Politics & Stuff

[NikkiCFC 7,913]

12 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

I 'd be talking nonsense if I was writing from a ... male perspective.

Guess what...

 

2 hours ago, cosmicway said:

CosmiC Junior will go to Sandhurst god willing and will become a brigadier general.

You never know. What would you do if he comes to you and says: dad, I'm a commie. 

[cosmicway 1,303]

1 hour ago, NikkiCFC said:

You never know. What would you do if he comes to you and says: dad, I'm a commie. 

He could become gay - I can't control sex.
But commie ? How and why ?

[Fulham Broadway 16,742]

6 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

He could become gay - I can't control sex.
But commie ? How and why ?

Teens always rebel against their parents. She might think her dad is a reactionary old racist and decide Socialism and lesbianism is a better path. Who knows ?

[cosmicway 1,303]

12 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Teens always rebel against their parents. She might think her dad is a reactionary old racist and decide Socialism and lesbianism is a better path. Who knows ?

Teens rebel because their parents don't treat them like adults like they should.
When I was a teenager I knew my family could not afford a Rolls Royce Silver Club. But a Fiat Berlina why not ?
Kids can't reason but adults by showing absolute despotism also don't reason properly.
Now communism or non-communism is an intellectual process.
And what model Fiat will the youngster see in a communist regime ?
 

Edited Saturday at 21:24 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,494]

7 hours ago, cosmicway said:

The real iron maiden

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,742]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

And what model Fiat will the youngster see in a communist regime ?
 

Fiat Stalin, Fiat Che Guavera, Fiat Fuckcapitalista.....?

[cosmicway 1,303]

21 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Fiat Stalin, Fiat Che Guavera, Fiat Fuckcapitalista.....?

No, I 'm afraid only one of those:

[Vesper 28,494]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

decide Socialism and lesbianism is a better path

Except we in the LGBTQ community did not 'decide' to be queer, we were born that way.

Political orientation, yes, that is 100 per cent a choice.

[cosmicway 1,303]

15 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Except we in the LGBTQ community did not 'decide' to be queer, we were born that way.

Political orientation, yes, that is 100 per cent a choice.

No you were not born, that's impossible.
For some reason you developed a liking.
Unless we talk of rare medical conditions.

[Vesper 28,494]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

No you were not born, that's impossible.
For some reason you developed a liking.
Unless we talk of rare medical conditions.

bullshit

I am not going to stand-by and listen to homophobic, unscientific claptrap.

It is NOT a choice, it is our biological nature from birth.

You see the same thing throughout the animal kingdom, and they lack the sentientness needed to make that sort of choice.

It is simply a biological fact.

You stating that it is a mere choice opens up the doors to all sorts of wickedness, pain, torture, and death, the very things that have been visited upon us queer folk for millennia.

I, and hundreds of millions of others, be they queer or straight, stand in the breach to close those doors of despair and death still open, and we shall keep the ones that are shut, shut.

We will never again allow those erroneous ways of thought, so often (but not always) forged out of selective interpretations of religion (aka the wilful suspension of disbelief, aka magical thinking), to subjugate us, to take away our inherent humanity and strip us of our manifest rights as human beings to live our lives as we were biologically fashioned.

We will never go back to the ways of darkness, ignorance, fear, torture, and death, NEVER.

[Vesper 28,494]

6 hours ago, robsblubot said:

Agreed, but my point is that people who *believe* a woman commits *murder* with *any* abortion won't ever "let it be." The "do your thing" will never work here, unless the mindset changes.

There are millions of Americans who think that non-whites are subhuman or at least inherently inferior to the white population, yet the laws prevent them (at least as of today) prevent them from again enslaving some (or even all) non-white peoples.

The US should not be governed by a tyranny of an extremist religious minority, which is exactly what the christofascists are now attempting (and have been for decades) to do in terms of abortion.

 

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/

 

 

 

 

[Vesper 28,494]

Trump amplifies falsehoods about immigrants in closing appeal

As his edge on the economy fades, the Republican nominee campaigned Friday in Aurora, Colo., promoting false claims about Venezuelan gangs taking over residential buildings there.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/11/trump-turns-immigration-closing-appeal-edge-economy-fades/

Donald Trump is leaning into a nativist, anti-immigrant message in the final stage of his third presidential campaign, advancing a closing argument centered on fearmongering, falsehoods and stereotypes about migrants as polls show his edge on economic issues fading.

In recent days, the former president has suggested that “bad genes” are to blame for people in the country illegally who have committed murders, reprised his warnings about a migrant “invasion” and suggested Vice President Kamala Harris’s handling of border issues shows she is “mentally impaired.”

Trump held a rally in Aurora, Colo., on Friday, after repeatedly promoting false claims about a Venezuelan gang taking over residential buildings in the Denver suburb.

He said an influx of violent Venezuelan prison gang members from Tren de Aragua have “invaded and conquered” and blamed Harris for importing “an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the Third World.”

