A Slightly Different Thing

Invasion? Damn straight, skippy. But wait - who's doing the invading?

Willfully Useful Idiots

Republicans are conditioned to keep doubling down, and at this point, after several rounds of it, they don't think they can pull back.

I see it as a combination of Sunk Cost Fallacy and SOP for propagandists.

And then, Press Poodles like Alex Wagner can't seem to grasp the concept of calling this shit out for the fascist shit that it is.

Even after Goldman explains it to her, she softens it and ends the segment with wording that I guess is meant to soothe us - to keep us from panicking.

Maybe a little panic is what we need - to get some of these fucking idiots up off their asses and into the goddamned fight.

The only way this shit ends

is by stomping the GOP

until there's nothing left

but a greasy spot on the rug

Today's Trae

Republicans have been shit-talkin' government for 50 years - at a minimum.

And apparently, it's finally come to where they can't afford to do anything that might make us think they've been lying to us the whole fuckin' time.

Today's Beau

The fuckery:

Arizona GOP chair resigns, alleges pressure from Kari Lake team

The chair of the Arizona Republican Party announced he will resign Wednesday after leaked audio appeared to show him attempting to pay Senate candidate Kari Lake not to run for office in 2024.

Jeff DeWit said that the audio was “selectively edited.” He explained, however, that he chose to resign because he was threatened by members of Lake’s team that more tapes would be released if he did not step down. Lake’s campaign has denied the allegation.

Lake publicly demanded DeWit resign over the audio Tuesday, calling him “corrupt” and “compromised.”

The audio recording was first reported by The Daily Mail.

“There are very powerful people who want to keep you out,” DeWit reportedly told the Senate hopeful in the recording, saying only that these figures were from the “east.”

“Just say, is there a number at which,” DeWit begins, before being cut off.

“I can be bought? That’s what it’s about,” Lake retorted.

DeWit allegedly responded, “You can take a pause for a couple of years … You can go right back to what you’re doing.”

Lake — who ran an unsuccessful bid for Arizona governor in 2022 — said she would not accept a billion dollars to leave the Senate race.

On Wednesday, DeWit said the call was not a form of bribe, but rather a conversation about hiring Lake at his personal company. He said she was already an employee when the recording was made early last year.

“Contrary to accusations of bribery, my discussions were transparent and intended to offer perspective, not coercion,” the outgoing GOP chair wrote in a statement. “Our relationship was based on friendship, and the conversation that is now being scrutinized was open, unguarded exchange between friends in the living room of her house.”

“I genuinely believed I was offering a helpful perspective to someone I considered a friend,” he added.

He continued, saying Lake has been “on a mission to destroy” him since the conversation, and condemned her “disturbing tendency” to record interactions without the other party’s consent.

“This is obviously a concern given how much interaction she has with high profile people including President Trump,” DeWit argued. “I question how effective a United States Senator can be when they can not be trusted to engage in private and confidential conversations.”

He also alleged that the conversation was a “set up,” adding that Lake “orchestrated this entire situation to have control over the state party.”

“This morning, I was determined to fight for my position,” he continued. “However, a few hours ago, I received an ultimatum from Lake’s team: resign today or face the release of a new, more damaging recording.”

“I am truly unsure of its contents, but considering our numerous past open conversations as friends, I have decided not to take the risk,” he added.

In response to DeWit’s resignation and allegations of threats, Lake’s campaign said the “tape speaks for itself.”

“No one from the Kari Lake campaign threatened or blackmailed DeWit. It is unfortunate that Dewit hasn’t recognized how unethical his behavior was and still hasn’t apologized to Arizona Republicans,” senior advisors Caroline Wren and Garrett Ventry said in a statement.

“DeWit’s false claims are just par for the course,” they continued. “The Arizona GOP must be relieved to have his resignation. Now we can focus on getting ethical leadership and win big in 2024.”

DeWit served as the state party chair since January 2023, after working as the chief operating officer for Trump’s 2016 and 2020 White House bids.

Lake, a former news anchor, has faced pushback against her Senate bid. She has been a leading booster of former President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, and fought her own legal battle after the gubernatorial loss in 2022.

She said Tuesday that she didn’t have anyone in mind to replace DeWit.

“I haven’t given it a lot of thought. What I want to do is make sure we get the corrupt people out,” she said.

It’s not the first time Lake has been accused of recording others without consent. Last year, she recorded an impromptu airport lounge conversation with Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) — the presumptive Democratic nominee for the Senate seat — confronting him over policy issues.

Lake, DeWit and the Arizona GOP have not responded to a previous request for comment on the recording.

Today's (Alleged) Fuckery

I use the word "alleged" because even a small-potatoes blogger should at least try to follow the rules.

That said, no one paying any attention at all can dismiss the real potential for disaster here.

These assholes ain't playin'.

Exclusive: Roger Stone Spoke With Cop Pal About Assassinating Eric Swalwell and Jerry Nadler

Weeks before the 2020 presidential election, infamous political operative Roger Stone sat across from his associate Sal Greco at a restaurant in Florida.

