Melania Trump Threatens to Sue Blogger and Destroy Her

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2026 //
6

The blogger known as “JoJo from Jerz” has an incredible, frightening story to tell. She has a large following on social media, and she uses it to say what she thinks about Donald and Melania Trump. She doesn’t like them.

Not long ago, she got a letter from a government attorney threatening to sue her for defamation. This is, of course, an outrage because the First Amendment protects her right to criticize the President, his policies, and his very public wife.

But the threat was clear. A lawsuit would bankrupt her, cause her to lose her home, and ruin her life. The federal government has unlimited resources; it can destroy your life simply by engaging in litigation. At some point, the ordinary citizen runs out of money.

I learned about the situation while reading Dean Obeidallah’s post, where he gave the background and explained that JoJo is Joanne Carducci, a single mother of two children.

Dean wrote:

I wasn’t surprised to hear that Donald and Melania have been threatening lawsuits against Joanne Carducci—better known as JoJoFromJerz—in an effort to silence her criticism. Carducci has millions of followers between X, Facebook, Threads, Substack and more. But what the Trump crime family didn’t count on is the type of fighter JoJo is and how people would rally to support her!

I spoke to JoJo about her ordeal that she only went public with in her Substack post on September 26, 2026, titled, “Be Best. Be Quiet. Or Be Bankrupted.” It was jaw-dropping to read how the Trumps—apparently led by Melania—had their lawyers send letters to JoJo threatening to sue her for criticizing Donald and the so-called “First Lady.” (In Trump’s case, Melania is far from the first lady—she’s more like the 100th!)

Having read Dean’s introduction, I then opened JoJo’s September 26, 2026, post, where she described the nightmare of being threatened by the Trumps, but most especially by Melania.

Jojo wrote:

For the first half of this year, Melania Trump was doing everything in her power to get me to shut up.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about this. I didn’t know how to talk about it. And if I’m being fucking honest, I’m scared to talk about it right now.

But I’m sick and tired of carrying it around, and I need to put it down.

And watching my fucking feed turn into a propaganda pageant for that self-anointed patron saint of women has exhausted whatever restraint I had left.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know something was happening earlier this year. I was trying to keep doing my work while worrying about my children, our home, my livelihood, and whether telling you what was happening could cost us everything.

Here’s what I didn’t tell you.

The president and the first lady of the United States of America were threatening to sue me.

Me. A single mother of two in New Jersey.

At first, the letters were about things I’d said about both of them, although mostly her, but over the next several months it became entirely about Melania. She wanted me to retract what I’d said and apologize, and when I wouldn’t, another letter would come, another accusation of defamation, another demand for money I didn’t have, until this woman’s wounded feelings had become something I had to consider every time I thought about my family’s future.

A prominent attorney who wasn’t able to help me told me I should do everything they asked because otherwise they would ruin me.

They would take my home.

And I don’t know how to explain what those words do to you when you’ve already had to rebuild your life from scratch, when the home somebody is telling you to be afraid of losing is the place you made out of everything you managed to save of yourself. There wasn’t some other fortune underneath us. There was this house, my work, and two children who depended on me to make it enough.

I cried every day for months, but I kept going because I had to keep going, because I didn’t have a choice, because my kids need me and their lives don’t stop to indulge two petulant narcissists who can’t stomach being criticized. There’s still dinner and soccer and baseball and laundry and life—the life I’ve worked so hard to make ordinary for them. They get to have that. They get to need things and forget things and go on being children without having to make room for whatever the first lady thinks she’s entitled to take out of their mother.

And I never told them. They still don’t know.

I didn’t want to scare them, didn’t want to give them a reason to look around their own home and wonder whether they would get to keep it, so I kept it from them, even as this constant background noise ran underneath everything else: two of the most powerful people in the world, with all their money and lawyers and access to the levers of power, had targeted me. 

My livelihood. My family. The life I was right there in the middle of trying to live. And I couldn’t make the enormity of that fit with how ordinary we were, how little we had to spare, how much damage they could do without it costing them anything they would miss.

She was swinging a fucking wrecking ball at a mosquito, and my children lived in the building.

For months, I told only the people closest to me and some incredible, heroic human beings—elected officials, people you might recognize from television—who showed up when I needed help. I sat on the rest because I was scared, and I hate that for me, but I fucking hate it for my country, too. I was afraid to tell you what the president and first lady were doing because I didn’t know what telling you might make them do next.

She never had to set foot in our house to make her presence felt in every room.

That’s the brutal, grotesque, fucking disgraceful truth.

And let’s be clear about what I do: I have never intentionally lied about her. When I’m talking about what these people say and do, I’m working from my understanding of the truth, what I can see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears. But a hell of a lot of my work is mockery and ridicule, because I’m a satirist and they’re public figures, and I have a right to point at the ridiculous fucking spectacle they’re making of this country and laugh.

They don’t have to like it. That couture-clad, cash-cushioned control freak was trying to turn free speech into a luxury item and price me out of my own fucking voice.

I don’t need to make shit up. With these two, the problem has never been a shortage of material.

Matt Platkin, New Jersey’s former attorney general, helped me for free, spending hours on the phone with me, giving his time and expertise at considerable personal cost, shepherding me through something I could never have begun to navigate alone. And he listened to me. He advised, explained, helped me understand what I was facing, but the decisions stayed mine. I still cry when I think about the sheer luck of somebody that good showing up in the middle of something that ugly, when I needed help I couldn’t afford and didn’t know how to find.

He’s an extraordinary fucking human being, and I owe him in ways I’ll never be able to adequately express, let alone repay.

Having him beside me felt like somebody putting a hand beneath a box I’d been holding so long my arms had started to shake. I still had to decide where to go with it, but I could finally take a breath without being afraid I’d drop everything. I kept returning to Timothy Snyder’s first lesson in On Tyranny: “Do not obey in advance.”

This is the beginning of her post. Please open and read it all.

It shows how thin-skinned the Trumps are, how ruthless they are, and what true courage looks like.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Grit, Injustice, Trump

Defying Federal Judge’s Order, Trump Cuts Down Hundreds of Trees in D.C. on Public Golf Course

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2026 //
4

Donald Trump is busy setting the world on fire, but his real concerns are remodeling the White Hiuse and the District of Columbia. He likes to defy environmental reviews and yo make irreversible changes.