Local officials, including Aurora’s Republican Mayor Mike Coffman, have said the claims are false and a gross exaggeration.

Standing before signs that read “deport illegals now” and “end migrant crime,” Trump said the United States is “occupied by a criminal force.”

If elected in November, Trump said that he will launch a deportation program, “Operation Aurora,” under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to dismantle “illegal migrant criminal networks” operating in the United States.

The law was last invoked during World War II to intern immigrants of Japanese, German and Italian descent.

Several Republicans were present at the rally to support Trump, but Coffman was not in attendance. He has been vocal in disputing Trump’s claims about Aurora while stopping short of criticizing the former president.

“The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true,” Coffman said Friday in a joint statement with council member Danielle Jurinsky, head of the public safety committee.

The Aurora Police Department “has now linked 10 people” to the gang, the statement said.

Democratic leaders in Colorado, including Gov. Jared Polis and Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, held a news conference ahead of Trump’s rally on Friday, criticizing the former president for spreading false claims about Aurora for his own political gain.

“Donald Trump has invited himself to Aurora to do what Donald Trump does best, which is to demonize immigrants, to lie, and to serve his own political purposes. And we can’t let him divide us anymore,” Bennet said.

Polis said Harris would fight for communities like Aurora, “not try to tear them down for a political stunt.” Trump attacked Polis by name during the rally, calling him “weak and ineffective.”

Illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are down significantly this year after the Biden administration imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum, and most experts say that immigration has boosted the U.S. economy.

But polls show Trump has a clear advantage on the issues of immigration and border security, and the former president and his allies are wagering that his false and exaggerated claims about migrants will excite his base and propel him to victory.

Trump also reiterated several of his false claims about immigrants during a rally in Reno, Nev., later Friday night, including showing a montage of news clips of migrants in various cities who have been arrested on criminal allegations.

He also baselessly claimed that America is an “occupied country” and asserted that the nation is known as such “all throughout the world.”

He then said that Election Day “will be liberation day in America.”

Trump’s critics are alarmed by his tactics and warn that they stoke racial divisions and fear of migrants.

“He doesn’t even respect us,” Marisela Sandoval, 39, a unionized Las Vegas hospital worker who was born in Dallas and grew up in Mexico, said in a recent interview when asked about Trump’s rhetoric. “It’s just so much hating against immigrants. It’s dangerous. So disrespectful.”

His base, however, is elated.

“Today I make you this promise: I will liberate Wisconsin and our entire nation from this mass migration invasion of murderers, child predators, drug dealers, gang members and thugs. It’ll be liberated,” Trump said before a crowd of thousands at a rally in Juneau, Wis., over the weekend.

The crowd roared. “Trump! Trump! Trump!” they cheered, offering the loudest standing ovation of the rally.

Trump has frequently used dehumanizing language to describe migrants, referring to them as “savage criminals” and “animals.”

He has said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and he has promoted false claims about migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and bankrupting the small Pennsylvania town of Charleroi.

His ads mentioning immigration frequently refer to migrants as “illegals” and include ominous imagery of people flooding the U.S.-Mexico border.

The ex-president has long relied on incendiary rhetoric against immigrants as a political tactic, dating to the launch of his first presidential campaign in 2015.

Since then, he has further sharpened those attacks and leaned even harder on immigration — which has been a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, as it was in 2016 — as polls have shown that he is losing his edge on the economy.

Trump has suggested the border is a bigger issue than the economy.

“I know they do all these polls, and the polls say it’s the economy,” he said at the recent rally in Wisconsin. “And the polls say very strongly it’s inflation, and I can understand it a little bit. To me, it’s the horrible people that we’re allowing into our country that are destroying our country.”

Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement that Trump remains focused on both the economy and immigration, which poll as top-of-mind for voters.

“Day in and day out, President Trump focuses on the issues that matter most to Americans: inflation hurting their pocketbooks and illegal immigration invading their country,” Leavitt said. “He will continue to discuss both issues over the next 26 days.”

At recent campaign stops, Trump has distorted official Homeland Security Department statistics on undocumented immigrants with homicide convictions, falsely claiming that the Biden administration “released” them when, in reality, the government numbers Trump is citing span decades and include people who are serving time in state and federal prisons.

His promises to expel undocumented immigrants — and many people who are legally present in the United States — have drawn some of the largest cheers at his rallies.

During the Juneau rally, cheers erupted again as Trump promised to end “the invasion of savage criminals” and begin “the largest deportation in American history” on his first day in office.

He repeatedly leaned on fear tactics in his remarks, saying that Harris, if elected, will “inundate your towns with illegal alien criminals” and “even if they haven’t arrived yet, they will be.”

Greg Fredrick, 57, who attended the Juneau rally, agrees with the former president’s concern about migrants spreading across the country.

