Julian Vasquez Heilig: Bad Bunny, Love, Family, Redemption, Recognition

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2026 //
0

Julian Vasquez Heilig watched the half-time performance of Bad Bunny at the NFL’s Suprrbowl and was moved to tears.

Here is why:

Some of us watched the halftime show and cried. Others changed the channel. That difference tells you everything.

If you were scrolling through Facebook or other media after the Super Bowl, what you saw depended entirely on your sphere of inclusion. Some timelines were full of joy, pride, and tears. Others filled instantly with the familiar chorus: worst halftime show ever, too political, too foreign, controversial, divisive, not for “real Americans.” Algorithms did what they always do, amplifying outrage in some spaces and celebration in others. 

What struck me most wasn’t the criticism itself, but how ready so many were to dismiss what they hadn’t even tried to feel, while others were overwhelmed by recognition. For many Latino viewers, that split wasn’t shocking at all, because it echoed a lifetime of us being told we belong in some rooms but not others, sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, often disguised as concern, taste, or tradition.

What made this rejection cut deeper is that it didn’t begin after the performance ended. It began weeks before the game, when commentators openly questioned whether this show would “connect,” a word that so often means conform, flatten, or assimilate. No one ever wondered aloud whether Kid Rock was American enough, even when his music is built on grievance, exclusion, and nostalgia for a past that never belonged to everyone. His belonging was assumed. His presence never put on trial.

At the same time, Latino culture was quietly framed as foreign, no matter how many generations it has lived here, worked here, fought here, and died here. Our music was treated like a visitor, our language like an interruption, our joy like something that needed justification. The stage was never neutral. The judgment was never waiting for the music. It had already been made, long before the lights came up. But what unfolded on that field at the Super Bowl refused to ask for permission. 

So let’s talk about what I noticed.

Sugarcane as the Opening Wound

Bad Bunny did not open with spectacle. He opened with a field covered in sugarcane, not just a backdrop, but a world presented on the field. The plants stood tall, swaying as if carried by an unseen breeze, but what most people didn’t realize in the moment is that nearly 400 humans were carefully costumed as sugarcane, blending into the scene with astonishing precision. Tall. Quiet. Unflinching. Heavy with memory. Sugarcane is how so many people of color came to the Caribbean, through chains and colonial economies that fed empires while consuming lives. It is the crop that reordered entire islands around extraction, turning land into profit and people into labor, and normalizing suffering as an economic necessity.

In Puerto Rico, sugarcane marks the moment when native Taíno worlds were shattered, not faded, not replaced, but violently erased. Declared “extinct,” even as their descendants lived on in bodies, in words, in bloodlines history tried to deny. To begin with sugarcane was to begin with truth instead of fantasy. It was to say our joy has a history, and that history was paid for with survival, endurance, and refusal to disappear.

From Fields to the Streets

The performance moved from the sugarcane fields into a different kind of economy altogether. From the fields into the cultural economy of the streets. Tacos on griddles, fruit drinks poured by hand, small businesses that exist because families willed them into being to suppor their families. What once took everything now gave way to spaces that feed people and keep memory alive through work that is chosen, not imposed. It was a quiet but powerful shift, from wealth taken to culture made, from plantations to livelihoods, from what was stolen to what was built and shared.

The Casita

From extraction to shelter. From labor to life. From history imposed to culture chosen. The Casita was not nostalgia placed on the field for sentiment. It was survival made visible, a place where memory rests without apology. I recognized it instantly because The Casita is a central feature of Bad Bunny’s current DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS world tour, and I saw it myself at his concert in Mexico City in December 2025. 

When it appears during the concert and now the Super Bowl, the entire feeling of the space changes. The arena stops feeling like something meant to be consumed and starts feeling like a neighborhood gathering, like a block party where everyone knows why they’re there. Ricky Martin, Jessica Alba, Karol G and Cardi B and Pedro Pasqual were spotted on The Casita porch at the Super Bowl. For a song, the focus shifted inward, toward intimacy, memory, and shared recognition rather than outward toward scale or spectacle.

Familia Without Age Limits

Then there was a wedding, and everything softened. Children stood beside elders, small hands near hands worn smooth by time. Adults moved between them, linking generations without needing to explain why. No one was ornamental. No one was hidden or pushed to the margins. This was not a beauty showcase designed for perfection and polish. It was a life showcase: messy, intimate, and unmistakably real.

