There have been overhauls to judiciaries and a continued expansion of Executive Branch power so far, but this gerrymandering is a very open and public battle with a scope that goes beyond Texas and will only continue to grow. At the time of writing, Texas Democrats are taking refuge in Chicago under the watchful eye of Big Pritz. While there, they engage in the best tactic available to them to delay the Texas special session and also avoid Gov. Abbott’s civil arrest warrants: just don’t show up. Without getting too deep in the minutia of their seats possibly being vacated by Ken Paxton, or whatever the other logistics are of this fight, it feels like a miracle that Democrats are actually doing anything at all.

Now for the most part, state legislators across the country haven’t been the primary crux of Democratic malfeasance over the last few election cycles. They’re far from perfect, but they look like revolutionaries in comparison to national Dems. In breaking quorum, Texas Democrats are bringing attention to a state battle that has national repercussions. At the absolute least, they are putting up a fight.

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Republicans know, though they’d never admit it, that the outlook for keeping the House in 2026 is bleak. That’s all this is about. It’s an electoral power grab, and when they successfully take those 5 extra seats in Texas, it’s not going to stop there. There will be court battles, California and maybe New York will redistrict their own states in response, and an entirely new battlefront will be opened up as the second Trump term continues on.

As brutal and awful as the Trump admin’s immigration policy is, and as unwieldy and irresponsible as the admin’s economic policy is, their long-term viability is ultimately subject to the whims of voters come election time. This gerrymander poses a particularly sinister threat in that we’re looking at the beginning of this administration’s attempt to negate any kind of accountability from voters on the policies they impose. This is the start of the fight that’s going to ultimately determine just how free and fair our elections are going to be from here on out.

Since Trump’s win in November, there has been plenty of concern over whether American elections will maintain any sort of integrity. There has also been skepticism about the Trump admin’s ability to actually rig elections. That skepticism always felt odd, especially because anytime I saw the sentiment, it was coming from people who already barely had faith in electoral politics to begin with. A “nothing ever happens” line of thinking despite the fact that things are happening right out in the open. The President ordering a Governor to redistrict their state in an effort to win congressional seats and maintain a majority feels like something happening to me.

Die-hard MAGA freaks are, obviously, not going to care about this. Highlighting the gerrymander and its crookedness is not for them. This is the kind of thing that doesn’t get to the low-information voter. It’s the kind of partisan politics that turns independents away from the voting booth and turns people off in conversational settings. But the nakedness by which this is being done creates an opportunity to present corruption at face value because there really isn’t much else needed to explain it. Trump told Abbott to illegally gerrymander Texas so they could get 5 more seats in the House in order to maintain a majority. What other way is there to spin that?

The voting group that actually won Trump the election were low-information voters who are typically apathetic to politics and voted for Trump because of “egg” and “woke.” So here, in plain daylight, we have that very party doing Autocracy. This is not to make people feel bad or stupid for their vote. It’s an opening for further conversation as to what exactly is happening and the perilous consequences it has. The Texas gerrymander is just the beginning. Where some stories come into the spotlight and then disappear without further examination or elaboration, this is something that is not going to go away. It may take different forms and reshape over the next 3 years, but the battle for American democracy is happening right now. Time to pay attention.

The Austin DSA chapter officially launched their podcast, Austin DSA Batcast, back in May and Episode 2 is finally out! I work as the lead writer for the podcast and am super proud of what we have created. Please feel free to subscribe and support in anyway. I’ll link our 2nd episode, on the struggle for trans rights in Texas, below! With a video version available here!

The reconciliation bill, Trump’s Big Bootyhole Bill, that just made its way through the Senate and into the House is probably going to pass. It cannot be overstated how awful this thing is: kicking millions of people off of Medicaid and SNAP, more tax cuts for the wealthy, and an unprecedented level of decimation to the healthcare industry nationwide. I mean, it is Republican as hell. It’s so abominable, in fact, there were even a handful of Republican senators who didn’t want to vote for it because it felt like electoral poison. But of course, they're Republicans at the end of the day, so they voted for it anyways.

Trump’s absolutely insane mismanagement of Israel/Iran only perpetuated geopolitical instability in the region. By bombing Iran (which Pentagon intelligence indicates was basically a complete failure), Trump risked setting off a chain reaction that could have genuinely placed the United States into yet another Iraq War-style quagmire. Israel continues to wield an impossible amount of influence over US foreign policy, and the continued handholding of this rogue state (who is still gunning down Palestinians attempting to receive food aid) as they wreak havoc in the region is becoming progressively harder for even the most staunch pro-Israel politicians to defend.

ICE has gotten completely out of control. It doesn’t take more than a 2-second Google search to find a video of a masked divorced dad shaped like a thumb walking up to a mother or father of a loving family and either harassing, beating, or arresting them. Sometimes all three. The argument that ICE is only going after criminals never held the slightest ounce of truth, but whatever quantum-sized bit of reality that was based in has phased into complete fiction. Upon Stephen Miller’s request to the DHS to increase ICE detentions by tripling daily arrests, ICE has begun arresting people who are walking out of courthouses and actually engaging in the LEGAL process of LEGALLY becoming a RESIDENT/CITIZEN. Much like Israel, even the neutrals are starting to embarrass themselves defending this shit.

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The Supreme Court came to several decisions this past Friday that, unsurprisingly, have stark consequences for future generations of American politics. Among the rulings was one that made it so circuit-level courts cannot put forth injunctions that go into effect nationwide. That may or may not be a bad description of what’s happened, but the primary result here is that the executive branch now has an unprecedented amount of power. Where circuit judges used to act as a line of defense for insane policy, like the birthright citizenship executive order that this ruling revolved around in the first place, they now have no real functional bearing on policy put forth at the federal level. This is one of those cases we may look back on, along with the presidential immunity ruling, as one of historic consequence.

But…

While executive power grows, the only silver lining I can grasp onto is the fact that maybe, just maybe, there is a shift in the tides that could one day lead to that power actually falling into the right hands. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral democratic primary is an indication of what politics may start to look like as the Trump II administration barrels on. While he won’t ever be able to run for President, what he represents still can.

Right now, Democrats are the most unpopular they’ve ever been in modern times. The base of the party hates Democrats, they hate Chuck Schumer, they hate Hakeem Jeffries, and most importantly, they hate the fact that the so-called “opposition party” has no real intentions to put forth any kind of opposition at all. This reality was only made more clear by the absolute trouncing Momdani’s campaign put on Andrew Cuomo. Momdani won the first round of rank choiced voting tabulation by such a large margin that Cuomo was forced to concede anyways.

The momentum Momdani carries with him is not isolated to New York City. It is a product of a larger, national attitude towards the state of modern politics. I’ve talked about this here before, but Trump’s victory in November was marginal. He won the states he needed to, but he didn’t even manage a majority in the popular vote. He didn’t even pass 50% of the votes. Republicans won the election on the backs of a historically unpopular Biden administration that was a perfect display of the larger Democratic identity crisis happening across the country.

The last 3 presidential election cycles have seen Democrats go out of their way to stomp out any kind of progressive momentum for fear of scaring off moderates. And yet 2 of the last 3 presidential elections were lost to a Trump campaign that displayed no hesitation in cultivating the right's most extreme voting blocs. Momdani’s victory provides yet another piece of proof that progressive values are not a liability, but an asset that allows a Democratic politician to be their authentic self and put forth an honest campaign.

For too long now Democrats have been dishonest charlatans whose lack of authenticity is worn on their sleeves and turns independents away. Despite their best efforts to dampen any sort of progressive momentum across the country, the movement continues to rear its head. This time, it arrives in the most high-profile city in the country.

Now, when I talk about the growing power of the executive branch in relation to Momdani’s victory, I want to clarify that I fully expect the Democratic Party to fuck this up one way or another. There is a difference between realism and optimism, and unfortunately, realism is labeled as such for a reason. Realistically, even if Momdani does become mayor of NYC, and the progressive movement reaches Bernie 2016 levels of hype, establishment Dems will force their will in every election after and give us some lame-ass presidential nominee in 2028 like Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg.

But this was supposed to be the optimistic part of the write-up, so that’s what we’re going to get into. With the amount of power now placed into the hands of the president by the Supreme Court, there is a legitimate opportunity for a hypothetical progressive president to enact sweeping leftist policy right on day one with the absolute power that sits on the desk of the Oval Office. If Republicans are going to act with impunity, then so should Democrats. The inspiration for this article was a tweet by Lolo giving some examples of just what this could look like.

Listen, I’m not a policy expert. I don’t know every facet of what enacting progressive policy might look like, and I know that SCOTUS as a whole is pretty cooked, but I do know that with the current standing of executive powers, a president who is serious about turning America around has an unparalleled ability to do so should they take office.

In the midst of arguably the most politically tumultuous month since March of 2020, the only thing keeping me sane is that if we get there, then just maybe there’s an opportunity to actually make change. Not empty promises like Obama or half measures like Biden, but real change that makes a tangible difference in people’s lives for the better. In doing so, a 60+ Senate majority could become a reality, making it easier to codify anything enacted through executive order.

Momdani’s victory in New York may appear infinitesimal as it’s just a mayoral primary, but the way in which it came about is seismic. Despite being outspent, despite having far less name recognition, despite a completely dilapidated New York democratic apparatus, despie his own party working against him, and despite new levels of fealty and obedience to modern American fascism, Momdani won because of the movement behind him. We may be 3 years out from the presidential race, but midterms are only a little more than a year away, and the New York mayoral election is approaching fast. Momentum is a real thing, and it’s the only thing that’s going to get social democracy into Washington.

Shit’s bleak right now, though; let’s go back to being real for a second. I’m not a “no elections in 2028” kind of guy, but it’s not impossible. It’s not impossible that suppression of oppositional voices continues to escalate, it’s not impossible Trump decides to run again for a 3rd term (assuming he’s still alive), and it’s not impossible America gets roped into more international conflict. At the same time, it’s also not impossible that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. But the only way to get there is by capturing progressive momentum where it exists and maintaining it.

It’s been awhile since I published something here, and I think the days of only publishing every so often are finally upon me, but I have been busy in the meantime! I co-wrote the first episode of the Austin DSA Batcast which you can find below, and I wrote episode 2 which is currently in production. So subscribe to that! You can also find the video versions on YouTube. Thanks for stickin around!

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Thank you, everyone. It is an honor to be your host tonight, and I cannot begin to express how excited I am to be here. You know, the first 100 days of an administration always felt like a bit of an arbitrary metric to me. Of the 1,461 days in a 4-year term, 100 is barely 7% of that. It’s hard to dish out adequate judgment when there’s still so much time left for things to get so much worse.

Nevertheless, 100 days is a nice round number and still plenty of time to take action on the most important issues an incoming administration wants to tackle. For instance, grocery prices are at all-time highs, and the Trump administration decided on day one to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Problem solved. Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine on day one, but the only major foreign policy move the Trump administration has made was sending JD Vance to kill the pope.

The two biggest stories of this second Trump term have been deportation and tariffs. It’s tough to pick just one, as they’ve dominated the news cycle going back and forth between Trump’s will-he-won’t-he tariff implementation and Trump’s less ambivalent willingness to deport both legal U.S. residents and U.S. citizens. Consequential in their own ways, both of these issues have propelled the U.S. into a constitutional crisis from which we may never be the same. Personally, I voted for Trump because I thought he was going to bring back Phantom of the Opera, but I may have to wait for the second hundred days. Fingers crossed. In the meantime, though, we must bear witness.

Chuck Schumer is here tonight, everyone; let’s give him a round of applause. Chuck, thank you for being here. We know you cancelled your entire book tour to make it tonight, maybe a bit overreactive for one event, but we really appreciate it considering no one was reading that shit in the first place.

Y’all, Pete Hegseth is here tonight and nominated for all but one award. Can you believe that? Well done, Pete, well done. When they told me I was going to be hosting the ceremony tonight, I told my wife I was not going to drink a single drop of alcohol in preparation, and still to this minute I am dry. The fact that I’ve been leaking my Signal chats entirely sober is just as impressive.

Last but not least, we have Tim Pool in the audience tonight. He’s not nominated for anything, but much like everywhere else he’s invited, we all wish he wasn’t. This ceremony is, of course, a black tie event, so thank you, Tim, for following the dress code. And ladies and gentlemen, we decided to let the beanie stay on once we found out that he actually becomes more insufferable with it off. So please, Tim, by all means keep that thing snug.

Alright folks, we have a great show planned for you all tonight, so sit back, relax, and let’s look on in a dreadful awe at the first 100 days of the 47th United States presidential administration.

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Biggest Loser Award

Nominees: Pete Hegseth, Chuck Schumer, JD Vance, Eric Adams, Elon Musk

Winner: Chuck Schumer

I could just leave this video here and move on, but I don’t want to be too lazy. In the first 100 days of Trump II, the Senate minority leader has managed to embody everything wrong with the Democratic party. Whether it’s his unwillingness to do what’s right even when it’s difficult (vote against the continuing budget resolution) or his undying loyalty to the state of Israel, the fecklessness and commitment to the status quo made Schumer an easy nominee.

What really elevated his status to winner, however, has been the complete and utter collapse of Democratic support within their own base since the start of the term. Approval of the party amongst their own voters is at record lows, and despite being the Democratic leader of the Senate, there is nary a soul who sees Chuck Schumer as the vessel by which to oppose this administration. Right from the start it was obvious he wasn’t doing enough.

Democrats let Elon Musk walk in and tear the administrative state apart, they helped pass the Laken Riley Act, and they’ve continued to fund aid for Israel, all the while admitting that there is nothing they can do. Since the vote on the budget resolution, Schumer has been getting obliterated by everyone from the public and fellow Democrats to the hosts of The View. This award could have easily gone to just “Democrats,” but that’s not fair to all of them, and really this kind of failure needs a face to blame.

Just Put The Fries In The Bag Award

Nominees: Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, John Fetterman, Mark Zuckerberg

Winner: Kristi Noem

As a cabinet member within an administration birthed by TV America, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem knows exactly how to play for the cameras. Noem has won this award for her outstanding cosplay ability and commitment to looking like she’s doing something while not actually doing anything at all. Among everyone in the administration, no one knows how to sell it quite like Kristi.

Noem is the kind of politician who takes you for a fool. She is catering to a group of people who see images on a screen and make no attempt to examine them further once the light particles are processed by the brain. You are not on the front lines! Employing the fake it till you make it strategy only works when it’s believable. Nobody but the dumbest scourge of America is buying into the John Wayne schtick. If there is anyone who does less at work than I do, it’s Kristi Noem. Quit being extra and just put the fries in the bag, bro.

Kristi Noem also gets a dishonorary Invoking Holocaust Imagery On Purpose award for this photo from several weeks ago.