“In Dodge County, we’re not feeling it, but other spots are, and it will come this way,” said Fredrick, a contractor in the township of Lebanon. “We need to seal the border up. It’s horrible.”

Fredrick raised concern over the number of illegal border crossings by migrants coming from China and other nations not typically known to come to the United States through the southern border.

“Something’s fishy with that. It’s not right,” he said, adding he’s worried another terrorist attack could be coming without more border security. “Something bad’s going to happen,” he said.

Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), often blame immigrants for the country’s problems.

Trump has claimed that migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are taking “Black and Hispanic jobs,” a characterization that many Americans have found offensive and economists said was false.

And Vance has called illegal migration “one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” arguing that migrants are competing with Americans for limited homes — a claim that has been debunked by economists and housing experts.

“If Kamala is reelected, your town, and every town just like it, all across Wisconsin and all across our country — the heartland, the coast, it doesn’t matter — will be transformed into a third-world hellhole,” Trump said during an event in Prairie du Chien, Wis.

A Fox News poll last month found that 51 percent of registered voters favor Trump on the economy, compared with 46 percent who favor Harris. That’s compared with a 15-point advantage that Trump had over Biden in March.

Inflation dropped in September to its lowest level in more than three years, and the Federal Reserve cut interest rates last month for the first time in more than four years. But many Americans continue to express concerns about the cost of living.

[Vesper 28,494]

Yes, this is what Donald Trump really sounds like. No, you cannot ignore it.

The former president’s rallies and interviews in recent weeks should remind voters what he really represents.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/13/trump-rally-interview-immigrants-lies/

By the Editorial Board

October 12, 2024 at 12:48 p.m. EDT

 

In her “60 Minutes” interview last week, Vice President Kamala Harris asked voters to watch Donald Trump’s rallies, particularly because Mr. Trump chose not to follow custom (surprise) and ditched appearing on the show. For those who can sit through the rally exercise, it’s revealing.

But if you haven’t been able to take Ms. Harris up on her suggestion, here is some of what you would have heard. It’s a useful reminder of what the Republican candidate for president has been saying.

Last month in Wisconsin: “They will walk into your kitchen,” Mr. Trump said of undocumented immigrants. “They’ll cut your throat.” Later, he called the same people “animals.”

This week in Scranton, Pa., he claimed (impossibly) that he would pay off the national debt despite his promises of massive tax breaks and new expenditures. After sniping at “stupid” Mitt Romney, whom he said attendees should be glad to be getting “the hell out of here,” he took aim at his opponents. Ms. Harris, he claimed, is a “radical left Marxist” — a tame attack in comparison with another contention: that she was born “mentally impaired.” In Reading, Pa., he called “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg “demented” as well as “filthy dirty, disgusting.

Then there is Mr. Trump’s latest crusade, to re-rename North Carolina’s Fort Liberty by dubbing it Fort Bragg once more, so that the base will again honor a Confederate general. This reignites a fight he waged as president, when he vetoed a bipartisan military spending bill over the issue — and saw that veto, also in bipartisan fashion, overridden.

On Thursday at the Detroit Economic Club, he returned to the matter of immigrants: “We allowed them to come in and raid and rape our country. ‘Oh, he used the word rape.’ That’s right, I used the word rape. They raped our country.”

Mr. Trump has acquitted himself no better in the various radio and podcast interviews he has given these past few weeks. To conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, he conjured a fantastical statistic on global warming: “The ocean will rise one-eighth of an inch in the next 500 years.” (Mr. Hewitt is a Post Opinions contributor.) In the same conversation, he embraced discredited theories of eugenics. Returning to the theme of illegal immigration, he again called immigrants murderers — asserting that “it’s in their genes.” He continued, “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

It’s hard to discern degrees of bad, but the former president’s lies about the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of two major hurricanes pummeling the Southeast have been particularly insidious. On Fox News, he insisted: “They’re being treated very badly in the Republican areas. They’re not getting water, they’re not getting anything.” Elsewhere, he declared that “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for” — you guessed it — “illegal migrants.” These allegations of a politically motivated emergency response are false, but they have discouraged people in need of aid from going to the agency for help. (And, as it turns out, Politico reports, it was Mr. Trump who as president hesitated to give disaster relief to blue parts of the country.)

Sometimes, Mr. Trump’s rhetoric is harmless, and, to be sure, he does not follow through on every outlandish thing he says. There’s arguably ridiculous entertainment in his invocation of “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” or in business leaders inquiring of the candidate, “How do you get up in the morning and put your pants on?” Yet the line between amusing and discomfiting cuts too close for comfort, and irresponsible rhetoric on a rally stage would make for a bleak reality in the Oval Office. Mr. Trump’s chaotic term as president showed that he often means what he says. Certainly, voters should examine Ms. Harris’s record and rhetoric. But they should also take seriously the words expressed by her opponent.

The Post’s View | About the Editorial Board

Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution, as determined through discussion among members of the Editorial Board, based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom.