After the vows a salsa performance broke out in the wedding party. In Latino culture, dance moves through generations like inheritance, passed the way names and recipes are passed. Young people hear rhythm before they speak, absorbing belonging before language. Grandparents hum songs older than memory, melodies tied to places they left, places they carry, places that never really let them go. Teenagers take those sounds and bend them toward the future, making something new without breaking what came before. When that wedding appeared on the field, it wasn’t spectacle. It was continuity. It was culture saying, softly but firmly, we are still here together, and we are not done loving.

Spanish Without Apology

Bad Bunny sung and spoke Spanish the entire performance. He did not translate. The screen did not translate either. In fact, my TV screen didnt even get the Spanish lyrics right. And still, the message landed. For Latino families, this moment felt deeply familiar, because they translate everything else every day. At school. At work. In hospitals. In courtrooms. In moments where clarity is demanded of us but rarely offered in return.

This time, the burden was not on us. It wasn’t defiance. It was dignity. It was a reminder that our language does not need permission to exist, and that when language is treated as a threat, the issue is not understanding. It is whose comfort has been prioritized for far too long.

Bad Bunny at the Album of the Year grammy

Then Bad Bunny paused one of the biggest stages in the world to do something profoundly delicate and human. In the middle of a performance steeped in Latino/a history, memory, and pride, he handed one of his recently won Grammy Awards to a five-year-old child actor. The gesture was quiet, unhurried, and unmistakably intentional. It was meant to represent a younger version of himself, but it also reached far beyond biography. In that moment, the Grammy became a symbol of possibility placed gently in the hands of the future.

For many watching, that was the first moment the tears came. Not because it was sentimental, but because it felt like restoration. In communities where so much has been taken—land, labor, language, and often the right to dream publicly—the act of handing something earned to a child carried enormous weight. It said that success does not have to end with one generation, that recognition can be shared, and that pride can be inherited. 

When the Flags Rose

And then it happened. The moment that broke something open. Flags from across the Americas rose, and the field turned into a family reunion. Bad Bunny spoke the names of them all. Music, movement, and memory collided in a fiesta on a field, joy too big to hold only 100 yards of field. You could feel it traveling living room to living room, chest to chest.

This wasn’t spectacle. It was release. It was the sound of people recognizing themselves all at once, across borders, accents, and histories that have always been connected.

Daring and Well Executed

Some viewers said they didn’t understand what was being said. That, in itself, is a statement about whose histories we teach and whose we erase in this nation. Nothing about this performance was accidental. It was layered, intentional, and deeply rooted in memory, lineage, and love.

So no, this wasn’t the safest halftime show ever, and it certainly wasn’t the worst. It was one of the most daring because it chose truth over comfort and belonging over approval. It trusted that love, memory, and pride could fill a stadium without asking permission.

And for families watching together, something special happened. Memories. Parents thought of grandparents who never saw themselves reflected on this stage. Representation. Children saw peers performing and honored. Wisdom. Elders watched their roles honored. 

For a few luminous minutes, the biggest stage in America felt like a home open to everyone, a casa abierta. And when Bad Bunny held out a football and the words appeared—“Together we are America”… it wasn’t a slogan. It was a recognition. Across a record 135,000,000 living rooms and kitchens, across generations gathered on couches and around tables, there may not have been a dry eye at all. There was only the quiet certainty that we are still here, still together, still carrying one another forward—together—on a stage that, for one night, felt unmistakably like the Benito Bowl.

Bad Bunny holds football with message of unity

Julian Vasquez Heilig is a Bad Bunny fan who believes that music is one of the most powerful archives of social truth. A nationally recognized policy scholar and education advocate, he examines culture not as entertainment alone but as a lens through which people understand belonging, resistance, and possibility. From his first encounter with “Vete” in a late-night Puerto Rican lounge at La Concha on Friday, December 6, 2019, to standing inside a packed Mexico City arena during the DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS World Tour, observing how crowd energy, memory, and identity move together, he approaches Bad Bunny’s work with the same curiosity he brings to public policy. For him, these moments are not just concerts or cultural events; they are data points of feeling and meaning, asking the same enduring question that guides his scholarship: What does this moment reveal about who we are, who gets to belong, and who we are becoming together?

Categories Creativity, Democracy, History, Joy, Love

The Kind of Schools That We Need Right Now

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2026 //
9

Some years back–actually it was 2019–I read an article that gladdened my heart. It was written in The Atlantic by gazillionaire Nick Hanauer. It was titled “Better Schools Won’t Fix America.”

