusual warning. The main sources are The New York Times, a YouTube video posted by Bloomberg News, and stories on MSNOW.

The warning asserted that Russian intelligence is deep into a campaign to sway the midterms in Trump’s favor, acknowledging his special relationship with Russian dictator Putin. That relationship was cemented by Trump’s latest deal to eliminate sanctions on Russian oil, to pour billions into the Russian economy, and to turn his back on Ukraine.

Google sent out the following warning:

Russia is deploying a highly sophisticated “army of bots” and generative AI to flood social media networks with fabricated videos, deepfakes, and targeted propaganda aimed at disrupting the upcoming November 3, 2026, U.S. midterm elections. [1, 2]

According to U.S. intelligence officials and recent independent research, Moscow’s primary goals are to inject chaos, undermine faith in democratic institutions, target Democratic candidates in key swing states, and weaken international support for Ukraine. [1, 2, 3]

Key Tactics and Operations

1. The “Matrioska” Drone Warfare Strategy

Automated Bot Swarms: A Russian disinformation network nicknamed Matrioska has been filling platforms like X (formerly Twitter) with fake election content. [1]
The Cycle: When researchers identify these accounts, X suspends them—but the network automatically replaces them with new dormant or artificial profiles. Experts describe this persistent replacement loop as the “disinformation equivalent of drone warfare”. [1]
Artificial Engagement: These bots rapidly inflate view counts on fabricated posts to make fake stories appear as though they are trending naturally. [1, 2]

2. AI-Generated Deepfakes & Impersonations

Celebrity Splice Fakes: Disinformation operators are pushing out AI-fabricated video clips of famous actors and musicians (including Robert De Niro, Julia Roberts, and Cher) appearing to attack political figures under campaigns like #AllDemocratsAreCriminals. [1]
Impersonating Major Media: U.S. intelligence reports that Russian covert campaigns are creating highly accurate clones of reputable Western news outlets like CNN, the BBC, and The New York Times to spread fake news articles and targeted character attacks against Senate candidates. [1, 2]
Commercial AI Misuse: Adversaries are reportedly utilizing commercial generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, to efficiently script and map out massive propaganda pipelines at an unprecedented speed. [1]

3. Integration into State Infrastructure

Cloud Infrastructure Consolidation: Security officials emphasize that Moscow has successfully integrated its state intelligence agencies with commercial cloud computing assets. This marks a shift from isolated “troll farms” (like the old Internet Research Agency) to a consolidated state digital ecosystem capable of massive scale.
Custom Bias Targeting: The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has been linked to programs designed to bypass traditional advertisement blocks by embedding customized, AI-driven propaganda directly into personal communication apps based on an individual voter’s specific biases. [1, 2]

To understand the warning, begin by watching the YouTube video posted by Bloomberg News.

Much of this material was based on a story in The New York Times about Russia’s election interference. This is a gift article. You can read it without a subscription.

Written by veteran intelligence reporters, it begins:

The Russian government has been targeting Americans with covert online disinformation operations seeking to undermine public confidence in November’s midterm elections, using a familiar playbook in an attempt to inject chaos into the voting season, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Classified U.S. intelligence assessments from recent months have determined that the Kremlin has again authorized a digital influence campaign to peddle content across social media in hopes of seeding or amplifying domestic divisions around the election season, the officials said.

The assessments did not find evidence of attempts to take aim at voting machinery in a way that could compromise the actual voting process, the officials added. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss classified information, did not specify the efforts to influence attitudes online. But experts in Russian disinformation have spotted some social media campaigns in recent weeks that use artificial intelligence to create fake videos of Hollywood celebrities talking about key battleground Senate races.

The disinformation campaign appeared to be less extensive or coordinated than at least some of Russia’s prior efforts in American elections, some of the officials said. Since 2016, the Kremlin has initiated online influence operations in every American federal election cycle, according to previously declassified assessments. The officials added that U.S. spy agencies see Moscow as less interested in midterm races than in presidential contests and as distracted by its grinding war with Ukraine.

Still, the push to inflame the electorate comes as President Trump has repeatedly sought to challenge the integrity of American democracy. In July, Mr. Trump gave a televised prime-time address on election security in which he claimed there were severe vulnerabilities in U.S. voting systems and accused American officials of a yearslong “cover-up” to conceal efforts by China and others to influence elections.

He has instructed a task force to declassify documents purporting to support his narratives of rampant voter fraud and foreign tampering, but those files, which were heavily redacted, did not reveal major new weaknesses in the country’s election systems or show that foreign governments had manipulated any votes.

Some of the officials said the main goal of the Russian influence operations appeared to be to sow chaos rather than aid one particular party, though the examples that independent disinformation researchers in recent weeks have attributed to Russia have exclusively attacked Democratic candidates in swing states.

The White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Russian Embassy did not respond to requests for comment. Russia has historically denied U.S. allegations of election meddling.

Some intelligence assessments have also found that Iran, too, may engage in influence operations around the November election as well, the officials said, though little activity had been documented in classified channels that traced to Tehran. The country, which has been locked in a war with the United States since February, sought to spread propaganda undermining Mr. Trump in the 2020 and 2024presidential elections, and officials said it was reasonable to expect the regime to do so again….

In 2016, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered a multipronged interference effort that sought to denigrate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, and bolster the electoral prospects of her Republican rival, Mr. Trump, U.S. spy agencies concluded. Multiple audits of those intelligence findings, including a multiyear investigation by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, corroborated those conclusions.

