This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
After all, fascism and white supremacy are European inventions that are not of this continent. These false ideologies come from another land and they have been poisoning humanity for a few centuries now, dating back to 1492 when Columbus first set sail. It's entirely synchronous that on this very day, the Columbus statue in Columbus, Ohio, just came down. Not at all a frivolous decision, as we are witnessing a symbolic re-ordering that has for too long ordered and subjugated us a peoples native to this continent. I'm just amazed that this is happening in my lifetime.
Regarding other news from today, what's this about somehow not getting the intelligence about Russia putting bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan when he had actually been briefed several times for well over a year?! I can only imagine how angry and frustrated the intelligence and military community are with their leader, a self-proclaimed "Il duce." Trump condemns neither white power nor Putin power. He has no ethical core. What he is politically, however, is abundantly clear. He is a white nationalist, fascist and a traitor to our country. -Angela Valenzuela
The basic facts are these: Sunday morning, Donald Trump tweeted about the “great people” in a video in which one of his supporters yelled “white power.” Three hours later, he deleted the tweet. Through the rest of Sunday and Monday, neither Trump nor any official spokesperson condemned the use of “white power” as a rallying cry. But how did it happen?
The White House continues to claim that Trump didn’t hear the white power part. It’s not that he didn’t listen to the video, aides say, he just somehow didn’t hear it. Or bother to condemn it once he knew about it. But, The Washington Post reports, “senior White House advisers say they immediately realized they had a problem” with the tweet, and it “set off a scramble.”
“Senior staffers quickly conferred over the phone and then began trying to reach the president to convey their concerns about the tweet,” the Post reports. “White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, son-in-law Jared Kushner and other senior advisers spoke with president, said several people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of private conversations.”
And three hours later, Trump agreed to have the tweet deleted, “moved, in large part, by the public calls from Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only black Republican, to do just that, aides said.”
In other words, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that Trump would agree to delete the tweet. It took Kayleigh and Jared and unnamed other senior advisers and someone pointing out that it’s probably a good idea to listen to the Senate’s only Black Republican on this one.
Although NBC News reported that the delay was also because White House officials could not immediately reach Trump, who “was at his golf club in Virginia and had put his phone down.”
Sit with that a minute: The president of the United States could not be reached for permission to delete a white power tweet because he was golfing.
Since then, Trump and the White House have had ample opportunity to distance themselves from the call for “white power.” Trump’s Twitter feed, for instance. Or when McEnany appeared on Fox & Friends on Monday and said “His point in tweeting out that video was to stand with his supporters, who are oftentimes demonized.” (Yeah, for saying things like “white power.”) Or when McEnany held a press briefing and claimed “he did not hear that particular phrase,” but somehow did not get a question about whether he condemned it until she had ended the briefing and was leaving, when she ignored questions shouted after her. (Not exactly well played, White House press.)
”A senior White House official said that had McEnany been asked, she was prepared to say that of course the president condemns white power, white nationalism and racism in any form,” the Post reports. She just … didn’t. Which is telling—although we already knew what it tells us.
Must-read scathing critique by Peter Wehner of the Trump presidency in The Atlantic. At this point, and good hygiene and social distancing notwithstanding, if the Coronavirus get us or our loved ones due to his reckless endangerment of Americans, we're "done," too. As the death toll registers at 80, blood is already on his hands. Devastating quote:
Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests.
He is indeed shrinking before our very eyes and needs to resign immediately. His enablers, too.
Contributing writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC
Editor's Note:The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.
When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would never vote for Donald Trump, even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled. How could I not vote for a person who checked far more of my policy boxes than his opponent?
What I explained then, and what I have said many times since, is that Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office. For me, that is the paramount consideration in electing a president, in part because at some point it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and leadership ability, will really matter.
“Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them” is how I put it four years ago. “No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.” I added this:
Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.
It took until the second half of Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.
To be sure, the president isn’t responsible for either the coronavirus or the disease it causes, COVID-19, and he couldn’t have stopped it from hitting our shores even if he had done everything right. Nor is it the case that the president hasn’t done anything right; in fact, his decision to implement a travel ban on China was prudent. And any narrative that attempts to pin all of the blame on Trump for the coronavirus is simply unfair. The temptation among the president’s critics to use the pandemic to get back at Trump for every bad thing he’s done should be resisted, and schadenfreude is never a good look.