Fell For It Again Award

Nominees: Centrist Democrats, Donald the Dove Voters, Fortune 500 CEOs, Glenn Greenwald, Pete Hegseth

Winner: Donald the Dove Voters

Arguably the single biggest lie of the 2024 Trump campaign was their insistence on a commitment to peace. This wasn’t a new thing for Trump, considering his anti-Iraq War sentiment that played extremely well in the 2016 campaign, but within the last 6 weeks or so of the 2024 campaign, both Trump and Vance took that opportunity to push hard against the conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Trump was relentless with the proclamation that Russia would have never invaded Ukraine and that Hamas would have never attacked Israel if he had been president. Obviously complete bullshit, and equally impossible to know, at the absolute least Trump’s foreign policy in his first term was a major provocation for October 7th. Listing all of the military action of Trump’s first term is frivolous, but as is usually the case with Trump’s rhetorical strategy, if he says he’ll bring peace enough times, then enough people will think he will. And enough people did.

These people are the recipients of the only award tonight that acknowledges the most gullible our country has to offer. Despite promising to end the war in Ukraine on day 1, we are on day 100, and relations are the worst they’ve ever been. Despite promising to end the genocide of Palestinians (my words, not his), Israel has continued to receive military and monetary aid from the US. US policy on Israel right now is simply hoping they exterminate Palestinians faster and get it over with. In the last 2 months alone, the US has launched multiple airstrikes against the Houthis killing dozens of Yemeni civilians, and threatened Iran with aggressive action if they do not comply with U.S. demands.

The Trump administration has zero interest in curbing US military operations abroad, and you need to pick up a goddamn book for once if you think otherwise. Donald the dove voters, you fell for it again.

Goodest Boy Award

Nominees: JD Vance, Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, John Fetterman, Mike Johnson

Winner: JD Vance

JD Vance is actually a better VP than people give him credit for. And by this I mean he embodies all of the pejorative qualities a vice president represents better than others have. Vance is powerless, insipid, and uninspiring. People know he’s slimy, and they know he’s a fraud, but he is the winner of this award tonight for always doing as he’s told and trying his best at everything.

Let’s start with his performance in the Oval Office during the Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky meeting. It was here that Vance set himself apart from the other nominees, as he scolded Zelensky for never once saying “thank you” to the US for all that they’ve done. After interpreting Zelensky’s desperate disposition—given the status of this conflict—as disrespect, Vance made sure to let Zelensky know who’s boss. How stupid Zelensky is, as the people of his country are massacred in a progressively hopeless defense against an invading force, to not grovel at the feet of our god-king. Good job, JD. You tell them!

Vance’s resume has also taken on the accomplishment of “annoying 4chan debatelord poster but on X.” Given who our president is, Twitter pettiness should not be a foreign concept, but where Trump gets by on his charisma and ability to be funny (not so much these days though), JD Vance’s rants emulate the worst of his personality. He’s a pseudo-intellectual that sometimes says “bullshit” and “retarded.” That’s what adults do! I mean, look at the length of these tweets. He’s whiny and petulant, but it’s all for the cause. You’re a good boy, JD.

Villain of the First 100 Days Award

Nominees: Donald Trump, Tom Homan, RFK Jr., Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, Russell Vought, Jaime Dimon, Stephen Miller

Winner: Stephen Miller

Alright, no sarcasm or irony here for Stephen Miller. Fuck this guy. He’s the winner of the Biggest Villain Award because he is the architect of all of the worst this administration has to offer. Miller is a shadow president in a way Elon wishes he was. As Trump’s brain rots away with time, and he becomes progressively more tired of actually doing any governing, Stephen Miller has all but the final say on what gets done and when. We saw it in the first leaked Signal chat; Stephen Miller quite literally gave the green light on behalf of the President.

ICE and their deportations are all Miller. The cruelty of these disappearings and deportations is all Miller. The defiance of civil rights and the judiciary for the sake of ethnic superiority is all Miller. He represents the kind of hate and vitriol that any future administration must respond to with imprisonment.

The first 100 days of Trump II have brought immense pain and suffering to a number of groups with the least amount of resources to fight back. That kind of bullying is what cowards do. As to not absolve anyone else in the administration of blame or guilt, they are all responsible, but it’s Miller’s vision. He is devoid of a soul, and even though JD killed the Pope, Miller is the closest thing to the Antichrist in American politics right now.

Biggest Winner Award

Nominees: Crypto Billionaires, Israel, China, Claudia Sheinbaum, Curtis Yarvin

Winner: China

No one has benefitted more than China in these first 100 days. America’s greatest frenemy gets to sit back and watch as the U.S. starts a fire it can’t even put out. Let’s start with the tariffs. By acting entirely on impulse with zero foresight, the Trump administration has severed trade relationships with almost everybody. It’s not just about the scope of the tariffs but the haphazard and arrogant manner in which they’re discussed.

World leaders understand that Trump’s threats are empty and that the U.S. may actually carry less leverage than the last couple of centuries would have us believe. Trump’s tariff policy is the administration’s most disorganized policy so far, and as more countries realize that the US is a paper tiger when it comes to trade negotiations, they will look elsewhere. Most notably, China. Just this week it was reported that Port Los Angeles is expecting a ~40% decline in cargo. It’s happening.

In addition to the tariffs, the United States continues to push authoritarian boundaries domestically and continues to support war crimes abroad. The stones that the U.S. likes to toss in their glass house are beginning to pile up, and the rocks are getting bigger. As oligarchy and capitalism continue to destroy the standard of living for the average American, the facade of the American dream will fade into myth. As one empire falls, another fills its place.

If the Trump II admin has succeeded at anything so far, it has been progressing the freefall of the U.S.’s global standing. China won this award because of a big-picture outlook on what 3 and a half more years of these first 100 days looks like. BRICS truthers are going to be vindicated as the age of the American empire continues to collapse in front of our eyes. In the grand scheme of things, we may see the Age of America as a small blip in the history of mankind. By the way things are looking, the chapter right after ours may be about the Chinese Century that followed.

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Let’s get local for a second. In 2023, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had bribery and abuse of power charges brought against him by members of his own staff! 16 articles of impeachment were brought forth in the Texas legislature, and he was acquitted on all of them. In March of 2024, he had securities fraud charges dropped after he agreed to do 100 hours of community service. There’s a twisted comedic irony in a settlement like that being brought to a public servant. Paxton was reelected in 2022 despite all of this being public knowledge.

These are just two general examples of the bigger picture. Democrats are no stranger to this type of corruption either, but it’s even worse that they are the ones who ultimately never bring these people to justice. And this is where the repercussive effects of this vicious cycle get ugly. Ordinary people see corruption, criminality, and deceit rewarded with the highest positions of power on the planet. Why, then, should they have any reason to believe that the democratic institutions held in such high regard by Democrats are functioning even remotely as intended?

The disillusionment of America’s political system is not a secret. Apathy towards American democracy and politicians led 90 million eligible voters to just not even bother with this past election. Even thinking about politics is an immediately negative experience for people.

This past week, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa held a town hall for a room full of boisterous constituents. Almost entirely white retirees living in and around rural Iowa, the people attending the town hall were angry. Among all their grievances, the one that stood out the most was in regard to Trump’s defiance of the SCOTUS ruling that required him to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador back to the United States. As Sen. Grassley fumbled over his words to provide anything resembling an adequate defense, one attendee shouted something to the effect of, “Why should I have to pay a $1,200 court fine but Trump doesn’t have to?”

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Often times corruption is dealt in the shadows. It hides behind the scenes, in secret, so as not to expose itself and run the risk of getting caught. Obviously the primary issue here is the administration’s extradition of legal US residents to a foreign prison camp without any due process, but the details of that are not as digestible to a median electorate. The defiance of the SCOTUS ruling, though, is an easy, cut-and-dry matter that has rural Iowans, a three-time Trump state, up in arms.

Over the last several decades, corruption has become increasingly unashamed. Using Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon as a basic modern starting point, the public can only take so many unabashed examples of zero accountability before the apathy sets in. Ken Klippenstein wrote a great article here on Substack about how nihilism is apparently a new target for the Trump administration. The Justice Department sees a string of assaults on public officials and Tesla dealerships, as well as the killing of the United Healthcare CEO, as a connected set of attacks stemming from a growing nihilistic sentiment among the public.

When you see the arbiters of global calamity and suffering continue to get away with it, with systems in place that are supposed to protect you simultaneously failing over and over, nihilism starts making a lot of sense. No one faced any sort of retribution for the lies and crimes of the War on Terror or the 2008 financial crisis. Trump and every Republican that defended January 6th and refused to certify the election saw zero repercussions. The Biden administration, openly defiant of international law, will never see any punishment for their perpetration of Israeli war crimes. This is all just within the last 25 years.

The laundry list for future Democratic administrations is impossibly long, and there are numerous to-dos that should be prioritized. One of those things is restoring justice to a country that has lost all sense of it. This doesn’t mean continuing to dish out slaps on the wrist. Merrick Garland and the Biden DOJ have done irreparable damage in their pussyfooting and meandering in holding Trump accountable for his election crimes and incitement of an insurrection. In their failure, all they did was legitimize the assertion from his base that he did nothing wrong. Counterintuitive in the most harmful way.

Obama bailed out the banks after the fallout of 2008 and refused to hold the Bush administration accountable for the War on Terror; may he run the risk of appearing too partisan. Enough is enough. All this has gotten us is a current administration that is kidnapping and detaining legal US residents for using their voice. They are rounding up legal US residents and shipping them away to prison camps. Killing them with kindness has done nothing but kill the civil liberties of the American people. It’s time to start locking these people up.

Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, Tom Homan, ICE agents—I mean, the list goes on and on. Start making an example of people instead of trying to set an example that nobody follows. Americans, and really the rest of the world, are facing both the direct and indirect consequences of a centuries-long inability to do what’s right. It’s always been said that power corrupts people, and even the most noble of individuals are subject to the inevitable subversion that comes with wielding great power. It’d just be nice if we could have somebody do some tyranny against the bad guys for once.

While the primary focus of the Hands Off! initiative was opposing cuts to federal jobs and government programs, the rapid-fire, headline-inducing nature of the Trump administration’s first few months made it easy for a collective opposition to protest everything they’re doing all at once. The rally here in Austin had a variety of speakers ranging from national congresspersons like Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett to state representatives, city council members, and local organizers. Each using the unilateral government overreach that has incited these spending cuts as the premise for outrage over mass deportation, the decimation of civil liberties, and incomprehensible economic instability.

Within all of this, there were the recurring questions of “What can be done?” or “What can we do to fight this?” These questions, of course, have several answers, one of which was happening right then and there. Collective action is a powerful response, but it doesn’t just have to come in the form of large-scale protests. One answer, suggested by almost every speaker at the rally, was continuing to talk to the people closest to you.

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There are a handful of numbers I keep coming back to since November 5th. Kamala Harris garnered around 7 million fewer votes nationally than Joe Biden did in 2020. Trump only saw a net gain of about 3 million votes from 2020. An estimated 89 million eligible voters did not vote. They don’t paint the full picture regarding the actions and attitudes of the electorate, but there’s a numbers game here that plays a role in the larger outcome. Most importantly, it’s something I believe we have the individual power to change.

Odds are, if you’re reading this, then you’re already infinitely more tuned in to politics than the median voter. That’s not even a flex; I just mean to say most of us are on Substack in the first place because we’re jonesing for political content. But to seek that content out at all is to act on a desire to learn and grow our knowledge base in an effort to better understand the world around us. It’s within this process that we acquire the most consequential tool in reshaping voter attitudes towards our political process.

The speakers at the Hands Off! protest all put forth the idea of taking advantage of this moment—a moment in which Trump’s popularity is steadily declining and Elon and DOGE’s popularity has cratered—by arming yourselves with the knowledge necessary to educate the people closest to you about what exactly we’re up against here. What separates the execution of this strategy today from its execution 6 months ago, is that there is no upcoming election anchoring any and all appeals in the midst of a conversation. Where the root of a conversation today is based in a response to current events, that same conversation taking place in November may come with the baggage of a sales pitch to vote for a particular candidate, whether you intend it to be that way or not.

Since the election, I’ve changed my approach to political conversation with people who are either apathetic, vaguely centrist, or just generally disinterested. We can engage these people, some of whom may be new voters, in ways that are not tied to any sort of immediate political contest. I’ve begun leaning less into the binary difference of right and wrong and more into the stark realities of how people are affected by policy. By connecting the repercussions of both Republican and Democratic inadequacy to someone’s real-world material conditions, there is an opportunity to showcase how a progressive agenda separates itself from standard politics.

For example, I have multiple close friends and family members who are schoolteachers, most of whom are not typically reading Substack accounts with less than 100 subscribers (we can change that, though; please subscribe with the button below).

There is a fight happening in the Texas legislature right now over the implementation of a universal school voucher program. You can read more about how destructive vouchers are here, but in short, a voucher program would serve to deteriorate a public education system that is already desperate for more help. This directly affects teachers. Whether it's a lack of further compensation, budget cuts, increased workload and responsibility, or siphoning of resources, the list goes on as to how public school teachers will be tangibly affected by legislation like this.

Vouchers are a particularly great example because they have a mostly benign appearance on the surface. They require further inquiry as to their contents. By strictly focusing on policy, the conversation becomes less about left or right and more about what is actually happening. For the sake of transparency, of course the idea here is to advocate for good policy; i.e. the importance of our public education system. But by making the consequences of said policy personal, it creates urgency, which hopefully becomes agency. I have found this to be the strategy that breaks down contenious barriers.

At the end of the day you don’t know how far this information will go either. Ideally, it would end up in front of people you would otherwise never have the opportunity to speak with. There is a potential for exponential growth her that makes me feel like I’m selling a multilevel marketing scheme.

Let’s be clear, and the Hands Off! Speakers made this point as well: this kind of approach is for people who are honestly willing to see truth when it presents itself. This isn’t for anyone’s terminally brain-rotted MAGA uncle. It’s for your brother, or cousin, or close friend who doesn’t participate in the political process too often but gets the sense that the deportation of college students for posting anti-genocide op-eds is maybe a step too far. Or maybe they’re wondering why the cost of living is still so high with absolutely zero federal legislation in place to change that.

The turnout at the Hands Off! protests all across the country was incredibly encouraging. Along with the special election results in Florida and Wisconsin last week, I entered this new week with a feeling of optimism that I haven’t felt in a long time. We are only 3 months into the second Trump administration, and there were crowd sizes in the tens of thousands. The discontent is there. If we can continue to build a coalition and put power behind the movement, imagine what a rally might look like in 2028.

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I am, of course, only talking about this game because the Cardinals would go on to blow that 20-point second half lead and lose the game. It was after this loss that Head Coach Dennis Green took the podium to address the press, giving us one of the all-time coaching rants.

“If you wanna crown ‘em, then crown their ass! But they are who we thought they were! And we let ‘em off the hook!”

We’re about a week removed now from the genesis of the Signal chat leak, and it’s high time we stopped letting them off the hook. It’s been the case over the course of this second Trump term that news moves fast, and any given story can be rendered obsolete within a single 24-hour span. Where some of their most heinous activity, like illegal deportations and threats to dismantle federal courts, will continue to rear its ugly head with each new instance, a screw-up like the Signal chat leak is subject to being buried with each passing day under the breakneck pace of this administration’s news cycle. They will undoubtedly mess up in all kinds of ways over the course of the next 3 and a half years, but the banality of how exactly we came to know of this chat serves a special purpose.