Researchers in Europe and the United States who track Russian disinformation campaigns have seen recent signs of Russian activity. In two separate waves over the past week, a network previously linked to Kremlin trolls posted a series of videos on X and BlueSky that appeared to rely on A.I. to churn out baseless claims against Democrats running for Senate in closely contested races. Elements of the campaign were reported earlier by MS NOW.

The posts attacked the candidates using themes that Mr. Trump and the Republican Party have relied on to disparage Democrats, including accusations of corruption, antisemitism and support for gay and transgender rights.

Please open the article to finish reading this important article.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Fake News, International, Media, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump

Benjamin R. Cremer: An Outpouring of Hatred While Shouting “USA! USA!”

By dianeravitch

October 22, 2026 //

Every day, as I read the political news, I think to myself “This is not America.” A country where masked men assault people on the streets, drag them out of their cars and homes, run them over with their cars, even kill them. A country where authorities deport people to lands they never lived in. A land where casual cruelty is tolerated. A land where the President insults the free press daily. A land of obscene wealth at the top and a shrinking middle class. This is not the country to which I pledged my heart every day in school and for many years afterwards.

Rev. Benjamin R. Cremer of Idaho was raised and home-schooled by his strict fundamentalist parents, but he came to think differently as he reconciled the world with Jesus’s words.

He wrote:

On October 12th, during a Trump rally at Youngstown, Ohio, several men physically assaulted a woman as the crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!”

The woman was wearing a t-shirt that said “Release the Epstein files!” and was loudly calling Trump a fascist. She was exercising her first amendment rights. Peacefully protesting at a public event.

Several men then began to push, punch, slap, and pull her to the ground. They even bragged about it later online.

The police came and instead of taking the men who were attacking her away, they removed her from the rally.

And the president of the United States was watching it all unfold. Instead of demanding them to stop. Instead of acting honorable and presidential. Instead of acting like a man. He called her “terrible” and a “big fat guy” as the police drug her away. “These are the people who want to destroy our country!” he said.

All while the crowd continued to chant “USA! USA! USA!”

This is just days after the president weaponized ICE to go after a sitting representative, Ilhan Omar and raided her home. A person he’s continued to target with overtly racist and bigoted rhetoric.

This is just days after the secretary of defense announced the live streamed execution of a prisoner confined to a wheelchair by firing squad.

This is in the wake of continued dehumanization and mistreatment of migrants and their children.

This is in the wake of barring journalists from the White House, book bans, eroding women’s rights, rounding up people in our streets, and making student read the Bible in schools, and so much more cruelty, all in the name of “patriotism” and “Christianity.”

All while people chant “USA! USA! USA!”

This is where we are as a country right now. It shouldn’t matter where we align ourselves politically or theologically. This dynamic should deeply disturb us all and drive us to oppose it.

History warns us time and time again that moral collapse in a society and the rise of authoritarian regimes rarely begins with a population openly declaring itself evil. It begins when people persuade themselves that their cruelty is necessary, their prejudice is justified, their enemies deserve what happens to them, and it is someone else’s responsibility to speak out.

That is why we must pay attention when dehumanizing language becomes ordinary, when humiliation becomes entertainment, when injustice is excused because the victims belong to the wrong group, and when religious leaders bless the very attitudes that the teachings of Jesus should compel them to confront.

The question is not simply whether we call ourselves Christians, patriots, conservatives, liberals, or defenders of freedom. The question is what those identities are producing in us. Are they making us more truthful, more merciful, more courageous, and more protective of human dignity? Or are they teaching us whom we are permitted to despise?

When the name of Jesus is invoked to excuse contempt, when political loyalty overrides mercy, when the vulnerable are treated as disposable, and when cruelty toward an out-group is celebrated as righteousness enmeshed with patriotism, Christ followers must ask whether they are bearing witness to Christ or merely baptizing the prejudices of their surrounding culture.

Cruelty, bigotry, corruption, and greed our masquerading themselves around as the definition of patriotism and Christian virtue.

While sitting in a concentration camp, awaiting his sham trial and execution, German theologian, pastor, and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

“If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that people are deprived of their independent judgment, and-more or less unconsciously give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. The fact that the fool is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that he is independent. One feels in fact, when talking to him, that one is dealing, not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him. He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very nature is being misused and exploited. Having thus become a passive instrument, the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. Here lies the danger of a diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings.”

As a Christian in America today, I refuse to be silent as this same mentality and evil continues rise among us.

May we raise our voices in solidarity together, not in mindlessly chanting “USA!” as blatant harm takes place before our eyes, but in speaking out against injustice and for liberty, freedom, and love to lead us.

Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Environment, Equity, Evil, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Injustice, Scandals, Trump, Tyranny

Shiloh Salazar Is Running in One of the Reddest Districts in Texas

By dianeravitch

October 21, 2026 //

Michelle H. Davis writes a blog called “Lone Star Left,” where she fights an uphill battle against Republicans who control every statewide office, including the legislature, where they have a super-majority.

For years, many legislative districts were so staunchly Republican that Democrats didn’t bother to field a candidate.

This year is different. The Texas Democrats are fielding a candidate in every district.

Michelle Davis describes one of the rural, poor districts where Democrats didn’t run a candidate for many years.

I wish there were a Michelle Davis in every state. I would like to know more about the candidates. I’m grateful Davis is providing profiles like this one.

The candidate is Shiloh Salazar.

Davis writes:

Who is Shiloh Salazar?

Shiloh Salazar is a mom, small business owner, former educator, and lifelong West Texan who’s had enough of watching corporate interests get a seat at the table. In contrast, working families get the short end of the stick.

