Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been clear about her desire to shut down the agency she runs. She’s laid off half the staff and joked about padlocking the door. She calls it “the final mission.” But the department is not behaving like an agency that is simply winding down. Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The department’s actions and policies reflect a disdain for public schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of other options — private, Christian and virtual schools or homeschooling. Share this article on * __Twitter * __Facebook * __Mail Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500 million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that often draws children from traditional public schools. They have repeatedly urged states to spend federal money for poor and at-risk students at private schools and businesses. And they have threatened penalties for public schools that offer programs to address historic inequities for Black or Hispanic students. McMahon has described her agency moving “at lightning rocket speed,” and the department’s actions in just one week in September reflect that urgency. The agency publicly blasted four school districts it views as insubordinate for refusing to adopt anti-trans policies and for not eliminating special programs for Black students. It created a pot of funding dedicated to what it calls “patriotic education,” which has been criticized for downplaying some of the country’s most troubling episodes, including slavery. And it formed a coalition with Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, PragerU and dozens of other conservative groups to disseminate patriotic programming. Officials at the Education Department declined to comment or answer questions from ProPublica for this story. At times, McMahon has voiced support for public schools. But more often and more emphatically she has portrayed public schools as unsuccessful and unsafe — and has said she is determined to give parents other options. To carry out her vision, McMahon has brought on at least 20 political appointees from ultraconservative think tanks and advocacy groups eager to de-emphasize public schools, which have educated students for roughly 200 years. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank Among them is top adviser Lindsey Burke, a longtime policy director at The Heritage Foundation and the lead author of the education section in Project 2025’s controversial agenda for the Trump administration. In analyzing dozens of hours of audio and video footage of public and private speaking events for McMahon’s appointees, as well as their writings, ProPublica found that a recurring theme is the desire to enable more families to leave public schools. This includes expanding programs that provide payment — in the form of debit cards, which Burke has likened to an “Amazon gift card” — to parents to cobble together customized educational plans for their children. Instead of relying on public schools, parents would use their allotted tax dollars on a range of costs: private school tuition, online learning, tutors, transportation and music lessons. More than 8 in 10 elementary and secondary students in the U.S. go to a traditional public school. But Burke expects that public schools will see dramatic enrollment declines fueled by both demographic and policy changes. Addressing an interviewer in an April podcast, she noted: “We’re going to have a lot of empty school buildings.” And in a speech last year she declared: “I'm optimistic that, you know, five years from now a majority of kids are going to be in a private school choice program.” In a 2024 podcast, Noah Pollak, now a senior adviser in the Education Department, bemoaned what he sees as progressive control of schools, which he said has led to lessons he finds unacceptable, such as teaching fourth graders about systemic racism. “And so the work that I do is trying to come up with creative policy ideas to stop that, to turn back the tide, to figure out ways that conservatives can protect these institutions or build new institutions,” said Pollak, who has been an adviser to conservative groups. As tax dollars are reallocated from public school districts and families abandon those schools to learn at home or in private settings, the new department officials see little need for oversight. Instead, they would let the marketplace determine what’s working using tools such as Yelp-like reviews from parents. Burke has said she is against “any sort of regulation.” President Donald Trump himself said in July that the federal government needs only to provide “a little tiny bit of supervision but very little, almost nothing,” over the nation’s education system except to make sure students speak English. Advocates for public schools consider them fundamental to American democracy. Providing public schools is a requirement in every state constitution. Families in small and rural communities tend to rely more heavily on public education. They are less likely than families in cities to have private and charter schools nearby. And unlike private schools, public school districts don’t charge tuition. Public schools enroll local students regardless of academic or physical ability, race, gender or family income; private schools can selectively admit students. Karma Quick-Panwala, a leader at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, which advocates for disabled students, said she wants to be optimistic. “But,” she added, “I’m very fearful that we are headed towards a less inclusive, less diverse and more segregated public school setting.” Allison Rose Socol, a policy expert at EdTrust, an organization focusing on civil rights in schools, decried what she called the “demo crew” in McMahon’s office. Socol described McMahon’s push to help grow private school enrollment through taxpayer-funded vouchers and other means as a “great American heist” that will funnel money away from the public system. “It’s a strategic theft of the future of our country, our kids and our democracy,” she said. Attention on McMahon often focuses on her former role as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. It was no different on the day of her Senate confirmation hearing, when journalists and social media delighted in noting that seated behind her was her son-in-law, the retired wrestler known as Triple H. Little attention was paid to the conservative education activists in the front row from Moms for Liberty, which has protested school curricula and