At the time, Greco was an NYPD cop working security for Stone on the side. Their conversation, at Caffe Europa in Fort Lauderdale, focused on two House Democrats for whom Stone harbors particular animosity, Jerry Nadler and Eric Swalwell.

In audio of the conversation obtained exclusively by Mediaite, Stone made threatening comments about the two lawmakers.

“It’s time to do it,” Stone told Greco. “Let’s go find Swalwell. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. It’s time to do it. It’s either Nadler or Swalwell has to die before the election. They need to get the message. Let’s go find Swalwell and get this over with. I’m just not putting up with this shit anymore.”

A source familiar with the discussion told Mediate they believed Stone’s remarks were serious. “It was definitely concerning that he was constantly planning violence with an NYPD officer and other militia groups,” the source said.

Both Nadler and Swalwell serve on the House Judiciary Committee. At the time of the Caffe Europa conversation, Nadler had announced the committee would be investigating then-President Donald Trump’s decision to commute Stone’s sentence after he was convicted of federal crimes in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

“A jury found Roger Stone guilty,” Nadler wrote on Twitter in July 2020. “By commuting his sentence, President Trump has infected our judicial system with partisanship and cronyism and attacked the rule of law. @House Judiciary will conduct an aggressive investigation into this brazen corruption.”

The source told Mediaite of Stone: “Stone had been at war with Nadler and Swalwell for years. He just hates them.”

“He just wanted to get Trump back into office so these things would stop,” the source added.

Stone was convicted of obstruction, witness tampering, and lying to Congress in the Mueller investigation. Prosecutors sought a nine-year prison sentence for the longtime Republican operative, but Trump’s Justice Department reportedly intervened to impose a less severe sentence. Stone’s sentence was eventually commuted by Trump days before reporting to prison.

The intervention from the Justice Department prompted Aaron Zelinsky, the prosecutor and Mueller deputy who led the case against Stone, to recuse himself from the case in protest. Mediaite reported last week that Stone was caught on tape in December 2020 urging Greco to “punish” Zelinsky.

“He needs to be punished,” Stone told Greco in the audio. “You have to abduct him and punish him. That has to be done. It will be easy to abduct him because he is a weakling.”

Stone denied making those comments, claiming they were generated by AI. He has previously claimed videos of his comments are actually “deep fakes.” In response to a request for comment on the remarks aimed at Swalwell and Nadler, Stone said, “Total nonsense. I’ve never said anything of the kind more AI manipulation. You asked me to respond to audios that you don’t let me hear and you don’t identify a source for. Absurd.”

Greco did not deny the comments, but said in a text to Mediaite: “I don’t think your reader is interested in ancient political fodder.”

Greco, who acted as security for Stone and was with the operative during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol soon after the 2020 election, was fired by the NYPD over his association with Stone. An NYPD spokesperson confirmed to Mediaite that Greco was terminated in August 2022.

Nadler and Swalwell did not respond to requests for comment.

What Do They Mean?

I think I know the answer to my question, but sometimes, like an idiot goat trying to get somebody to explain a typewriter to him, I find myself trying to make sense of something that isn't meant to make sense to me or anybody else.

Shutting down the borders is a pretty classic Daddy State type move. And when you can couple it with some good old-fashioned racial scapegoating - hey - why not?

They have yet to articulate what exactly "shutting down the border" would look like.  What does Mike Johnson mean as he calls for "... transformational policy change to secure our border, enforce our laws, and deter even more illegal immigration"?

I'm afraid it's not a big stretch to think it means machine guns, razor wire, and land mines.

And let's remember that a closed border serves to keep people in too.

Border dispute could force partial government shutdown

Far-right House Republicans are threatening to block legislation to keep the federal government operating without sweeping changes to immigration laws

Far-right Republicans in the House are threatening to force a partial government shutdown unless Congress enacts strict new changes to immigration law, imperiling crucial government services — and U.S. aid to Ukraine — over a long-fraught issue that could be critical in this year’s elections.

Dozens of GOP lawmakers toured a portion of the U.S.-Mexico border at Eagle Pass, Tex., on Wednesday to push House-passed legislation that would significantly limit migrants’ ability to claim asylum, restart construction of a border wall and cut into President Biden’s power to grant humanitarian parole to migrants. Members of the Republican conference’s most conservative flank demanded that legislation become law in exchange for their votes to approve federal spending for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year, though the GOP-led House already rejected such a trade in September.

“H. R. 2 needs to be the unflinching House policy because all of it’s important to securing the border,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), chair of the archconservative House Freedom Caucus, told The Washington Post. “The president and Senate majority leader have no interest in securing the border, and so therefore, we as a House majority should say, ‘We’re not going to fund a government that is going to continue to facilitate this border invasion.’”