One of his plans involves turning a public golf course in D.C. into a championship course. A federal judge ordered him not to make any changes without getting it cleared by her.

A “furious” federal judge excoriated the Trump administration Monday morning for cutting down hundreds of trees at East Potomac Golf Links, the historic course eyed for redevelopment by President Donald Trump, telling government lawyers they had cost their credibility by ignoring her repeated warnings to give notice before work continued.

Over the weekend, his team cut down 430 trees. Another 300 will be cut down. The judge is furious.

Trump thinks he is a king and doesn’t need permission. Fortunately for him, he’s surrounded by sycophants who do whatever he tells them.

Rick Maese of The Washington Post reported:


Government lawyers told U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes at an emergency hearing that approximately 430 trees were removed Saturday and that another 299 are still targeted for removal. Reyes ordered the government to stop cutting down trees until at least 2 p.m. Tuesday, by when she hopes to hear testimony from another administration official involved in the tree removal.

Reyes says she had been reluctant to issue a temporary restraining order in the case. But, she added, “I have no faith that the government isn’t going to cut them down unless there’s an order in place not to do so.”

Violating her order “by two seconds” would prompt contempt proceedings, the judge said.
“I am thoroughly unamused right now,” Reyes said as the hearing began. “I do not know how I could have made it any plainer. I did not want what happened to happen.”

At one point, Justice Department attorney Marissa Ann Piropato told Reyes that government lawyers “did our best” to keep the court apprised of any construction work at the course.

“No, you did not do your best,” Reyes responded, her voice rising. “You did your absolute worst.”
The hearing followed an emergency request filed late Sunday by preservationists seeking to stop the National Park Service from removing additional trees at the historic public golf course.

The D.C. Preservation League and two golfers allege that the administration is racing ahead with irreversible work while avoiding the environmental and historic-preservation reviews required for the president’s proposed transformation of East Potomac into a championship-level course.

Categories Trump

John Thompson: Why Are Oklahoma Republicans Bullying Their Muslim Neighbors?

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2026 //
1

John Thompson, historian and retired teachers in Oklahoma, questions the outbreak of bigotry towards Muslims, starting at the tip.

He writes:

Gov. Kevin Stitt recently ordered the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety and the Oklahoma Office of Homeland Security to determine whether the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) or any of their members, or the Muslim Brotherhood are a terrorism or public-safety threat. His order also directed state public safety leaders to advocate for federal action to designate the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as Foreign Terrorist Organizations under federal law.

The Tulsa World reported that CAIR responded by saying it and the Muslim Brotherhood do not share any organizational ties. And, CAIR is an “American civil rights and advocacy organization unaffiliated with any ‘offshoot, chapter, or agent of any foreign movement, organization, political party or government.’”

And, the Oklahoma Voice reported that Pauline Jones, a political science professor at University of Michigan added, “There’s a paper trail of trying to undermine CAIR,” but no evidence tying CAIR to terrorists. Such anti-Muslim efforts create “fear that’s nonsensical.” 

Moreover, Oklahoma State University’s Stephen Nemeth, an expert on international relations and terrorism, “said while ordering an investigation ‘sounds menacing,’ it’s more of a ‘convenient bogeyman.’” And, “It’s probably just a way to kind of gin up maybe some activism or voter interest.” 

CAIR’s Oklahoma Executive Director Veronica Laizure-Henry told NPR:

Throughout CAIR’s long history in Oklahoma, our civil rights organization has worked to protect the Constitution’s guarantees of free speech, religious freedom and equality under the law. We have also pursued justice for all people, including Oklahoma Muslims impacted by hate. … Our successful civil rights work in Oklahoma is exactly why Gov. Stitt is targeting our organization with debunked conspiracy theories. We look forward to continuing our civil rights work in Oklahoma and proving once again that the Constitution is stronger than any politician’s bigotry.

Moreover, the Oklahoman responded to Stitt’s call for “both the Oklahoma Legislature and the federal government to declare CAIR a terrorist organization” by reminding him of the “Oklahoma Standard,’” that calls for “kindness and inclusion.”

Yes, what we are seeing is a battle between the best and the worst of our state.

The Oklahoman also explained how the Interfaith Alliance of Oklahoma weighed in:

“The Interfaith Alliance of Oklahoma is deeply concerned about Governor Stitt’s executive order regarding Muslim organizations,” the organization said in a statement. “The executive order was issued without any evidence of what is being accused, and such unfounded claims are harmful to our Muslim neighbors.”

And it recalled how Gov. Kevin Stitt “showed commendable leadership when, in 2021, he welcomed nearly 2,000 refugees from Afghanistan after the city of Kabul was taken over by the Taliban.”

As the Oklahoman also reported, when “Imad Enchassi, senior imam of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City” learned of Stitt’s order, he said, “I could feel a chill going from the tip of my head to the bottom of my toes,” and “Our governor has a good relationship with us — he knows us and we know him. It was a slap in the face.”

In 2019, Stitt’s visited with Muslims during CAIR-OK-sponsored Muslim Day at the Capitol.  In 2023, Stitt pulled out of CAIR-OK sponsored Ramadan Iftar “due to wildfires raging in multiple areas of the state,” but a “CAIR-OK leader read Stitt’s planned remarks that the governor’s office sent to be shared with Oklahoma Muslims and others who attended the event at the Oklahoma History Center.”

And, the Oklahoman has reported about the ways that anti-Muslim bigotry has a long history, and how it’s exploding.  

Former state Sen. Mike Mazzei [R] who is running for governor,  had previously run against so-called “Sharia Law” and so-called Muslim terrorists. And he has been endorsed by Donald Trump. On the day when Mazzei and Trump spoke in Durant, Mazzei doubled down on his promise to prosecute CAIR.

Granted, such racism predates  today’s Trumpists, but there is a long history of many Oklahomans standing by their neighbors, while others commit to cruelty.