[Vesper 28,494]

Analysis

Officials Can’t Go Rogue on Election Certification

Partisans are trying to undermine the vote count in key states.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/officials-cant-go-rogue-election-certification

 

A classic 19-century Thomas Nast cartoon of New York’s William “Boss” Tweed shows him leaning on a ballot box with the quote, “As long as I count the Votes, what are you going to do about it? say?” Joseph Stalin, for his part, once said, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”

Crooked counting of votes is a hallmark of a failed democracy. One of the things our country has gotten right over its centuries of development is vote counting. In the 20th century, the counting of the votes became a noncontroversial part of elections. There is no national election, and not even 50 state-run elections, but hundreds of elections run by counties. There are layers upon layers of protections to ensure that elections are clean — free, fair, and without fraud. It all depends on trust and impartial election officials doing their jobs. 

One of those steps is among the least controversial: having the results certified. It is, to use a technical term, “ministerial.” No judgment is supposed to be involved. Two plus two equals four. 

But since 2020, in their frenzy to undo the voters’ will, election deniers have tried to upend that process. That year, Donald Trump lobbied Detroit County board members to get them to reject the votes of their own constituents. In 2022, officials in Cochise County, Arizona, broke from tradition and voted against certifying the election results based on some vague worries about voting machines. A judge eventually ordered them to certify, putting an end to their little rebellion.

This year, around the country, rogue local election officials are increasingly threatening to withhold certification of results, based on no evidence of impropriety whatsoever, cheered on by hordes of online election deniers.

The statewide Georgia election board has a new majority of ardent Donald Trump supporters. He hailed them as “pit bulls” at a rally. State officials ordered country boards to refrain from certifying unless they undertake investigations. Most recently, they ordered local officials to count the number of ballots by hand. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger warned, “What they’re talking about is breaking open the ballot boxes.”

Can officials really withhold certification?

The Brennan Center recently published a pair of resources thoroughly answering this question.

The first is a series of state-by-state guides laying out the legal protections for election certification in each battleground state and the process to ensure that officials carry out that duty. The law is clear: Certification is not a discretionary act. Election officials are legally obligated to do it. 

In the second, my colleague Derek Tisler lays out in detail the checks, double checks, and triple checks that all occur well before election certification. That’s why certification is obligatory. If there are doubts about the accuracy of the count or the validity of ballots, there is ample opportunity to raise those flags before election certification. Refusing to certify is an act of partisan petulance — the last tantrum of sore losers — not the heroic stand of a conscientious objector. 

[Vesper 28,494]

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-11-ai-threatening-social-safety-net/

Amid pitched discussions of whether artificial intelligence–powered technologies will one day transform art, journalism, and work, a more immediate impact of AI is drawing less attention: The technology has already helped create barriers for people seeking to access our nation’s social safety net.

Across the country, state and local governments have turned to algorithmic tools to automate decisions about who gets critical assistance. In principle, the move makes sense: At their best, these technologies can help long-understaffed and underfunded agencies quickly process huge amounts of data and respond with greater speed to the needs of constituents.

But careless—or intentionally tightfisted and punitive—design and implementation of these new high-tech tools have often prevented benefits from reaching the people they’re intended to help.

In 2016, during an attempt to automate eligibility processes, Indiana denied one million public assistance applications in three years—a 54 percent increase. Those who lost benefits included a six-year-old with cerebral palsy and a woman who missed an appointment with her case worker because she was in the hospital with terminal cancer. That same year, an Arkansas assessment algorithm cut thousands of Medicaid-funded home health care hours from people with disabilities. And in Michigan, a new automated system for detecting fraud in unemployment insurance claims identified fivefold more fraud compared to the older system—causing some 40,000 people to be wrongly accused of unemployment insurance fraud.

The United States has long put up administrative burdens to deter the poorest applicants from making use of government help.

These cases are the modern face of an old problem. The United States has long put up administrative burdens to deter the poorest applicants from making use of government help. The New Deal–era distinction between “earned” social benefits—like Social Security—aimed at working white men, and social assistance programs for the poor has translated over time to especially high barriers for the Americans most in need. AI now offers tools to turbocharge this restrictive approach, as the scholar Virginia Eubanks’s prescient work has documented. Well before the release of ChatGPT, Eubanks chronicled how government agencies administering child welfare, social assistance, and law enforcement were using faulty and biased automated systems to make decisions affecting vulnerable communities. The result is a public assistance system increasingly plagued not by oversubscription, but by chronic underuse.

Recognizing this trend, the Biden-Harris administration pursued policies to make sure AI will strengthen, and not undermine, the social safety net. Last year, President Joe Biden directed two of the largest safety net agencies to work with states and localities to root out bias in AI tools and increase transparency and human oversight of these systems.