orchestrated book bans nationwide; Defending Education (formerly Parents Defending Education), which has sued districts to fight what it calls liberal indoctrination; and the America First Policy Institute, co-founded by McMahon after the first Trump administration. Now two people who once served at Defending Education have been named to posts in the Education Department, and leaders from Moms for Liberty have joined McMahon for roundtables and other official events. In addition, at least nine people from the America First Policy Institute have been hired in the department. AFPI’s sweeping education priorities include advocating for school vouchers and embedding biblical principles in schools. It released a policy paper in 2023, titled “Biblical Foundations,” that sets out the organization’s objective to end the separation of church and state and “plant Jesus in every space.” The paper rejects the idea that society has a collective responsibility to educate all children equally and argues that “the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” It frames public schooling as failing, with low test scores and “far-left social experiments, such as gender fluidity.” The first AFPI leader pictured in that report is McMahon. Linda McMahon testifies at her Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of education. Seated behind her are, from left to right, son Shane McMahon, Defending Education’s Nicole Neily, the former wrestler Paul Levesque (also known as Triple H), daughter Stephanie McMahon, Erika Donalds of the America First Policy Institute, and Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice. Credit:Win McNamee/Getty Images AFPI and the other two nonprofit groups sprang up only after the 2020 election. Together they drew in tens of millions of dollars through a well-coordinated right-wing network that had spent decades advocating for school choice and injecting Christianity into schools. Ultrawealthy supporters include right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, who, through a super PAC, gave $336,000 to Moms for Liberty’s super PAC from October 2023 through July 2024. Defending Education and AFPI received backing from some of the same prominent conservative foundations and trusts, including ones linked to libertarian-minded billionaire Charles Koch and to conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, an architect of the effort to strip liberal influence from the courts, politics and schools. Maurice T. Cunningham, a now-retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, studied the origins and connections of parents’ rights groups, finding in 2023 that the funders — a small set of billionaires and Christian nationalists — had similar goals. The groups want “to undermine teachers unions, protect their wealthy donors from having to contribute their fair share in taxes to strengthen public schools, and provide profit opportunities through school privatization,” he concluded. The groups say they are merely trying to advocate for parents and for school choice. They didn’t discuss their relationship with donors when contacted by ProPublica. These groups and their supporters now have access to the top levers of government, either through official roles in the agency or through the administration’s adoption of their views. When the department created an “End DEI” portal to collect tips about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in schools, it quoted Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice in the press release. She encouraged parents to “share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools.” Moms for Liberty referred to the portal as the “culmination” of Justice’s work. (Federal judges ruled against some of the administration’s anti-DEI actions and the department took the controversial portal down in May.) Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward, Justice, who is now with The Heritage Foundation’s political advocacy arm, told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.” She and others say most public schools don’t teach students to read, are dividing children over race and are secretly helping students to change genders — familiar claims that have been widely challenged by educators. When Trump signed an executive order in March to dismantle the Education Department, Justice sat in the first row, as she had at McMahon’s confirmation hearing. The president praised her, along with various governors and lawmakers. “She’s been a hard worker,” he said. Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward, Justice told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.” Defending Education’s Nicole Neily, who was also at McMahon’s confirmation, stood next to McMahon when the secretary announced an investigation into the Maine Department of Education for keeping records from parents about student gender identity plans. Defending Education has filed civil rights complaints against colleges and school districts and has been successful in having its causes taken up by the Trump administration. In an email, Neily told ProPublica she is proud of the work that Defending Education has done to challenge schools that have supported DEI in their curricula and have allowed students to hide their gender identity from parents. She singled out teacher unions and “radical education activists” while blaming drops in student achievement on “the education-industrial complex.” “The sooner this stranglehold is broken, the better,” she wrote. McMahon’s tenure also has been marked by an embrace of religion in schools. She signaled that priority when she appointed Meg Kilgannon to a top post in her office. Kilgannon had worked in the department as director of a faith initiative during the first Trump term and once was part of the Family Research Council, an evangelical think tank that opposes abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. She has encouraged conservative Christians to become involved in what she’s described as “a spiritual war” over children and what they’re being taught in public schools. “This is why we have to lead as Christians, because what the left is doing is a top-down imposition of an agenda, of a Marxist and anti-God and anti-family agenda,” Kilgannon said in a 2023 summit on America’s schools. Reached by phone, Kilgannon told ProPublica, “I have no comment,” and hung up. ### Overhauling “Government Schools” Betsy DeVos, the Michigan billionaire who was education secretary in Trump’s first term, cheered on July 4 this year when Congress instituted