Federal agents recorded nearly 250,000 illegal crossings along the southern border in December, the highest total ever in one month, according to preliminary Customs and Border Protection data obtained by The Post.

That crisis is complicating efforts in Washington to head off a partial shutdown. Funding for roughly 20 percent of the federal government — including for essential programs such as some veterans assistance and food and drug safety services — expires on Jan. 19, and money for the rest of the government runs out shortly after that, on Feb. 2. But lawmakers have not yet agreed on how to pass full-year spending bills or more temporary funding. Without action by the first deadline, a partial government shutdown would begin. Congress returns next week with little time to work out the details.

The White House’s top budget official told reporters Friday that the GOP tactic significantly increased the risk of a shutdown.

“I wouldn’t say pessimistic, but I’m not optimistic [about the odds to avert a shutdown],” Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “Earlier this week, their border trip left me with more concerns about where they’re headed.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) did not formally back the demands to link immigration restrictions with federal spending, but with a narrow GOP majority in a bitterly divided chamber, he relies on the Freedom Caucus, a group that has been a persistent thorn in the side of Republican leadership, to maintain power. He called that immigration bill, H.R. 2, a “necessary ingredient” to any immigration policy.

“Let me tell you what our top two priorities are right now,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday. “In summary, we want to get the border closed and secured first, and we want to make sure that we reduce nondefense discretionary spending.”

Republican lawmakers and political operatives say immigration issues work to their advantage, and hope to capitalize on the porous border to maintain control of their narrow House majority, retake the Senate and propel former president Donald Trump back to the White House.

“I would prefer the Senate Democrats found enlightenment and said, ‘H.R. 2 is what we want to do.’ Turns out I live in the real world and that’s not going to happen,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) said. “But if we can get a substantial win on the border, I think it is one of those rare cases where it actually really helps the country and helps us politically.”

That strategy has at least some support in the Senate, where Democrats control the chamber by a single vote, requiring help from Republicans to get around potential filibusters to pass new spending legislation.

“I think that we have a real fiscal crisis in our country, but I think the most significant crisis we have is what is going on at the southern border,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), a regular interlocutor between hard-right lawmakers in the House and more pragmatic Senate Republicans, told The Post on Friday. “And I encourage my Republican friends in the House to use all the negotiating leverage they can to solve this problem politically.

A bipartisan group in the Senate — Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) — has been negotiating border legislation for weeks in connection with a separate spending bill that would devote more than $100 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine and Israel and to the U.S.-Mexico border, among other priorities. That bill would include $14 billion in border security provisions. Senate Republicans have demanded immigration policy changes, as well as the security funding, before they’d vote to approve additional money for Ukraine.

But House Republicans are far more skeptical of Kyiv than their Senate counterparts, and demands to link immigration policy to ongoing government funding, instead of to the Ukraine aid, could mean the House won’t pass any assistance for the war in Ukraine.

This round of budgetary negotiations wasn’t supposed to be so complicated. In the spring, President Biden struck a deal with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to suspend the nation’s debt limit in exchange for limiting discretionary spending to $1.59 trillion in 2024, with 1 percent growth in 2025. Because that represented a cut when taking inflation into account, Biden and McCarthy agreed to spend another $69 billion each year in a side deal, with some of that offset by repurposing existing funds.

But House Republicans, led by members of the Freedom Caucus, were unsatisfied with that arrangement. A few months later, they ousted McCarthy from the speakership when he turned to Democratic votes in September to maintain those spending levels and avert a government shutdown. In a sign of stark internal divisions, though, the GOP-led House also rejected a stopgap funding measure with steep budget cuts that included the sweeping border changes the far right now seeks. (McCarthy resigned from Congress at the end of 2023.)

After taking over as speaker, Johnson in November also needed support from Democrats to pass another stopgap funding bill, which staggered expiration dates between Jan. 19 and Feb. 2.

The $69 billion side deal that McCarthy struck has been a sticking point through the fall and winter. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), then chair of the Freedom Caucus, told reporters just after Thanksgiving that his group would support the $1.59 trillion spending total that the debt ceiling law set — even though that was the amount that led some members to boot McCarthy from the speakership and drive the government to the verge of a shutdown — but only if it didn’t include the side agreements.

By early December, Johnson echoed the sentiment, declaring that the additional funding was not codified in law, but merely a handshake deal between his predecessor and Biden.

“This budget agreement was not a handshake agreement,” Young, from the White House OMB, said Friday. “It was a vote of Congress. It is not optional. They have to keep their word.”

“That group has got sway over Johnson. They’ve toppled McCarthy. They’re the reason why nothing’s got done in the last 12 months,” Rep. David Trone (D-Md.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, told The Post.

Good, the Freedom Caucus’s new leader, said he has told Johnson that the speaker would “be a hero to the American people” if he threatened a government shutdown over border security.

“I think that’s a fight the American people will reward Speaker Johnson for waging,” Good said.

It's Crazy

Wanna know how fucked up the polling is? - and how it got fucked up?

Republicans.