For instance, my former neighbor Mauree Turner was the nation’s first Black, non-binary, Muslim to be elected to a state legislature. But, as National Public Radio explained, Rep. Turner:

Was censured and removed from legislative committees. There had been a demonstration in the capitol against anti-trans measures with some scuffling between protesters and police. Afterwards, a protester went to Turner’s office to rest. Republican legislators accused them of “harboring a fugitive.”

 In 2017, I wrote about Ramadan Iftar with Our Elected Officials which “was a wonderful antidote to the worries that go along with life in our Red state. As usual, the diverse audience shared laughter and an opportunity to discuss where we go from here. In attendance were a dozen current or former state legislators, two school board members, a city councilman, and two candidates for governor.” 

As always in these interfaith gatherings, “the most humorous exchanges occurred when Iman Imad S. Enchassi and reform and conservative rabbies shared the stage and engaged in delightful banter.” This time, however, a Christian pastor was equally hilarious “when riffing off a classic CAIR/OK punch line.” When Executive Director Adam Soltani is told to “go back to where you come from,” he responds No!, he is not going back to Kansas.”

During its “2017 Legislative Wrap-Up,” CAIR led a discussion, which addressed the “surrealistic behavior” of so many members of the party that controls two branches of the Oklahoma government, and led to the conclusion, “We have to laugh together to protect our sanity – as we work together to save our public institutions.”

But, then, CAIR recognized the session’s “first disgrace,” a bill which passed out of a House committee which would “require a woman to get the written consent of the fetus’s father before obtaining an abortion.” The second was the effort to shrink the budget deficit by turning students who are identified as English Language Learners over to ICE for possible deportation.

Then, its public affairs coordinator said:

During the interim session, we will be planning community meetings on issue areas and helping you stay connected with your elected officials, even when they are not at the Capitol. We will continue to support and promote policies that maximize religious freedoms, Constitutional protections, and work towards eliminating inequality in Oklahoma. We look forward to your help making a more equal Oklahoma for all.

So, why are Gov. Stitt and Sen. Mazzei attacking an organization which they must know is an exemplar of the Oklahoma Standard? And, why are so many Republicans still making vicious attacks on their neighbors?

We know that a diverse range of Oklahomans will defend CAIR. But, will we be able to defeat the fear mongering of the state’s super majority of legislators?

Categories Bigotry, Ethics, Oklahoma, Religion

Marc Elias: No Doubt! Trump Lost the 2020 Election.

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2026 //
3

Marc Elias is a leading lawyer in defense of democracy. He has won numerous federal and state cases in defense of voting rights. In this post, Elias refutes The Big Lie.

By Marc Elias · Democracy Docket founder

This weekend, in an interview with Ted Koppel on CBS’s Sunday Morning, Steve Bannon confirmed what I have been saying for years: “The core belief of the MAGA movement is [Trump] won the 2020 election.”

When confronted with the fact that Trump and his allies lost more than 60 court cases challenging dddddddssstsdtsrsrssssssssssrsrrerzzfzzrz sadp the election results, Bannon resorted to a familiar GOP tactic. He falsely suggested that the cases were thrown out on technicalities: “We can go debate this another time, but we didn’t have standing. We never even got into court.”

Even worse, Koppel told viewers that Bannon was “technically correct; they didn’t have standing. They couldn’t find a judge who thought they had a significant case worth hearing.”

Koppel may have meant that the cases failed because they lacked merit. But what he said is simply wrong.

Trump and his allies found plenty of judges willing to hear them out, in many cases through hours or even days of testimony and argument. Those judges listened, weighed the evidence and ruled against them.

I know, because I was the lawyer who helped Joe Biden defeat those cases one by one.

Correcting the record matters as we approach another election in which Trump and the GOP are once again spreading lies. So let me put this one to bed, once and for all.

In 2022, a group of prominent conservatives reviewed every one of the 64 cases that Trump and his allies brought in the six key battleground states. The group included former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, former Republican Sen. John Danforth and retired federal appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig, along with two other retired federal judges and another former Republican senator.

Their conclusion was stark: “Donald Trump and his supporters have failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results of the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Most importantly, their report directly rebuts the claim Bannon is making today: that Trump never got his day in court. “Of the 64 cases brought by Trump and his supporters,” they wrote, “twenty were dismissed before a hearing on the merits, fourteen were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before a hearing on the merits, and 30 cases included a hearing on the merits.”

In other words, fewer than one-third of the cases were dismissed by a court before reaching the merits. In another 14, Trump’s side walked away rather than test its claims in front of a judge.

Trump’s problem was never a lack of opportunity. As the report’s authors put it, “Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states.”

Consider the record.

In Arizona, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and the state Republican Party went to court claiming that Election Day votes for Trump had been wrongly thrown out. Over a six-hour hearing, the claim that thousands of voters had been disenfranchised fell apart. The campaign narrowed its case to a handful of ballots and the judge dismissed it.

In Wisconsin, Trump requested recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties, the state’s two largest Democratic strongholds. The recounts increased Biden’s lead.

Trump then lost in federal court and before the state’s conservative-majority Supreme Court.

The federal judge, whom Trump himself appointed, found that Trump had standing, held a daylong hearing, and ruled against him anyway: “This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits.”

When the Trump campaign asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to throw out more than 221,000 absentee ballots, the conservative court refused. As one justice noted, the president “failed to point to even one vote cast in this election by an ineligible voter.”

In Nevada, Trump’s electors filed and litigated a full election contest, with evidence submitted by both sides. They alleged everything from a vote-buying scheme to illegal voting to malfunctioning voting machines in Clark County. In the end, the judge found that they had failed to prove their allegations “under any standard of proof.” The Nevada Supreme Court unanimously affirmed.

In Michigan, the Trump campaign’s lawsuit over ballot counting rested on a poll watcher’s account of what someone else had told her. The judge rejected it as “inadmissible hearsay within hearsay.” In another Michigan case, a judge heard evidence on claims of fraud at Detroit’s TCF Center and found the plaintiffs’ version of events “incorrect and not credible.”

In Georgia, every ballot was counted three times, including a full hand count. There, one of the Trump campaign’s first lawsuits fell apart within a day. It concerned just 53 absentee ballots in Chatham County. County election officials testified that the ballots had arrived on time, and the judge dismissed the case at the end of the hearing.

