“In the new school year, thousands of Oklahoma students will be required to learn about 2020 election fraud conspiracy theories as part of a new curriculum developed by the state’s controversial superintendent, Ryan Walters. Walters, who has come under fire in recent months for an effort to require Oklahoma classrooms to stock Bibles and display the Ten Commandments, has said that the addition “empowers students to investigate and understand the electoral process.”
Under the state’s new curriculum, high school students will be taught to “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”
While it’s not necessarily unreasonable to want students to learn about the dispute over the 2020 election, the standards’ framing of the controversy (which turned up no evidence of election interference) and Walters’ comments about it make it clear that teachers are meant to shed doubt on the veracity of the election.”
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“The standards also contain passages directing teachers to ensure that students can “identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab,” and “explain the effects of the Trump tax cuts, child tax credit, border enforcement efforts.””
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“The curriculum change is just one of a battery of recent attempts to inject partisan politics into public school curricula. While blue states have faced criticism from the right for injecting critical race theory into the classroom, many red states have engaged in far more galling efforts to politicize classroom instruction.”
MAGA Republicans ranted and raved about a deep state they mostly imagined, and then created a real one…
“at the same time that he’s focused on dismantling the deep state, Trump seems to have built his own undemocratic, unaccountable executive apparatus.
How else should we view the incident that The Washington Post reported on last week involving Elon Musk, the unofficial head of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio?
As DOGE was slashing its way through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Rubio issued a waiver ensuring that “existing life-saving humanitarian assistance programs” should continue, despite the announced shutdown of USAID. “Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House,” the Post reported. “But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, [Luke] Farritor and [Gavin] Kliger would veto the payments—a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online.”
As a result, USAID clinics that were supposed to be protected by Rubio’s order were shuttered.
That is an almost perfect illustration of how conservatives used to believe the deep state operated—with unelected, unofficial back-channel operatives overruling the plainly stated instructions of those who are nominally in power.”
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“this should be worrying to anyone who takes seriously the threat of the deep state or values the rule of law.
Whatever your views of Musk and Rubio as individuals, it simply cannot be that the Senate-confirmed secretary of state is having his decisions overruled by a man (or his lieutenants) who still lacks any official place in the White House’s organizational chart and who runs a rebranded version of the U.S. Digital Service, an agency meant to streamline the executive branch’s digital outreach efforts that has no statutory authority to make spending decisions.”
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“while the situation with USAID and Rubio is the most high-profile, it is not the only example of DOGE and Musk operating like the very deep state Republicans used to criticize.”
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“Overruling the decisions made by legally appointed officials. Dodging transparency. Refusing to identify who is running the show. Are Musk and the DOGE just the deep state by a different name?”
“”Part of the confusion comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type,” reported the Associated Press last month in response to DOGE reports about improper payments. “This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago.” (The agency auto-stops payments to those older than 115.) The Social Security Administration’s inspector general has admitted as much: The agency is really struggling to figure out how to “properly annotate death information in its database” per the A.P., and there are nearly 20 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 and earlier who haven’t been marked as dead. But Trump is conflating “not marked as dead in a database” with “received benefits”—an absolutely wild leap we have no evidence to support. In fact, the July 2023 report from the inspector general notes that “almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.””
Trump’s speech was filled with falsehoods. Does he lie to make Republicans repeat what they know is a lie as a sign of loyalty? Is he flooding the zone with bullshit to overwhelm society so that it can’t effectively fact check him? Could he possibly believe all the falsehoods he says?
“Since buying the platform in 2022, Musk has helped turn X into an epicenter of election misinformation. With 203 million followers, Musk has the biggest reach on X and is the platform’s most prominent pusher of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda. At Musk’s request last year, X changed the site’s algorithm to put his posts in more people’s feeds — posts that increasingly urged people not to trust the outcome of the election. The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that Musk’s misleading posts about the election have been viewed more than 2 billion times this year.”