Nick is an interesting guy. He is an entrepreneur in Seattle. He works alongside other successful venture capitalists, and for a time, partnered with Bill Gates to persuade the Washington legislature to endorse charter schools as a remedy to replace “failing” public schools.

But somewhere along the way, he had a change of mind and heart. He realized that the basic problem in the U.S. was income inequality, not “failing schools.”

He began his 2019 article:

Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America.

This belief system, which I have come to think of as “educationism,” is grounded in a familiar story about cause and effect: Once upon a time, America created a public-education system that was the envy of the modern world. No nation produced more or better-educated high-school and college graduates, and thus the great American middle class was built. But then, sometime around the 1970s, America lost its way. We allowed our schools to crumble, and our test scores and graduation rates to fall. School systems that once churned out well-paid factory workers failed to keep pace with the rising educational demands of the new knowledge economy. As America’s public-school systems foundered, so did the earning power of the American middle class. And as inequality increased, so did political polarization, cynicism, and anger, threatening to undermine American democracy itself.Great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around.

Taken with this story line, I embraced education as both a philanthropic cause and a civic mission. I co-founded the League of Education Voters, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public education. I joined Bill Gates, Alice Walton, and Paul Allen in giving more than $1 million eachto an effort to pass a ballot measure that established Washington State’s first charter schools. All told, I have devoted countless hours and millions of dollars to the simple idea that if we improved our schools—if we modernized our curricula and our teaching methods, substantially increased school funding, rooted out bad teachers, and opened enough charter schools—American children, especially those in low-income and working-class communities, would start learning again. Graduation rates and wages would increase, poverty and inequality would decrease, and public commitment to democracy would be restored.

But after decades of organizing and giving, I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I was wrong. And I hate being wrong.

What I’ve realized, decades late, is that educationism is tragically misguided. American workers are struggling in large part because they are underpaid—and they are underpaid because 40 years of trickle-down policies have rigged the economy in favor of wealthy people like me. Americans are more highly educated than ever before, but despite that, and despite nearly record-low unemployment, most American workers—at all levels of educational attainment—have seen little if any wage growth since 2000.

To be clear: We should do everything we can to improve our public schools. But our education system can’t compensate for the ways our economic system is failing Americans. Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.

Hanauer recognized that the hollowing out of the middle class was harming our entire society:

In short, great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around. Pay people enough to afford dignified middle-class lives, and high-quality public schools will follow. But allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it.

Hanauer’s turnaround resonated with me. He was boldly breaking ranks with his peers. I doubt he suffered ostracism, because many of the elites toy with education; it is not a vital interest to them. In my limited experience, watching the uber-rich participate on behalf of charter schools, it appeared that many were going along with the crowd, while some thought that privatization was a miracle cure.

Hanauer understood that children need a good start in life and they need a stable, secure home life to do their best in school. He understood that economic inequality undermined many children’s interest in school, which was less important than survival or a warm winter coat or medical care. He even understood that the decades-long efforts to stamp out unions contributed to economic inequality.

We spoke on the phone. I did a podcast with him. I was impressed by his keen intellect and independence of mind.

With each book I wrote about privatization, I insisted that schools are vital institutions in educating children, but they can’t do it alone. In Reign of Error, I spelled out what I considered a life-course approach to improving the chances of giving children the education they need and deserve.

In the competition between public schools and charter schools, the only measure that outsiders considered was test scores. But I knew that was not right. For many young people, it’s miraculous when they manage to show up for school. They chose to go to school, not to babysit a younger sibling, not to take a part-time job delivering to customers, not to hang out in the local park.

What kind of a school was that? I came to understand that the closest approximation of a school that I imagined was a community school. Community schools provide wraparound services to students and their parents.

Categories Community Schools, Democracy, Education Reform, Funding, Health, Innovation, Medicine, Parents, Philanthropy, Students, Teachers

Stephen Dyer: Ohio Wants to Punish Districts That Joined a Lawsuit to Block Vouchers

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2026 //
2

Stephen Dyer, former legislator and current public school advocate in Ohio, is outraged that legislators are considering a bill to punish public school districts that joined to oppose vouchers.

In his Substack blog called “Tenth Period,” Dyer rails against the legislators who want to defund public schools.

Dyer writes:

Ohio’s Public School Districts need to be pissed. Like REALLY pissed. 

That’s because Jamie Callender — long a champion of failing Charter Schools — just introduced legislative blackmail.