Salazar spent years organizing and showing up on public schools, early childhood programs, water security, agriculture, healthcare access, economic stability, the unglamorous stuff that actually determines whether a rural community survives. She’s testified about early intervention programs on Capitol Hill. She’s stood up at community meetings packed with residents furious about a data center project. She’s the reason there’s a paper trail on FCI Big Spring’s closure and what it’s doing to the families who depended on those jobs. This campaign is built on a record of actually being in the room.

She’s also a parent of a child with special needs. That’s not a talking point Austin Republicans can fake, no matter how many times they slap “family values” on a bill that guts the programs families actually need.

Her platform reads like a checklist of things Texas Republicans have spent a decade underfunding or ignoring. Protecting public schools, investing in rural healthcare, strengthening agriculture, planning honestly for a water future, and backing paid family leave and affordable childcare.

Salazar’s whole pitch is people-first solutions rooted in West Texas, not culture-war talking points imported from a cable news green room.

The district.

HD72 covers Coke, Coleman, Concho, Glasscock, Howard, Irion, Reagan, Runnels, Sterling, and Tom Green counties, basically the Concho Valley and the ranch and oilfield country around it, anchored by San Angelo (Tom Green County, roughly two-thirds of the district’s population) and Big Spring (Howard County). It is Drew Darby’s seat.

Demographics are 51.8% Anglo and 48.2% non-Anglo. Hispanic residents make up 40.3% of the district. Median household income runs well under the state average. Per capita income is $34,894 versus a state figure of $40,752, and nearly 22% of households earn under $25,000 a year.

It’s an older district. 17.1% are 65 or older versus 13.4% statewide, and it’s a heavily veteran district; over 11,000 veterans call it home. The economy runs on agriculture, ranching, and oil and gas (7.4% of employment versus 2.3% statewide) and on government jobs (18.6% of the workforce versus 14.1% statewide, driven in no small part by FCI Big Spring before the feds gutted it).

Housing is cheap by state standards. The average owner-occupied home value is $221,027 versus $366,039 statewide, but rent burden is brutal. 34% of renters pay more than a third of their income to keep a roof over their heads.

So this is a poorer, older, heavily rural, heavily veteran district with real pockets of Hispanic and Black population concentrated in specific counties, especially Howard and Reagan, sitting inside a state that is trending the other way politically even as its demographics shift.

In 2024, Trump led by 56 points here, Cruz led by 51 points, and Drew Darby ran unopposed. Turnout was only 62.1%. Darby also ran unopposed in 2022.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you this is a swing district, because it isn’t. The biggest goal in this election cycle should be to move the margins as far left as we can and see where we land, but this district would need a fundamental realignment to flip.

To make real gains, Salazar should focus where coalitions already exist, like Howard and Reagan Counties. They’re already majority non-Anglo with heavy Hispanic populations. That’s turnout work, and turnout is exactly where rural Democratic campaigns bleed out.

She has to run on material conditions since this district is poorer than the state average, older, more dependent on government jobs, and just got hit with a federal prison closure that gutted Big Spring’s employment base. That’s the actual local economy that may have a chance of cutting through in a district where “Democrat” has been a slur for two decades.

Democrats would be doing themselves a lot of favors to exploit the local fights the GOP has created. The Dove Creek data center fight, the water transparency mess, the “sanctuary county for the unborn” ordinance. These are all local controversies where the incumbent’s party is on the unpopular side, and where Salazar has already shown up in person.

Salazar’s campaign looks less like a Hail Mary and more like the first real investment anyone’s made in finding out what this district actually looks like when someone bothers to organize it. It’s a really good thing, but it isn’t easy.

The incumbent.

Drew Darby (R), an attorney and businessman, runs Drew Darby and Associates Law Firm and owns Surety Title Company out of San Angelo. He’s held HD72 since 2007. He chairs House Energy Resources, sits on House Administration and State Affairs, and got a seat on the special committee investigating the July 2025 flooding disaster. In a district built on oil, gas, and increasingly on data centers hungry for both power and water, chairing Energy Resources is a savvy bit of self-preservation.

And I didn’t catch on to how much until, in 2025, he had the gall to imply that the oil industry is taxed TOO MUCH.

Too much. Like killing millions of people a yearand destroying our planet deserves less tax.

Before Austin, he chaired the San Angelo Water Advisory Board and the Lake Nasworthy Advisory Board. This is a man who has literally chaired the region’s water planning bodies and now, decades later, is presiding over a district where residents are showing up to town halls furious about opaque data center deals and where Salazar is out there saying West Texas needs “honest water policies now.” Darby’s been the water guy all along.

In Shiloh Salazar’s own words.

Below are some questions I asked Salazar, based on previous reader polls, along with her answers.

Q: Do you support a statewide minimum wage increase to at least $15/hour?

I support this, but I actually think we need more of a sliding scale because in some areas even 15 is not enough. As someone who lives in West Texas, in the rural areas, I’m tired of a one-size-fits-all when it comes to things like the economy.

Q: Do you oppose school vouchers and efforts to privatize public education?

As a former public school educator at a Title I school, I’m against vouchers. I have a daughter who was in special education with a district that had only online therapists because they couldn’t afford to hire someone to keep them in rural West Texas. I’m actually in favor of doing a sales tax on the data that data centers acquire and store, and using that sales tax to fund our schools.

Q: Should higher education in Texas be free or debt-free at public institutions?