Then there is Pennsylvania, where Rudy Giuliani appeared in court himself. He told the judge there was “widespread, nationwide voter fraud.” But under questioning, he admitted, “This is not a fraud case.”

In dismissing the lawsuit, the judge wrote that the campaign had offered “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations.” On appeal, a Trump-appointed judge wrote for a unanimous panel: “Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

Many of these cases were reviewed by appeals courts or state supreme courts with Republican-appointed or conservative majorities. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up any of them.

The Big Lie survives because reporters fail to push back on claims like Bannon’s. The lie that Trump won the 2020 election is a disease, and every suggestion that Trump never had his day in court helps it spread.

Over the past six years, that disease has infected our politics and our culture, and it has bred new conspiracy theories along the way. It drove insurrectionists to storm the U.S. Capitol. And it helped Trump win a second term, and with it a second chance to undermine our democracy.

To fight back, we must correct the record — not just for the past but for the future.

Categories Arizona, Elections, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Students Pay the Price for Failing Voucher Programs Where Education is a Fiction

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2026 //
0

Bruce Baker has written a sterling article about the real price of voucher programs. Who pays? Students.

Universal voucher programs like those of Arizona and Florida provide little, if any, educational benefit to students. They attend schools where teachers need not be certified or experienced. Their curriculum is non-existent. Their standards are phony.

The state pays for them not to get an education. The same may be said of home schooling, where in many cases uneducated parents are sharing their lack of an education with their children.

The result of this negligence is that these young people will earn less money over their lifetimes and have limited opportunities because of their mediocre or non-existent education.

The parents and the state are stigmatizing children by giving them a voucher.

The infamous federal report called “A Nation at Risk” warned about “a rising tide of mediocrity.” Today’s vouchers and home schoolers are responsible for “a rising tide of failure.”

Baker writes:

Back in January 2013, I wrote about three Kansas judges who saw right through the state’s claim that deep funding cuts would cause no harm. The Shawnee County District Court panel in Gannon v. State of Kansas (decision, p. 188) put it this way:

Simply, school opportunities do not repeat themselves and when the opportunity for a formal education passes, then for most, it is most likely gone. We all know that the struggle for an income very often – too often – overcomes the time needed to prepare intellectually for a better one.

If the position advanced here is the State’s full position, it is experimenting with our children which have no recourse from a failure of the experiment.

The Kansas experiment was a legislature cutting school budgets and betting that nobody would be hurt. That was bad enough. But at least in Kansas, the children were still in schools. There were still teachers, curricula, and test results that a court could look at.

A decade later, Arizona and Florida are running a different experiment. They hand public money to parents, place few limits on how it is spent, and ask almost nothing about whether the child learned anything. If that experiment fails for a particular child, who answers for it? Who does the 18-year-old sue?

The new experiment: money out, no questions asked

Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, expanded to all students in 2022, now serves more than 100,000 children and is expected to cost over $1 billion a year. Florida followed in 2023 with universal eligibility and a homeschool ESA, the Personalized Education Program (PEP), worth roughly $8,000 per child.

Consider what the statutes actually require of the parent. Under A.R.S. § 15-2402, the Arizona parent signs an agreement to use “a portion” of the money to provide instruction in reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies and science. That is the whole of the academic obligation. Then comes the remarkable part, subsection I: a signed agreement “constitutes school attendance” for purposes of the state’s compulsory attendance law. The contract is the education, as far as the state is concerned.

There is no testing requirement for ESA students in Arizona, no curriculum approval, no portfolio, and no evaluator. Even homeschool guides that are friendly to the program say so plainly. The state checks receipts, not learning.

Florida asks slightly more. PEP families must submit a student learning plan and have the child take a nationally norm-referenced test each year, with results sent to the scholarship funding organization (FLDOE PEP FAQ; Step Up PEP Family Handbook). But what triggers loss of funding is failing to take and submit the test, not the score. A child can test at a first-grade level in tenth grade and the money keeps flowing.

That is the experiment. The state funds the choice, defines the choice as compliance, and measures nothing that would tell anyone whether the child is learning.

What the money has bought

Reporters in both states have spent three years documenting what this money buys. Some of it was approved under the rules. Some was flagged as improper only after the fact. All of it was spent from accounts that exist, by law, to educate a child.

Baker here posts a chart that includes tickets to theme parks, video games, pianos, lingerie, jewelry, gift cards, payments to parents, trampolines, kayaks, appliances, paddle boards, LEGO sets, dolls, stuffed animals, surfboards, treadmills, swing sets, and much more. Open the link to see his chart.

In fairness to the programs’ defenders, Arizona’s education department maintains that most purchases are valid and that misspending is a small share of the total. Florida’s administrator, Step Up For Students, requires a statement of educational benefit for theme park tickets and caps them at $500 a year (WFTV). When Florida legislators tried to tighten the list in 2024, families lobbied against it and the restrictions failed.

But “small share” is the wrong frame. Arizona auto-approved purchases under $2,000 — over a million requests and $124 million — to clear a backlog, with plans to audit later. Of 18,000 parents flagged for $10.3 million in banned purchases, only six were referred for prosecution. And every audit is an audit of purchases. None asks the only question that matters to the child: was anyone teaching me to read?

The legal question: who does the 18-year-old sue?

Imagine a young woman turning 18 in Phoenix or Orlando. For a decade, her ESA paid for theme park passes, a television, a trampoline and a lot of LEGO. Nobody ever taught her to read beyond a primer. She has no transcript and no diploma. The state that funded all of it called her “in attendance” the entire time. What are her options?

I’m not a lawyer, and what follows is a policy researcher’s tour of the doctrinal terrain, not legal advice. But the terrain is not encouraging.

1. Sue the parent. Arizona abolished parental immunity in Broadbent v. Broadbent (1995), replacing it with a “reasonable and prudent parent” standard. Florida has never gone that far. So in Arizona, at least, a negligence claim against a parent is not barred at the door. But she would then run into the doctrine of educational malpractice. Since Peter W. v. San Francisco Unified School District (1976), courts have refused to recognize a duty of care for academic outcomes. They cite the lack of a workable standard of care, uncertain causation, and the burden on schools. If courts won’t hold trained, licensed educators to a duty to teach a child to read, a court is unlikely to impose one on a parent the legislature expressly freed from any measurable standard.