House Bill 671 would withhold billions of dollars of state aid to the 330+ school districts that are suing the state over its unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies. 

Nothing like holding the futures of hundreds of thousands of Ohio’s public school students hostage to score cheap political points. 

Think of it this way: Callender would rather shut school down for hundreds of thousands of Ohio Public School students than argue for his pet program in court. Sounds like someone who thinks they’re about to lose. Bigly.

And why? So rich adults can have you, the taxpayer, subsidize their private school tuition? 

That’s one helluva hill to die on, Jamie. 

One helluva hill.

This bill is especially rich coming from Callender — a guy who stood up for ECOT and David Brennan for years while they ripped off taxpayers for hundreds of millions of dollars and failed their students. 

Obviously, if this bill passes, it will be litigated. And Callender will lose. 

What this bill truly reveals is this: Ohio Republican fear. They know their tuition subsidy program is a legal loser. They know people hate the fact that Les Wexner can get a private school tuition subsidy courtesy of Bob and Betty Buckeye. So their only hope is to cow school districts into dropping the suit.

But I know these people. And they won’t give up. In fact, this will drive more districts into the arms of Vouchers Hurt Ohio. 

Because the only way to deal with legislative extortionists is to call their bluff. 

Then beat the living shit out of them in court. 

Then beat the living shit out of them in the court of public opinion.

Then beat the living shit out of them politically. 

I have a simple message for the leaders of Ohio’s Public Education system: Are you going to let this extortionist hold your students’ futures hostage?

Our state’s 1.5 million public school students need you to fight. Not cave. 

My friends, War has been declared. 

Battle must be joined. 

To arms.

Categories Education Reform

Trump Is Selling Access to Him for $1 Million as Part of Nation’s 250th Celebration

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2026 //
5

The New York Times reported that Trump is peddling access to him for $1 million and more as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary. I have posted a link to a gift article so you can read it in full.

President Trump’s allies are offering access to him and other perks to donors who give at least $1 million to a new group supporting flashy initiatives he is planning around the nation’s 250th birthday, according to documents and interviews.

The group, Freedom 250, is threatening to overshadow years of plans meant to reach the broadest cross section of Americans for semiquincentennial celebrations. They are now taking on a Trumpian flare, replete with marble and machismo.

But Freedom 250 has also emerged as another vehicle, akin to the White House ballroom project, through which people and companies with interests before the Trump administration can make tax-deductible donations to gain access to, and seek favor with, a president who has maintained a keen interest in fund-raising, and a willingness to use the levers of government power to reward financial supporters..

Several of Freedom 250’s planned events and monuments lack obvious connections to the Boston Tea Party, the signing of the Declaration of Independence or other seminal moments in the nation’s founding. Rather, they are tailored to Mr. Trump’s political agenda and his penchant for spectacle, personal branding and legacy. They include the construction of an arch overlooking Washington, an IndyCar racethrough the nation’s capital, a national prayer event and an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on the White House lawn to coincide with the president’s 80th birthday.

Meredith O’Rourke, the president’s top fund-raiser, is amassing private donations for Freedom 250. Her team is circulating a solicitation, obtained by The New York Times, offering “bespoke packages” for donors.

While there are inconsistencies in the solicitation language, the detailed breakdowns of packages for donors indicate that those who give $1 million or more will get invitations to a “private Freedom 250 thank you reception” hosted by Mr. Trump, with a “historic photo opportunity.” Those who give $2.5 million or more also are being offered speaking roles at an event in Washington on July 4.

There is no end to the possibilities for selling access to Trump.

.

Categories For-Profit, Trump

Federal Appeals Court Endorses Trump’s Harsh Immigration Policy

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2026 //
35

The Fifth Circuit Court of Apoeals ruled in favor of Trump’s deportation policy, even for immigrants who had committed no crimes and lived in this country for decades. In a split decision, 2-1, the Court gave Trump a victory in his efforts to remove immigrants.

Politico wrote:

A federal appeals court Friday night backed the Trump administration’s policy to lock up the vast majority of people it is seeking to deport without offering a chance for bond, even if they have no criminal records and have resided in the country for decades.

A divided three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the administration’s view — a reversal of every administration’s position for the last 30 years — is the correct interpretation of the federal government’s power to detain people targeted for deportation.

“That prior Administrations decided to use less than their full enforcement authority … does not mean they lacked the authority to do more,” Judge Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee, wrote for the 2-1 majority.