Or more accurately, Republican fuckery, plus Press Poodles who refuse to do their fucking job.

What do we hear? "Crime is rampant!!!!"

Bullshit.

It's bullshit now, the same as it was bullshit back in 2017 when Trump did that god-awful American Carnage crap at his inauguration.

"Well now, that was some pretty weird shit." --George W Bush 

Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They're wrong.

Almost 80 percent of Americans, and 92 percent of Republicans, think crime has gone up. It actually fell in 2023. An expert blames a familiar culprit for the mistaken impression.

Crime in the United States has declined significantly over the last year, according to new FBI data that contradicts a widespread national perception that law-breaking and violence are on the rise.

A Gallup poll released this month found that 77% of Americans believe crime rates are worsening, but they are mistaken, the new FBI data and other statistics show.

The FBI data, which compares crime rates in the third quarter of 2023 to the same period last year, found that violent crime dropped 8%, while property crime fell 6.3% to what would be its lowest level since 1961, according to criminologist Jeff Asher, who analyzed the FBI numbers.

NINETEEN-SIXTY-ONE
SIXTY-TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO

Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023 at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded, Asher found, and every category of major crime except auto theft declined.

Yet 92% of Republicans, 78% of independents and 58% of Democrats believe crime is rising, the Gallup survey shows.

“I think we’ve been conditioned, and we have no way of countering the idea” that crime is rising,” Asher said. “It’s just an overwhelming number of news media stories and viral videos — I have to believe that social media is playing a role.”

The FBI’s quarterly numbers cover about 78% of the U.S. population and don’t give as full a picture as the more comprehensive annual report the FBI puts out once a year. But Asher said the quarterly reports in the past have hewed fairly close to the annual ones.

The most recent annual report, released in October, covered 94% of the country and found that violent crime in 2022 fell back to pre-pandemic levels, with murder dropping 6.1%.

Asher maintains a separate database of murder in big cities which found that murder is down 12.7 percent this year, after rising during the pandemic.

Detroit is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1966, Asher found, while Baltimore and St Louis are on track to post the fewest murders in each city in nearly a decade. A few cities, including Memphis and Washington DC, are still seeing increases in their murder rates, but they are outliers.

FBI data doesn’t have a separate category for retail theft. It falls under “larceny,” which declined overall last year, according to the latest numbers. Retail theft is widely believed to have skyrocketed in some cities, and the industry says it is at “unprecedented” levels. But the data doesn’t necessarily support that thesis.

FBI numbers are not the only measure of crime. The annual Justice Department survey of criminal victimization in 2022 found that a lot of crime goes unreported, and that more people reported being victims of violent crime in 2022 than in 2021. But Asher has documented questions about that survey’s methodology.

So why are Americans’ perceptions about crime so different from the apparent reality? Asher believes there is a measure of partisanship at work — Republicans are more ready to believe crime is increasing while Democrats hold the White House — but he largely chalks it up to media consumption.

“My neighbors never post on NextDoor how many thousands of packages they successfully receive,” he wrote recently. “Only video of the one that randomly got swiped.”

Asher and other analysts say the natural tendency of the news media to highlight disturbing crime stories — and the tendency of those stories to go viral on social media — presents a false but persuasive picture.

Videos of flash mobs on shop lifting sprees or carjackings in broad day light are more ubiquitous, even if those crimes are not.

“These outlier incidents become the glue people rely on when guesstimating whether crime is up or down,” he wrote.

Greasing Up The Fuckery

They're not going to be this obvious.

And the quality will get better.

A lot better.

The rise of AI fake news is creating a ‘misinformation superspreader’

AI is making it easy for anyone to create propaganda outlets, producing content that can be hard to differentiate from real news

Artificial intelligence is automating the creation of fake news, spurring an explosion of web content mimicking factual articles that instead disseminates false information about elections, wars and natural disasters.

Since May, websites hosting AI-created false articles have increased by more than 1,000 percent, ballooning from 49 sites to more than 600, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks misinformation.

Historically, propaganda operations have relied on armies of low-paid workers or highly coordinated intelligence organizations to build sites that appear to be legitimate. But AI is making it easy for nearly anyone — whether they are part of a spy agency or just a teenager in their basement — to create these outlets, producing content that is at times hard to differentiate from real news.

One AI-generated article recounted a made-up story about Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychiatrist, a NewsGuard investigation found, alleging that he had died and left behind a note suggesting the involvement of the Israeli prime minister. The psychiatrist appears to have been fictitious, but the claim was featured on an Iranian TV show, and it was recirculated on media sites in Arabic, English and Indonesian, and spread by users on TikTok, Reddit and Instagram.

How to avoid falling for misinformation, AI images on social media

Quiz: Did AI make this? Test your knowledge.

You are probably spreading misinformation. Here’s how to stop.

The heightened churn of polarizing and misleading content may make it difficult to know what is true — harming political candidates, military leaders and aid efforts. Misinformation experts said the rapid growth of these sites is particularly worrisome in the run-up to the 2024 elections.