This was not a leak at the hands of a foreign country or a hacker prodigy, nor was it by the threat of blackmail. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and his fat boomer thumbs accidentally added the wrong person to a group chat. It was a glorified butt-dial, a mistake fully representative of the carelessness with which our government currently operates. There is no level of spin that allows for this fact to become ambiguous. Never let them forget how embarrassingly stupid this is.

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While this is no doubt a major story, and the casual nature in which the most powerful people on planet earth use emojis to react to war crimes is depraved, watching Republicans this past week has been a particularly uplifting experience. In the face of rising American fascism, it feels nice to relish in the fact that the most smug and self-assured people we know were put on their backfoot with nothing to grab hold of. A public screw-up that only affirms the most abject criticisms about Trump and his circle.

These people want to be taken seriously so badly, but they cannot help how consistently inauthentic and fabricated their public personas really are. It’s why Kristi Noem and JD Vance keep cosplaying in photo ops, and it’s why I can’t help but laugh at Pete Hegseth getting a shout-out from Marco Rubio that looks like it was pulled from my Microsoft Teams chat. When we get to look behind the veil, we see a group of people who couldn’t be less resolute.

The Republican response to this has been messy. Mike Waltz was on Laura Ingraham’s show sort of kind of admitting that Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the chat by accident, but that Goldberg’s contact information was placed into his phone by an outside party. Tulsi Gabbard testified before the Senate and said they did not discuss classified information in the chat, but the fully released messages provide details of military action down to the exact minute. Trump thinks Signal sucks, but Pam Bondi thinks it’s still great. Pete Hegseth is barely answering questions about it and stands by the fact that there was no wrongdoing. The communication is disjointed because there is no excuse or line of reasoning that provides adequate cover for why we even know about it in the first place.

Obviously this story is rich with hypocrisy coming from the same people who spent a decade+ seething about Hillary Clinton using a private email server, but if hypocrisy were truly damning, we’d exist in a completely different reality. Ultimately this leaked chat works as a direct line of proof that the people who work so hard to project an image of strong, serious, infallible leadership are exactly who we think they are. They’re careless, callous, incompetent, and self-righteous. This group chat has it all.

There’s no grand conspiracy here because Mike Waltz legitimately just did some stupid shit that is either directly or adjacently similar to something we’ve all done on our phones. The only difference is we’re all not the National Security Advisor of the United States of America. When it comes to their more abominable policy positions, the cruelty is the point, and they do not care how evil or fascist it all is because they like being that way. This leaked chat, though, it makes them look dumb and clueless in a way they couldn’t be more insecure about.

A major criticism of Democratic opposition is that they don’t go hard on ad hominem attacks towards Republicans in the same way Republicans do towards them. Take this chat and never let them forget it. Republicans will not shut up about how important national security is, and that’s why we have to deport anyone with a tattoo, and that’s why trans people have to use their assigned birth gender on their passports, and that’s why we have to crack down on pro-Palestine sentiment. If they really cared about national security, they wouldn’t be using a private app on private phones for private discussions. So while the hypocrisy is certainly palpable, the cherry on top is that they just so happen to look so goddamned stupid at the same time.

We can’t let them off the hook for that.

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What has transpired within higher education over the last month is dismaying, but not particularly surprising. After all, these are institutions that, much like the parasitic business executives and politicians we often deride, are beholden to similar benefactors that ultimately call the shots. It’s not a secret that education is a key component in producing better outcomes in life. As such, government strong-arming of universities is a tale as old as time.

The genesis of higher education’s transition from accessible, public asset to systematic debt mill is particularly salient today. Most of the enacted legislation that pulled state funding from colleges and forced their hand to charge tuition was in response to rising social unrest of the late 50s and 1960s. College campuses were a battleground for civil rights and anti-war movements, rightfully disrupting and agitating the powers that be. The voices of student protesters and activist groups grew louder with each passing semester.

Ronald Reagan’s election as governor of California in 1966 came with the promise of cuts to state funding for colleges and a pledge to “clean up the mess at Berkeley.” As for what followed, I’m going to let a couple of quotes from Reagan do most of the talking here. The first is from a 1966 speech at the San Francisco Cow Palace:

“There has been a leadership gap and a morality and decency gap at the University of California at Berkeley where a small minority of beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates have brought such shame to and such a loss of confidence in a great University…”1

The next one is from a press conference two weeks after proposing California universities should adopt tuition as a revenue model. Reagan stated this was in an effort to

“get rid of undesirables […] those who are there to carry signs and not to study might think twice to carry picket signs.”2

And lastly, I’ll add an all-time classic from Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during Reagan’s 1970 reelection campaign:

“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat…We have to be selective on who we allow to go through [higher education],”3

In February of 1970, as state funding for higher education continued to decrease year over year, the UC Board of Regents finally imposed tuition, or an “educational fee” as it was called, on all registered students. The fallout from this transition is obvious and cannot be overstated. Student debt is now a way of life, college’s return on investment has shrunk, and a fundamental pillar in the pursuit of a better future has collapsed.

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The American dream has always been mythologized, but now more than ever it feels like complete fantasy. Good grades and a college degree are no longer parameters that guarantee a well-paying job, a house, and the ability to support a family. People aren’t just now becoming disenchanted with higher education; public opinion has already turned sour.

Research on this sentiment provides some notable data points. The first is from a Gallup-Lumina report that shows an almost 10-year decline in confidence towards higher education and an increase in skepticism towards higher ed within that same 10-year period. Roughly a third of these respondents cited cost as the reason for declining confidence.

Another is from Pew Research, which shows only 22% of US adults think college is worth the cost. As an added bonus, 47% of US adults think college is worth the cost but only if you don’t have to take out loans; a notably fantastical reality for most Americans.

The implementation of college tuition and its rising costs has essentially worked as planned. It’s not so much that Americans don’t value getting an education, but they see the financial commitment required to do so as a barrier not worth overcoming. While the decimation of the American dream is a multifaceted project, making a degree both unattainable up front and insignificant even after finishing has been a particularly successful part of it.

The fact that higher education wasn’t always this way is proof enough that it doesn’t have to continue as it exists now. A core value of this newsletter is that education is a human right, and its attainment serves as a basis for better future outcomes and earnings in a person’s life. This belief extends beyond the individual as well. An educated society is more stable, more peaceful, and more prosperous. Roger Freeman and Ronald Reagan knew this. Both of them were fully aware of the threat this posed to capital owners and the status quo.

Abolishing student debt and advocating for tuition-free public colleges is not a frivolous venture for handouts. It is a just cause in the fight against fascist oppression that has sought to keep people ignorant, poor, and hopeless. We are now, once again, living through a moment in history where higher education is spotlighted in the midst of an administration’s retalitory flailing. The power that knowledge has is not lost among our political leaders; it’s why they work so hard to suppress it. They’re not going to lose sight of that, and we shouldn’t either.

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These are individual, but not isolated, examples of what fascistic compliance looks like today. There is a fealty in America that is not new but feels more willing and unconcerned than ever before. Among all the parties mentioned here, universities play a particular role in that they have historically served as battlegrounds for student-led movements and activism of all kinds. Student protests are barometers for generational attitudes and illustrate a future in which those students strive to live, actualizing the protections of the First Amendment in order to do so.

For years now, Americans have had to endure relentless badgering from the right on the apparent Marxist radicalization happening across American education. From higher ed to K-12 schooling, the deep state has taken a top-down approach to manipulating the minds of our youth in order to transform the country into a Communist hellscape. In doing so, conservatives have become marginalized and censored in such a way that, upon taking power, the only option for recourse is to bring oppositional forces to heel.

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It was always known, but has now become clear, that the essence of Trump II is to push the boundaries of executive power in a way that permanently alters presidential authority in this country. Coincidentally, we are witnessing this in practice with American universities acting as subservient conduits for the goals of this administration. Hypocrisy is not the problem here, however. What has transpired at Columbia University over the last couple of weeks is the single biggest threat to American civil liberties that we face today. The arrest and subsequent disappearing of Mahmoud Khalil is the first of what the administration hopes will become many—a litmus test for what they can get away with.

Since Khalil’s arrest, Columbia has also gone on to revoke the degrees of several pro-Palestinian graduates and expel current students. It’s hard to imagine Columbia being disinterested in doing these things anyways, but it’s important to note that the catalyst for this was a $400 million cut in federal grants to Columbia by the Trump administration “due to the school's continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

This is an institution of higher learning being threatened by the government to comply with their dishonest and manipulative definition of antisemitism or risk having their funding cut. It will not stop here. There are 9 other universities listed by the DOJ’s Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism that will face the same kind of ultimatum.

The facts of the matter are important. Mahmoud Khalil committed no crime, has done nothing illegal, is a legal US resident, and was arrested by plainclothes officers who did not identify themselves. The purpose of campus protests surrounding Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people was to get the universities to divest from their complicity in Israeli war crimes in the West Bank. Being opposed to Israeli war crimes is not the same thing as being antisemitic.

Khalil, and all students and graduates affected by Columbia’s actions, exercised their First Amendment rights. They were not violent. Khalil was arrested without a warrant under the pretense that his student visa was being revoked. Upon being told that Khalil is a legal resident with a green card, officials said they were revoking that instead. After his arrest, Khalil was not allowed to speak to his lawyers for several days, and his lawyers were lied to regarding his whereabouts. At one point, Khalil’s lawyers were hung up on when inquiring over the phone about where Khalil was being held. His arrest and detention are illegal and blatant violations of the First Amendment.

On the topic of fealty, one of the more confounding aspects of the State Department’s actions is that this is all done, supposedly, specifically for the sake of Israel. The US is going out to bat this hard for an ally that has completely isolated itself from the rest of the world over the precise issue the US is shielding them on. Despite already existing in this country to a certain degree1, we are looking at a future where it is fully illegal to be critical of the state of Israel. Even taking into account that American foreign interests directly align with the expansion of an Israeli state, it is wild to see the US care so deeply about dissent towards something that is not itself. The United States is choosing wholeheartedly to die on this hill.

Columbia is cowardly in a way that is far too common today, caving to the mafioso-style strong-arming of an administration that just keeps getting away with it. This is what has made student protests so meaningful. When the adults on campus refuse to stand for what’s right, the responsibility falls upon the collective action of young people everywhere. Universities pride themselves on the facade of being intellectual sandboxes, and yet they are now responsible for some of the most oppressive First Amendment violations in America’s history. Students cannot rely on school leadership so they in turn look to each other.

Unsurprisingly, campus administrators operate with the same sort of loyalty to the bottom line as any business executive or politician. Columbia’s endowment is almost $15 billion, and they are the largest private landowner in New York City. This asset compilation is not uncommon among elite universities, providing crucial context to this type of maddening capitulation. $400 million is not nothing, but it is apparently the running price tag on civil liberty.

The Trump administration's stranglehold on the media and persistent blitz of headline after headline have made it difficult for certain stories to stick. While it’s effective in creating a disorienting 24-hour news cycle, federal spending cuts and mass deportation are the issues dominating headlines writ large. Even as individual stories come and go, the administration cannot escape sentiment surrounding its execution of policy. As this pertains to Columbia, Khalil, and the government’s attempt to deport pro-Palestinian protesters, it is imperative that this particular story does not get lost in the shuffle. What happens to Mahmoud Khalil will be a defining moment of our time. American fascism is no longer a “what-if.” It is here, and it is happening now. The eventual court battle will determine the extent to which it is allowed to continue.

It remains to be seen how exactly these other 9 universities will handle the State Department’s threats, but there’s no reason to believe those presidents and administrators will be any less servile. If we’re keeping track of who exactly has been on the right side of history, I’d wager the students protesting the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank seem to have the better track record. After all, what Columbia has done isn’t even all that unprecedented.

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In its current state, the Democratic Party exists as a fundraising apparatus. They are not interested in solving any of the most pressing issues Americans face today because doing so would require them to go against the interests of the benefactors they serve. Oftentimes, those same benefactors donate to Republicans as well. Take House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, for example. In the 2023-24 election cycle, his top contributors consisted of AIPAC, BlackRock, and Lockheed fucking Martin. Similarly, he’s receiving tons of money from both the real estate and investment industry.

Comparatively, let’s look at some of the money House Majority Leader Mike Johnson is receiving.

Do I even need to go much deeper here? I guess I could, and maybe one day I should, but for now let this serve as a perfect representation of what we’re dealing with within Democratic leadership. Jeffries is adamant that Democrats have no leverage1, and therefore must work to find common ground with Republicans as their only option. As such is the inherent paradox of centrism; by attempting to exist in the middle, you ultimately stand for nothing at all. This is not solely about Hakeem Jeffries either. It is the corporate Democrat class of politician, like Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, or even Kamala Harris, that insists we must work with Republicans because they are incapable of breaking from the monied interests they serve.

The Democratic voter base is becoming increasingly tired of the do-nothing strategy of sitting idly by, keeping your fingers crossed that Republicans screw up badly enough to bring home the votes necessary to win elections. A Quinnipiac poll finds 68% of registered Democrats disapprove of the job Congressional Democrats are doing, the highest margin since they began measuring congressional performance in 2009. As it stands, we are living in a moment where the party has nothing to rally behind.

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This does, however, present an opportunity. Where there exists a power vaccuum there must exist someone to fill it. Unfortunately, it remains to be seen who exactly that will be, but regardless of whoever I or anyone else believes it to be, there does already exist a foundation for what that person should be fighting for. While Hakeem Jeffries is busy touring his book and House Democrats are censuring their own party members, at the ripe age of 110 years old Bernie Sanders is touring the country to spread a message about the greatest threat our country faces.

On his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Sanders has already visited a number of cities in red counties in red states to try and drive home the reality that vast wealth inequality is the root of America’s dysfunction. On March 8th, 10,000 people showed up to his rally in Warren, Michigan. He is reaching max capacity at his venues in places like Omaha, Nebrasksa and Kenosha, Wisconsin, having to turn people away, creating overflow crowds of hundreds more people. These are political rallies in non-election years, headlined by someone not running a campaign, pulling these numbers.

When most Democrats are in a state of do-nothing apathy, Bernie Sanders is doing just the opposite. He is gathering Americans from all walks of life, much in the vein of the “coming together” rhetoric espoused by Jeffries, to educate them on what exactly we are up against here. It is not immigrants, trans people, women, or anti-Israel protestors who are the reason you can’t afford groceries or rent. It is a class of billionaire oligarchs who continue to get wealthier at the expense of the American people. These are the people whose thumb we are under.

On a smaller scale, Gov. Tim Walz presents a similar understanding of what exactly the Democratic voter base is looking for. In an interview with Fast Politics, Walz postulates, “When we get back, which we will – we'll fight – I’ll tell you what people are going to expect is they're not going to expect us to tinker around the edge with the ACA [Affordable Care Act.] They're going to expect universal health care.” In a separate interview with Politico, Walz makes an observation that few Democrats are even willing to admit regarding his vice presidential campaign loss: “We shouldn’t have been playing this thing so safe.” It really is just that simple.