The matter could soon be headed for Supreme Court consideration.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement adopted a new view of the law in July, prompting an explosion of arrests and detentions — and a flood of lawsuits from detainees who argued that they were illegally locked up without due process.

The vast majority of judges across the country have rejected the administration’s approach. A POLITICO review of thousands of ICE detention cases found that at least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy — in more than 3,000 cases — while just 27 backed it in about 130 cases.

Jones was joined in the decision by Judge Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee. Judge Dana Douglas, a Biden appointee, said in a dissent that the panel’s view would require the detention of as many as 2 million immigrants residing in the United States without bond — “some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens.”

So, it seems that the brutal tactics of ICE have won approval by the Fifth Circuit Court of Apoeals. The masked men may continue to break into homes, smash car window, and handcuff their prey, without due process, even though most of those they arrest have not committed crimes, and some are American citizens. It’s not the “worst of the worst” that Trump is deporting but people who are gainfully employed, who contribute to their communities, and who are good neighbors. Their “crime” is that they have not been able to master the maze of attaining citizenship.

Several years back, I employed a handyman who was very responsible and efficient. He was from Guatemala. He was very active in the local Catholic Church. He was a good worker on construction jobs, and his employer paid him $25 an hour. He did not have papers. I called an immigration lawyer and asked if I could help Jose get papers. He said “the only way you can help him get papers is to marry him. There is no other way.”

The problem was that I was married already, and so was Jose. Two years ago, Jose went home to Guatemala. His timing was excellent.

Categories Ethics, Immigration, Trump

After 40 Years as a Subscriber to The Washington Post, I Canceled My Subscription

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2026 //
17

I thought of canceling my subscription to The Washington Post when Jeff Bezos blocked the editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for President in 2024.

But I didn’t because there were so many writers whose work I appreciated, both opinion writers and news reporters. .

I have a special connection to The Washington Post.

I worked as a copyboy for The Post in the summer between my junior and senior years in college. It was a menial job but I loved it. It was a badge of honor (in my mind) to work there.

When my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Chiice Are Undermining Education was published, Valerie Strauss of The Post decided to give the book maximum exposure. First, she interviewed me for Book TV, then she wrote a glowing review.

I read The Post everyday and enjoyed the reporting, the editorials, and the opinions.

But now, it is impossible to remain a subscriber after Jeff Bezos cut the heart out of the paper. Since he realized how vengeful Trump is, he became Trump’s sycophant. He hired a Murdoch guy as publisher. He hired a conservative as editor. He fired 1/3 of the news writers. He laid off bureau chiefs all over the world. His focus now is politics and national security.

As one ex-staffer put it, he murdered The Post. What was once was a great liberal (but not leftwing) newspaper is now a conservative paper. No more investigative reporting if the kind that toppled Nixon. No more deeply researched reporting from other nations.

He cut the heart out of the newspaper I loved to read for decades.

Jeff Bezos left a loyal reader like me no alternative. I canceled. There are so many other sources of news today that I don’t need to read a newspaper that sold out its principles.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Ethics, Media, Trump

Trump Posts Racist Video, Portraying Obamas as Apes, Later Withdraws the Post

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2026 //
9

It should come as no surprise that President Trump is racist and that he is insanely jealous of President Obama. Obama won the Nobel Prize, which is beyond Trump’s grasp. It rankles Trump that he can’t threaten or bribe the Nobel Prize committee. Trump can’t believe that there is one award that he can’t get no matter how hard he tries.

Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his racism, such as when he referred to African nations as “shithole countries.” He has made clear that he would welcome white immigrants, whether from South Africa or Scandinavia, as he expels immigrants of color. His vision of Make America Great Again seems to rely on depictions of a White America, a time preceding the Civil Rights movement. Norman Rockwell’s family has complained about the Trump administration’s misuse of Rockwell paintings to allude to an idyllic all-white America.

Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt was quick to denounce protests about the meme as “fake outage” and to urge journalists to focus on issues that “actually matter to the American public.” Like the Epstein files? Or the brutality of ICE?

In the early afternoon, about 1:30 pm, Trump deleted the post, having realized that no one thought it was funny, and many saw it as rank racism.

Erica L. Green and Isabella Kwai wrote in The New York Times:

President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, the latest in a long pattern by Mr. Trump of promoting offensive stereotypes about Black Americans and others.

The brief clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about anomalies in the 2020 presidential election.

The depiction of Mr. and Mrs. Obama as apes perpetuates a racist trope, used historically by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize Black people and justify lynchings and other atrocities. A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama declined to comment.