America’s first federal voucher program. It came in the form of a generous tax credit program to encourage voucher expansion at the state level. Families can start accessing the aid beginning Jan. 1, 2027. DeVos once said she wanted “to advance God’s kingdom” through vouchers for religious schools and has funneled vast amounts of her family fortune into advocating for school choice. She called the passage of the federal measure “the turning point in ending the one-size-fits-all government school monopoly.” An article in The Federalist, a conservative publication, boiled down the implications into one headline: “How Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill Will Help Kids Escape Failing Government Schools.” But school choice isn’t the only tool that Trump’s education leaders are using to target public schools. McMahon has gutted the Education Department’s civil rights division, where lawyers and other federal employees work to ensure all students can access public school, free from discrimination. The administration rolled back protections for LGBTQ+ students and students of color, prioritized investigating discrimination against white and Jewish students, and launched aggressive investigations of states and districts that it says refused to stop accommodating transgender students. It has rescinded official guidance that said schools had to provide language help and other services for students who are learning English, contradicting long-established federal law. And Trump officials have repeatedly cast public schools as dangerous even as the agency canceled about $1 billion in training grants for more school mental health professionals — money that had been authorized by Congress to help prevent school shootings. The administration now says it plans to resume paying out a fraction of that funding, which would be used for school psychologists. Over and over, the department has used the threat of pulling federal funding to force compliance with new directives and rapid shifts in policy. The department, for instance, threatened to withhold money from schools that did not verify they were ending diversity initiatives, which were designed to address inequitable treatment of Black, Native and Latino students. In August, the department announced it was withholding millions of dollars in grants from five northern Virginia school districts that had refused the department’s demands to bar transgender students from using restrooms and locker rooms that aligned with their gender identity. The districts argued that complying would mean defying Virginia law and a 2020 federal appeals court ruling. Nevertheless, the Education Department told the districts that until they acquiesced to the agency’s bathroom rules they would have to pay expenses up front and request reimbursement. McMahon wrote to districts that “Lindsey Burke is available to answer any questions.” The Fairfax County Public Schools sued and in a legal filing said it faced losing $167 million this school year, money that it was relying on to provide meals to students, support programs for children with disabilities, help English-language learners and enhance teacher training. The federal department has argued that it has discretion to withhold funding and admonished the district for taking the agency to court. Trump officials have repeatedly cast public schools as dangerous even as the agency cancelled training grants for more school mental health professionals — money that had been authorized by Congress to help prevent school shootings. In this atmosphere, public school advocates are particularly concerned about what will happen to funding for Title I grants, which is the federal government’s largest program for schools and is aimed at helping students from low-income families. In early September, House Republicans proposed slashing more than $5 billion from the $18.4 billion earmarked for Title I, putting at risk reading and math teachers, tutors and classroom technology. At the same time, under McMahon, the Education Department is trying to redefine how states and districts can spend the money. In three guidance letters so far this year, the agency encouraged states to divert some Title I money away from public school districts. One suggested paying for outside services, such as privatized tutoring. Another urged states to use Title I money to benefit low-achieving students who live within the boundaries of a high-poverty public school but attend private schools. McMahon is prepared to loosen even more rules on the money. The federal dollars currently are distributed to districts using a formula. Project 2025 calls for Title I to be delivered to states as block grants, or chunks of money with few restrictions. McMahon has encouraged states to ask her to waive rules on spending the money. Critics of this approach fear that Title I money could eventually be used in ways that undermine public schools — on private school vouchers, for example. Public school advocates like William Phillis, a former official at the Ohio Department of Education, fear the change would devastate public schools. “I just know any block grant or any funding that would be left up to state officials on Title I money would be misappropriated in terms of the intent,” Phillis said. “Block grants to Ohio would go to the private sector.” A spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce did not respond to requests for comment. Rainey Briggs, chief of operations for Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa, said he supports parental choice but worries that public schools will suffer financially and will not have the resources to stay up to date. And he fears that right-wing narratives around public schools, the distrust and lack of support for highly trained district leaders — whether from some parents or politicians — could lead accomplished educators to walk away. “Public education is irreplaceable,” he said, citing its commitment to serve every child regardless of their background or circumstance. Those influencing Trump’s education agenda disagree. “If America’s public schools cease to exist tomorrow, America would be a better place,” Justice told ProPublica. _Megan O'Matz is a ProPublica reporter covering issues in Wisconsin and throughout the Midwest. Jennifer Smith Richards pursues stories about abuses of power — often focusing on schools and education — and stories about private businesses throughout the Midwest._ * public schools * privatization * Education Department * Linda McMahon Subscribe to Portside