It is this ethos that the future Democratic leader must embody in order to adequately rally the base and provide a tangible belief system for independent voters to grasp onto. You cannot tell Americans to find the middle in between both parties because there is nothing there. It is a charade that serves corporate interests so Democrats can fundraise as the not-Republican party but still functionally operate within the confines of a capitalist framework. When our next elections come around, we must be able to recognize what a worthwhile candidate should stand for.

1. First and foremost is their support of a complete and comprehensive dismantling of the billionaire class. Raise the marginal tax rate, increase taxes on corporations, remove exploitative loopholes, break up monopolies and duopolies in the sectors where they exist, and do whatever it takes to diminish the impossibly large stranglehold that wealth has on our way of life. Making this priority number one is key, as immense wealth disparity is the basis for America’s increasingly dire socioeconomic circumstances.

2. In tandem with number 1, any Democratic politician worth voting for must firmly advocate for overturning Citizens United. Elon Musk spending a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected while subsequently getting $83 billion richer by the end of last November is a stark example of the Pandora’s box Citizens United opened up. It is a direct assault on democracy as 1 person, 1 vote becomes progressively irrelevant. There is nothing an ordinary person can do to combat this kind of influence. Fighting for elections to be publicly funded is the only way to level the playing field.

3. Democratic candidates must empower unions and get the PRO Act signed into law as soon as they enter office. Democratizing workplaces and putting power in the hands of workers is a massive step in fighting billionaire power. It’s not just about receiving union endorsement but being honest about standing with working people. Sign the PRO Act and bring power to the majority of Americans who exist in the working class.

4. Reform the Supreme Court. Apply a strict standard of ethics, remove the lifetime term limit, and stack the shit out of it. If a future Democratic president has any hope of signing legislation that will become law and make everlasting change for the better in this country, they must reform the Supreme Court. As it exists, any kind of drastic progressive change is nearly impossible. In a real-life example of Democratic fecklessness, Republicans have won this fight for the foreseeable future by playing their own game while Democrats play by losing rules. The Supreme Court does not work for Americans; it works for the Republican party.

5. Democrats must end the unconditional, unwavering support of the state of Israel. It’s hard to truly articulate the scope of the influence Israel has had, and currently has, over American foreign and domestic policy. Abroad, America’s support for the genocide in Gaza is unconscionable. The American people are not blind to this, as it absolutely played a role in depressing turnout for Kamala Harris in November. At home, the recent illegal detention of Mahmoud Khalil is a frightening development in America’s commitment to suppressing dissent towards Israel’s crimes. AIPAC owns politicians on both sides, and yet their mission only serves to benefit right-wing ideology. This cannot continue, and honestly a Democrat’s stance on these issues may serve as the single biggest litmus test as to where their moral compass points.

6. Abandoning marginalized groups in the name of polling, or for the sake of capitulation to a conservative worldview, is an instant red flag. Any Democrat that denies the humanity of trans people or demonizes immigrants should not step foot anywhere near a position of power. There is a growing sentiment among Democrats that the LGBTQ+ community is an electoral liability and that immigration must in fact be curbed because of crime. This kind of rhetoric is rooted in bigotry and xenophobia and is undeniably fascist. There’s a reason conservatives say these things too.

7. Lastly, no Democratic politician should be taken seriously unless they unabashedly and unequivocally support universal healthcare. This is the biggest no-brainer in politics right now. Enough is enough with politicians beating around the bush on this. Expand Medicare to cover every person in this country. The response to the killing of the United Healthcare CEO was not one-sided. American people are tired of being ripped off. They are tired of going into debt for life-saving surgery. They are tired of living and dying at the behest of the profit margin. Of all the things listed here, support for single-payer healthcare is the bare minimum for whether supporting a Democratic candidate is even worth considering.

This obviously isn’t everything, but it’s baseline policy like this that Americans are willing to fight for. Democrats must latch themselves onto a principled belief system that is separate from the monied interests that have stifled American progress. Not only is centrism an electorally losing position, it is morally bankrupt. It supports a continuation of the status quo in the face of extensive, necessary outcry by the people of this country who find themselves dissatisfied as a direct consequence of that status quo. As voters, we cannot continue to support this. The Democratic Party has proven time and time again that they are not capable of meeting this moment in history. They are unequipped to fight because they are not equipped with a belief system that says fighting is the right thing to do. Support the politicians who work to support you, and leave the rest of these hapless losers behind.

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Musk’s presence here is important for a plethora of reasons, not least of which is how his wealth juxtaposes Trump’s suggestions about US education. Towards the latter half of the interview, Hannity gets around to asking about the Department of Education and why we can do away with it. Trump doesn’t get too deep into it, but he does manage to take the lead on this question. In the midst of dropping some auspicious mentions of school choice and giving education back to the states, he makes note of how US education is lagging behind other countries. Specifically, he mentions Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and even China as benchmarks for what he’d like US states to become. This is not the first time he’s brought this up either. He talked about it during the campaign, and just a few weeks before going on Hannity, he put out the exact same line1 to a room full of reporters.

For context, the rankings Trump is talking about here2 are not as cut and dry as he’d like them to be. He doesn’t even get the numbers right. The US is not ranked last in anything, and he’s placing the US as 40th out of 40, which also isn’t correct because the rankings he’s talking about have 81 countries. Even if—which he probably is—Trump is only referring to comparable OECD nations, that’s still only 37 countries. Not that fact-checking this kind of stuff matters anymore, but it’s important to see the real picture because knowledge is power, ya know?

What he’s more than likely referencing are PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) and TIMMS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) rankings. Let’s look at some quick numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics (coincidentally a research entity that has been hit by DOGE cuts) that showcase the gap in American student outcomes compared to other countries:

• The US ranks 34th on the NCES mathematics literacy scale for 15-year-old students behind countries like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and China.

• The US ranks 9th on the NCES reading literacy scale behind countries like China but ahead of the Scandinavian countries.

• The US ranks 16th on the NCES science literacy scale behind countries like China, but just marginally ahead of the Scandinavian countries.

As we see, the US is not particularly excellent at anything and exists on a spectrum of good to pretty bad. If Republicans are serious about improving academic outcomes, then the United States should unequivocally look to other countries and adopt their most successful initiatives, both inside and outside the classroom. The only problem is that nothing about Republican policy is going to get us there. The gall to go so far as to put those countries—countries that typically operate within a socially democratic framework—on a pedestal with the world’s richest man barely a foot to your left is astounding. This is one of the most infuriating things about the entire Republican apparatus. They will see a problem and do the opposite of what the solution is.

To frame US inadequacy in a way that calls for school choice and the removal of federal oversight as the solution is disingenuous in the most classically Republican way. The ways in which US education differs from other high-performance nations are vast and beyond the scope of a single article, but it’s worth looking at some key basics. First and foremost, the countries Trump has mentioned prioritize their teachers in a way that is totally absent in the United States.

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Evaluating Teacher Value

If we are to work on improving student outcomes, then we must work to improve the environments of the frontline educators whose job is seen as the most important factor in accomplishing that. Arguably the largest distinction that the US holds in comparison to other wealthy nations is how it values teaching as a profession. On its face, there are the obvious differences: American teachers are paid significantly less to work longer hours for fewer benefits. All of this plays a role in America’s teacher shortage crisis, compounding over decades to increasingly devalue teaching as a professional field. As test scores decrease and student outcomes worsen, the perception of public education—on the right in particular—has put teachers front and center as enemy number one.

There is a level of professional respect applied to teachers in other countries that simply does not exist in America. Schools here operate more as factories to churn out laborers than they do as institutions creating individual thinkers. That has, in effect, degraded education as a specialized profession and turned teaching into a position that can be filled by anybody. Take the teacher shortage, for example. In Texas, many school districts have removed certification requirements in order to be hired. States like Oklahoma, Arizona, and Florida have dropped the requirement of needing a bachelor’s degree. Would you trust an engineer with no credentials to design a bridge? It’s subtle, but American policymakers have made it clear that they value the worth of teachers so little, they would rather backfill the position with unqualified individuals than provide teachers with the necessary resources to succeed.

High-performance countries like Finland and China get all of their teachers anywhere from the top half, to as high as the top 5%, of high school graduates3. Finland in particular set the standard among Nordic countries in the late 70s by implementing a rigorous, 5-year, research-based master’s course for teacher education. In addition to stricter education requirements, high-performance countries have made concerted efforts to improve teacher recruitment by making teaching as attractive as possible. Teachers are paid fairly and in proportion to other professions that require the same amount of education4 and, as a result, teacher status is elevated.

The execution of instruction itself is also different in high-performance countries, as, much like other specialized fields, teachers are afforded a high degree of autonomy in how they operate within their classrooms. Teacher autonomy in America is minimal, and they are beholden to a methodology that leaves little room for experimentation. By emphasizing the rigid process of teaching students to merely pass standardized tests, teachers manage to have little say in the curriculum while still maintaining a high degree of accountability.

In Sweden, for instance, teachers see themselves as “…very autonomous, in particular in relation to choices of content and method.”5 When you put the power of decision-making into the hands of the educators themselves, you give them the flexibility to work in accordance with the needs of the students. Increasing teacher autonomy is a heavily studied, core aspect of a teacher’s job satisfaction6.

Unfortunately, Republicans view teacher autonomy as the primary driver behind their perceived Marxist indoctrination in public schools. There’s a ton of irony—some might call it hypocrisy—in the policy of the freedom party that is designed to restrict the abilities of teachers to do their jobs. The best example is Florida’s 2022 legislation that enacted a myriad of requirements in how teachers should talk about slavery and American history, not to mention the nationwide book banning spree over the last few years. Still, it is not just teacher satisfaction alone that makes a difference. The systemic and structural rot at the core of the United States has adversely affected schools and the communities in which they serve.

Looking Inward and Outward

It would help to listen to teachers as well. In treating them as consummate professionals and experts on the subject of childhood education, we should prioritize their concerns about student performance. There are a few correlating concerns put forth by teachers that reflect America’s inadequacies in ways that only reality could.

Nearly half of all teachers hold negative views towards both their school’s academic performance and the behavior of their students. Most notably, teachers in high-poverty schools hold negative views at 73% and 64%, respectively. This leads us to our next concern.

Wealth inequality in America is at levels approaching pre-revolutionary France7, and teachers don’t have to be card-carrying communists to notice it in their own way. Among all teachers, poverty is seen as the single biggest issue facing their students today. Poverty does not just mean you are cash poor. It serves as a catalyst for every issue affecting a child’s ability to get a good education. A child living in poverty may find it more difficult to get to school each day. They may be less likely to get the help they need to improve their grades, or they may have to take time out of schoolwork—or the school day—to watch over younger siblings because their parents have to work. The list goes on and on as to how poverty affects every other aspect of a child’s life, including their education. As the saying goes, it’s expensive to be poor.

At a close second is chronic absenteeism, which has skyrocketed in a post-pandemic world with no sign of return to pre-pandemic levels. Absenteeism at this scale is not just a spontaneous choice to miss random days of school. It is a reflection of the poor socioeconomic conditions afflicting communities across the country. Unsurprisingly, most of the root causes of absenteeism were problems exacerbated by the pandemic. Food and housing insecurity, social anxiety, lack of reliable childcare, and growing distrust in science and institutions have all fractured the cohesion between schools and the communities in which they serve. There are innate, structural deficiencies in how America cares for its people. Both Republicans and Democrats alike point to any number of reasons for what they believe is the cause of declining test scores across the country, but rarely do they look beyond the classroom.

As for the countries Trump would like the US to emulate, we can start with the Gini Index we used to compare the US’ wealth inequality to pre-revolution France. Right now the US sits at a coefficient of 41.3. Comparatively, the other countries are as follows:

• Sweden - 29.8

• Norway - 27.7

• Denmark - 28.3

• Finland - 27.7

• China - 35.7

We are looking at coefficients significantly lower than where the US sits. Further, the rate of childhood poverty in America is drastically higher than in other OECD nations. While not listed in the graph linked above, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have much lower levels of childhood poverty than the US. Childhood poverty is the single biggest contributing factor to a decrease in future earnings, so our immediate takeaway here is that children in the countries Trump so adamantly wants to mimic are more commonly positioned to succeed from the earliest possible age. If a student’s material conditions are better, we can cut right through the central causes of absenteeism as well.

Harkening back to our discussion about teacher autonomy for a second, when we see that structure and organization within schools, along with positive relationships between students and teachers, are the driving forces behind keeping students in school8, we can understand the scope of how important it is to let educators apply their expertise in their own ways. Teaching for the students instead of the test is a fundamental part of creating a more enjoyable and welcoming schooling experience.

We Live In A Society

Lastly, it must be reiterated that on a functional level, every country Trump mentioned operates within the framework of a socialist to socially democratic welfare state. These countries have some combination of universal healthcare, universal childcare, free higher education, and a myriad of social safety nets that provide for their people in a way the US doesn’t even come close to. The tax-to-GDP ratio in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden is almost double what it is in the US. This is how these countries are able to supply communities and schools with the necessary resources to succeed, and this is why having Elon Musk sit beside Trump during this interview is so irritating. That is an unacceptable reality to live in. Wealth concentration in America is completely out of control, and reforming American education is not going to work, let alone happen at all, unless that wealth is adequately redistributed.

If there is anything to take away from what I’m saying in all this, it is this: all of these high-performance countries see schools as a public good that serves as a core pillar for a thriving society. What Republicans want to do to public education in America could not be more antithetical to what creates successful education systems abroad. This is not to say other countries are utopian societies liberated from the shackles of oppression, free from any and all shortcomings. But my god, it is not rocket science to see what’s working elsewhere and integrate that blueprint here in America. It’s insulting for Trump or any politician for that matter to acknowledge the shortcomings of American education, but look to privatization as the solution. The time is now to demand more of our leaders and tax the wealthy, support schools, support teachers, and support the communities they reside in.

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Project 2025’s section on the DoE, authored by Lindsey Burke, Director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, makes light of the fact that the agency is to be abolished upon the completion of the liquidation of its offices. Some will be rid of entirely, while others, like FAFSA and FSA, will be moved elsewhere. At the forefront of this quashing is, of course, the expansion of school voucher programs and a set of six other core principles1 that McMahon will oversee over the course of this term. However, in a series of convenient coincidences, McMahon does not currently have any real knowledge of the specifics regarding Project 2025’s implementation or what dismantling the DoE looks like in practice. All she knows is that, “It’s [the DoE] not working.”

McMahon’s hearing was a mostly mundane affair. We did not get the same fireworks seen at RFK’s hearing, nor did we get an unrelenting interrogation like with Pete Hegseth or Russell Vought. Instead, McMahon faced a Senate that, while contentious, already sees the writing on the wall. We are barely a month into this administration, and tens of thousands of federal workers have already been laid off or bought out. Public displays of willful ignorance to the game plan of your benefactors are not exclusive to McMahon, but it was clear in her testimony that no matter what she said about protecting IDEA, Title I, or civil rights, the plan that Project 2025 has laid out is already being put into place. Linda McMahon has been nominated to simply oversee its execution.