100%. As a student whose parents worked in public service and just over the threshold of too much for aid but not enough to help support me through getting a degree, I became an unconventional student who took classes online a little here a little there when I could afford them because we lived in that predicament. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a degree; I’m still a few classes shy of that degree because money got tight, but we were always just over that threshold and never quite made enough to keep going.

Q: Should Texas guarantee free school meals to all K–12 students, regardless of income?

100%. Again, I live in a Title I area where over 69% of the population is below the poverty line. I was pregnant, making only 669 a month working at the ISD, feeding kids some of my pregnancy snacks because lunch wasn’t enough, and they knew dinner would be short-handed. If we are going to force families to send their kids to school 8 hours a day, we better feed those babies.

Q: Should Texas end tax breaks and regulatory loopholes for oil and gas companies, including exemptions from emissions reporting and waste disposal standards?

Yes. We should go one step further and make sure that they are not doing in-house testing, and make sure a third party is testing and sending those results in a way that can be requested as open records if a need should arise. We should also be taxing oil and gas a lot more on the routes they take and helping rural counties that are primarily oil industries keep up with the county roads that were not made to handle that load. For example, in 2019, Howard County had $ 57 million dollars worth of road damage to county roads and had one of the worst safety ratings on those roads in the state of Texas. Many roads were deemed deadly because of their conditions, yet Howard County doesn’t have the tax base to fix those roads.

Bonus Question: What does being a Democrat mean to you in 2026?

Look, I’m running in 10 counties, and only 3 have party chairs; of those 3, they’re very small and not very active. I am in an R+56 area. I don’t have time to worry about the title or the party. To me, I’m a Democrat because I’m pushing to get people back at the kitchen table and talk about what we are going through and how we can work together and fix it. I don’t play party politics, though. I will call out both sides when they aren’t doing the right thing. I have told thousands of voters I don’t need you to become a Democrat; I need you to vote for the person that actually cares. Being a democrat out here means you get hated the moment you open your eyes, until you put the party aside and start talking about an electric bill that’s $500 that we both can’t afford.

Shiloh Salazar is running because the electric bill is $500 and nobody in Austin is losing sleep over it.

Meanwhile, Drew Darby, who’s had nineteen years and a chairmanship over the region’s own water board to actually fix something, spent 2025 arguing the oil industry gets taxed too much while his district’s roads crumble and his constituents ration lunch money.

HD72 isn’t flipping this cycle. That was never the pitch. But somebody finally showed up to find out what happens when you organize a district everyone else wrote off, and that alone is worth paying attention to. Watch this one.

You can learn more about Shiloh Salazar on her website, Facebook, or TikTok.

Categories Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Texas, Trump

John Thompson: Please! No More Miracles!

By dianeravitch

October 21, 2026 //

Belief in transformative miracles is a recurring theme in the history of American education. Sometimes educators are compelled to embrace “miracles”” based on word of mouth. Other times, the media push educators to do something without evidence, but lots of enthusiasm. In 2000, I wrote a book called Left Back, which traced the rise and fall of cures and nostrums in the classroom. These bursts of enthusiasm are seldom promoted by teachers; they are too busy doing their job to come up with revolutionary ideas.

John Thompson reports from the front lines in Oklahoma:

Republican Mike Mazzie, an anti-Muslim freemarket ideolgue, showed more civility in the recent gubernatorial debate with Democrat Cyndi Munson than he did in the Republican primary debate. Maybe that is why he received less fact-checking from the daily press.

So, I will focus on my field of expertise, and limit my fact-checking to Mazzie’s claims regarding public education.

First, he has proposed “eliminating the state income tax over six years, and vowed to get rid of property taxes on homes owned by those who are 65 or older.” Both taxes play an essential role in funding public education, which has been weakened over the last quarter of a century by the test-driven mandates that Mazzi supports, budget cuts, the Ryan Walter’s administration, Covid, and demographic changes.

In his Republican primary debate, Mazzie denied that those cuts would hurt schools because, Oklahoma has 541 school districts “run by liberal left-leaning radical socialists.”

Three of his opponents, who had decades of experience in public education, pushed back.

Sen. Adam Pugh said he rejected Mazzie’s words “wholeheartedly.”

Superintendent John Cox called Mazzie’s comment “a direct hit on him. ‘I am an extremely conservative person, and I’m not that radical socialist.’”

And, Robert Franklin, who is now running for State Superintendent:

Invoked his years as an assistant principal …”When people made fun of one another, we call that bullying. We also put people in detention for that kind of stuff.” He said the rhetoric disqualified Mazzie from his vote, flatly without apology.

In the recent debate with Rep. Munson, the closest thing Mazzie said in terms of funding schools after extreme tax cuts was criticizing her for wanting “to pour more and more money into an already dysfunctional system.” And then he changed the subject to school choice, legislative bans for boys playing in girls sports, and requirements that boys should not be in girls bathrooms.

Mazzie’s other claims that need fact checking involve the so-called “Mississippi Miracle.”

He promised:

I will hire a statewide literacy director in my first week in office to replicate the very successful Mississippi model, which took them from 50th to first in the country in reading outcomes. The keys for their success are phonics curriculum, enough reading coaches statewide, and accountability.

Mazzie oversimplified some numbers about Mississippi’s rankings. But, more importantly, he offered no evidence that Oklahoma, even if it doesn’t eliminate its income and/or property taxes, would provide nearly as much funding as Mississippi did for literacy, which started with $100 million grant from the Barksdale Institute, which would be worth almost $200 million today.