Mr. Trump has a history of making degrading remarks about people of color, women and immigrants. And in his second administration, official posts from the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department have posted images and slogans that echo white supremacist messaging.

In response to questions about the clip, which Mr. Trump posted Thursday during a late-night spree on social media, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said criticism of the video was “fake outrage.”

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” she said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — the Senate’s only Black Republican — wrote on X that he hoped the post was fake “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”

The latest clip appeared to have been taken from a video that was shared in October by a user on X with the caption “President Trump: King of the Jungle,” and an emoji of a lion.

In that video, several high-profile Democrats — including former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former vice president Kamala Harris — were shown as various animals, while Mr. Trump was depicted as a lion. The Obamas, in the clip, were shown as apes. The video ended with the animals bowing down to Mr. Trump.

Categories Education Reform

Ruth Marcus: Why I Left the Washington Post

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2026 //
1

Ruth Marcus started her career at The Washington Post in 1984. She rose through the ranks and eventually became an editorial writer, a columnist, and deputy editor of the editorial page.

She wrote in The New Yorker about why she ultimately quit:

I stayed until I no longer could—until the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, issued an edict that the Post’s opinion offerings would henceforth concentrate on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets,” and, even more worrisome, that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” I stayed until the Post‘s publisher, Will Lewis, killed a column I filed last week expressing my disagreement with this new direction. Lewis refused my request to meet. (You can read the column in full below, but—spoiler alert—if you’re craving red meat, brace for tofu. I wrote the piece in the hope of getting it published and registering a point, not to embarrass or provoke the paper’s management.)

Is it possible to love an institution the way you love a person, fiercely and without reservation? For me, and for many other longtime staff reporters and editors, that is the way we have felt about the Post. It was there for us, and we for it. One Saturday night, in May, 1992, the investigative reporter George Lardner, Jr., was in the newsroom when he received a call that his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Kristin, had been shot and killed in Boston by an abusive ex-boyfriend. As I recall, there were no more flights that night to Boston. The Post’s C.E.O., Don Graham, chartered a plane to get Lardner where he needed to go. It was typical of Graham, a kindness that engendered the loyalty and affection of a dedicated staff.

Graham’s own supreme act of loyalty to the Post was his painful decision to sell the paper, in 2013, to Bezos, who made his vast fortune as the founder of Amazon. The Graham family was hardly poor, but in the new media environment—and under the relentless demands of reporting quarterly earnings—they were forced, again and again, to make trims, at a time when investment was needed. Instead of continuing to cut and, inevitably, diminish the paper that he loved, Graham carried out a meticulous search for a new owner with the resources, the judgment, and the vision to help the Post navigate this new era. Bezos—the “ultimate disrupter,” as Fortune had called him a year earlier—seemed the right choice.

For a long time, she writes, Bezos was a hands-off manager. During Trump’s first term, Bezos supported the newspaper’s editorial opposition to Trump’s 2016 election and its tough coverage of the chaotic Trump term.

She liked Bezos: In my experience of that time, Bezos came off as charming, smart, and unpretentious.

In 2020, the Washington Post endorsed Biden.

In 2024, Bezos stopped the editorial board from publishing its endorsement of Kamala Harris. The man Bezos selected as publisher was Will Lewis, a Brit who had worked in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Lewis defended the non-endorsement. Two opinion writers resigned, most signed a letter to Bezos objecting to his decision. Some 300,000 people cancelled their subscriptions.

After the election, Bezos seemed to fawn over Trump, defending him at every turn, donating to his inauguration fund. Two months after the election, Bezos offered Nelania $40 million to produce a documentary about her life in the White House. Many saw it as protection money.

Bezos defended his new view about Trump by saying that Trump had grown, was more deliberative since his last term. He told a reporter from The New York Times that Trump “is calmer than he was the first time and more confident, more settled.” Marcus said Bezos displayed “willful self-delusion.”

In early January, before the Inauguration, a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winning Ann Telnaes depicting the billionaires bowing to Trump was rejected by the editor David Shipley on grounds that it slduicated a column already published. Marcus thought this was an example of “obeying in advance,” that would not have happened if Bezos were not in charge.

Then came the order from Bezos on February 25, 2025, to editorial writers that The Post would publish only editorials and opinions that supported “free markets and personal liberties.” Those with opposing views would not appear in The Post.

No editorial writer had worked under these restrictions before. Marcus submitted a piece objecting to the restrictions; the publisher (Will Lewis) rejected it. She was stunned.