In 2009, Linda McMahon was appointed to the Connecticut State Board of Education by then Governor Jodi Rell. Her qualifications would come into question even back then, with the only basis for her nomination coming in the form of her education degree from East Carolina University and a desire to become a teacher. It would later be discovered that she actually lied about her degree, majoring in French, not education, so really her only qualification was that she wanted to be a teacher at some point. McMahon would only serve on the board for less than a year, ultimately resigning to pursue her next political venture.

McMahon’s foray into politics may predate Trump’s 2016 victory, but her electoral history bears a striking resemblance to other Trump-endorsed MAGA ghouls over the last 10 years: she loses. Not just once, but twice, and neither were close. McMahon first ran for US Senate in the state of Connecticut in 2010 and then again in 2012, losing to both current Senators from the state, Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal. By and large both of her campaigns were lost on aesthetics not policy. Despite running as an outsider with anti-establishment, populist rhetoric, McMahon could not capitalize on her wealth and business success in the same way Trump has been able to. Connecticut is a blue state through and through, but even in the Republican primaries she faced criticisms from opponents like former US congressman Rob Simmons for “buying the election.” McMahon would eventually find a home as administrator for the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, until finally ending up here as the nominee for Secretary of Education.

I can’t help but feel like McMahon got into politics because she was bored. Like when your retired parent joins a book club or picks up shifts at the library so they have something to do. The obvious big difference being your mom actually wants to help kids find The Lorax on the shelf, whereas Linda McMahon is looking for passive income. McMahon approaches politics with the same blatant and arrogant contempt for government as Trump, Musk, or any other billionaire. The uber wealthy have managed to turn large scale assaults on government and public trust into a side hustle. What better way to demonstrate this contempt than to take a job only to fire yourself? Linda McMahon can afford to oversee the dissolution of the DoE much like a CEO can afford to lay off thousands of employees because, in the end, they’ll make it out okay. Trump’s cabinet and inner circle are filled with CEOs and executives who live in a reality in which business and government are constantly at odds. If businesses are good at anything, it’s selling you shit. The dismantling of the DoE is the result of a multi-generational effort to sell the American people on the inadequacies of government. As an added layer of richness, McMahon’s hiring and self-firing acts as a comically large middle finger in the face of mass layoffs across the federal government.

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This past week, DOGE eliminated over $800 million worth of federal contracts at the Institute for Education Sciences within the DoE. The contracts in question were terminated without any regard for what they are composed of and have upended decades worth of important education research. It cannot be stressed enough that DOGE is currently undergoing a sweeping misinformation campaign about what constitutes waste within the government. Much of the $880 million total that was canceled has already been paid out! It’s so disingenuous and deceitful it warrants an entire discussion on its own, but that same spitefulness has now made its way into the DoE.

Among the multitude of studies that were cancelled was the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which provides crucial data on how American 4th and 8th grade student performance compares to other countries. The data has been collected and presented in 4-year cycles since 1995 and now, in the middle of the school year and a current cycle, has been thrown away. 4th and 8th grade test scores act as a key data point in K-12 learning, and don’t just serve as records for tracking purposes. The TIMSS study and others just like it are used to make informative policy decisions that address critical areas of need. Now, whether or not those policy decisions are implemented is something I’ve discussed extensively, but it’s worth reiterating that the charlatans letting Elon parade around Washington and confirming nominees like McMahon are the same ones impeding any sort of progress in American education.

The second sentence in the DoE section of Project 2025 reads, “When power is exercised, it should empower students and families, not government.” It’s the kind of rhetoric that works perfectly in tandem with how Republicans portray themselves when they’re out of power. When they’re in power, as they are now, and acting on it, Lindsey Burke actually manages to give the game away. What Trump, DOGE, and soon enough Linda McMahon are doing to the federal government right now is unequivocally illegal. Congress determines how the money is spent, and Congress has the authority to abolish the Department of Education. Power of the purse and separation of powers are taught in middle school-level government cirriculum. If children are learning stuff like that in middle school, it may start making a bit more sense as to why Republicans want to dismantle education.

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“I think that what Trump should, like, if I was giving him one piece of advice, [is] fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people. And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Andrew Jackson did not actually say this, but he may as well have given the context of what Vance is talking about here. In 1832 the Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that states did not have the right to impose regulations on Native American land. Jackson and the state of Georgia refused to enforce the ruling, and over the course of the next 6 years, Cherokee natives were kicked off their land, culminating in the Trail of Tears. To invoke the rhetoric of Andrew Jackson at all is certainly a choice in its own right, but to reference the open defiance of our country’s checks and balances in this way is perfectly analogous to what is happening in this moment.

One of the first things Trump did upon entering office was fire inspector generals across 17 different agencies. He has since signed multiple executive orders that fire certain federal employees outright, and has offered others severance packages in exchange for their resignations. Most recently, Trump fired the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is now overseen by billionaire Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought. This past week, Vought issued a series of directives that essentially froze all bureau activity, marking the start of what the administration hopes will become the bureau’s total abolition. All of this, in conjunction with the DOGE raid of the Treasury Department, is not a matter of administrative change. It is happening according to plan.

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To say Democrats are asleep at the wheel here is an understatement. They are effectively fighting fire with tissue paper in the hopes that the fallout from this administration’s actions will be repercussive enough to change voters’ minds all on its own. Sam Seder of The Majority Report has been talking recently about how movies utilize reaction shots as a way of messaging to the audience how they should feel, and that Democrats are transcendently awful at this as a media tactic. Recent imagery like Chuck Schumer leading half-spirited chants, or Democrats letting a single inane man with zero authority keep them from entering the Department of Education, the reaction shots of Democratic leaders have been uninspiring to say the least.

Let’s assume that the Democratic strategy of wait and see plays out all the way through the midterms and into the next general election. Maybe one of Elon’s groyper goons screws up a line of code and locks people out of Medicare or Social Security payments, or Trump fully implements his tariffs and tanks the economy. What leads them to believe that voters will act in a retaliatory manner? We just watched an election take place in which a man who incited a coup and openly tried to overturn the results of an election still won. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and Republicans still won.

I fully understand that Trump is an institution all his own and that his popularity does not extend to the party beyond him, but the Republican media apparatus has been incredibly efficacious in their manipulation of narratives. In this same election, we watched Democrats capitulate to almost every Republican talking point and offer virtually no pushback. This isn’t to say Democrats will never fight on anything. They have leverage to threaten a shutdown in March and may pick other battles along the way, but it’s hard to put any faith into a party so consistently inept. Despite this lack of aggressiveness, there have also been a few court rulings that serve to stem the bleeding of the administrative state in the meantime.

This is where the last bit of Vance’s statement comes into play, though. The collapse of any sort of serious resistance in Washington puts the primary oppositional force in the hands of systems and institutions that the Trump administration has deliberately set out to destroy. How the United States spends its money is decided by Congress, and yet an unelected, de facto government official in Elon Musk has taken that course of action into his own hands. Several of Trump’s executive orders are blatantly unconstitutional. The mass layoffs of federal workers on partisan grounds are also illegal. Trump, Musk, and even J.D. Vance understand that it is easier to just run fast, break shit, and ask questions later because our existing accountability measures have never been all that strong in the first place.

Whether it’s the Iraq War, Watergate, or Iran-Contra, you will be hard-pressed to find examples of American leaders being held accountable for egregious corruption and overreach. Really, you don’t even have to go back any further than January 6th, 2021. The courts may not hand Trump and Musk a win in every case—reversing birthright citizenship comes to mind—but they will absolutely allow this administration to undercut the federal government in ways that will be difficult to fix in the future.

While those government cover-ups serve as parallels for this administration’s lack of accountability, none of them apply to what Trump and Musk are actually doing in quite the right way because there is no cover-up here. The transparency in all of this is part of the process. We are watching the destruction of federal agencies happen in broad daylight as Musk tweets and Trump posts on Truth Social in real time. The most apt comparison to what’s currently going on in the federal government is, coincidentally, what Musk did when he bought Twitter: gut the workforce, ditch content moderation, and publicly document the process via social media. Twitter has lost nearly 80% of its value since Musk’s purchase and now exists solely as a vehicle for Musk to create an American version of WeChat, China’s everything app. DOGE is a means to an end for Elon constructed under the guise of government amelioration.

Even if we get a court ruling where DOGE is forced to halt its operations in the Treasury Department, or wherever else, and must relinquish any and all spending decisions to Congress where they’re supposed to be, of all the people on planet Earth, why would Elon Musk or Donald Trump agree to do so? Who is going to enforce that? As I was writing this, the New York Times broke news of a federal judge in Rhode Island that ruled the Trump administration has acted in direct defiance of his previous ruling by not unfreezing federal grants. Trump has no reason to react to this in any other manner than, “So what?” And on a more personal level, for two of the most public-facing narcissists alive today, letting the courts tell them what to do is in direct contrast with the self-regulating image they like to portray. Don’t take my word for it; just ask J.D. Vance.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to doom too hard here. Yes, this administration will do, and has already done, damage, but it will come to an end. I don’t buy into the waiting game as an electoral strategy, but I do buy into it as the reality in which we all get through this. Waiting for this term to end doesn’t have to mean an absence of proactivity either. Just the opposite. This election was not the national mandate Republicans claim it was, and that leaves the door wide open for winning when it matters most. Democrats are struggling to fight back because they are still grounded in institutional norms and processes. Unfortunately, fighting back through the legal system can only get you so far when its recourse is upheld with the same legitimacy as a pinky promise. If we’re going to be waiting around, we may as well create some reaction shots of our own.

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First is the EO “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” This is essentially an order mandating that public schools abide by a set of conservative educational principles or risk having their funding pulled. The other focuses on “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families,” with the goal of emboldening school voucher programs and their accessibility. Among other roadblocks, it’s possible these EOs become entangled in court battles that prevent their immediate wholesale implementation, but their existence alone offers a glimpse at Project 2025’s education priorities in action.

The Republican assault on education in America is a crucial part of their long-term strategy. It is not about encouraging the pursuit of knowledge and learning in the hope for a better tomorrow. It is about compounding the preexisting reality of education becoming increasingly unobtainable, open only to those willing to pay for it. The spirit of these EOs works well in tandem as one aims to sow distrust within the public school system, and the other encourages an alternative option while also siphoning public school cash. A decline in test scores over the last several years, only exacerbated by COVID, has presented an opening for the Republican narrative surrounding education to stick. The one-two punch these EOs provide marks the start of the current Trump administration’s assault on public education in America.

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Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling

Republicans are afraid. What they deem as liberal indoctrination or anti-American is oftentimes just the truth, and they know the truth is convincing. The opening sentence of Section 1 of the EO puts it all into perspective:

“Parents trust America’s schools to provide their children with a rigorous education…”

Okay, fine.

“…and to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand.”

Wait, what the hell?

What does a patriotic admiration for the US have to do with a rigorous education? A rhetorical question, obviously, because the answer is it doesn’t. This verbiage puts the true intentions of this EO and the continued Republican effort surrounding policy just like it front and center. Despite all the bitching and moaning from conservatives about how your kid is going to school a boy and then coming home a girl, the reality is they just want to do their own version of indoctrination.

When Republicans talk about cutting off funding for schools, they really just mean schools in deep blue states and cities. It’s the states and cities that develop the curriculum, and then it’s the teachers that execute it. The EO mentions abiding by the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, FERPA, and the PPRA while talking about how the Attorney General will coordinate with state and local AGs to enforce the law. The broad language leaves a lot on the table. Are they going to convict individual teachers or schools? Cut off funding for entire states, cities, or districts? As it is, only 10% of public schools’ funding comes from the federal government. States and cities come up with the other 90% on their own. There is a second option, though, which involves blanketly targeting the cities and states Republicans don’t like. This one seems a bit more their speed.

By reframing history within the context of American exceptionalism, conservatives palliate slavery and the broader reality of systemic racism and oppression. To them, America must be free of criticism. If this isn’t brainwashing, then I don’t know what is. The fact that this country was built on the backs of slavery, genocide, and oppression is not a liberal mindset. It’s objective truth. America is imperfect in so many ways, and to pretend otherwise is dishonest and harmful. This is the inherent paradox behind Make America Great Again. When exactly was America great? The 50s? The 60s? When the marginal tax rate was more than twice what it is now? That doesn’t seem like something Republicans would find all too great. The 80s? What’s changed since then? We are living in the fully realized version of that neoliberal order. America is what it is, and it’s not good enough. People are catching on, and Republicans know it. That’s what this is about.

Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families

Coincidentally, I talked a lot about school vouchers last week, so there’s not too much to say that hasn’t already been discussed. This EO does have a couple of highlights, though. First and foremost, the EO alludes to the “review of available mechanisms” on how federal funds can be used to support this initiative. Project 2025 has provided some insight into this in the form of block grants, federal funds given to states for a specific purpose with no actual oversight on how that money is actually spent. So even if a state was given IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) grants, a block grant makes it so the money could technically go to whatever the individual state sees fit. Given how little schools actually get from the federal government, this appears to be the most likely mechanism by which the government will help fund school voucher programs across states.

There was also this gem of a quote:

“When our public education system fails such a large segment of society, it hinders our national competitiveness and devastates families and communities.”

They are giving the game away here. Public schools are failing, so the Republican answer is to direct money away from them in order to create a competitive alternative. Schools are failing because families and communities are being devastated, not the other way around. To them, education is just another untapped market ripe for monetization.

Something both Republicans and Democrats don’t understand is the symbiotic relationship between the schools our children attend and the communities they reside in. Fixing education is not done by addressing one individual issue. It takes broad, sweeping legislation that addresses all of the shortcomings that culminate in public schools’ most pressing issues. There is no world where privatization fixes chronic absenteeism, poverty, behavioral issues, or any number of the major problems teachers face today. That’s kind of the point, though. This EO doesn’t do much in this moment, but it is a foundational piece of the larger, destructive effort at hand.

The best-case scenario with EOs like these is that they’re just smokescreens; gestures for the Republican base of support that has absolutely no idea how government operates. Nevertheless, this is where it starts. It’s hard to say where they go from here or what comes next, though. A lot of what Project 2025 talks about would need congressional approval, and that’s unlikely with the House and Senate as they are now. Specifically, it mentions working with Congress to pass the Department of Education Reorganization Act “…to reform, eliminate, or move the department’s programs and offices to appropriate agencies.” It’s through this legislation that the bulk of the work would be done. For now, Trump must rely on the courts to uphold whatever EOs he signs off on. There will probably be some budgetary battles regarding education as well, but ultimately there’s hope. These EOs are a glimpse of the fights Republicans are willing to take on and a litmus test for what they can really get away with. Given that the administration is already rife with chaos, I’d like to think they never even get around to it.

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Voucher programs fit into the larger Republican playbook the same way a lot of their more multifaceted policy positions do. At face value, school vouchers don’t appear to be immediately harmful to anyone in particular, and the policy is presented under the pretense of simply allowing more choice to parents and students. Vouchers allow the free market to dictate how education should operate in this country. When I hear stuff like this, I’m reminded of a Calvin & Hobbes strip where Calvin’s dad is perplexed by the sheer number of peanut butter options at the grocery store.