Policy often delivers messages that politicians don’t say out loud. Biden’s approach acknowledged that the problem with AI’s use in the social safety net is the underlying logic of punitive benefit administration. In other words: Tech shouldn’t be used to restrict qualified people from accessing services, from nutritional assistance to Medicaid, but instead should be a tool for maximizing access to these programs for those who qualify.

The next president has a powerful opportunity to build on this commitment and strengthen the social safety net in the age of AI. On day one, a new administration could bring all benefits programs across the federal government—including those serving people seeking housing assistance, unemployment or disability insurance, student aid, or disaster relief—under the Biden-Harris paradigm. But protecting the most vulnerable in an increasingly algorithmic world requires a broader effort.

First, we must address the take-up problem—low use of social benefits by qualified people in need—in the AI age. As American society speeds toward wider adoption of powerful data-driven tools, we need to know much more about the role AI and algorithmic technologies are playing in blocking—or expanding—the reach of benefits programs to qualified applicants. Social safety net agencies should regularly publish estimates not just of improper payments to ineligible individuals, but also of those who fail to take up benefits for which they are eligible, especially due to automated decision-making systems, building on the Biden-Harris effort to reduce burdens in access to social programs.

Second, the people who rely on safety net programs must have a more influential voice in decisions about deploying these technologies. Data-driven tools are evolving more quickly than traditional public input processes may be able to operate. A new administration can set up councils, composed of representatives from communities most affected by safety net programs, to more dynamically seek input on proposed changes to benefit systems, including the use of AI and automated systems, to gauge their on-the-ground impacts. Building on Biden’s progress in expanding public participation, agencies should compensate those individuals for their time, as the Department of Health and Human Services has begun to do. Organized labor, representing the frontline local, state, and federal agency workers administering these programs, should be key partners in this effort.

Finally, it must be easier for people to challenge a bad determination made by or with AI. A new administration should create clearer pathways for people to push back when they suspect incorrect decisions, whether they are made by a human or a machine, and connect with attorneys for support. One forum for contestation could be the U.S. government’s equal opportunity offices, an existing infrastructure for ensuring legal protections for people who use federal programs. These efforts could be supplemented by collaborating with civil society organizations—including groups like TechTonic Justice and the Benefits Tech Advocacy Hub that are already leading this work—to set up a national legal aid network for people who may have been affected by AI-driven harms, including unjust denial of their benefits.

Presidential leadership, of course, has limitations. Congress will also have a vital role to play in making these changes durable by adding safeguards to the statutes that govern public benefits programs, as well as devoting the resources local, state, and federal agencies need to deliver benefits in a timely and equitable manner. But these early steps can help put the U.S. on the path to protecting the social safety net in the age of AI.

Nine in ten Americans will rely on public assistance at some point in their lives. Technology should not be another hurdle in our most difficult hour. When that day comes, every American should know: Help is on the way.

[cosmicway 1,303]

26 minutes ago, Vesper said:

bullshit

I am not going to stand-by and listen to homophobic, unscientific claptrap.

It is NOT a choice, it is our biological nature from birth.

You see the same thing throughout the animal kingdom, and they lack the sentientness needed to make that sort of choice.

It is simply a biological fact.

You stating that it is a mere choice opens up the doors to all sorts of wickedness, pain, torture, and death, the very things that have been visited upon us queer folk for millennia.

I, and hundreds of millions of others, be they queer or straight, stand in the breach to close those doors of despair and death still open, and we shall keep the ones that are shut, shut.

We will never again allow those erroneous ways of thought, so often (but not always) forged out of selective interpretations of religion (aka the wilful suspension of disbelief, aka magical thinking), to subjugate us, to take away our inherent humanity and strip us of our manifest rights as human beings to live our lives as we were biologically fashioned.

We will never go back to the ways of darkness, ignorance, fear, torture, and death, NEVER.

Maybe animals are into same sex activities.
Have n't seen them, but I have heard it's happening in the animal world.
Those same sex activities is not something unnatural.
Our prohibitive stance against them is simply because human societies don't like them - scores of human societies don't like them.
Also it can be dangerous (because of Cassius Clay considerations !).
Now what you are trying to say is not about that, but you are saying some people are born hetero and some others are born homo.
This is unscientific and it is a false theory, bar some highly exceptional medical cases of children born without sex organs.


 

[Vesper 28,494]

https://prospect.org/education/2024-10-11-breaking-public-schools/

Education spending in North Carolina is about to go way up, thanks to lawmakers’ largesse. But the extra funds—close to half a billion dollars—won’t go to the public schools attended by the vast majority of children in the state, or to hike teacher pay, despite a worsening shortage. Instead, the huge influx of cash will go to pick up the tab for private school tuition, including for well-off families, a priority for North Carolina’s Republican supermajority. In fact, according to recent state analysis, funding for the state’s public schools will drop by nearly $100 million as a result of voucher expansion. While Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed the bill, legislators are expected to override him.

As one school district leader stated, “It feels like to me that there’s a desire to suffocate traditional public schools to justify their demise.”