She tried to see him, but was told, “The decision is final.”

Marcus wrote:

So, too, was mine. I submitted my letter of resignation on Monday, to Bezos and Lewis. “Will’s decision to not run the column that I wrote respectfully dissenting from Jeff’s edict—something that I have not experienced in almost two decades of column-writing—underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded,” I wrote. “I love the Post. It breaks my heart to conclude that I must leave.”

The Washington Post that she had known and loved for forty-one years was dead.

Categories Billionaires, Censorship, Freedom of the Press, Media

Glenn Kessler: Jeff Bezos Runs the Washington Post for an Audience of One

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2026 //
2

Glenn Kessler is the relentless fact-checker who spent many years at The Washington Post and now writes his own blog at Substack, still fact-checking.

He wrote recently about Jeff Bezos’s plan to lay off a large number of staff at the venerable newspaper. News of the impending cuts circulated for days. When it finally happened, journalists were shocked by the depth of the cuts. One third of the writers lost their jobs. The sports section was eliminated. Foreign coverage was slashed. Local reporting, a Post specialty, was cut hard.

As things now stand, one of America’s most consequential newspapers is in a death spiral, accelerated by Jeff Bezos. It is not often that we witness the destruction of a great institution by those entrusted with its care.

Ashley Parker, a former reporter for The Washington Post, wrote in The Atlantic about “The Murder of the Washington Post.”

Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future. This morning, executive editor Matt Murray and HR chief Wayne Connell told the newsroom staff in an early-morning virtual meeting that it was closing the Sports department and Books section, ending its signature podcast, and dramatically gutting the International and Metro departments, in addition to staggering cuts across all teams. Post leadership—which did not even have the courage to address their staff in person—then left everyone to wait for an email letting them know whether or not they had a job. (Lewis, who has already earned a reputation for showing up late to work when he showed up at all, did not join the Zoom.)

The Post may yet rise, but this will be their enduring legacy.

Kessler wrote:

“You’re right. I did lose a million dollars [on the newspaper] last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in…sixty years.”

—Charles Foster Kane, speaking to his ex-guardian, in Citizen Kane (1941)

[Diane’s note: if Jeff Bezos subsidized the Post at $100 million a year, he would run out of money in 2,500 years, or 4526, that is, assuming that he wasn’t growing his wealth at the same time.]

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, his net worth was about $25 billion. Now, as he prepares to order devastating layoffs at the newspaper, his net worth is about $250 billion — even after giving one-quarter of his Amazon shares to his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott.

Bezos is a businessman, and the Washington Post is not a charity, so I understand the inclination to demand that losses be stemmed. The newsroom should be able to stand on its own feet. But even if the losses are still around $100 million a year — the figure announced a couple of years ago — for a person of Bezos’ wealth, that would mean he’d have to close the place in…2,500 years.

I don’t think the layoffs have much to do with saving money. Amazon, after all, just spent $75 million buying and promoting a documentary about Melania Trump. It’s about power and influence in Donald Trump’s second term.

After Trump won the first time in 2016, I was among a small group of reporters and editors invited to have lunch with Bezos. With a booming laugh and big smile, he said he wanted to hear war stories about covering the wild Trump-versus-Clinton campaign.

At one point, someone asked if he was concerned that Trump would seek retribution against his other businesses. (I’m writing this from memory, not notes, so I won’t use quotation marks.)
Bezos acknowledged that Trump would assume any negative story about him had been ordered up by Bezos, because that’s what Trump would do if he owned a newspaper. But he said that wasn’t our problem. We only had to write the best stories possible; he could handle the heat if Trump got mad.

Those were comforting words at the time. As far as I know, Bezos has never interfered with any news coverage during his 13 years as owner — even stories critical of Amazon or coverage of Bezos’s personal life, let alone politics. For many years, he didn’t even appear to get very involved with the editorial page, even though, as owner, he could dictate whatever opinion-page policy he wanted.

As Bezos predicted, Trump in his first term often fumed about the “Amazon Washington Post” — they are not connected — and his administration took actions that were costly to Bezos. The Pentagon gave a $10-billion cloud-computing contract to Microsoft, and Amazon sued in 2020, saying Trump intervened because of his anger at The Post. (In 2022, the Microsoft contract was scrapped, and the business was split among four firms, including Amazon.)