And he doesn’t seem to understand that since federal, Covid funding has run out, effective, but expensive, high-dosage tutoring is being replaced by dubious, digital tutoring models.

Neither does Mazzie seem to understand how accountability-driven test prep, that took off due to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), undermined the teaching of History, Science, Critical Thinking, Recess, Arts, and Music. And, that is crucial because background knowledge is the key to reading, and the data-driven mindset that he wants were the major reasons why reading has declined.

Mazzie should also read the Report: Beyond the Surface: Leveraging High-Quality Instructional Materials for Robust Reading Comprehension Learning brief, funded by Tulsa’s Schusterman Family Foundation. As reported by the 74, One of the lead authors, Dan Reynolds, asked, “Are we teaching our K-4 kids that reading is just tasks? Are we teaching them that they just need to label stuff and fill out graphic organizers?”

Reynolds said the “Surface-level” instruction they discovered, “weakens instruction for students and can later manifest as a skills disadvantage.”

And, Mazzie doesn’t seem to know the history of simpler, cheaper reforms producing brief and short-lived gains. Yes, Mississippi produced big gains in 4^th grade reading, even when it used NAEP test scores, which are more reliable than state tests that are designed to be taught to. But Mississippi’s 8^th grade scores remain lower than they were in 2002. This indicates that retentions and test prep haven’t improved reading comprehension.

Even worse, as Mississippi ramped up 8^th grade reading prep, evidence has grown that they are increasingly teaching kids to hate reading. For instance, Wired magazine reported how students would:

Grab a Chromebook and log in, at speeds ranging from feet-dragging to actively resistant. They open the StudySync software program, which shows them each a series of questions tailored to their weaknesses. Their faces look like they’re being marched to the guillotine.

And the article ends with the teacher saying that she “can’t think of a single student across her five periods who reads for fun, who considers her class anything beyond an ordeal to be survived.”

By the way, the debate prompted me to read new claims by the supporters of the “Miracle.” For instance, I reread a study that is representative of the rewriting of history that is being presented as evidence that the “Mississippi Miracle,” will be transformative because it is bringing back NCLB’s accountability system. It said that, “There is at least one study about the fact that NCLB led to achievement gains.”

That study actually explained that the “main advantage to using NAEP data for our analysis is that it is a low-stakes exam that is not directly tied to any state’s standards or assessments.” And, it found that, “Accountability has produced substantial gains in math skills but not in reading.” It estimated that, by 2007, as No Child Left Behind, “8^th grade reading dropped by 3.8%.”

In conclusion, Mazzie seems completely unaware of both, peer reviewed social and cognitive science, and what actually happens in schools. Having had decades of experience working with Republicans, like Robert Franklin, the outstanding candidate for State Superintendent, I’m dismayed by the way he promoted fact-free claims. Having served in the nonpartisan MAPS for Kids, where we listened to national experts, as well as local educators, patrons, and students, I’ve worked in team efforts to tackle complex and interconnected education challenges, as well as witnessing the damage done by ideology-driven true believers in simplistic, cheap, market-driven mandates.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Oklahoma

Meg White: Spellings and Duncan Want to Revive Their Failed Programs

By dianeravitch

October 21, 2026 //

Charters proved to be the stepping stone to vouchers, persuading parents they school was a consumer choice.-z

Education advocate Meg White writes about one of the worst ideas of our time: Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan have teamed up to support a revival of No Chid Left Behind and Race to the Top.

They might as well call their effort, “Make failure great again!”

If it didn’t work the first time, do it again.

Both programs shared a common strategy: Test and punish. George W. Bush’s NCLB created a singular focus on standardized test scores as the measure of schools. Educators were told that they must raise scores every year or face dire consequences, including turning the school over to a charter organization or private management; firing and replacing teachers and the principal; closing the school.

The unintended consequences: teaching to the test, once considered unethical, became the norm; narrowing of the curriculum to only the subjects tested, reducing time for history, civics, science, recess, and the arts; cheating. Testing became the goal of schooling, rather than a measure.

Duncan’s Race to the Top dangled big cash rewards to states if they adopted his program: evaluate teachers by the rise or fall of student test scores; fire teachers who don’t raise scores: adopt the Common Core; enact laws to permit charter schools.

Together, these two federal programs thoroughly demoralized the teaching profession and caused enrollments in teachers’ colleges to plummet. They crushed the joy of teaching and learning without achieving their goals. Teachers were unjustly fired. Charter schools were opened by for-profit entrepreneurs, as well as grifters and profit-seeking corporations. The charter industry boomed but also burst, as charters closed almost as frequently as they opened.

NCLB required that every school must ensure that every student reached “proficiency” on standardized tests, a clearly impossible goal, by 2014.

Race to the Top blamed teachers and schools for low scores. Duncan wanted the public to know how terribly the schools were doing. He counted on the adoption of Common Core and the spread of charter schools to produce a huge jump in test scores.

On the very last day of the Obama administration, the Department of Education quietly released an evaluation admitting that Race to the Top had failed to achieve its goals.

Meg White writes:

Two former U.S. education secretaries—one Republican and one Democrat—argue that the federal government needs to stop just handing out money for public education and start demanding real results. Margaret Spellings, who served under President George W. Bush, and Arne Duncan, who served under President Barack Obama, have offered their collective ideas on how to strengthen public education, many years later.