North Carolina’s tilt toward school privatization is all the more remarkable given that the state was, until relatively recently, a model for the kind of education-as-human-capital vision that united both political parties. Starting in the 1980s, governors of both parties plowed money into public schools, teacher salaries, and community colleges, with the aim of supercharging the state’s economic development.

The explosion of so-called universal school vouchers is likely to have a far more profound impact than culture-war hot buttons.

Today, the story couldn’t be more different. The GOP candidate for governor, current Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is a vocal proponent of school vouchers and has encouraged North Carolina parents to remove their children from public schools, citing alleged agendas in the classroom. “Do not turn your children over to these wicked people,” Robinson told attendees at a church service.

A growing number of parents seem to be listening. North Carolina, which once had the highest percentage of students enrolled in public schools in the nation, has seen private school enrollment soar in recent years.

In recent years, education policies in states red and blue have diverged dramatically. Red-state lawmakers have donned the mantle of culture warriors, imposing limits on what teachers can talk about and what kids can learn, mandating so-called patriotic education, and injecting religion into public school curricula. Conservatives have banned “critical race theory” in schools and intimated that teaching students about LGBT history is a pretext for “grooming” children. Oklahoma is now requiring that public schools teach the Bible as an “indispensable historical and cultural touchstone,” Louisiana is requiring displays of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, and Texas has inserted Bible stories into its elementary school curriculum.

But the explosion of so-called universal school vouchers is likely to have a far more profound impact on the lives of young people in red states than these culture-war hot buttons. As states race to pay for families to send their kids to private schools, blowing up state budgets in the process, the schools attended by the vast majority of kids will be left with far fewer resources, blunting their prospects. By design, funds are being shifted away from students in poor and rural areas and into the pockets of affluent parents, entrenching inequality in the process.

A Radical Shift

“Anyone know of a flat earth curriculum?” The query, posed in a discussion group for recipients of school vouchers in Arizona, which are known there as education savings accounts, or ESAs, was not a joke. Arizona is home to the nation’s most ambitious experiment in free-marketizing education. Parents here are allowed to direct education funds, not just to the school of their choice, but to anything they might call “education.”

As Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne, a loud proponent of vouchers, admitted in an interview, the state’s emphatically hands-off approach means that there’s nothing to prevent parents from using public dollars to teach their kids that the Earth is flat. Indeed, state law prohibits any kind of public oversight over the burgeoning nonpublic sector of private schools, homeschooling, and microschools, which are for-profit ventures in which small groups of students learn online while being monitored by a guide.

While Arizona’s ESA experiment would seem to be a cautionary tale, a growing list of red states view it as a model. Fourteen states have now enacted so-called universal voucher programs, providing taxpayer funds to any family that wants them. As economist Doug Harris has argued, these “super vouchers” represent a radical break with what he calls the foundational traditions of public education across the country: “separation of church and state, anti-discrimination, and public accountability for educational processes and outcomes funded by taxes.”

Voucher advocates have long couched their support for abandoning public education in the language of mobility and uplift. In North Carolina, vouchers have been rebranded as Opportunity Scholarships; in Louisiana, they are GATOR scholarships, or “Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise.” But a radical exacerbation of existing inequities is the far more likely outcome. Among states that have adopted universal vouchers, wealthy parents have leapt at the opportunity to send their kids to private schools using state funds. A review by The Wall Street Journal last year found that the biggest beneficiaries of the new voucher programs have been students already enrolled in private schools, meaning that their parents were wealthy enough to pay for tuition themselves.

A 2017 protest of Arizona’s education savings accounts (ESAs). The program has led to a $1.5 billion state budget shortfall this year.

States that have opened existing voucher programs to wealthy residents have seen a similar trend. In Indiana, for example, which has had a voucher program for low-income students since 2011, lawmakers have steadily expanded eligibility to more affluent Hoosiers. According to recent analyses of the program, which is projected to cost the state $600 million this year, vouchers in Indiana now subsidize predominantly wealthy, white suburban families whose kids never attended public schools. Meanwhile, the percentage of low-income students receiving vouchers has been steadily decreasing.

The ability of private schools to hike tuition as a result of state support is also likely to deepen the divide between rich and poor students. A study published by researchers at Brown and Princeton Universities found that after Iowa adopted a voucher program, tuition at private schools rose by nearly 25 percent. Across the border in Nebraska, where lawmakers have tried but so far failed to enact a similar program, no such tuition hikes occurred. Vouchers, conclude the researchers, act as tuition subsidies for families who can afford private schools, incentivizing such schools to charge more while pricing out families who can’t afford it.

One of the arguments voucher proponents have long made is that funding parents directly will end up saving taxpayers money, since the amount of the voucher is typically less and sometimes far less than what states spend to educate a child. Yet that logic only holds if students are leaving the public schools. Because these programs have ended up subsidizing parents whose kids already attend private school, they represent enormous new budget items.