“Some of these sites are generating hundreds if not thousands of articles a day,” said Jack Brewster, a researcher at NewsGuard who conducted the investigation. “This is why we call it the next great misinformation superspreader.”

Generative artificial intelligence has ushered in an era in which chatbots, image makers and voice cloners can produce content that seems human-made.

Well-dressed AI-generated news anchors are spewing pro-Chinese propaganda, amplified by bot networks sympathetic to Beijing. In Slovakia, politicians up for election found their voices had been cloned to say controversial things they never uttered, days before voters went to the polls. A growing number of websites, with generic names such as iBusiness Day or Ireland Top News, are delivering fake news made to look genuine, in dozens of languages from Arabic to Thai.

Readers can easily be fooled by the websites.

Global Village Space, which published the piece on Netanyahu’s alleged psychiatrist, is flooded with articles on a variety of serious topics. There are pieces detailing U.S. sanctions on Russian weapons suppliers; the oil behemoth Saudi Aramco’s investments in Pakistan; and the United States’ increasingly tenuous relationship with China.

The site also contains essays written by a Middle East think tank expert, a Harvard-educated lawyer and the site’s chief executive, Moeed Pirzada, a television news anchor from Pakistan. (Pirzada did not respond to a request for comment. Two contributors confirmed they have written articles appearing on Global Village Space.)

But sandwiched in with these ordinary stories are AI-generated articles, Brewster said, such as the piece on Netanyahu’s psychiatrist, which was relabeled as “satire” after NewsGuard reached out to the organization during its investigation. NewsGuard says the story appears to have been based on a satirical piece published in June 2010, which made similar claims about an Israeli psychiatrist’s death.

Having real and AI-generated news side-by-side makes deceptive stories more believable. “You have people that simply are not media literate enough to know that this is false,” said Jeffrey Blevins, a misinformation expert and journalism professor at the University of Cincinnati. “It’s misleading.”

Websites similar to Global Village Space may proliferate during the 2024 election, becoming an efficient way to distribute misinformation, media and AI experts said.

The sites work in two ways, Brewster said. Some stories are created manually, with people asking chatbots for articles that amplify a certain political narrative and posting the result to a website. The process can also be automatic, with web scrapers searching for articles that contain certain keywords, and feeding those stories into a large language model that rewrites them to sound unique and evade plagiarism allegations. The result is automatically posted online.

NewsGuard locates AI-generated sites by scanning for error messages or other language that “indicates that the content was produced by AI tools without adequate editing,” the organization says.

The motivations for creating these sites vary. Some are intended to sway political beliefs or wreak havoc. Other sites churn out polarizing content to draw clicks and capture ad revenue, Brewster said. But the ability to turbocharge fake content is a significant security risk, he added.

Technology has long fueled misinformation. In the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. election, Eastern European troll farms — professional groups that promote propaganda — built large audiences on Facebook disseminating provocative content on Black and Christian group pages, reaching 140 million users per month.

Pink-slime journalism sites, named after the meat byproduct, often crop up in small towns where local news outlets have disappeared, generating articles that benefit the financiers that fund the operation, according to the media watchdog Poynter.

But Blevins said those techniques are more resource-intensive compared with artificial intelligence. “The danger is the scope and scale with AI … especially when paired with more sophisticated algorithms,” he said. “It’s an information war on a scale we haven’t seen before.”

It’s not clear whether intelligence agencies are using AI-generated news for foreign influence campaigns, but it is a major concern. “I would not be shocked at all that this is used — definitely next year with the elections,” Brewster said. “It’s hard not to see some politician setting up one of these sites to generate fluff content about them and misinformation about their opponent.”

Blevins said people should watch for clues in articles, “red flags” such as “really odd grammar” or errors in sentence construction. But the most effective tool is to increase media literacy among average readers.

“Make people aware that there are these kinds of sites that are out there. This is the kind of harm they can cause,” he said. “But also recognize that not all sources are equally credible. Just because something claims to be a news site doesn’t mean that they actually have a journalist … producing content.”

Regulation, he added, is largely nonexistent. It may be difficult for governments to clamp down on fake news content, for fear of running afoul of free-speech protections. That leaves it to social media companies, which haven’t done a good job so far.

It’s infeasible to deal quickly with the sheer number of such sites. “It’s a lot like playing whack-a-mole,” Blevins said.

“You spot one [site], you shut it down, and there’s another one created someplace else,” he added. “You’re never going to fully catch up with it.”

On GOP Fuckery - Immigration

• In 2013 Dems passed a bi-partisan immigration reform bill in the Senate
• House Republicans refused to allow it on the floor for debate
• Obama asked Republicans to propose their own immigration bill
• Republicans refused
• Republicans then demanded Obama do something about illegal immigration
• Obama used Executive Order authority to put some reforms in place
• Republicans were outraged, and called Obama a tyrant for doing what they demanded of him

Republicans don't want immigration reform - or much of anything else - they want to maintain the problem so they have an "issue" they can use to scare the rubes and tell them who to blame for it.