Under their proposed plan, the federal government would provide funding to states, pay for scientific research on how kids learn best, and ensure test scores are made public so schools cannot hide poor performance. State governments would be responsible for setting high standards and choosing the actual teaching methods without lowering the expectations to make their states look better. Spellings and Duncan refer to the success in Mississippi, saying, “Mississippi’s historic gains in student test scores since 2013 does not come at the expense of any other state. Instead, it’s a chance for those states to learn from and build on Mississippi’s progress (edweek.org).

Regarding the Mississippi miracle, I wrote about this earlier this year. Much controversy surrounds the increase in test scores.

Their bipartisan plan outlines several goals for every state to ensure student success from early childhood through graduation. First, they suggest schools focus on early learning by giving every child access to high-quality preschool and ensuring they can read well by the third grade. Second, middle schoolers need to learn practical skills, specifically finance and technology. Finally, for future preparation, high schools must provide access to advanced classes so that every graduate leaves with a clear path to a job, trade school, or college, regardless of their family’s income (edweek.org).

Critics, educators, and policy experts argue that this approach is fundamentally flawed because it heavily relies on strategies that failed under initiatives like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT). When federal funding is tied to standardized tests, schools face tremendous pressure to meet those numbers. This forces teachers to teach to the test. Consequently, this dynamic narrows the curriculum, systematically pushing out untested subjects like history, art, music, and physical education (edweek.org).

To avoid losing federal money or facing public embarrassment, many states historically responded by lowering their testing bars so more students would technically pass. This creates a false illusion of progress where state data looks positive, but independent national audits show that actual student performance has stagnated or declined.

If they are serious about research on how children learn best, they will see that it is not scripted curricula or one-size-fits-all literacy programs.

This strategy has failed because it treats low achievement strictly as a bureaucratic problem that can be solved with goals and data, completely ignoring any socioeconomic inequalities that can predict a child’s success. It does nothing to address underfunding in low-income districts, food insecurity, unstable housing, or the widespread teacher shortages caused by low pay and poor working conditions.

Imposing top-down mandates from Washington ignores the challenges of different communities, and strips local educators of the flexibility they need to build tailored solutions for their students. Hiring uncertified and inexperienced teachers does not support strong pedagogy for students who need good teachers.

Spellings and Duncan conclude, “This is a moment for national leadership. We call on the president, Congress, governors, and education leaders to put student achievement back at the center of the nation’s agenda. Washington should provide the direction, research, and transparency. States should set high expectations and act when schools or students fall short. Parents should hold all of us accountable for results(edweek.org). This is a repeat of the failed policies of NCLB and RTTT.

NCLB and its strict test-based accountability system created unintended consequences that damaged public education. The law included an outrageous expectations that 100% of American students achieve academic “proficiency” in reading and math by 2014, which was statistically impossible.

No Child Left Behind was built on the mistaken belief that low test scores stemmed entirely from ineffective teachers or indifferent administrators who required threats to improve. By focusing on classroom performance, the policy overlooked the systemic, out-of-school challenges that directly hinder student success—including chronic poverty, food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and massive funding disparities between school districts.

Race to the Top pressured states to alter their education policies for a share of $4.35 billion in grants, but ultimately failed to improve student test scores. This failure stemmed first from a rushed adoption of the Common Core State Standards. The initiative forced states to tie teacher job security to standardized test scores using unproven statistical models. States made unrealistic promises to turn around failing schools in four years, yet the federal prize money amounted to a mere 1% of state education budgets—far too little to execute such massive structural overhauls (economicpolicyinstitute.org).

Ultimately, RTTT repeated past policy mistakes by relying on a narrow, data-and-testing approach that hyper-focused on classroom metrics while completely ignoring the actual out-of-school drivers of the achievement gap, such as deep childhood poverty, food insecurity, and unequal school funding (economicpolicyinstitute.org). If Congress seriously considers data on charter schools, vouchers, and Educational Savings Accounts, they need to look at their high cost and lack of success in Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. It didn’t work there, but depending on where you get your news, there were miraculous gains in test scores.

Two former secretaries of education who initiated failed programs, are again suggesting ideas that didn’t work, and again do not address the extrinsic issues students face before they ever get to school.

These are my reflections for today.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Propaganda, Race to the Top

Trump Claims That Schools in 5 States Encourage Transgender Surgery

By dianeravitch

October 20, 2026 //

At a rally a few days ago in Dalton, Georgia, Trump made the preposterous claim that five states allow schools to promote transgender surgery.

We got critical race theory and transgender mutilization insanity out of our schools. I mean, we have five states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy three or four days later. It’s true. And teachers make — somebody makes a decision. Can you imagine? Goodbye, Timmy. I love you so much.

I’ll see you later. And you say where’s my son? My son is in the hospital. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? They don’t even need approval. It’s sick. You’ll have five — I think Minnesota and some others. I think it’s five or six states. You know that, right? So — and we made English the official language of the United States of America.

He told the same story about the notorious five states repeatedly in the 2024 election, and each time he said it, the news media said it was false. He never produced evidence. Never. Not one single instance.

No teacher. No student. No Timmy. No Tammy.

At first, I was outraged that no journalist called him out for this lie.

But as I read the speech, I realized there were so many lies that it would be overwhelming to correct them all.

Please, if you can stomach it, read the clips from this speech given in Dalton, Georgia, on October 16, 2026.

Categories Fake News, Fraud, Gender, Lies, Trump

Andy Spears: Tennessee Republicans Want State Takeover of Nashville Schools, Despite Record of Failure

By dianeravitch

October 20, 2026 //

Andy Spears is a veteran education journalist from Tennessee. He writes on his blog that Tennessee Republicans want the state to take control of the public schools in Nashville. They have already taken over the schools of Memphis.