A narrower theory may be stronger: misappropriation. The Arizona statute says ESA money may be used “only” for the expenses of the qualified student. A diamond necklace or a family Disneyland trip is not that. A custodial-account or constructive-trust theory, treating the parent as having diverted money held for the child’s benefit, at least fits the facts. But that recovers the misspent dollars, not the lost education. And a judgment against a parent with no assets is worth little.

2. Sue the vendor. The private school, the online program, the tutoring center or the “ESA-approved” camp are private actors. A contract or consumer-fraud claim might reach a vendor that took money and delivered nothing. But a vendor that delivered exactly what was purchased (a ski pass, a paddleboard) did nothing wrong. And educational malpractice bars claims that the instruction itself was inadequate.

3. Sue the state, under the federal Constitution. This is where the Kansas panel’s warning bites hardest. San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973) held there is no fundamental federal right to education. DeShaney v. Winnebago County(1989) held the Due Process Clause generally imposes no duty on the state to protect a child from harm inflicted by a private actor, including a parent. The one federal appellate ruling to recognize a right to a basic minimum education, Gary B. v. Whitmer (6th Cir. 2020), was vacated when the full court took it up after the case settled. She might argue that the state created the danger by funding the deprivation and deeming it lawful attendance. That theory is untested in this setting.

4. Sue the state, under the state constitution. Both states have education clauses. Florida’s is among the strongest in the country, declaring education a “paramount duty” and requiring a “high quality system of free public schools.” In Bush v. Holmes (2006), the Florida Supreme Court struck down a voucher program for diverting public funds to private schools outside that uniform system. But in Citizens for Strong Schools v. State Board of Education (2019), a divided court held that “high quality” offered no judicially manageable standard. More fundamentally, state adequacy litigation produces prospective, system-wide remedies. It is not a damages action for an individual who already aged out.

5. Ask the state to step in. Ordinarily, a child receiving no education might trigger truancy enforcement or an educational neglect inquiry. In Arizona, that door is closed by statute: the signed ESA agreement constitutes school attendance under § 15-2402(I). When the state does catch misspending, its remedy is to suspend the account or send it to collections. Any money recovered goes back to the state, not to the child whose education it was meant to buy.

So the honest answer to the legal question is: almost none. The 18-year-old is, in the Kansas panel’s words, a subject of an experiment with no recourse from its failure. The difference is that in Kansas, the state was cutting the budget of institutions still obligated to teach her. In Arizona and Florida, the state has written itself out of that obligation and handed the obligation, and the money, to someone the law does not hold to any measurable standard.

Please open the link and finish reading this excellent critique.

Categories Arizona, Education Reform, Florida, Privatization, School Choice, Students, Vouchers

Note to Elite Media: Stop Promoting Rahm Emanuel!

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2026 //
14

Paul Waldman was a reporter for The Washington Post . He now writes a Substack blog. As this article shows, he is a journalist with insight and a long memory. A certain sector of the Democratic elite likes him.

Paul does not. Neither do I.

Back when Rahm was President Obama’s chief of staff, I was invited to meet with the top officials of the Obama administration at the Old Execurive Office Building (next door to the White House). Rahm was there (but strangely, not Arne Duncan), along with Melody Barnes, the chief of the President’s Domestic Policy Council, and Roberto Rodriguez, the President’s education advisor.

I answered a series of questions:

*What did I think of merit pay? It never works.

*What did I think of Common Core? Try it out in 3-5 states and see what happens, said I.

*What did I think of Race to the Top? Not much, said I.

Needless to say, they disregarded all my warnings.

Rahm jumped in to ask, “Why are Catholic schools so much better than public schools?”

I explained that Catholic schools do not have to accept students they do not want and they are free to expel students who persistently misbehave. Even if they never use that power, they have it.

I asked Rahm if he had met my son, who had worked on business deals with his brother Ari, who ran a major talent agency.. Rahm said, “Never heard of him.”

He might have said something polite, like “no, but I will ask my brother.” But Rahm is rude, always.

With that, he stormed out of the room.

I understood why people think he is obnoxious.

Then, when he closed 50 Chicago public schools in a single day, I wrote him off as a dunce about education and children.

Waldman writes:

To a certain kind of political reporter, Rahm Emanuel is a compelling figure, a politician of deep wisdom and experience, just the kind of person who ought to be given serious consideration as a candidate for president. And if the voters themselves aren’t all that interested? Well that can change, with a sufficient volume of lengthy profiles and interviews.

And so a campaign has begun to make Rahm happen, engineered by the man himself but with the active assistance of a good portion of the elite news media. The good news is that Rahm is not going to happen, because he represents everything that Democratic voters are eager to reject at this moment.

Rahm is everywhere, whether you asked for him or not

Here’s Rahm being interviewed by CNBC. Here’s Rahm being interviewed by Fox News. Here’s Rahm being interviewed by CBS News. Here’s Rahm being interviewed by Politico. Here’s a big profile of Rahm in the New York Times, which says “he has emerged as a behind-the-scenes force in his party’s push to flip the House this fall.” And going back a few months, here’s Politico saying “His pugilism and his critique of the party’s leftward lurch will create a gauntlet his would-be rivals will have to navigate.” Everyone will have to deal with Rahm, so powerful a presence is he!

Readers under 30 or so might not have a deep familiarity with Emanuel, so the short version is this: He’s had a long list of jobs (campaign operative, fundraiser, White House staffer, congressman, White House chief of staff, mayor of Chicago, Wall Street rainmaker, ambassador to Japan), in which he earned a reputation as, to put it plainly, an asshole. Reporters profiling him will describe incidents of him shouting and swearing at people, or mention that sometimes he has been referred to as “Rahmbo,” but what it comes down to is that he’s an asshole.

That isn’t necessarily disqualifying, even if it should be; lots of politicians are abusive to people around them, as are bosses in a million workplaces. But unlike some of them, Emanuel isn’t a silver-tongued charmer whose charisma will hypnotize voters on the campaign trail.