That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity.
“They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told TheWashington Post. “To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”
Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity has been only enhanced during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus. “It is failing. Let’s admit it.” He added, “The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that. I think it should be, but we’re not."
But that’s not all. The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable. The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that. “We worked very well with that office,” Fauci told Congress. “It would be nice if the office was still there.” We may face a shortage of ventilators and medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate anything like that in countries such as Italy. (This would cause not only needless coronavirus-related deaths, but deaths from those suffering from other ailments who won’t have ready access to hospital care.)
Some of these mistakes are less serious and more understandable than others. One has to take into account that in government, when people are forced to make important decisions based on incomplete information in a compressed period of time, things go wrong.
Yet in some respects, the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it.
The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.
Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing. He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.) The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low.
“I like the numbers,” Trump said. “I would rather have the numbers stay where they are. But if they want to take them off, they’ll take them off. But if that happens, all of a sudden your 240 [cases] is obviously going to be a much higher number, and probably the 11 [deaths] will be a higher number too.” (Cooler heads prevailed, and over the president’s objections, the Grand Princess was allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland.)
On and on it goes.
To make matters worse, the president delivered an Oval Office address that was meant to reassure the nation and the markets but instead shook both. The president’s delivery was awkward and stilted; worse, at several points, the president, who decided to ad-lib the teleprompter speech, misstated his administration’s own policies, which the administration had to correct. Stock futures plunged even as the president was still delivering his speech. In his address, the president called for Americans to “unify together as one nation and one family,” despite having referred to Washington Governor Jay Inslee as a “snake” days before the speech and attacking Democrats the morning after it. As TheWashington Post’s Dan Balz put it, “Almost everything that could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.”
Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.
The nation is recognizing this, treating him as a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” in the words of Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of TheNew York Times.
Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes.
The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.
PETER WEHNER is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Egan visiting professor at Duke University. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.
Like Dr. Alvaro Huerta, I am personally very concerned about the 2020 Presidential election and how the importance of the African American and Latina/o vote needs to be taken seriously into account. Our communities should not get treated as an afterthought but rather dealt with centrally. From that standpoint, I do agree with Dr. Huerta that the most valid contenders are Warren, Sanders, and Biden. These, in comparison to the rest, would excite these combined electorates. My hope is, of course, that whoever the candidate ultimately is, that we all rally behind that candidate in order to get Trump out of office. -Angela Valenzuela
As part of my last two essays on how Democrats can beat President Trump (here and here) I’ve added another five lessons. As a registered Independent (as noted in my last essay), I’ve consistently been critical (to the present) of Democrats and Republicans in the areas of race, class, place, immigration, etc. My most recent book on defending Latina/o immigrants shares more reasons why. Also, since I’m offering these perils of wisdom to the Democrats on a pro bono basis, don’t blow it, Democrats!
African American and Latina/o Support Is Key
Without the majority support and enthusiasm of African American and Latina/o voters, the ultimate Democratic candidate to take on Trump will lose. Let’s not get confused or bothered by the recent Iowa caucus fiasco or the New Hampshire primary. These primarily white states, where Iowa is 91% white and New Hampshire is 93% white, will not determine who wins the White House given the importance of more diverse states with large populations of African Americans, Latinas/os, Asian & Pacific Islanders and others. At 94% white, a state like Vermont might as well be next to make sure that we secure the whitest possible candidate. For Democratic leaders and voters, this should be part of the criteria to defeat Trump, mimicking former President Barack Obama’s diverse coalition.
That said, given that Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer don’t have a strong record with African Americans and Latinas/os, they should all drop out now. That includes Tulsi Gabbard and Deval Patrick. Not sure why Gabbard and Patrick are still in the race since they’re polling in the subzero range?