Don & Kev & Lil Matty

This one kinda slipped by me.

You wanna friend? Buy a dog.

McCarthy privately recounts terse phone call with Trump after ouster

During the call, former president detailed the reasons he hadn’t intervened during the effort to remove McCarthy as speaker

In the weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) traveled down to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and threw a lifeline to the former president, who was under a cloud of controversy for provoking the historic assault.

Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in your inbox weekdays.
The fence-mending session between the two Republican leaders ended with a photo op of the two men, grinning side by side in a gilded, frescoed room. The stunning turnabout of the House GOP leader, who had previously blamed Trump for the deadly attack, paved the way for the former president’s return to de facto leader of the Republican Party.

When the tables were turned almost three years later, however, Trump did not return the favor.

Wait - Trump stiffed him? Whooda thunk it, huh?

During a phone call with McCarthy weeks after his historic Oct. 3 removal as House speaker, Trump detailed the reasons he had declined to ask Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and other hard-right lawmakers to back off their campaign to oust the California Republican from his leadership position, according to people familiar with the exchange who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose a private conversation.

During the call, Trump lambasted McCarthy for not expunging his two impeachments and not endorsing him in the 2024 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the conversation.

“F--- you,” McCarthy claimed to have then told Trump, when he rehashed the call later to other people in two separate conversations, according to the people. A spokesperson for McCarthy said that he did not swear at the former president and that they have a good relationship. A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment.

The transactional — and at times tumultuous — relationship has seemingly endured despite McCarthy’s ouster. The two continue to speak and text, according to people with knowledge of the relationship.

McCarthy has previously grappled with discrepancies between his private, disparaging comments about Trump to others and his continued fealty to the former president. In her new book, former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) accused McCarthy of repeatedly lying about his relationship with Trump after the Jan. 6 attack. Cheney writes that when she pressed McCarthy about why he visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago, McCarthy claimed that he was summoned by the former president’s staff out of concern for his well-being.

“They’re really worried. … Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him,” McCarthy told Cheney, according to CNN.

During McCarthy’s prolonged fight for the speakership in January, Trump assisted him in clinching the gavel by leaning on some of the holdouts, which he later claimed credit for on social media. But during the Gaetz-orchestrated ouster effort, Trump remained relatively quiet. After McCarthy was removed as speaker, Gaetz indicated in an interview that Trump was supportive of his actions.

“I would say that my conversations with the former president leave me with great confidence that I’m doing the right thing,” Gaetz said.

And now the knives are out for Mr Gaetz.

McCarthy has not endorsed Trump or any other candidate for president. But he had always planned to endorse Trump around the Iowa caucuses next year, at a time McCarthy thought the endorsement mattered, according to people familiar with his plans. He told Trump during the call that he was unable to endorse him earlier because he feared that some of his donors would have rescinded their support if he put his thumb on the scale early in the 2024 presidential race, according to a person briefed on the conversation. McCarthy indicated to others that he also withheld his endorsement to protect some of the more vulnerable members of the House Republican conference, another person added.

Whether McCarthy will remain in public office is unclear, as he has privately indicated to allies that he has started exploring a career beyond the halls of Congress, according to people familiar with his thinking. The former speaker faces a Dec. 8 filing deadline, with a five-day leniency period offered to incumbents, to decide whether he will seek another term in 2024.

“If I decide to run again, I have to know in my heart that I’m giving 110 percent. I have to know that I want to do that,” McCarthy said at an event Wednesday. “I also have to know if I’m going to walk away, that I’m going to be fine with walking away.”

Since his ouster, he has taken a no-holds-barred approach to the people who facilitated his removal from leadership, unloading on individual lawmakers in public interviews. McCarthy and his allies have at times used their power and deep coffers to weed out Republican incumbents who caused headaches in Washington, or were misaligned with McCarthy’s interests. This month, McCarthy said in an interview with CNN that Gaetz should face consequences for his actions and predicted that Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), one of the eight lawmakers who joined Gaetz, would lose reelection for her “flip-flopping.”

McCarthy, a prolific fundraiser, has said he’d continue to assist with the party’s fundraising efforts as the new speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), establishes himself in the role. On Thursday, McCarthy’s top fundraiser and confidant, Jeff Miller, will host a fundraiser for the Johnson Leadership Fund, charging $10,000 to attend, according to a copy of the invitation obtained by The Washington Post. Miller, who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for House Republicans since McCarthy became House minority leader, previously told The Post that he would start fundraising for Johnson’s team.

But it’s unclear to what extent McCarthy will personally be involved with fundraising for the House GOP conference going forward. And concerns remain about whether Johnson will be able to re-create McCarthy’s fundraising juggernaut that helped win back the House in 2022 — and will be necessary for Republicans to retain power going into the 2024 election season. To date, McCarthy has funneled $35 million in direct contributions to the House GOP campaign effort since January and has sent a total of $23.8 million to the National Republican Congressional Committee and state parties this cycle.