Yet Bezos was unbowed. He embraced and promoted a new slogan — Democracy Dies in Darkness — that seemed aimed directly at Trump’s administration. He boosted the size of the staff and increased the ambitions of The Post. He appeared to embrace the idea, dare I say, that he was the steward of a public trust.

Presidential-level threats disappeared with Trump’s defeat in 2020, though Joe Biden was no fan of the tech industry. But when Trump ran again and the Democrats were on the ropes, Bezos’s calculation changed. He could afford Trump’s first term; a second could be ruinous, especially as Elon Musk, his main rival in the space business, embraced Trump.

I used to think billionaires had enough “fuck-you” money to do what they pleased. But in Trump’s creeping autocracy, and with his campaign of retribution, billionaires have too much to lose.

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta spent $100 million to fund fact-checking around the globe. But once Trump was elected, Zuckerberg pulled the plug on funding U.S. fact-checkers, shutting many down. Bezos scrubbed a planned newspaper endorsement of Kamala Harris and announced a rightward shift in the opinion pages, leading hundreds of thousands of subscribers to cancel their subscriptions. That, of course, likely increased the losses.

If there was ever a time for a news organization to need help from a billionaire, it’s now — when AI is killing search traffic and new ways to attract readers are needed. This is when investments are required, not cutbacks.

Even before Trump re-emerged, Bezos appeared to have grown less interested in The Post. The New York Times capitalized on subscriber growth during Trump’s first term to make acquisitions that expanded its reach (The Athletic, Wordle). The Post made no such moves. Subscriber growth stalled, then slipped. Bezos lavished attention on his new love, Lauren Sánchez, whom he married last year in Venice in a $50-million extravaganza. He also spent $500 million on the most expensive superyacht in the world — twice what he paid for The Post.

Unlike Scott — who has given away more than $19 billion to 2,000 non-profit organizations— Bezos has set aside a pittance of his net worth for philanthropy. Many Post reporters hoped Bezos would simply give the newspaper to his ex-wife, believing she had a greater sense of social responsibility (and none of his corporate conflicts).

No longer engaged, Bezos appears to have embraced a crude calculus: laying off staff and trimming the sails of a once-great news organization sends a message to an audience of one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, even if the decision ruins the lives of scores of talented reporters and editors.

After all, since the election Bezos has worked hard to ingratiate himself with Trump —making a $1 million donation (via Amazon) to the inaugural fund., dining at the White House, visiting Mar-a-Lago and, according to Trump, solving “a problem very quickly.” (Amazon had planned to list the cost of tariffs with products, but canceled that after Trump called Bezos.)

Trump views any news that is not favorable as “fake news.” He couldn’t have been happy with The Post’s aggressive coverage last year of the dismantling of the federal government, which led to an FBI raid on a reporter’s home in January.
But Trump views Bezos as trying to make the newspaper “more fair,” as he put it in a March interview with Clay Travis. “I think it’s great,” Trump gushed. “It’s such a difference between now and the first…He’s really trying to be more fair. But they actually did a couple of bad articles that everybody said, ‘This is crazy.’”

In another interview, with Sharyl Attkisson, Trump said, “I’ve gotten to know him and I think he’s trying to do a real job. Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with the Washington Post. And that wasn’t happening before.”

And so far in the second term, not once has Trump referred to the “Amazon Washington Post.”

Categories Freedom of the Press, Media, Trump

Trump Promises to Fund Tunnel if Schumer Agrees to Name Penn Station and Dulles Airport for Him

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2026 //
12

We have known for years that Trump is egotistical. We have seen examples of his egotism repeatedly, from his renaming of the John F. Kennedy Center to his slapping his name on countless products and hawking them.

But this one takes the cake!

According to CNN, Trump make an offer to New York Senator Chuck Schumer: Trump would release billions in federal funding for a tunnel linking New York and New Jersey if Schumer agreed to rename Penn Station and Dulles Airport for him.

Schumer said no.

I read this online last night and thought it a joke or a smear.

It’s not.

CNN wrote:

(CNN) — President Donald Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last month that he was finally prepared to drop his freeze on billions of dollars in funding for a major New York infrastructure project.

But there was a condition: In exchange for the money, Schumer had to agree to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.

Apparently, there are no limits to Trump’s egomania.

Republicans in Congress have been pondering whether to name a day for Trump as a national holiday or to put his face on a coin, although such honors are always limited to those who are no longer living.

I assume that Trump is so rattled by a sense of his mortality that he wants to assure that he will be immortalized by plastering his name everywhere.

Sad.

Categories Education Reform
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