What makes Buttigieg think that he can fix this country’s structural racial problem if he couldn’t get the job done at the local level? In terms of Bloomberg, he’ll never secure the majority support of African Americans and Latinas/os due to hisracist stop-and-frisk policy. A convenient and self-serving apology won’t help. This also explains why Kamala Harris never had a chance, given her background as a prosecutor with America’s incarceration problem related to African American and Latinas/os.
From 11 Candidates to Three
As of early February, 2020, there should really only be three candidates left: former Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I’m not implying here that these candidates have strong records in terms of race or racial justice issues. For example, while Biden was part of Obama’s Deporter-in-Chief campaign, Sanders and Warren focus too much on class issues. While class is very important, so is race.
Given the importance of the 2020 president election, we can’t have too many Democratic candidates at this stage when Trump doesn’t have to deal with internal competition. In short, while the existing Democratic candidates compete against each other for individual donations and voters, Trump has the field all to himself.
This is a recipe for disaster for Democrats.
Stop With the Cannibalism
By attacking each other during primary debates and on the campaign trail, Democrats are only increasing Trump’s chances to get re-elected. While I believe in debate and differences of opinion, this is not the time to engage in WWE takedowns, where the ultimate Democratic candidate will be hobbled going against Trump. Why give Trump more ammunition? This makes no sense to me. Given that Trump has solidified his white nationalism base and agenda, like any tyrannical leader in world history, he’s consistently espousing and implementing his Draconian agenda with limited or obstacles. With the help of the GOP-led Senate, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his racist base, Trump can actually “stand in the middle of Fight Avenue and shoot somebody” without political repercussions. If this were to occur, I wonder if Attorney General William Barr will just look the other way, like a good subordinate in the mafia?
Money Does Matter in Elections
If billionaires like Bloomberg andSteyer want to help the country (and the world), they should invest their billions in helping defeat Trump through donations to the ultimate Democratic candidates, direct ads against Trump and other legal avenues. This includes recruiting other billionaires and millionaires to pitch in. While the existing Democratic candidates are dividing the American donation pie among each other, Trump is raking in millions of dollars solely for himself and his white nationalist agenda. This includes the RNC, which, like the GOP-dominated Senate, is beholden to Trump. With millions of dollars at his disposal, Trump will continue to hold his white nationalist rallies and buy ads on television, radio and social media to secure his re-election.
This is another recipe for disaster for Democrats.
Unity and Clear Message on Progressive Values
In order for Democrats to win the White House in 2020, they must immediately unify around one candidate (with a strong VP candidate from a diverse background) and advance an agenda based on progressive values. This includes access to health care for all Americans residents/citizens, affordable housing, good-paying jobs and opportunity to pursue higher education without getting into massive debt. This also includes no brown kids in cages! While there are more issues, Democrats should keep the message clear and simple for all open-minded voters to understand.
In short, the ultimate Democratic candidate (and VP candidate) must speak in a
language that most voters understand, energizing millions of Americans (state-by-
state) to get to the ballot box on Tuesday, November 3.
***
Dr. Alvaro Huerta holds a joint faculty appointment in Urban & Regional Planning and Ethnic & Women’s Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Among other publications, he’s the author of Defending Latina/o Immigrant Communities: The Xenophobic Era of Trump and Beyond. He holds a Ph.D. (city and regional planning) from UC Berkeley. He also holds an M.A. (urban planning) and a B.A. (history) from UCLA.
On November 12, U.S. Supreme Court To Consider the Fate of DACA Recipients and their Children
Washington, DC - A quarter of a million U.S. citizen childrenwould be harmed if the Trump administration cancels Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and their parents lose thisvitalfamily protection. Pediatricians, children’s advocates, and parents across the nation are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider this fact when reviewing the Trump administration’s closure of the program.
They filed anamicus brief(appendixhere) with the U.S. Supreme Court that details the harm that rescinding DACA would have on young children. The briefexplainsthat society has a moral imperative to protect children from harm and promote family unity.
The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) supported the development of this brief, working with the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, the American Academy of Pediatrics, anddozens of children’s advocacy organizations, medical professionals, and child development experts. The brief was written by Persyn Law & Policy and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP.