They are unfazed by the fact that Tennessee’s first effort to take over “failing schools” was a disastrous failure. It was called “the Achievement School District” and was launched with bold promises of catapulting low-performing schools into high-performing schools. Other states copied Tennessee’s lead without waiting for results. When the results came in, the low-performing schools were still low-performing schools. The state has no magic formula.

He writes:

Tennessee Republicans spent the past two legislative sessions engineering a state takeover of Memphis schools. Now, they’ve set their sights on Nashville.

State Rep. Scott Cepicky of Maury County, who chairs one of two Education Committees in the Tennessee House of Representatives, told WKRN in Nashville that he’s looking at an effort to have the state take over Nashville schools.

“We’ve already gone after Memphis, and now it’s Nashville’s next,” Cepicky told the radio show host.

Cepicky also spoke about the comptroller potentially doing a financial audit: “I am asking the Speaker to do a forensic audit on Nashville to start the process of looking at taking them over. We’re going to get the comptroller involved, financially.

A board appointed by Tennessee Republican leaders now has authority over Memphis schools, after some legal wrangling that delayed the takeover. That board includes the leader of a dark money issue advocacy organization that has been at the forefront of state education policy since 2010 – Tennessee Score.

Tennessee has a terrible track record in the school takeover business. The so-called Achievement School District, run by the state, was supposed to turn schools around in Memphis. Instead, the ASD failed massively, leaving students and Memphis communities behind.

Four Tennessee schools are now returning to local control after getting taken over by the state ten years ago. The Memphis-area schools were brought into the Achievement School District with the promise from state leaders to turn things around.

But the schools are now returning to Shelby County Schools with no significant improvement in test scores.

The latest data from the Department of Education shows each of the four schools report less than five percent of students performing at grade level. ASD as a whole reports just 4.5 percent of students performing at grade level.

This is the type of terrible policy Cepicky and his GOP colleagues want to bring to Nashville schools.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Failure, State Takeover, Tennessee

Texas Evangelicals Lead the Fight to Eliminate Separation of Church and State

By dianeravitch

October 20, 2026 //

Robert Downen wrote for The Texas Monthly about the Texas-hatched plan to make the United States a “Christian nation.”

He opened:

Dan Patrick calls the separation of church and state a lie and has worked to infuse Christianity into Texas institutions. Trump is helping him take that strategy nationwide.

Dan Patrick is the state’s powerful far-right Lieutenant Governor. Before he entered politics, he was a talk-show host and was considered a mini-Rush Limbaugh, completely lacking any trace of compassion. His goal now is to spread Christian nationalism.

Anyone who has studied American history knows that the Founding Fathers had no intention of creating an evangelical Christian nation. If they did, they would have written it into the Constitution. Indeed, the word religion appears only twice in the document:

The First Amendment says:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

Article VI, Clause 3, of the Constitution says:

“No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

But prominent religious extremists claim that the Founding Fathers actually wanted a decidedly Christian nation with no separation of church and state.

They must have forgotten to write it down.

Texas evangelicals are intent on imposing their views on everyone, and not just in Texas.

Robert Downen of The Texas Monthly wrote:

Flanked by a coterie of pastors, lawyers, a self-described prophet, and a former talk show host, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick stood in the Oval Office in June and boldly proclaimed the beginning of a new era for religious liberty. For far too long, he said, Americans of faith had been trampled underfoot by secularism, their sway over government held at bay by weaponized disinformation. “The separation of church and state is not in the Constitution,” Patrick said as President Donald Trump nodded from behind the Resolute Desk. “From this day forward, that phrase should have no power over people of all faiths ever again.”

It was a monumental moment. For decades, leaders of Texas’s religious right have argued that the Founding Fathers were primarily conservative evangelicals and that the First Amendment’s establishment clause was meant only to prevent the adoption of a specific Christian denomination as the national religion. Led by David Barton, an Aledo-based activist and self-described amateur historian, the movement contends that because the words “separation between church and state” do not appear in the U.S. Constitution, the notion that the founders intended to maintain a wall between the two is a myth that has been used by secularists to obscure America’s true Christian heritage. Rather than a bulwark against theocracy, they claim, the founders envisioned a wall that extends only one way—protecting the church from the government.

In Texas those theories have helped fuel a massive infusion of Christianity into public life, particularly in schools. State lawmakers have in recent years passed bills that require the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms; grant voluntary, school-sanctioned prayer time; and allow districts to replace counselors with religious chaplains. At the same time that Texas leaders have successfully pushed for school-voucher legislation that sends taxpayer money to private, often unregulated, religious schools, they have focused intently on what is taught in public classrooms. Barton, for example, served as an adviser to the State Board of Education’s recent overhaul of K–12 social studies curricula, a process that experts said inserted revisionist history into lessons and downplayed the contributions of non-Christians.

Patrick’s Oval Office remarks, delivered as part of the Department of Justice’s Religious Liberty Commission, which he coleads with Trump’s former housing secretary Ben Carson, were a high-water mark for the movement. Now, with a friendly president and U.S. Supreme Court, Patrick and his allies are working to codify their views into federal policy. The result would be an America that looks a whole lot more like Texas.

A few decades ago, the ideas championed by Patrick would have been considered fringe, even to many conservative Christians, according to Joseph Locke, a historian at the University of North Texas and author of One State Under God: A History of Religion in Texas. “To see [these ideas] sponsored and supported at the highest level—and to see Texans at the head of it—is pretty remarkable,” Locke told me.