Seriously, who demands this much choice? Especially when it comes to education. Schools need real help, not competition. In their pursuit of money-making opportunities, Republicans have left public education out to dry. In Texas, for example, Gov. Abbott has been holding public school funding hostage in exchange for the passage of his voucher legislation. There has not been a significant increase in state funding for public education in 5 years, a reality only worsened by inflation.

For now, Greg Abott serves as a bit of a side villain within the larger roster of Republican cronies. But his relentless fight for school vouchers, in the face of very real bipartisan opposition mind you, is one that lends him a particular chunk of political capital. School vouchers are not a new idea, but they have recently seen an influx of implementation. Since 2021, 15 GOP led states have either established or expanded voucher programs. If Abbott gets his way, Texas would be the largest state to do so.1 Further, his ideal voucher plan is universal; making every student in the state eligible for the program. It would be a massive victory for one of the more slimy grifts in the Republican pantheon of grifts. Just another debilitating right-wing policy proposal that is obfuscated by the allure of freedom and choice.

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Pulling Back The Curtain

Over the last 5 or so years, the Republican narrative surrounding public education has focused on a few key criticisms. Most of their talking points involve some combination of parents’ rights, the freedom to choose, liberal indoctrination, or critical race theory. School vouchers work as a comprehensive policy in that their implementation encompasses all of these things in some form or another. By empowering private schools, education becomes progressively commodified. Parents are then provided with public funds to encourage their child’s removal from the public school turning them gay, to their placement in a local Christian Academy. Did I mention these public funds are also entirely attributable to religious institutions as well? The unconstitutional nature of something like this is actually a bit of a tough sell, especially to the anti-handout party. It would explain why Gov. Abbott failed to get anything passed in both Texas’ previous legislative session and an additional 4 special sessions. Rural congresspersons know that school vouchers don’t just provide more choice; they actively harm public schools and students in the process.

This is partly because private schools are not subject to the same accountability measures that public schools are, and that’s the whole point. Without proper accountability, private schools are not beholden to any sort of academic standard and are free from discriminatory oversight. If it seems too impossible to be true, the genesis of voucher programs is openly rooted in the response to Brown v. Board of Education. You can’t make this stuff up. North Carolina, a state that already has two different statewide voucher programs, offers insight into what these ideas look like in practice. This report gives us a more detailed look, but the best example they provide is from Grace Christian Academy in Sanford, NC. As a part of the application and selection process, Grace requires a tour of the campus with the applicant’s family.

“We love getting to know our families personally, and a tour is a great way to ensure your family and our school are a good fit for one another.”2

This kind of harmful ambiguity is present within every facet of school voucher systems. Even the item itself, a voucher, is completely nebulous and raises no immediate red flags when you hear about it in passing. If for some reason you’re still on the fence about how a school could get away with discrimination in the year 2025, it’s because it exists in between the lines.

There’s also the money side of things. At the risk of sounding like the very budget hawks I’ve derided in the past, the cost of a universal voucher program that Gov. Abbott wants to implement isn’t the main issue here. It’s the diversion of those funds away from public schools and into the hands of for-profit schooling charlatans. In the last legislative session, the initial bill that was being debated allotted $500 million to craft a voucher program. This time around, that amount has doubled to $1 billion. $1 billion that could be spent on items of actual importance like healthcare, infrastructure, social safety nets, or any myriad of public resources that are desperate for attention. As Gov. Abbott grows increasingly desperate to pass a universal voucher program, other legislation bears the brunt of that anxiety. In 2023, he vetoed at least a dozen other bills, claiming they could wait until “after education freedom gets passed.” All of this culminates in the continued degradation of our public school systems, making the $10,000 or so the state would give you to attend private school all the more enticing. Assuming they even accept you at all.

The Bigger Picture

On January 14th, the 89th Texas Legislative Session began with the primary objective of passing some form of school voucher legislation. The big difference this time is that Gov. Abbott worked tirelessly over the last year to flip the seats he needed in order to rummage up support for vouchers. Over a dozen anti-voucher Republican seats were replaced with pro-voucher congresspersons, along with some Democratic seats that were crucial in the opposition effort in the House. The fight continues, and it’s unclear what the final product will look like, but it is beginning to look more like a matter of when than if.

What makes this fight so obscene is how much it has maligned public schooling in the process. Oftentimes, supporters of voucher programs believe that public schools are failing them. Why might that be? Just to reiterate: Greg Abbott has been withholding public education funding increases for years now in order to get his voucher legislation passed. Even beyond the money, the narratives surrounding American public education being regurgitated by Republicans do just as much harm. It’s always been the Republican game plan to undermine education, but the last 5 or so years have been relentless and methodical. Highlighting public schools as a focal point for the country’s failures is all part of a larger effort to tip the scales in favor of their preferred version of social stratification.

Education is a foundational metric in determining future outcomes and quality of life for individuals. By stripping public education for parts and gatekeeping private school for those only deemed worthy, Republicans have managed to turn education into a privilege meant for only an elite few. This isn’t to say that education isn’t already like that. It is. Low-income school districts are constantly fighting with cities and states for more resources. Higher education is unequivocally guilty of this and has been for centuries. The very existence of the Ivy League is proof of that. But the scale at which Republicans are aiming to uproot public education only serves to exacerbate a growing problem.

It’s worth mentioning that the $10,000 amount that Gov. Abbott wants to delegate to students feels arbitrary. Some private schools do charge less than that for annual tuition, but plenty more charge 2 to 3 times that. This doesn’t even account for transportation, school supplies, and other expenses. Again: none of that matters if they don’t even let you in. Greg Abbott is no stranger to misguided and cruel policy, though. Before the draconian abortion ban and migrant displacements, he was advocating for shit like banning sex toys. With Gov. Abbott’s 2015 gubernatorial victory coinciding with Trump’s eventual victory in 2016 (and now 2024), the emboldenment of the far-right in America has lent credence to the continued advocacy of things like school choice. Despite their best efforts to protect the children, they sure do seem pretty good at only protecting their own.

The Texas legislature will continue to meet and debate this week as SB2, the bill containing the voucher-like education savings account, goes to the Senate Education Committee for a vote and then (presumably) onto the full chamber. Despite the fact that the legislature cannot pass bills within the first 60 days, Gov. Abbott is sure to designate the bill as an “emergency item,” bypassing this rule and putting SB2 to a vote sooner than later.

It feels futile in this day and age to point out hypocrisy among politicians, but in the event that this passes, it’s important to remember a few things. It’s important to remember that taxpayer dollars are being used to subsidize religious institutions. The same institutions that receive state tax exemptions. It’s important to remember that the free market, the thing that sends us into economic recession every 10-20 years, will be dictating your child’s education. But most of all, it’s important to remember that Republicans are fighting for this, more than anything else, under the pretense of the right to choose…

I should also remark that the views I have expressed here are mine only, and do not represent that of my employer.

And yet, like clockwork, Democrats could not help but trip over their own feet. By the time the DNC rolled around, both “weird” and “we’re not going back” were basically nowhere to be found. In conjunction with Biden staffers, Harris’ inner circle made an intentional push to ditch the polarizing rhetoric. Harris’ acceptance speech at the DNC would set the tone for the rest of the campaign: a centrist push for unification and return to normalcy that was a derivative reprise of the Biden 2020 campaign. From then on, Harris’ polling would steadily fall as her campaign became progressively meek, uninspired, and retrogressive, culminating in her election loss.

The return to normalcy was an impossible sell. The issues of today are a direct result of what that normalcy perpetuates, and voters know it. It’s why Trump won the first time, and it’s why he won again. Normalcy as an idea for the future is, frankly, insulting, and it’s certainly more insulting than calling Trump or JD Vance weird. At least that’s honest. Democrats spent the whole election cycle lying about Biden’s health, tiptoeing around the subject of Gaza, and one of the few honest things they had going for them was rejected for the sake of bipartisanship. Republicans are weird. Framing weird as a direct insult implies there is an underlying stigma attached to the conservative belief system. It’s one thing to believe something and keep it to yourself, but openly binding yourself to that belief makes it yours. Separate from truth and reality is perception. It’s the latter of those that gets you elected.

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This is less about fighting fire with fire than it is about simply leveling the playing field. By operating within the boundaries of their misguided sense of self-righteousness, Democrats have ceded ground to Republicans on almost every major issue. This criticism goes beyond electoral politics. More importantly, I’m talking about political conversations with family members, co-workers, friends, whoever. The conversations we have a say in. Normalcy legitimized harmful right-wing narratives (particularly on immigration and crime) by letting them remain unabated in the public consciousness until they became some of those people’s realities. Dispelling these narratives feels like rowing against the current, and facts only get you so far. At some point you’re going to have to rip down the facade of parity and tolerance. Restricting women’s bodily autonomy is shameful, mass deportation is vile, denying climate change is unfathomable, and believing in any of those things is fucking weird. Donald Trump’s numerous comments about Ivanka are weird. JD Vance’s beef with childless adults is weird. Normalcy means letting these people into the White House.

Looking back, Michelle Obama’s “They go low, we go high” remarks from the 2016 DNC reinforce these same appeasements. 8 years later, and it looks like Michelle is starting to get it. She was the only living First Lady to not attend Jimmy Carter’s funeral, and she’s not attending Trump’s inauguration either. Her attendance is expected for the sake of normalcy, but what’s the point? Among countless other examples, the President of the United States is now someone who incited an insurrection upon their previous election loss. Tradition is dead. It is nauseating to see Barack Obama chum it up with Trump at Carter’s funeral. Barely a week removed from comparing Trump to Hitler, Biden shakes Trump’s hand and laughs alongside him in the Oval Office. Normalcy got us here.

It doesn’t have to be confrontational; it might not even resonate, but there are people willing to be on the right side of things if it presents itself to them. While maybe less antagonistic, it’s like yelling fire in a crowded theater and then claiming free speech. You don’t get to spout bullshit and get off scot-free.

Your co-worker thinks maybe there are too many immigrants; no man, immigration is the backbone of this country. Mass deportation is abhorrent, and it’s not going to help anyone.

Your mom thinks trans women should stay out of girls’ sports; there are like 6 people in the whole country this situation even applies to. Quit worrying about genitalia.

Normalcy says we should accept these views in the name of opinion. Yet as Trump takes office, we are staring at a direct, tangible result (for the second time, mind you) of that frame of mind.

At the risk of appearing too cordial, I’ll end with this: there are also plenty of people unwilling to be on the right side of things no matter what. These are the fucking weirdos. Tell them as much. Use these freaks as the proper example for what believing in hate should look like. Enough with the capitulation to racist vitriol. The era of letting someone perpetuate vaccine skepticism, climate change denial, or revisionist history for the sake of civility is over. We’ve got some of the most unimaginable ghouls leading our nation now because Democrats refused to call a spade a spade. Trump was supposedly the biggest threat to democracy we’ve ever faced, and I’m sitting here watching Democratic leaders usher him into office with smiles and applause.

As Biden leaves the White House one last time, normalcy needs to leave with him. Democrats are more useless than ever, and as usual it’s up to ordinary people to pick up the slack. If there’s any iota of a sliver of hope here, it’s that Trump’s win was slim. He didn’t even break 50% in the popular vote. The battle for truth is winnable; we just have to be willing to participate.

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In both the video he posted on Tuesday and the interview from yesterday, Zuckerberg runs through a checklist of right-wing appeals ranging from free speech apologia to a full buy-in of Trump’s America First rhetoric. This is a complete change of course from his historical liberal advocacy. It’s not like Zuckerberg was ever a bastion of progressive politics, but his politics were rooted in a coastal, Silicon Valley liberalism. What Zuck has done this past week is not a matter of a change in his principles. After all, Peter Thiel is an original angel investor in Facebook, and he’s also JD Vance’s daddy. These billionaires are simply doing what is best for their businesses. At the 19:55 mark of the podcast, in the midst of his explanation on his political transformation, Zuckerberg puts it out there in the open: “This is the right place to be going forward.”

Of course it is! Trump is about to be president, and I’m sure it also has nothing to do with Meta’s impending FTC hearing regarding antitrust. Can we honestly say he would be on this same PR tour if Trump had lost? Zuck’s motivations are not based in any kind of principled belief system. Everything he does is solely for the betterment of Meta and its shareholders. That’s not meant to be a groundbreaking discovery, but where conservatives see a large-scale vindication of their values, it’s important to see this for what it really is: America’s oligarchy at work.

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As the conversation continues, Zuckerberg explains that part of his shift in Meta policy came from a place of no longer wanting to decide what the truth is. This line of reasoning is based in a blatant disregard for any kind of responsibility. Ignoring a larger conversation about mis/disinformation for now, when it comes to reality or facts, the truth is just that. There is no “is or isn’t.” The harmful nature of giving credence to lies and insanity is what got us to the point in the first place. It has allowed vaccine skepticism to grow; it happened with the narrative surrounding immigration, and it’s exactly what happened in the events preceding Jan. 6th. Zuck also references comments made by incoming Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that women do not belong in combat roles. Zuck says, “If it’s okay to talk about on the floor of Congress, why shouldn’t you be able to debate it on social media?” It’s an odd correlation to make, and all it does is highlight the complete degeneracy of the types of conversations our politicians are having. We should not allow blatant misogyny (from an alcoholic rapist no less) to be discussed with any sort of legitimacy. It shouldn’t be a balancing act to do the right thing. It should just be done.

After 80 minutes or so, the discussion surrounding politics teeters off, and Zuck and Rogan shoot the shit about rich guy hobbies and how Apple’s Vision Pro sucks. Over the course of 3, hours Zuck attempts to completely alter his persona in the eyes of a group of people who have long villainized him. It’s intentional, it’s methodical, and just like his fellow 1%ers, it’s all for his own benefit. Zuckerberg knows that letting right-wing rhetoric and vitriol fester, grow, and become legitimized is the only way Meta can grow. Anything else, like the FTC suit or tax cuts on the wealthy, is what will bring about the demise of companies like his that no longer offer anything of value to society. Meta has run its course on creating products that “give people a voice.” Its only objective now is continue to exist as it does and swallow anything that comes near it. There’s only one group of politicians that’s in the business of letting things like that happen, and they’re about to take office.

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The c-word in question here is capitalism. Or how about cheap? The sheer irony here of an acclaimed patriot like Vivek criticizing American culture as lazy and unambitious is rich. If you want more high-skilled workers, then fix America’s education system.

Taking the side of nurture in the nature vs. nurture debate, Vivek presents the idea that the modern American zeitgeist is a product of millennial era youths being molded into mediocrity. This is the basis for the rest of the tweet.

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This culture he’s referencing is entirely antithetical to the Make America Great Again brand of politics that Vivek and other right-wingers advocate for. It’s not that it doesn’t exist it was just born out of the Americana, superficial aesthetic qualifications for success from the 50s, 60s, and onward that have come to define the classic American image. This block of text is a critique of his own ideology.