In aninterviewwith the Mountain West News Bureau, a group of public media stations in CO, ID, MT, UT, and WY,Wendy Cervantes, CLASP’s director of immigration policy,said “We know from current research that even the fear of deportation alone can have really significant impacts on children’s mental health and can lead to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.” The amicus brief
Marlen Ortiz, a mother of a young son from South Bend, Indiana, shared her concerns about the future withTelemundo. “They are playing with our lives,” she said. “But this is something serious for me. I fear for my security and that of my child…. My son lives in constant fear that they could deport me… I don’t know what more they want us to do.”
The DACA case affects children inevery state, but the largest number live in: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Texas.
Read the amicus brief filed inUnited States Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California;Donald J. Trump, President of the United States v. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People;andKirsten M. Nielsen, Secretary of Homeland Security v. Martin Jonathan Batalla Vidal[consolidated cases]here, withappendix.
Data about the contributions and family ties of DACA beneficiaries can be foundhere, including the number of U.S. citizen children affected by the policy in each state.
No!!! This is so incredibly terrible! Politics and profit combined with climate change denial, a horrible president, and elected officials that have been trying to gut this act for years—are responsible for this. Moreover, because of the polity's massive bombardment with so many issues we are facing right now with this presidency, this decision is in jeopardy of fully coming to fruition. Let's all stand up and make it known that we oppose this. We are running on borrowed time when it comes to the environment. As a result of the Endangered Species Act, signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1973, we still have manatees, polar bears, grizzly bears, seals, whooping cranes, beluga whales, and bald eagles—our nation's very symbol. They will certainly be denied to the next generation if we fail to vociferously voice our opposition to this. -Angela Valenzuela
The Trump administration announced new regulations that will effectively gut the Endangered Species Act (ESA) on Monday, hampering one of the most important environmental laws ever passed.
The Department of the Interior, currently headed by former fossil fuel lobbyist David Bernhardt, and the Department of Commerce made sweeping changes to the regulations required by the ESA just months after a United Nations report detailed an “unprecedented” decline of biodiversity and accelerating extinction rates. The changes "clarify, interpret, and implement portions of the Act," according to the text of the final regulations.
One function of the ESA is to protect the land that a threatened or endangered species needs to survive. The new regulations would limit the designation of this land, called critical habitat, stating that sometimes it “may not be prudent;" for example, if the habitat threats lie outside the scope of the Act or if an area will provide "negligible" conservation value for a chiefly non-US species. The new rules also require regulators to consider land where the species currently lives (rather than evaluate their ideal habitat) before expanding to unoccupied areas.
Habitat loss is one of the greatest drivers of extinction, and so critical habitat designation is deemed a crucial part of the Act by conservationists. Many species are threatened or endangered because they’ve been pushed to a small fraction of their original range, and protecting more land can help them rebound.
The new regulations also roll back automatic protections for species on the brink of becoming endangered. In the past, when a new species was designated as “threatened,” they were automatically given the same protections as endangered species, including penalties for killing or harming individuals or destroying their critical habitat. With high levels of protection, the hope was that threatened species would be able to make a recovery and never reach the level of “endangered.” Now, protections for threatened species will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
The Trump Administration has also redefined the term “foreseeable future,” which was used to determine threats to the survival of a species. Now, regulators must work within a time-frame (also to be decided on a case-by-case basis) that can reliably account for “both the future threats and the species’ responses to those threats.”
With the Trump Administration’s history of denying climate science, the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council worried in a blog post that all of these changes will stop the Interior Department from considering threats due to climate change.
In the past, to prevent economic interests from infringing on conservation goals, the ESA specified that species would be listed “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of such determination.” The new regulations remove this sentence.
Environmentalists worry that this opens the door to considering the economic impact of protecting endangered animals and could lead to exploitation by fossil fuel companies looking to develop land intended to protect our most vulnerable species.
However, Gary Frazer, the Assistant Director for Endangered Species at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said that the department plans to continue to list species solely based on scientific knowledge. Agencies are still allowed to compile economic data and present it to the public.
Despite its popularity, some businesses and government officials have often tried to weaken the Act, prioritizing short-term economic gain over the conservation benefits of saving species.