What is disqualifying, however, is that Rahm’s inclinations run toward caution and centrism, and that is the opposite of what Democratic voters want at this moment. It’s not just about ideology, it’s about a style of politics those voters are absolutely fed up with, one driven by the belief that the way to succeed is to constantly look over your right shoulder, not do anything that might make Republicans too angry, and not just spend your time chasing independent voters but do so by trimming back your ambitions until they’re a shapeless lump of timidity and compromise.

To me, the emblematic Rahm Emanuel moment came in early 2010, when Democrats were struggling to pass the Affordable Care Act. For a brief time they had a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate (though some of those were very conservative Democrats), and as they approached the finish line, needing only to get the two chambers to agree on a single bill, Ted Kennedy died and a Republican, Scott Brown, won a surprise victory to replace him. At that point, Emanuel counseled retreat: throw the big bill in the trash, then try to pass a bill to expand coverage for low-income kids, something far less ambitious but likelier to get bipartisan support. In addition to misreading what Republicans would accept (absolutely nothing, then as now) it amounted to abject surrender. As Molly Ball reported in Time magazine, Nancy Pelosi wasn’t having it:

Pelosi told the White House to rein in Emanuel and get him to stop pestering her members about his “eensy weensy bill.” At a meeting in the Oval Office, Pelosi confronted the subject directly. “Mr. President, I know there are some on your staff who want to take the namby-pamby approach,” she said. “That’s unacceptable.” Obama took her side. They were going to go for it.

She was right, and the ACA passed. If Emanuel had had his way, it wouldn’t have happened.

The problem is not that he believes in nothing, it’s what he does believe in

One might look at where Emanuel is now and say he’s changed, at least a little. In July he went to Israel and gave a speech excoriating Benjamin Netanyahu, and now says the Israeli government should no longer get support from the U.S. taxpayer (though he says they should be free to buy American weapons with their own money if they want, just like other countries). He’s still advocating small-bore policy changes, but ones that are updated for the present moment, like a ban on lawmakers betting on prediction markets and a mandatory retirement age of 75 across the federal government.

I’m sure there will be more to come, as Emanuel tries to present himself as a man for this moment. But while he may evolve a little bit here or there, he’s still the same guy he always was, and that’s the problem. He’s the avatar of a certain kind of Democratic centrist politics, one that yearns to win the votes of Republicans but views progressives with little but contempt. Like many others, he believes that the way to win votes across the center is to engage in some vigorous hippie-punching (Rahm is eager to talk about how awful the DSA is), then present some ideologically denuded, tiny policy ideas under the guise of “pragmatism.”

If he really believed in those policy ideas, that would be one thing. But it’s never been clear that Rahm believes in much of anything. He wants power, but he has never seemed animated by doing much with power; he has never presented a vision of how he’d like government and society to work that goes much beyond “What we have now, but a little better.”

Back in 2020, Democrats had no greater goal than getting rid of Donald Trump, which is the biggest reason Joe Biden got their nomination; he was widely seen as the safest and most electable choice. But this is a very different moment. Yes, they’re desperate to win, and still will be in 2028. But even more, they’ll be drawn to candidates who can sell them on a vision of something deeper, more fundamental, and more lasting.

That’s not who Rahm is, and to his credit (I guess) he’s not trying to pretend it is. Which is why I’m fairly sure that as the primary process goes on, we’re likely to see him coming in 10th or so in all the polls, even as he gets inordinate attention in the news media.

There have been times when his brand of corporate-approved, right-leaning centrism was attractive to voters; in many ways that what his old boss Bill Clinton offered in 1992. But this is not 1992, and Rahm Emanuel is no Bill Clinton. Fortunately.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Democrats, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm

I’m Off on the Road to Morocco!

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2026 //
22

Yesterday, I took a flight to Casablanca with Brooklyn friends who belong to the same church. They are Catholic, I am Jewish, and we are not likely to encounter many active churches or synagogues. Their annual trips are well-organized, and this is the first time I was available to join them. We will be touring in Rabat, Fez, and Marrakech.

The blog will continue without interruption.

I’ll stay in touch.

P.S. If you are a film buff or as old as I, you may recall that Bing Crosby and Bob Hope made a series of “on the road” movies in the 1940s, all very silly and good fun. My 31-year-old grandson reminded me that we watched “The Road to Morocco” together when he was 7 years old. Now, I’m on the road, but not with Bing or Bob or Dorothy Lamour.

Categories Ravitch, Diane

Trump Makes a Deal with Putin That Betrays Ukraine, the U.S., and Our Allies

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2026 //
12

When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, western nations imposed sanctions on Russia in an effort to persuade him to stop the war through economic pressure. Despite sanctions, Russia has managed to continue its oil exports, using a “shadow fleet” of unmarked tankers. In recent months, Ukraine has been hitting Russian oil storage facilities and oil refineries in hopes of suppressing Russia’s oil revenues. Those oil revenues fund Russia’s war.

Day after day, Russia has relentlessly sent missiles to bombard civilian targets in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, killing men, women, and children. Without the American Patriot missile systems, Ukraine is almost defenseless.

Trump sent his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his friend Steve Witkoff to talk to Putin about negotiating a peace deal. They left the meeting wreathed in smiles, saying it was a day they would never forget. But they weren’t negotiating a ceasefire or an end to the war. They were negotiating a partnership with Putin to get Russian oil to the U.S. before the midterm elections.

Barely a month ago, Congress passed the Lindsey Graham Russian Sanctions Act, which gave Trump the power to impose 100% tariffs on any nation buying Russian oil.

Guess who is buying Russian oil? The United States! Trump will have to tariff his own country. The members of Congress who passed the Russian Sanctions Act must feel very foolish indeed.

Trump announced triumphantly that Russia would sell the (no longer sanctioned) Russian oil in order to lower prices of diesel in the U.S.

Senator Thom Tillis (NC) said on national television that Trump may be breaking a law passed in 2022. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Tillis said the 2022 law banned oil imports from Russia unless all Russian troops were out of Ukraine.