Trump, meanwhile, has in part dragged down the party’s fundraising efforts as he maintains front-runner status in its presidential primary. The Post previously reported that big-dollar donors have cut back on issuing big checks to the NRCC in recent years because they did not want the money being used to help Trump.

It Goes Around

... and then it comes around.

Today's Republican Fuckery

Gettin' real tired of these dog-ass Republicans spinning this shit - that they can hide every shitty thing they do behind "My right to free speech."

"Your Honor, even though we have nothing but QAnon bullshit and my client's own fantasy version of the events in question, the defense will establish that the gun used to murder the deceased was merely expressing its God-given right to speak freely, and that my client - as a public official - was duty-bound to assist ... and blah blah fucking blah."  

I understand we have to sort this crap out carefully, because we're setting precedent with every court decision. But Jeezus H Fuq, these idiotic "philosophies" have to be squashed, and they have to be squashed posthaste and with prejudice.

Tina Peters files federal lawsuit to block criminal investigations, prosecutions against her

Peters, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Colorado secretary of state last year, was indicted on 10 counts by a Mesa County grand jury. Her trial begins Feb. 7.

Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday seeking to halt local, state and federal criminal investigations and prosecutions against her in a security breach of her county’s election system in 2021.

The 43-page lawsuit was filed against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Mesa County District Attorney Daniel Rubenstein. It claims their continued investigations into Peters violate her constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of association and right to petition the government to redress her grievances.

The lawsuit comes as Peters is scheduled to go to trial Feb. 7 in Mesa County. A grand jury indicted her in March 2022 on 10 counts stemming from her actions during an election software update in May 2021. Peters is facing felony and misdemeanor charges, including attempting to influence a public official and criminal impersonation.

Belinda Knisley, Peters’ deputy clerk at the time, was also indicted in the case. Knisley pleaded guilty in 2022 to three misdemeanors and agreed to testify against Peters.

Peters’ new lawsuit claims she was performing her duty to preserve records as an elections official when she had a consultant make a “forensic image” of the elections software before the update completed by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems. Two months later, passwords used during the update were posted online by a conservative website.

The lawsuit claims the investigations and prosecutions by state and federal authorities constitute retaliation and harassment of Peters.

Rubenstein, a Republican, said Wednesday he hadn’t been served with the lawsuit.

“I … am aware that one has been filed,” he told The Sun. “Having been elected as the district attorney for the 21st Judicial District, I have a constitutional, statutory, and ethical obligation to represent this community in criminal matters.”

Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state said in a statement: “Tina Peters compromised her own voting equipment in an attempt to prove the Big Lie and risked her constituents’ constitutional right to vote. Her attempts to evade accountability with this frivolous lawsuit will not work.”

Peters, who claims without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state last year, losing the Republican primary by nearly 90,000 votes. She also ran unsuccessfully earlier this year to be chair of the Colorado GOP.

Peters was separately sentenced to home detention and community service earlier this year for trying to prevent authorities from seizing an iPad she used to make a prohibited recording of one of Knisley’s court hearings. The sentence was stayed pending an appeal. Peters was also held in contempt of court for making the recording and fined $1,500.

Today's Wingnut

Tommy Tuberville is known as the dumbest member of the US Senate.

Classic bit of abuser's bullshit at about 10:55

"I hate to have to do this."

Translated: "I'll stop hitting you when you stop making me hit you."

 

Hey, asshole - nobody's "making" you do anything. You're doing it because you choose to do it. Take responsibility for your own actions and stop blaming your victims for what you're doing.

What a fuckin' dick this guy is.

Dumb & Dumber

The hollowing-out of public education in USAmerica Inc has to be getting close to where the whole thing implodes.

Standard Operating Proceedure for 'conservatives' has been to cut school budgets and attack the Dept of Education, and then crow about what a mess the schools are -"See? Government schools are bad. We need to privatize the system - put it in the hands of a few noble entrepreneurs and let them raise us back to the heights of blah blah blah..."

1. Fuck something up
2. Wait a bit
3. Point at it and say, "Oh look - it's fucked up. Vote for me and I'll fix it for ya."

Home schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

A district-by-district look at home schooling’s explosive growth, which a Post analysis finds has far outpaced the rate at private and public schools

Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.

The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.

The growth demonstrates home schooling’s arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system, with its impact — on society, on public schools and, above all, on hundreds of thousands of children now learning outside a conventional academic setting — only beginning to be felt.

Obtaining accurate information about the home-schooling population in the United States is challenging. In 11 states, including Texas, Michigan, Connecticut and Illinois, officials do not require notification when families decide to educate their children at home or monitor how those students are faring. Seven additional states have unreliable tallies of home-schooled kids, The Post found.