As ProPublica documented recently, Arizona’s voucher program has precipitated a “budget meltdown” to the tune of nearly $1.5 billion this year. While the rising tide of red ink will inevitably lead to slashed spending on the state’s public schools, the cost of paying for private school tuition is now crowding out spending on all sorts of state services and projects, including investment in vital water infrastructure. Arizona’s budget woes are exacerbated by the fact that there’s less money coming in thanks to a flat tax that delivers huge benefits to the wealthy.

“States that have passed significant tax cuts, dramatically expanded private school vouchers, or done both should be alarmed by how quickly Arizona found itself in a deep fiscal hole,” warned the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently. On that list of states: Iowa, West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Arkansas. Faced with shrinking revenues and costly new voucher programs, these states will soon be forced to enact major spending cuts, setting off a battle for increasingly scarce resources.

Voucher proponents appear to have gamed that out as well. The looming budget showdowns will pit affluent parents, who will be loath to give up their new entitlement, against the majority of families whose children still attend public schools. It isn’t hard to predict the outcome.

Culture War as Smoke Screen

“To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust,” proclaimed conservative provocateur Christopher Rufo in a 2022 speech. To a remarkable extent, that sentiment now animates Republican education policy. Some 18 states have banned the discussion of so-called divisive concepts, threatening teachers with punishment and schools and districts with fines, while giving parents the right to sue if their kids encounter banned topics in the classroom. But the anti-CRT furor signaled just the start of the GOP’s embrace of the school culture wars. Over the past two years, red states have cycled through a fixation on pornography in libraries, social and emotional learning—a Trojan horse for Marxism, claim its critics—and anything having to do with gender.

What is increasingly apparent, though, is that these successive panics have merely been smoke screens for enacting school vouchers. “It is time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war,” wrote Heritage Foundation research scholar Jay Greene in an influential 2022 paper. His boss Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025, was making a similar argument, albeit in more apocalyptic terms, by urging red states to go to war against “a movement willing to cover up sexual assaults, mutilate vulnerable children, and celebrate racism.” Such arguments would provide the playbook for voucher expansion in one state after another, as right-wing groups fanned the flames of the culture wars while holding up vouchers as an alternative for “anti-woke” parents.

Red states are growing steadily less educated, while education levels in blue states continue to rise.

Incendiary rhetoric about indoctrination also plays another key role in the school privatization campaign. In his new book The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, education scholar Josh Cowen argues that voucher advocates have embraced the role of culture warriors in part to obscure the disastrous academic results of previous voucher experiments. In Louisiana, for example, where Gov. Jeff Landry is leading a crusade to fuse church and state, research found steep academic declines for students who participated in the state’s voucher program, largely because they ended up attending low-quality religious schools.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has spent the better part of two years making ever more outlandish claims about the state’s schools as he seeks to enact a controversial voucher scheme. By the spring of 2023, he was warning of “an extraordinary movement to expand transgenderism in schools in the state of Texas.” Public school teachers, Abbott insisted, were “using their positions to try to cultivate and groom these young kids” into being transgender.

That was precisely the sort of rhetoric that convinced Courtney Gore to run for school board in deep-red Granbury, Texas. Elected as a Republican in what had previously been a nonpartisan contest, Gore pledged to root out indoctrination in the local schools. Today, Gore views herself as having been a pawn in a larger scheme to sow distrust and chaos in order to “degrade trust in our public education system.” Says Gore: “The ultimate goal is to try to get vouchers passed.”

A Deepening Divide

At a rally this summer, Donald Trump touched on the topic of school spending. “We spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, and we’re at the bottom of every list,” he told a crowd in Philadelphia. Cut spending in half, Trump insisted, and the result will be “much better education.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s claim is wildly at odds with research on the connection between school spending and student achievement. That more spending, particularly on schools attended by the poorest students, leads to improved academic performance and graduate rates is now so well established that even former naysayers have conceded the point. The evidence regarding the damage done by slashing school spending is also considerable. Deep spending cuts result not in a system that looks like Norway, as Trump opined to the faithful, but in stunted academic and life outcomes for kids.

Twelve years ago, Kansas attempted a radical experiment in tax cutting. Under then-Gov. Sam Brownback, lawmakers slashed taxes on the state’s top earners and reduced the tax rate on some business profits to zero. As one think tank put it, “Kansas Tax Cuts Among Deepest State Tax Cuts Ever Enacted.” The cuts did not bring the promised “trickle-down” economic renaissance. As revenues plunged, lawmakers were forced to make deep cuts to spending, particularly for public schools. By 2016, Kansas had tumbled to near the bottom of state spending on public elementary and high schools.