Trump announced the Russian oil shipments as “tons,” not gallons. The U.S. consumes about 4 million gallons of diesel daily. The first release of Russian diesel (300,000 tons) is about 2.2 million gallons, or a half day of diesel consumption in the U.S. Even the larger amounts that Trump has announced would not last long, a matter of days, maybe weeks.

The closure of the waterways that transit oil from the Middle East is the fundamental problem, a problem of Trump’s making.

Having called on Zelensky to stop bombing Russian oil targets, he added that Zelensky should step down as president of Ukraine because he refused to stop bombing Russian oil targets. Zelensky’s response was to bomb another Russian oil facility.

Trump reacted by saying he would stop negotiating a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. When he campaigned in 2024, he claimed he would get a peace deal in one day. It’s almost two years later, and he has no deal. He makes demands only on Ukraine, never Russia.

Trump blamed Zelensky for the high price of oil in the U.S., sidestepping his own responsibility for shutting down the global oil supply when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz after Trump ordered his war on Iran.

Russia comes out ahead. Trump is either a fool or a traitor.

Putin must be laughing. In addition to being free of sanctions on its sale of oil, Russia is supplying Iran with weapons to kill Americans.

It’s a win-win for Putin.

But not for the U.S.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Extremism, International, Trump

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Nikole Hannah-Jones and Her Daughter

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2026 //
4

Recently, superstar journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a long essay for The New York Times Magazine regretting her decision a decade earlier to put her daughter into a local public school in New York City. Not only was the school segregated, it had a disengaged principal, indifferent teachers, and low-quality academics. She came to realize that she was imposing her ideas on her daughter at the cost of her education. Now that her daughter is in high school, she is attending a highly desirable high school with high standards. Hannah-Jones told her daughter to make her own choice within the public school system. She chose an excellent public school.

There’s hardly a commentator who has not passed judgment on the essay. Right-wingers praised it as an endorsement of school choice or a condemnation of public schools. Former NYC Chancellor wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the persistence of bad public schools was the fault of Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ unions. His article was titled “Nikole Hannah-Jones Vs. Randi Weingarten.” He maintained that it was the unions that preserved bad schools. The solution, he argued, was non-union charter schools.

But his argument dodged the responsibility of school leaders like himself to weed out incompetent principals and replace them with good principals who set high expectations for staff and students. And, of course, he neglected the failure of thousands of charter schools, due to academic failure, misappropriation of funds, or low enrollment.

In the following essay posted on his blog, Cloaking Inequity, scholar Julian Vasquez Heilig presents a different argument. In addition to his professorship at Western Michigan University, he is a founding member of the Network for Public Education.

He writes:

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay about her daughter’s education is heartbreaking because it poses a question almost every parent understands: Did I make the right choice for my child?

Hannah-Jones made the choice more publicly and politically than most. A decade ago, she and her husband sent their daughter, Najya, to a predominantly Black, high-poverty public school in Brooklyn. They could afford other options. Instead, they wanted their own choices to reflect their belief that privileged families help reproduce educational inequality when they abandon schools serving poor Black children. Then their daughter grew old enough to judge that decision for herself.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” Najya asked her mother after discovering how her middle school compared with New York City’s most prestigious public schools. Later, she put the question even more painfully: If her parents had the resources to get her a better education, why hadn’t they? That is not really a question about school choice. It is a question about parenthood.

Every parent makes these tradeoffs, although few of us have to explain them in The New York Times. Families choose schools because of academics, income, housing, sports, religion, culture, race, language, safety, disability services, discipline, transportation, friendships, family traditions and often simply what they can afford. Rarely does one school maximize everything a family values.

A parent might choose a Seventh-Day Adventist school with fewer Advanced Placement courses because faith formation matters deeply. Another might choose a suburban school for its academics but watch a Black child struggle culturally. A family might remain in a less prestigious district because grandparents live nearby. An athlete may choose a school because of a coach or a starting opportunity. A parent of a child with disabilities may value services more than test scores. Another family may choose a culturally affirming school where their child feels known. None of those choices can be reduced to a ranking on GreatSchools.

That is partly what makes Hannah-Jones’s conclusion so complicated. Najya did experience serious academic failures. Her elementary school sometimes failed to assess her properly, return graded work or even recognize substantial gaps in her mathematics preparation. Her mother eventually discovered assignments riddled with mistakes that had never been corrected. Those are not imaginary problems created by standardized tests or middle-class expectations. Children deserve competent teachers, rigorous instruction and honest feedback.

My own research has found that teacher preparation and teacher quality matter (Darling-Hammond et al., 2005). Defending public education should never require pretending otherwise. But an educator responding to Hannah-Jones’s essay on Facebook raised the concern that has stayed with me: the article can leave readers “to blame structural problems on the usual scapegoats who never had the power to create them.” That is where I think we need to be careful.

Hannah-Jones herself provides the evidence for a more structural conclusion. Najya’s middle-school principal explains that her school enrolled everyone, including children arriving years behind academically, while selective schools concentrated students already prepared to succeed. More than one-third of students at Najya’s middle school had identified learning disabilities, compared with 17 percent at her selective high school. The school was simultaneously expected to remediate years of lost learning, teach grade-level material, manage social and behavioral needs and prepare its strongest students for elite high schools.

That is not simply a teacher-quality problem. It is institutional sorting. My research has documented versions of this dynamic for two decades. Jennifer Holme and I found persistent racial, economic and linguistic segregation long after Jim Crow formally ended (Vasquez Heilig & Holme, 2013). My colleagues and I later found intense racial segregation in charter schools as well, reminding us that giving families more choices does not automatically dismantle inequality (Vasquez Heilig et al., 2019). Research on accountability similarly showed how schools serving marginalized students can be punished for outcomes produced partly by unequal opportunities to learn (Vasquez Heilig & Darling-Hammond, 2008; Vasquez Heilig et al., 2018).

School finance matters too. Davíd Martínez and I have argued that educational opportunity is fundamentally a civil-rights question because children cannot be held equally accountable when they have not been provided comparable opportunities to learn (Martínez & Vasquez Heilig, 2022). This does not absolve the adults who failed Najya. It changes the scale of the indictment. So Hannah-Jones’s story ultimately demonstrates why the parental decision is harder than “choose the better school.”