This is where he really starts to cook. In what world do American millennials, or even some early Zoomers, see characters like Cory Matthews and Zack Morris as pillars of success? If anything, the culture has come around to the idea that Zach Morris was kind of an asshole (the oldest of those linked videos is 7 years old!) and Cory Matthews was just another vanilla middle-class white dude. Let’s also be real: despite their good intentions and sweet nature, Urkel and Screech were complete klutzes whose clumsiness comes with its own set of consequences, including burning down small businesses.

Fact: This is anecdotal.

This one is my particular favorite. Whiplash, famous for its core dynamic of harmful physical and verbal abuse from an instructor onto a student, is definitely a model for what we should strive for as a culture. His blatant misinterpretation of the movie is a perfect example of how his entire argument is based on a false premise. As for everything else, why does having more of any of those things mean we need fewer of the others? Young right-wingers are obsessed with co-opting the very real loneliness epidemic as a harbinger of their depression and incel-ism. We should be encouraging kids to hang out more!

Vivek does not have this same kind of sentiment for LGBTQ+ groups, whose “lack of normalcy” is the entire basis for conservative vitriol towards them. Double standard aside, “those kinds of parents” and “those kinds of kids” are just vague representations of maybe somebody you knew once. It’s rooted in no concrete reality.

If your parents love you and are proud of who you have become, it doesn’t matter because Vivek thinks you might be a fucking loser.

Again with the “normalcy.” Not only is it ultimately subjective, but this kind of global comparison really comes down to improving American education. Which, if I can remind everyone, is continually neglected and intentionally underfunded.

Does anyone want to tell Vivek that American innovation as a result of the success of Sputnik came from an intense government effort to compete that included pouring tons of money and time into national programs and resources at the federal level? That’s the exact opposite of Vivek, the small government crusader (per his Twitter bio). Also, if I’m reading the end of that second sentence correctly, does Vivek want us all to go woke??

This guy literally just said he doesn’t see legislation as a solution. No wonder he thinks they have their work cut out for them. How do you expect to change a culture without altering the socioeconomic conditions that create that cultural perception to begin with? Whatever tax cuts this next administration puts forward, he may get that. Just not in the direction he thinks.

At the end of the day, America’s culture crisis has nothing to do with an inherent laziness or desire for mediocrity. It’s a product of a complete apathy for the prospect of a viable future. For decades, young adults were being sold an American Dream that was the result of hard work and an education. That American Dream has become progressively harder to attain. Not because Cory Matthews was just so goddamn cool that we all wanted to be like him, but because the meritocracy that was supposed to be a product of the American experiment has shown itself to be a lie. If Vivek, or Elon, or Trump, or any other billionaire hack is concerned with a lack of high-skilled labor in America, then it starts with reforming public education. Oh wait, they want to eliminate the Department of Education.

The term “budget hawk” has got to be a complete misnomer at this point. Hawks are supposed to be precise, methodical, and efficient. With the current status of the national deficit sitting at a paltry $36 trillion, we can conclude that these people are none of those things. At the very least, they’re wildly ineffective. This is because the same groups whining about spending are the same groups advocating for tax cuts, and, unsurprisingly, this has not been helpful. The idea that any of these people actually care about the budget, the national debt, or overspending is laughable when ultimately it’s just a self-serving ploy to oppose spending they don’t like. Something like “budget starling” might be more appropriate, or if we want to just get real about it: “annoying ass mf” feels the most apt.

Constantly chirping about the deficit, budget hawks zero in on cutting spending as the only solution. This includes cutting anything from education to the arts to social security to Sesame Street. Remember when that dumb shit was a story? Good times. Anyways, these people never have that same smoke for, say, the Department of Defense, whose ballooning budget outpaces the next several countries combined. Instead, other areas of government, and sometimes pieces of legislation, come under fire by these budgetary birds of prey because to them, there’s just no way we can afford to allocate money that way. Budget hawks come in many forms, and, while they aren’t the subject of this article, the general opposition to government spending provides context for the “why” behind why a lot of important and helpful policies never come to fruition.

Returning to the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing held back in June, Senator Bill Cassidy (who will chair the committee in the next congress) and his witnesses provide testimony for the case against a national $60,000 teacher minimum wage. We covered all of the wokeism condemnation in the previous article, but there are two other important components of their testimony to cover. First, there’s Senator Cassidy’s gigantic chart, which presents the idea that while education spending has increased, NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) scores are decreasing. Compelling stuff.

Second is the testimony of Mr. Robert Pondiscio, Senior Fellow in Education Policy from the American Enterprise Institute. He puts forth the agreeable idea that too much is being asked of teachers these days. They are overworked to the point of leaving the profession altogether, and their expanding range of responsibility has made it next to impossible to adequately teach. This is all true. Teachers are absolutely stretched thin; they are fleeing the profession, and people are becoming progressively disenchanted with the idea of teaching. All interesting realities to present as a case against raising teacher pay, though.

As it pertains to teachers, their mass exodus has prompted the hiring of uncertified teachers in Texas. States like Oklahoma, Arizona, and Florida have dropped the requirement of needing a bachelor’s degree. Given that teachers are the most important factor regarding student achievement, these stopgap solutions only exacerbate the problem by placing unqualified and unenthusiastic educators in classrooms, resulting in increased turnover. It is undeniable that raising teacher pay works as a retention strategy. $60,000 is still too low, but it’s a start. Beyond just teacher pay, Sen. Cassidy and Mr. Pondiscio hone in on spending as a root issue for education failures and ignore the socioeconomic realities of people and communities that are also part of the equation. It’s not just about the money. It is systemic. But if the two of them want to put money under a microscope, then that’s where we’ll start.

That’s What The Money Is For!

It is important to note, again, that the Department of Education’s oversight is relatively small. Just about every aspect of public and private education is handled at the state and local level, including funding. The DOE’s primary functions are the distribution of funds (amongst states that then distribute it from there in accordance with federal designations), research and data collection, and ensuring equal access to education nationwide. Of course, states and cities and districts all spend their money differently. Even then, over the last 10 years, the majority of money they’ve spent comes from state, local, and private sources. Only 8% came from the federal government! Still, much like Mr. Pondiscio’s testimony, Sen. Cassidy’s chart is not incorrect on its face. On a per pupil basis, states are spending more and more, and outcomes are unfortunately still unsatisfactory. It’s disingenuous, however, to present those individual facts as 1:1. If that were the case, then surely a decrease in spending would result in an increase in test scores. Yet the 10 states with the lowest public funding per pupil all have mixed standing. Utah spends the least of all states yet ranks near the top in Pre-K-12, but Oklahoma, Nevada, and Arizona all round out the bottom 5 in spending as well as the bottom 5 in those same Pre-K-12 rankings. It just doesn’t make sense to blame the spending when in reality it’s about where it should be going. Raising teacher pay comes to mind.

The second testimony of the night came from Dr. William Kirwan, chancellor emeritus of the University System of Maryland, and Chair of the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education. In his testimony he talks about the commission’s 3-year study of other cities and nations around the world with high academic success (he cites Finland, Shanghai, Singapore, and Ontario). The commission concluded that there were 5 pillars to success for these education systems:

1. Invest in early childhood education and development

2. Prepare, compensate, and treat teachers like true professionals

3. Develop a fully aligned, periodically updated, and rigorous K-12 instructional system

4. Invest significantly in students needing the most support to be successful

5. Require a high degree of accountability at the school level

He goes on to talk about number 2 in depth, given the nature of the hearing, but every one of these was presented to the Maryland General Assembly and then incorporated into the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future legislation, which was enacted in 2021. He goes on to reference a DOE national survey that showed Maryland now leads the country in new students entering teacher preparation programs.

The degradation of student outcomes brings forward the necessity for massive change. What’s happening now isn’t working, and Dr. Kirwan presents a platform for comprehensive reform across the nation. A national minimum wage for teachers is only a part of this. States and cities have so much autonomy when it comes to the money they spend that even if some of them perform above national averages, it doesn’t help that scores are decreasing nationally. You cannot talk about national spending as a singular causality if how that spending is delineated varies all the way down to the individual district. It’s not just about spending oversight either. It’s about all of the things Dr. Kirwan listed as a package. You can’t just do one; you have to do them all. What Dr. Kirwan is presenting isn’t new, but the study he brings forth is contemporary and direct about the standards the US needs to match.

In his opening testimony, Sen. Cassidy specifically states, “…but the federal government dictating how states spend their money does not address the root cause of why teachers are struggling to teach in the classroom. More mandates and funding cannot be the only answer we come up with. We must examine broken policies that got us here and find solutions to improve.” To have this be a part of your opening statement and not see Dr. Kirwan and his commission’s findings as the answer you’re looking for is nonsensical. If the way things are isn’t working, then change is needed. That change must involve an increase in federal resources, both spending and oversight. As it stands, Sen. Cassidy doesn’t even want one of those things. It’s not just him, though. It is a direct initiative of Republicans as an oppositional party to deny the federal government the spending and oversight it requires to adequately address areas of need. Even worse, for these annoying ass mf’s, it goes beyond just education.

It Starts At Home

Bernie closes the hearing with an appeal to examine the priorities of the United States. Prioritizing education in this country means ending the charade of a nation without the means to solve its problems. Among other things, defense spending and tax cuts all cost this country an unfathomable amount of money. They get through Congress with virtually zero pushback. The testimonies of both Sen. Sanders and Sen. Cassidy, as well as their witnesses (excluding Ms. Neily, whose “schools have gone woke” rhetoric was the subject of the article preceding this one), all make the case that they care for teachers and students. They all agree that teachers are overworked and underpaid, and students are bearing the brunt of that. What appears to be missing from Sen. Cassidy and his witnesses, though, is an understanding of why those issues exist and how they have compounded over time.

Rising absenteeism is an issue brought up extensively in the hearing, and rightfully so. The data is staggering. Post-pandemic numbers show that chronic absenteeism nearly doubled from 2019 to the end of the 2021-22 recording period. With that came a massive increase in the number of schools facing high to extreme levels of absenteeism. These numbers have slightly decreased based on early 2022-23 data, but any sort of regression to pre-pandemic levels appears fraught. A lot of the root causes of absenteeism are all issues that intensified during the pandemic. Food and housing insecurity, social anxiety, lack of reliable childcare, as well as growing distrust in science and institutions, have all fractured the cohesion between schools and the communities in which they serve. Teachers list most of these as the top issues plaguing students outside of school. Schools can certainly help alleviate these things if given the resources, but they are not solutions. Those solutions exist by addressing needs at the socioeconomic level. It is within the power of Congress to do so, but they don’t. Teachers are then left to pick up the slack.

The outlook is equally grim when we look inside the classroom. In the same Pew Research study linked above, teachers find that a lack of interest, disruptive students, and cellphone use are the primary in-classroom challenges. Teachers are then stretched thin trying to subsidize the work of parents, social workers, and therapists. Every testimony from the hearing says as much. Poverty and a lack of reliable healthcare in this country have compounded the sociological hardships facing the most vulnerable people in our communities, and it snowballs into the classroom. The inability to access necessary medications or special treatment that would alleviate behavioral problems. The inability to see a doctor and get a child properly diagnosed at all. Unfettered corporate pandering has let Instagram and TikTok run away with addicting children (and adults, speaking for myself there) to their phones. The return on investment for getting a good education has become progressively slim while still getting more expensive. These don’t just apply to students either. These same inadequacies plague parents and caretakers, making it even more difficult to raise a family and set their children up for success. This is all extremely broad, but that’s exactly the problem. It’s not just a Republican thing either. Democrats are just as culpable for their negligence. Congress has spent decades ignoring everyday Americans in favor of their corporate benefactors and has let these issues go completely unresolved. It has created a cycle of teachers leaving the profession, resulting in worse student outcomes.

As Dr. Kirwan mentioned in his testimony, the best school systems in the world regard educators as consummate professionals and see them in the same light as architects or CPAs. In America, they have been infantilized, demonized, and relegated to babysitters who do math problems sometimes. There is little disagreement about what the failures of our education system actually are. Despite that, the obstacle for major change remains penny-pinching politicians who insist upon the country’s inability to pay for the things that matter most. Any solution to these deeply interconnected issues is going to involve spending the money to do it. Whether it’s reinstating the COVID-era child tax credit that cut childhood poverty by 30%, raising the national minimum wage, a federal jobs program to build affordable housing across the country en masse, or free breakfast and lunch for every student at every school, solving the education crisis in this country begins with fixing its most intrinsic problems. We are the richest country in the history of the world. It’s not about spending. Our priorities just lie elsewhere.

After roughly 90 minutes, the hearing comes to an end. Papers are shuffled, hands are shaken, and life continues as normal. The futility of a hearing like this is what’s most frustrating. Despite pleas from the witnesses that the country is failing its children, it falls on deaf ears in the name of “it costs too much”. Really though, it’s “we don’t care.” You will always hear politicians use this excuse. They say it about Medicare for All, they say it about free public college tuition, they say it about the Green New Deal, and they say it about free childcare. It’s tired and negligent in the most repercussive way. America is not a serious country because it’s not serious about making itself better. Oftentimes, we hear that differences in political approach are based on differences in opinion. That mindset needs to be strapped to a rocket and launched into the sun because it’s untrue, and it lets people like Sen. Cassidy get away with what’s really happening. Many people in our government are not there to make things better. They are there to enrich themselves and the donor class they serve. Crippling education and maintaining an uneducated populace is a part of that. The sooner we get real about it, the better off we’ll be.

All of this drivel has been the basis of right-wing agitation towards todays educators and institutions for years now. If only it were true! But seriously, post-COVID, Republicans have come to dominate culture war narratives surrounding education through the demonization of teachers, schools, and higher education institutions. On the ground, this movement has evolved into groups like Moms For Liberty, which exists today as a direct result of the relentless woke fearmongering and anti-masking sentiment. By infiltrating school boards and altering public school curriculum, Republicans know they can work from the bottom up to establish a platform for Conservative worldview. Nationwide book banning, Florida’s anti-woke legislation, and Texas’ Senate Bill 17 are recent, prominent examples of what this type of provocation looks like on a practical level. This is all in addition to the continued promotion (and continued public rejection) of voucher systems and privatization of public education. None of this alleviates the real issues of overflowing classrooms, overworked teachers, and underperforming students.

Therein lies the problem. Republicans have been able to successfully cultivate a media and social environment of distraction and misdirection. Whether it’s vaccine efficacy, woke superheroes, or a Marxist takeover of education, the oppositional conversation presented by Republicans aims to agitate instead of solve. It has completely upended the way Republicans in government go about education reform, and it ignores critical shortcomings of the American education system. In a hearing held back in June, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions examined the country’s current state of educational affairs. There was a lot of ground covered here, but the primary focus was on gauging the environment for setting a teacher minimum wage nationwide. As agreeable as that is, it was the arguments themselves, made by Senator Bill Cassidy and his witnesses, that were of the most intrigue. Entrenched in their concerns about inefficient spending and low test scores are criticisms that woke curricula and administrators are the catalysts for these issues. One of Senator Cassidy’s witnesses was Nicole Neily, a Federalist Society contributor and founder of yet another parentally themed advocacy group: Parents Defending Education. Neily and her testimony embody the shift in rhetoric on American education over the last 5 years.