The drop in educational attainment among students was just as dramatic. As school funds dried up, resulting in teacher layoffs and program cuts, the number of students who dropped out before earning a high school diploma rose dramatically, while the percentage of high schoolers going to college plunged. Jonathan Metzl, a scholar and medical doctor, who chronicled the impact of Kansas’s tax-cutting experiment in Dying of Whiteness, argues that young people in the state “became cannon fodder in the fight to redistribute wealth upward.” Just four years of school budget cuts was enough to narrow the possibilities for a generation of young Kansans. It got so extreme that the state supreme court found the underfunding of schools unconstitutional.

Former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) cut public school spending so heavily that the state supreme court found the underfunding unconstitutional.

Today, a growing list of states seems poised to replicate the Kansas disaster, as the combination of shrinking state coffers and enormous new voucher programs forces deep cuts to spending on public education. The result will be a deepening, and seemingly intentional, decline in educational attainment in red states.

“We are in the first extended period of diverging educational attainment in U.S. history,” warns Mike Hicks, an economist at Indiana’s Ball State University and the author of The Country Economist newsletter on Substack. Red states are growing steadily less educated, the result of disinvestment from public education, while education levels in blue states continue to rise. That divide is also, of course, partisan. Notes Hicks: “The 15 states that have seen the biggest relative drop in educational attainment are all solidly Republican states—and poor. Indiana ranks 10th on this list. The top 15 states are all solidly Democratic—and affluent.”

Now, as red states race to enact sweeping school privatization schemes, that divide is likely to become a chasm. The same states that dominate the “least educated” rankings, a list that includes West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, have also adopted universal school voucher programs. Texas, which comes in at number 41, is poised to join them in the coming months after big-money school choice donors, including hedge fund billionaire Jeff Yass, poured money into state races in a largely successful effort to eliminate voucher opponents within the GOP.

For their part, red-state policy elites seemed determined to hasten the process of driving educational attainment levels down. In addition to vouchers and tax cuts, these same states have also rolled back restrictions on child labor, allowing teens to work longer hours and in more dangerous occupations. Pitched as a way to help teens “develop their skills in the workforce,” as the governor of Iowa put it, such laws will also have the effect of nudging more kids out of school and into work.

What Happens in Red States Won’t Stay in Red States

So far, the explosion of voucher programs has been largely confined to the states that, as one education pundit observed, make up the “old Confederacy.” That’s unlikely to remain the case for long. The American Legislative Exchange Council recently unveiled a new Education Freedom Alliance, with the aim of getting universal vouchers enacted in 25 states by 2025. Led by two right-wing business organizations, the Job Creators Network and the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, the ALEC effort seeks to expand vouchers in red states where they’ve previously encountered resistance—Texas, Tennessee, and Nebraska—as well as in purple states like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

Project 2025 goes much further. The education section of the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration, created by the Heritage Foundation, lays out a plan for restructuring federal education funding so that it flows directly to parents to use outside of public schools, essentially replicating the Arizona model. Among its proposals: turning Title I, which supports high-poverty and rural schools, into a “no strings attached” block grant to states, while encouraging states to distribute funds to parents in the form of education savings accounts.

Should its architects prove successful, Project 2025 would have dire implications for the nation’s public schools. A recent Center for American Progress analysis predicted that eliminating Title I funding would result in the loss of 180,000 teacher positions and negatively affect the academic outcomes of some 2.8 million students.

But cutting funding to schools and steering taxpayer dollars to institutions that are allowed to discriminate remain deeply unpopular positions. That’s why Americans have consistently rejected private school vouchers when they’ve been placed on the ballot, a result that is likely to be repeated when voters have a chance to weigh in on voucher measures in Nebraska and Kentucky this November.

The imposition of the red-state vision for school privatization and more entrenched inequality is likely to come not through Congress or via voters, but through the courts. Last year, encouraged by a string of Supreme Court rulings that have opened the door to public funding of religious schools, Oklahoma attempted to open what would have been the nation’s first taxpayer-supported religious charter school. The virtual school was to be operated by the state’s Catholic Archdiocese, which would teach Catholic doctrine and require students and staff to attend mass; its employees were to be classified as “ministers,” exempting them from labor law protections.

This summer, Oklahoma’s highest court prevented the school from opening, arguing that the state could not fund the school without violating the prohibition against government-established religion in both the state and federal constitutions. The case is now headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. According to a recent Politico investigation, conservative legal activists are determined to use the Oklahoma school as a means of undermining the entire separation of church and state.

Blue states, which ban both discrimination and the use of public monies for religious education, may soon find themselves with no choice but to fund both.

[Vesper 28,494]

3 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Now what you are trying to say is not about that, but you are saying some people are born hetero and some others are born homo.
This is unscientific and it is a false theory, bar some highly exceptional medical cases of children born without sex organs.

You are the one spewing unscientific claptrap, not me.

Also, pro-tip:

Sex organs do not determine inherent sexual orientation.

In fact, your bringing up people born without sex organs shows the illogical nature of your 'it's a choice and only a choice' argument, as your statement injects a selective BIOLOGICAL underpinning (albeit one that is falsely reductive to sexual organs) to your claims.