Stephen Miller,Photo from Southern Poverty Law Center Stephen Miller has a theory about this political moment. As President Trump expands his lawbreaking and dictatorial rule, the powerful MAGA disinformation apparatus—at Miller’s direction—is supercharging public attention to the debate over Trump’s conduct in a way that’s designed to deeply polarize it. That will force Americans to take a side in that standoff, Miller clearly believes, driving them to embrace authoritarian rule, though perhaps without understanding it in exactly those terms. Do Democratic leaders broadly have their own theory about this moment? It’s unclear. But here’s what we can divine right now: Governors JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California do have one. They grasp Miller’s theory of the case, and they are responding in kind, with their own war for attention, on the intuition that voters will side with the rule of law over authoritarian dictatorship— _if_ they are presented with this as a clear choice. This week, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act after a federal judge blocked him from sending the National Guard into Portland, in a ruling that sharply noted Trump is making up facts about crime there as his pretext. Share this article on * __Twitter * __Facebook * __Mail “It’s a burning hellhole,” Trump said. “You have a judge that tries to pretend there’s no problem.” Trump declared that he’d enact the Insurrection Act “if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.” The specter of Portland “burning” is dim-witted MAGA propaganda. But Trump is now nakedly threatening to invoke the notorious nineteenth-century act if Democratic governors or the courts _lawfully_ exercise their roles in our constitutional schema, in a way that displeases him. This would unshackle vast and dangerously vague authorities to domestically deploy the military, powers nominally reserved for extraordinary domestic unrest or civil breakdown. Trump would invoke it based on sheer fabrications, or possibly on old footage of Portland he saw on Fox News. Yet it’s no accident that this comes right after Miller loudly denounced the Portland ruling by that judge—a Trump appointee, no less—as “legal insurrection.” Miller declared that it’s “insurrection” when judges assume for themselves “powers that have been delegated by the Constitution to the president.” Miller is also insisting that judges “have no conceivable authority” to restrict the commander in chief from “dispatching members of the U.S. military to defend federal lives and property,” meaning in Portland. Of course, here in non-MAGA reality, the judge was merely interpreting whether Trump breached the limits Congress has already placed on that presidential authority. She concluded that Trump doesn’t have unlimited power to simply declare that the conditions permitting him to federalize a state’s National Guard have been met. In other words, as Harry Litman argued at TNR, facts matter. But that’s precisely what Miller denies. His argument, in essence, is that Trump’s power to declare by fiat that those conditions have been met _really is_ quasi-absolute. To that end, Miller appears to _want_ Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. Recently, Miller was asked directly if he’s discussed the idea with Trump, and he evaded the question. It’s likely that Miller, a master manipulator lurking furtively behind the despot’s throne, frequently uses the word “insurrection” about Trump’s opponents to lodge it deep in Trump’s brain stem and make invocation of the act more likely. As The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger notes, Miller’s goal is to supplant the rule of law with the “rule of Trump,” a personalist form of rule that answers to Trump the man and no one else. Yet there’s another dark aim here that’s worth appreciating. Miller is working overtime to polarize the public debate about Trump’s increasingly dictatorial abuses of power. And he’s doing so quite consciously. He relentlessly depicts Democrats as allied with a vast, inchoate class of violent criminals and insurrectionists operating in every shadow of American life. Miller seizes on every attention-grabbing moment he can to amplify the point, even if—and this part is crucial—it looks likely at first to reflect negatively on Trump. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank Consider what happened after ICE raided an apartment building in Chicago last week. As Garrett Graff chronicles, media coverage was brutal: It depicted jackbooted federal agents busting down doors and dragging children, some naked, out into the dark streets. Yet MAGA was undaunted. State-sponsored propaganda video depicted the affair as akin to an action movie featuring the thrilling spectacle of defeated-looking migrants in handcuffs. Miller went on Fox News to hail the operation as an enormous triumph. Amid all this, Miller’s public battle with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has been particularly noteworthy. Pritzker went on CNN and tore into the ICE raid, vividly depicting it as a lawless action targeting U.S. citizens in order to provoke a response and justify more thuggery later. Pritzker called it “Trump’s invasion,” deliberately using a term Miller uses for immigrants. Miller eagerly took the bait: The rub here is that both these men _want_ this fight. To be clear, the public is squarely with Pritzker: A new CBS survey finds that 58 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s National Guard deployments. And G. Elliott Morris’s recent poll finds opposition to National Guards assisting ICE at 51 percent to 37 percent. But in Miller’s worldview, polls like that only register shallowly held convictions, _at best_. In this understanding of politics—and you should read Brian Beutler and Lee Drutman on this—what really matters is the political attention economy, and how conflict plays within it. Supercharging searing civil tensions over jarring high-profile events drives attention, jolts low-propensity voters out of their information ruts, and compels them to _really_ take sides. Pritzker and Newsom are now plainly motivated by an understanding like this one. Pritzker has plunged very deeply into the public argument over Trump’s troops in Chicago. In urgent moral language, he has told his state’s residents that Trump represents a dangerous threat to their way of life. Newsom has done the same. After Trump tried to dispatch California’s National Guard into Portland, Newsom warned: “America is on the brink of martial law.” In short, Pritzker and Newsom see it as a defining challenge of this moment that Trump is consolidating authoritarian power daily, and using it to subjugate and dominate blue America as if it’s akin to an enemy nation within. And they are shaping their approach accordingly. Miller plainly believes there’s a latent majority out in the country that can be sleepwalked into authoritarianism. If Democrats sit this debate out, Miller has calculated, Trump’s deceptions can flood public information spaces, persuading low-info, low-attention voters that his autocratic encroachments constitute a proportional response to the civic unrest he keeps propagandizing about. What’s notable, in one sense, is how badly this project has failed. Despite months of effort, Trump and Miller have not come close to manufacturing the sense of fear or trauma out in the country they’d hoped for. But in the nascent Pritzker-Newsom understanding, assuming this will all take care of itself—that voters will resist Trump-Miller agitprop without prompting—is insufficient. We’ve learned, hearteningly, that majorities seem to harbor a deep attachment to liberal rights and liberties, one that instinctively recoils at masked kidnappings, at hypermilitarized vehicles on urban boulevards, at the trappings of totalitarian dictatorship. But this must be _activated_. That takes conflict and controversy—powerful imagery and language that rivets attention. It’s not clear many Democrats understand this. Some Democrats have confided to reporters that they see this topic as a “trap” enticing them into a losing debate about crime. But why assume voters will automatically believe Trump’s occupations are actually about combating crime? This throws in the towel, right up front, on communicating to voters what this debate is really about: that Trump’s abuses should be utterly abhorrent to anyone who values living in a free society. Do Democrats, broadly speaking, have a theory of this moment that’s consciously matched to MAGA’s authoritarian politics? They need one. Because guess who does have a theory of the moment? Miller does. And he’s amassing unprecedented power to put it into practice as we speak. _Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcastThe Daily Blast. A seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author of the critically acclaimed book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics. _ * Stephen Miller * dictatorship * secret government Subscribe to Portside