Najya eventually chose one of New York City’s highly selective public high schools. Academically, she initially struggled because her previous schooling had left gaps. But there was another cost. She had gone from Black schools where, as Hannah-Jones writes, nobody questioned whether Black children could be smart to an environment where classmates used racial slurs and questioned her intelligence. She briefly wanted to leave.

By the end of the essay, Najya herself recognizes the tradeoff. She tells her mother she is glad she did not spend her early childhood in predominantly white schools because her Black schools helped give her a strong racial identity and the confidence to challenge racism. She had also discovered something important about her more privileged classmates: They were not necessarily smarter or better behaved. “They just had more.” That may be the most important sentence in the essay.

Parents make choices. Systems distribute what there is to choose from. Honestly, I personally understand Hannah-Jones’s regret. When your child says, “I never really got the education I wanted,” intellectual arguments about the common good become painfully inadequate. I have heard that same argument from my children. Parents have a special obligation to their own children, and there is no shame in acknowledging that. But we must resist those who are turning this deeply personal story into another argument that the solution to educational inequality is for parents to make better individual choices via vouchers and charter schools. That road leads exactly where we already are.

Families with money purchase tutoring. Families with information navigate admissions systems. Families with mobility purchase homes near preferred schools. Families with social capital advocate successfully. Families without those advantages receive whatever the system leaves behind. The problem is not that parents love their own children too much. The problem is that we have constructed a competitive education system where high-quality education is rationed and doing the best for one’s own child can require leaving other children behind.

The goal should therefore not be to tell parents which sacrifice to make. Choose academics over culture. Choose integration over belonging. Choose religion over coursework. Choose athletics over proximity. Choose the collective over your child. Those are family decisions, and reasonable parents can weigh them differently. Our public responsibility is different. It is to make the consequences of those choices less brutal.

Conclusion

I should also say that I have long admired Nikole Hannah-Jones and her work. I first met her in Oakland in 2017 at the Network for Public Education conference, and I have been a fan of her scholarship and journalism (see photo). That is part of why her essay stayed with me. I read it not as an argument to defeat, but as an extraordinarily difficult question posed by a parent whose choices illuminate the choices millions of families are forced to make.

A Black child should not have to choose between cultural affirmation and rigorous academics. A poor child should not have to attend school with less because her parents earn less. A student should not need admission to a selective school to encounter advanced mathematics. And teachers in high-poverty schools should not be expected to repair years of accumulated inequality while working with fewer resources and then be blamed when they cannot perform miracles.

Hannah-Jones asks whether fighting for every Black child meant betraying her own. I think her essay points to this conclusion: There was never a perfect choice available. That is the real indictment. And it is not an accident. For generations, American education policy has created and maintained systems in which access to rigorous coursework, experienced teachers, enrichment, safety, social capital, and opportunity too often follows race, wealth, and geography. Parents are then asked to make intensely personal choices inside inequalities they did not create.

The question, then, is not whether Hannah-Jones made the right choice for her daughter, or whether another family would have been more virtuous for choosing differently. The harder question is why we continue to tolerate the American education system that makes families choose among things every child should receive together.

Please share.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Failure, New York City, Racism, Research

Florida Wants to Be First State to Repeal All Vaccine Mandates

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2026 //
2

Florida is one crazy state. Its state leaders interfere in every aspect of people’s lives. Under the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, it passed a rigid abortion ban, denying every woman in the state the right to control her body and her life choices.

DeSantis has led a campaign to destroy the state’s public schools, so the state now spends billions yearly to subsidize charter schools, unaccountable voucher schools, and home schooling. Most of the voucher schools are religious schools with uncertified teachers.

As his Surgeon General, DeSantis chose a doctor with extremist views against vaccines. Parents can still get their children vaccinated, but they will be in school with unvaccinated children.

Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s goal is to eliminate all vaccine requirements.

CBS News reported:

TALLAHASSEE — The Florida Department of Health is moving forward with its push to remove the requirement for four vaccines for children entering schools, but has dropped its attempt to expand exemptions for the immunization requirements.

In August, the DOH struck the words “sincerely held moral or ethical belief” from a proposed rule change that would have allowed parents to opt not to get their children vaccinated for various diseases, which are normally required to attend K-12 public schools. The exemptions currently in place must be based on religious tenets and practices.

Meanwhile, the DOH also announced a public meeting next Thursday in Lake Mary to discuss repealing the requirement of four vaccines from entry requirements for PreK-12 public and private schools.

Immunizations for Hepatitis B, varicella (chicken pox), Haemophilus influenza type b (Hib) and pneumococcal conjugate would no longer be required to attend Florida schools under the proposal. The move has been in play for over a year after Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced his intent to get rid of all vaccine mandates in the state.

The immunization requirements considered for repeal by DOH are an agency rule, not in state law, and can be repealed by the agency itself.
The Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a statement they “remain concerned,” about the state’s move to weaken the state’s vaccination mandates.

“Florida’s pediatricians will continue to make their voices heard in opposition to this proposed rule that would undermine the health of Florida’s children and communities,” the statement reads. “When school vaccine protections are eliminated, immunization rates decrease, leaving more people, including those too young or medically unable to be vaccinated themselves, vulnerable to contracting these dangerous illnesses.”

In a comment submitted by FCAAP in opposition to the proposed rule, the advocacy group estimated the repeal of vaccination requirements in Florida would result in a reduction of the state’s GDP by $74 million in the first year and nearly $9 billion over a decade.

Attempts to repeal all vaccine mandates in the state began over a year ago when Gov. Ron DeSantis and Ladapo called on the Legislature to change state law. Legislative action is needed to remove the requirements for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, polio, diphtheria, rubeola and tetanus vaccines.

But even though the move to repeal all vaccine mandates was supported by DeSantis, First Lady Casey DeSantis and then-Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas, no legislator filed a bill in any of the multiple legislative sessions in 2026.

Multiple attempts at a “Medical Freedom” bill that would have expanded vaccine exemptions and mandated doctors to provide an alternate vaccine schedule passed the state Senate but failed to pass the state House.

Categories DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Health, Medicine, Science
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