Let’s look at some of the conversation around American education, how that conversation has affected real legislation, and how the issues with America’s declining education standing go deeper than just education reform on its own. While this particular newsletter is going to focus on the rhetorical and legislative agenda put forward by Republicans (of utmost importance considering the incoming administration), the bigger picture presents a failure of both Democratic and Republican leadership in helping working class people. The growing lack of institutional trust Americans have in their government has made its way into public schools, and because of it the synonymous relationship between schools and the communities they reside in is continually eroding. At the end of the line, everyone bears the brunt of it.

Mom’s Mad

Born out of the anti-masking campaign of the COVID pandemic, Moms For Liberty was founded in 2021 by 3 former Florida school board members. They have since come to adopt the same kind of anti-woke, social purity belief system as any of your favorite Evangelicals. In addition to opposing LGBTQ+ rights and freedoms, they are arbiters of alternative history that is sympathetic to America’s brutal past of slavery and genocide. And, of course, what would any Conservative advocacy group be without a sex scandal regarding a founder? Nevertheless, their fight for “parental rights” and “truth” has garnered the group national recognition from top Republicans, including Donald Trump. Groups like them revel in a line of advocacy that The Guardian calls “housewife populism”, and hide their vitriol behind the facade of protecting children. It’s one thing to spew hate in a vacuum, but another thing entirely to become a pillar of a national ideological movement. Especially when it pertains to schooling. If children begin to question things when they’re young, they’ll only continue to do so in the future. Ultimately, Moms For Liberty is afraid that children will come to the correct conclusions about our society writ large.

That’s what the crux of their movement, and the larger conservative social agenda, is about. This idea that if your teacher is gay, they should not have pictures of their spouse on their desk. They should not talk about their partner, nor should they normalize any sort of romantic affinity for someone of the same sex. Discussions of gender will cause students to question their realities, sending them into a spiral of derealization and shame. Any exposure to the existence of LGBTQ+ people is enough to alter the brain chemistry of a child, transforming them into the most adamant Troye Sivan and Chappell Roan fans. Or worse, turn them gay completely. It is a denial of human existence and, pardon the pun, a textbook example of oppression. Further, Moms For Liberty continues to perpetuate inflammatory “groomer” rhetoric, pushing the narrative that anything surrounding the LGBTQ+ community is inherently sexual and without humanity. The lack of compassion and empathy ingrained into this worldview is directly antithetical to the processes of learning and understanding that are the basis for any sort of intellectual society. This same state of denial extends to American history as well.

Moms For Liberty and their movement were a catalyst for the surge of discussion surrounding Critical Race Theory. Much like their stance on gender and sexuality, there is a black hole where nuance and critical thinking should be. To the right, Critical Race Theory exists solely to oppress white people and fill them with guilt for the acts of their ancestors. Or more classically, it’s reverse racism. This grievance isn’t new. It’s the same complaints riddled towards Affirmative Action and any myriad of reforms that force people to take an honest look at America’s history and its systems of governing. Most damning, though, are efforts from Moms For Liberty, PragerU, and Conservative commentators like Charlie Kirk to palliate slavery and the broader reality of systemic racism and oppression. Honest analysis of history is the best way to determine and explain how and why systems exist as they do today. To say that the United States is a country built on the backs of slavery and genocide, while rhetorically salient, can also just be stated as a simple matter of fact on its face. This is another instance of making sure that children never come to question the American institution as it exists. It must be free of criticism.

National adoption of the Moms For Liberty platform is sprawling. They have roughly 300 chapters in cities across the country and are directly associated with prominent Republicans, including Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley. All 3 spoke at the 2023 Moms For Liberty conference, and with the upcoming administration, the moms now have a direct line to the White House. With this comes the normalization and potential implementation of their beliefs and worldview. Moms For Liberty doesn’t write the legislation for these people, but they do make it happen. While a national-level implementation of these reforms remains to be seen, the state of Florida, and many others, have done just that.

Sunshine State of Mind

Watching Ron DeSantis flail around for several months on the primary campaign trail was truly a highlight of this last election cycle. Despite being touted as an early favorite and potentially transformational figure within the party, his absolute charisma vacuum was too much to overcome. If DeSantis was to be against pudding and ICEE’s, he was unfit to be our leader. His anti-woke platform was not enough to propel him to the nomination despite a very public fight with Disney and enacting comprehensive conservative education reform across the state of Florida. In 2022, DeSantis signed into law statewide education reform that covered everything from LGBTQ+ discussion to how black history should be taught in classrooms. It also allowed for the use of PragerU Kids videos to be shown in schools. Videos featuring sanitizing, innacurate narratives that slavery was a compromise, and American land was not stolen. Shortly after, states all over the country followed suit and enacted similar reforms of their own. The links above covers this in detail, but it seems almost equally important to question why a bill like this needed to exist in the first place.

Coincidentally, Florida actually ranks quite high in education by many metrics. #1 overall (an aggregate of #10 in K-12 & #1 in Higher-Ed), in fact, with their best K-12 metric being the college readiness of their students. If any sort of reform needed to exist, the immediate assumption is it would address areas of need in an otherwise stable machine. The existence of the legislation passed in Florida and other states is merely a means of drawing hard lines on what kind of speech and thought can be said or discussed. It doesn’t get any more obvious than all of the book banning, which should come across as kind of the baseline entry point for fascism. Thousands of books on gender and race banned across these states over the last few years in the continued effort to shield children from the realities of the world around them. There is no practical purpose for this legislation to exist. It is not looking to increase test scores, improve graduation rates, or help those who may need it most. In fact, the rigid approach to discussions of race and gender only hinders broader understandings of history and human health.

There’s an obvious irony that the freedom party is responsible for some of the most sweeping restrictions on speech and expression in recent years. Legislation like this is a successful win for the likes of Moms For Liberty, Evangelicals, White Nationalists, and anyone looking to suppress the existence of an already marginalized group. It’s not like they just attempted to do all this stuff. It is enacted. It is now the standard in many places all over the country. As an issue, Democrats have completely failed to adequately oppose this rhetoric. With the fallout of the election came a flurry of Democratic analysis that saw mainstream Democrats, and even leftists, begin to cede ground to Republicans on these issues. The lack of backbone is appalling. Instead of fighting for teachers and the rights of others, or creating any sort of compelling counter narrative, they’ve decided that popularism and getting elected is what’s most important. While a small part of a larger issue, it’s important to note because it has allowed what may be coming over the next 4 years to happen.

Trickle Down Stupidity

In just over a month from now, Donald Trump will take office again, and if we’re to take him at his word for all of the things he campaigned on, then one of the first things to be affected is the U.S. Department of Education. More accurately, the U.S. Department of Education is going to be eliminated entirely. The consequences of this are beyond the scope of being adequately covered here, but the assertion alone is enough to work off of. It plays into the larger Conservative belief system of smaller government, states’ rights, and privatization, while also satisfying the base’s moral advocacy bloc. By attributing the DOE with the supposed expansion of social Marxism in schools and institutions, as people like Jordan Peterson talk about, the Trump administration creates a tangible villain that needs to be defeated. The irony here being that the DOE doesn’t set any kind of federal curriculum that states must follow. Its functions boil down to the distribution of funds, research and data collection, and ensuring equal access to education nationwide. It doesn’t matter, though. The reality distortion field that the right has created surrounding public education has made combatting both prejudice and misinformation increasingly difficult.

In addition to the anti-woke aspects of the DOE’s dismantling, the fiscal repercussions are also troubling. Project 2025’s section on education makes clear what some of these priorities are. Before even being fully rid of the DOE, the Trump administration aims to block grant federal funding to states from the Department (page 325). Money that is dedicated to states specifically for things like Title 1 funding for low-income school districts or special education programs would now be given to states with no strings attached under the belief that they’ll do what’s right without being made to do so. Once that dries up, though, and the DOE is completely done away with, it’s up to the states themselves to figure it out. Some states may be fine, but it’s practically immoral to let states like Mississippi or West Virginia fend for themselves financially. With less and less money to pay teachers, they will not only flee the poorest states, but any incentive to become a teacher at all in those states becomes virtually non-existent. This is all by design. It is an intentional effort to erode educational institutions because a less educated populous is a weaker populous. And, as usual, communities that will be hit hardest by reforms like these are already in the most precarious circumstances.

You don’t need a polysci doctorate to see the math behind the “diploma divide” in this last election. It’s not new either. College educated voters swinging for Democrats has been trending that way for decades. Hearkening back to the HELP hearing from earlier, Senator Cassidy concedes that teachers are important. That they deserve to be paid adequately even. Yet he argues that despite increases in education spending, test scores have fallen. Very suspect, so let’s dive into that. Next time around we’ll look at the money that is of much concern to Senator Cassidy (ask him if he has that same energy for the Department of Defense) and see what’s really going on with it. In the eyes of some, that money is being so misallocated that it may be worth getting rid of it altogether.

The amount of wealth and economic concentration on display here is directly antithetical to any serious Democratic society. Some might rightfully argue it’s Oligarchical. It is impossible to be involved in that many avenues of business and still have the best interest of the individual shareholders in mind. Even when it comes to shareholder voting power, which is a main point of contention for opponents of this anti-corporate narrative, the 3 firms control roughly 23% of all votes for companies in the S&P 500. The neutered voting power of an individual doesn’t just apply to economics, though. There is something much more sinister lurking here. Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street embody a ballooning corporate class of businesses and executives whose wealth and influence continue to skyrocket, virtually unopposed by any kind of regulation, law, or tax code, let alone any sort of moral imperative. The United States has always been a country beholden to the almighty dollar over the individual. This isn’t exactly new. But as wealth inequality widens and the middle class continues to shrink, so does the individual power to enforce change through Democracy.

In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that it was a violation of the First Amendment to restrict independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations. This complete evisceration of election spending oversight has given companies and the wealthiest individuals unilateral influence on the outcome of elections by way of funneling unlimited amounts of money into SuperPAC’s. From 2008 to 2016, election spending increased by 900%. In the 2 years from 2018 to 2020, election spending increased by $5.7 billion. This money is not made up of grassroots and middle and working class dollars. The majority of people are becoming voiceless, and big money has never been louder. The most vile aspect of all of this is that it doesn’t even just apply to the support of an individual candidate. Through the black magic of SuperPAC’s, corporations are allowed to denigrate oppositional candidates without their preferred candidate taking any kind of accountability. The notable “I’m Donald Trump and I approve this message” soundbite you here before or after any political ad only applies to ads paid for by the Trump campaign itself. If, hypothetically, you had a PAC and wanted to run an ad claiming that Ted Cruz is in fact The Zodiac Killer, you wouldn’t need Colin Allred’s stamp of approval. Now, you’d need buyers for the ad itself, but regardless this is obviously fucked. A blatantly twisted and dishonest interpretation of the First Amendment, Citizens United has allowed corporations to speak as if they are people. It has been integral to America’s transition from a Democracy to full-blown Oligarchy.

Elon Musk gave over $100 million to the Trump campaign through his America PAC, but his most devious contribution wasn’t strictly monetary. In a report by The Guardian, during the final stretch of the campaign, Arab American voters in metro Detroit began seeing texts and mailers about Kamala Harris’ support of Israel. Displaying text that exclaims Kamala will “ALWAYS stand with Israel,” she will “stand up against Hamas and radical terrorists in Gaza.” There were ads even specifically mentioning that her husband is Jewish. Meanwhile, in heavily Jewish-populated areas of Pennsylvania and Detroit, texts and mailers were sent out saying “two faced Kamala stands with Palestine,” and “Why did Kamala Harris support denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands? And why did Harris show sympathy for college protesters who are rabidly antisemitic?” These targeted, rhetorically manipulative, and conflicting ads were intentionally delivered to 2 of the most emotionally vulnerable voter demographics in this election cycle. The ads were produced by Future Coalition PAC, which has only one donor: Elon Musk. This kind of sick shit is on the fast train to normalization. You don’t get to be as rich as Musk through any kind of compassionate moral compass, and this type of sociopathic immorality will only continue to infect our elections. In fact, as Trump’s cabinet begins to take shape, Republicans are already threatening oppositional party members. If you do not fall in line, you will get primaried, and it will be funded by Elon Musk.

Big money influence on elections is not exclusive to Republicans. Democrats absolutely abuse big money and leverage their consultant and corporate coalition in order to suprress the left. There is, however, a noticeable gap between the amount given to Republicans and the amount given to Democrats. This election cycle, the top 10 Republican donors outspent the top 10 Democratic donors by $691,999,569 million. That is an astonishing differential, and it’s a simple matter of corresponding goals and ideals. Right-wing policy inherently benefits corporations and wealthy individuals in a way that genuine leftist policy does not. The conservative belief in small government and deregulation is directly correlated to their argument in favor of Citizens United. All of this in an effort to put the powers that be in place and enact sweeping tax cuts for big business, deregulation to allow corporations to act without guardrails, and spending cuts to cripple the federal government portraying it as dysfunctional and ineffective. This has been happening, and it’s happening now. Musk, along with fellow wealthy sycophant Vivek Ramaswamy, bought their way into creating a fugazi government entity in the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, whose companies are the recipients of billions in government subsidies, will continue to seek favorable treatment from this new administration. Trump’s Energy Secretary pick, Chris Wright, is an energy executive at the second largest fracking services company on Earth. It’s hard to imagine he would fall in line with policy that may affect Liberty Energy’s bottom line. Miriam Adelson, Trump’s 3rd largest donor for this cycle, bought Trump’s foreign policy on Israel. Trump’s tax-cut legislation in 2017 was the largest of its kind for big business. He’ll brag as much about it. None of this is isolated to Donald Trump and his time in politics; this is just how it works. The 2024 election and its result are the most visible and tangible outcomes of a system working as intended.

The present reality of this corruption is a lot like the wealth of those who perpetuate it. It is already here, but it is growing, it is getting worse, and it is becoming progressively harder to combat. If Democracy is the foundation of the American experiment, then Oligarchy has taken root and ascended through the cracks. Americans are already disenchanted with Democracy, and if there’s any hope in salvaging it, then it starts with overturning Citizens United. It starts with eliminating the mechanisms that allow for obscene wealth to buy elections and disenfranchise voters. Progressive policy can’t be enacted if the coalition can’t even get elected. Wealth inequality and its negative effects on the lives of the American people is required rhetoric for any serious Democratic politician. It is at the core of America’s most terminal problems, and it cannot continue to be tossed aside in favor of friendly corporate gesturing and appeasement.

Republicans have made a myriad of groups out to be boogeymen. Assigning blame to minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and women for a carousel of issues that are never actually correlated. It is time for this country’s discontent to be directed at the right people for the right reasons. The only minorities that should be marginalized and ridiculed are the über wealthy. A small handful of individuals with an outrageously disproportionate amount of power. The real boogeymen of America have long existed in the shadows, hiding under the beds and in the closets of working-class Americans. Blocking their minimum wage increases, gutting social safety nets, and terminating their employment and benefits for the sake of profit. They now live in broad daylight. Open, unabashed, and shameless with their intentions. Now more than ever, they should terrify you.