@[email protected] i have also posted a discussion on your community forum, as it seems multiple federated posts here have not been able to bring your attention to this problem yet https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986

Attached: 1 image Texas Guard arriving in Chicago looks like Attack of the Meal Team Clones. Just printing out copies of the same overweight mustachioed dude. (This is an AP photo.) #Chicago #USpol

Terrified Curtis Yarvin—the “philosopher behind JD Vance”—plans to flee the USA. The Dork Enlightenment guru says the Trump administration is failing to go full authoritarian. “I feel that I personally have to start thinking realistically about how to flee the country.”

It’s just a matter of time before some fucker in a uniform KILLS one of us in the street. One of us just trying to live.

'That's pure insurrection': Trump makes startling claim to MAGA TV host https://twp.ai/E6CWpB

California Democrats, led by Congressman Ro Khanna, demand that President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio secure the release of Americans from the Global Sumud Flotilla detained by Israel.

Attached: 1 image Deloitte will refund Australian government for AI hallucination-filled report Consulting firm quietly admitted to GPT-4o use after fake citations were found in August. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/deloitte-will-refund-australian-government-for-ai-hallucination-filled-report/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm;_social-type=owned&utm;_source=mastodon&utm;_medium=social

The texts were the work of someone with at least a seventh-grade education.

The rally in the city of Pecs defied a police ban under a law passed this year by Viktor Orban's right-wing government that prohibits LGBTQ+ demonstrations.