For most of the nation’s history, the church-state wall was treated as near sacrosanct by many Christians—especially Baptists, who looked to it for refuge from the violent persecution they faced in colonial America. Texas, with its heavy concentration of Southern Baptists, was aggressive in separating faith from policy in the decades after declaring its independence. Clergy were constitutionally barred from serving in state offices until 1869. For much of the next century, Locke said, the idea of advocating for policy on explicitly religious grounds would have been anathema to most Christians. Church-state separation “is not some kind of idea that emerged from the ether in the nineteen-sixties,” he told me. “This is something that was absolutely foundational to what it meant to be a Protestant in Texas.”

But that began to change amid growing conservative anxieties over secularism, feminism, gay rights, and racial desegregation. By the late eighties, a Republican coalition of business interests and politically active Christians led in much of the South. Enter Barton, whose theories gave leaders permission to abandon the church-state wall, Locke said, and to call for Christian dominance over American life.

Many scholars have pushed back against Barton’s work, noting that it is riddled with errors and false quotes. (His 2012 bestseller on Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was pulled by its Christian publisher because “basic truths just were not there,” the company said.) Still, his theories have become increasingly mainstream as acolytes of his movement have risen to power. Mayes Middleton, the Republican nominee for Texas attorney general, repeatedly invoked Barton’s theories during his three terms in the Texas Legislature. U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said Barton had a “profound influence on me and my work and my life.” And leaders of Barton’s advocacy group, WallBuilders, are frequently called to testify in statehouses across the country and reportedly are advising the Trump administration’s purge of “woke” history from the Smithsonian Institution.

The DOJ’s Religious Liberty Commission, which Patrick said he persuaded Trump to establish, is the latest example of the movement’s rising influence. Save for one Orthodox rabbi, its members are all conservative evangelicals or Catholics—including notable Texans such as Dr. Phil McGraw and Allyson Ho, a lawyer and the wife of hard-line Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho. Its findings are undergirded by the work of Barton, who also testified during one of the commission’s hearings.

Released in late June and based on several hearings held over the previous year, the commission’s 224-page draft report details what it says were intentional attempts, namely by the Biden and Obama administrations, to persecute people of faith. The examples range from a Navy SEAL who was punished after refusing, on religious grounds, to get a COVID-19 vaccine to a former Texas Children’s Hospital surgeon who was federally charged after leaking information about patients, including children, who sought gender-affirming care. (The DOJ dropped the charges after Trump’s reelection.)

Echoing the work of the DOJ’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which was formed in 2025, the report describes a wave of anti-Jewish discrimination sweeping across college campuses—including via student protests over Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. (One adviser to the commission was removed after speaking out against Israel and what she said was Zionist influence over the commission’s work; the only Muslim member resigned in protest of the removal and the war in Iran.) And the report includes dozens of examples in which conservatives faced social or workplace consequences for expressing their views on issues such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, or use of gender-inclusive pronouns.

photo of donald trump and dan patrick shaking hands — Trump greeting Patrick during a National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 1, 2025.Alex Brandon/AP

The report focuses heavily on discrimination in education—specifically in what it calls “government-run schools.” Across three sections totaling about forty pages, it describes numerous examples in which public school students, teachers, or other employees were prevented from expressing their religious views. Among the stories it highlights are that of a high school valedictorian who was told not to mention Jesus Christ during his graduation speech and a high school football coach in Washington state who was told by administrators not to pray midfield with his team after games. In both cases, as with many others mentioned in the report, the current system worked: After legal intervention, the valedictorian was allowed to give the speech as intended, and Joe Kennedy, the high school football coach, won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld his right to personal prayer.

Still, the commission recommended a host of policy changes that may ring familiar to Texans: enacting universal school-voucher legislation, allowing school-sanctioned prayer time, and ensuring that classrooms can hang religious displays such as the Ten Commandments.

The commission also wants a massive expansion of legal and public enforcement mechanisms. Any public official who accuses someone of improperly engaging in religious expression would be required to provide, within thirty days of their complaint, a written explanation that outlines where church-state separation appears in the Constitution or what law has been violated. Commissioners also want to create another DOJ task force to “track and prioritize litigation protecting religious liberty”—sourced from hotlines established across the federal government and education system. Disputes would then be handled by a federal judiciary that, per the report’s recommendation, would ideally be staffed by judges who are sympathetic to the commission’s interpretations of religious liberty.

Most consequential, the commission calls for the DOJ to issue guidance clarifying the “understanding of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state.” In other words: to make denial of the separation of church and state federal policy. To emphasize the point, Patrick has said, he may personally “print up a million bumper stickers saying there is no separation of church and state.”

Some religious experts warn that the report—and the ideas espoused in it—are dangerous. In comments submitted to the commission in July, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which advocates for the historical Baptist position on church-state separation, argued that it cherry-picks anecdotal evidence to support its claims. When I spoke with David Segal, a rabbi and a policy counsel for the BJC, he expressed concern that the report ignores the long history of attacks on the religious liberty of minority faiths, including the president’s frequent targeting of Muslims and the recent decision by the U.S. Department of Defense to drop 180 faith traditions from its list of recognized religions. “It’s very focused on anti-Christian bias at the expense of other kinds of religious discrimination,” Segal said. “They were trying to present one version of a story of how religious freedom looks or should look in this country, which is a story about how Christians are targeted by the government.”

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1. Habba’s $50 Million Pardon Payday

2. Witkoff Calls Putin Humanitarian

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Who is Cecilia Castellano?

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