The Post was able to collect reliable data from 32 states and the District of Columbia, representing more than 60 percent of the country’s school-age population. In 18 of those states, private and public school enrollment figures were available for comparison.

The resulting analysis — which includes home-school registration figures for nearly 7,000 individual school districts — is the most detailed look to date at an unprecedented period of growth in American home schooling.

Washington, D.C.’s school district saw a 108% increase in home-school enrollment since the 2017-18 school year. There were 88,626 students enrolled districtwide in the 2021-22 school year.

Examination of the data reveals:

• In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51 percent over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7 percent growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4 percent in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling.
• Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.
• In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic.
• Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance.

Because they do not cover every state, the figures cannot provide a total count of the country’s home-schooled children. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2019 — before home schooling’s dramatic expansion — there were 1.5 million kids being home-schooled in the United States, the last official federal estimate.

Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data.

By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data.

It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.

“This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

The rise of home schooling is all the more remarkable, he added, given the immense logistical challenges many parents must overcome to directly supervise their kids’ education.

“The personal costs to home schooling are more than just tuition,” Malkus said. “They are a restructuring of the way your family works.”

In most states examined by The Post, home schooling has fallen slightly from its peak, while remaining at highs unmatched before the 2020-2021 school year. In only two, Georgia and Maryland, has it returned to pre-pandemic levels. And in four — Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and South Dakota — home schooling has continued to expand.

Celebrated by home education advocates, the rise has also led critics of weak regulation to sound alarms. Home-schooled kids don’t have to submit to any form of testing for academic progress in most states, and even states that require assessments often offer loopholes, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which urges greater oversight.

Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.

“Policymakers should think, ‘Wow — this is a lot of kids,’” said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate. “We should worry about whether they’re learning anything.”

‘Such a long way’

If there is a capital of American home schooling, it may be Hillsborough County, Fla.

The Gulf Coast county of 1.5 million — including Tampa and its orbit of palmetto-studded suburbs — is famous as a barometer of the nation’s political mood. Its vote results have predicted the winner in 22 of the last 24 presidential elections. Now it is a harbinger of a different trend: the widespread adoption and acceptance of home schooling.

There were 10,680 children being home-schooled at the beginning of the 2022 academic year within Hillsborough County’s school district, the biggest total in The Post’s home-schooling database. The county’s home-schoolers outnumber the entire public enrollment of thousands of other school districts across the country, and their ranks have grown 74 percent since 2017. Over the same period, public school enrollment grew 3.4 percent, to 224,538 students.

Just as remarkable is the infrastructure that has grown up to support home-schoolers.

Their instruction still happened at home much of the time when Corey McKeown began teaching her kids 14 years ago in Carrollwood, a Tampa suburb. Once or twice a week, parent-run co-ops offered a chance to mingle with what was still a small community of home educators.

Today, Hillsborough home-schoolers inhabit a scholastic and extracurricular ecosystem that is in many ways indistinguishable from that of a public or private school. Home-schooled kids play competitive sports. They put on full-scale productions of “Mary Poppins” and “Les Miserables.” They have high school graduation ceremonies, as well as a prom and homecoming dance.

The Christian home-schooling co-op that had about 40 kids in 2011 when McKeown joined it — a co-op she would go on to direct — has grown to nearly 600 students.

“Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for anything,” she said. “We have come such a long way.”

Corey McKeown owns and operates Trinity. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
Of the 10 districts with the most home-schooled kids in The Post database, nine are in Florida. That’s partly because of the state’s large school districts, but also because its elected officials have grown friendlier to home education as they saddle public schools with politically charged restrictions on what can be taught about race and gender.

Home-schooled kids in Florida aren’t required to sit through the same standardized tests as their public-school peers. But they are allowed to join the same high school sports teams, and are eligible for the same scholarships at public universities.

“It’s a tremendous imbalance,” said Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray. After decades as a public and parochial school teacher, Gray taught history part-time for several years at a Catholic home schooling co-op. She said that experience left her worried about many home-schooled kids’ academic preparation and lack of exposure to diverse points of view, and she is convinced home education should not be most families’ first choice.

“I can tell you right now: Many of these parents don’t have any understanding of education,” she said. “The price will be very big to us, and to society. But that won’t show up for a few years.”

Some of home schooling’s immediate costs to society will soon be more directly measurable in Florida. Earlier this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), following the lead of policymakers in other conservative states, expanded the state’s educational voucher program. Children who learn at home are now eligible if their parents submit instructional plans and they take an annual standardized test.

As a result, families in Hillsborough County may be getting their most powerful incentive yet to home-school: up to $8,000 per child in annual taxpayer funding.

From Harlem to Kentucky

Home-schooled kids number more than 154,000 in Florida, the largest count among states with available data. But in no state have their ranks grown faster than in New York.

Its home-school population has more than doubled since 2017, rising to nearly 52,000. It was the largest statewide rate of increase in The Post’s database, and some of the fastest growth came in a place not necessarily synonymous with home education: New York City.

In 24 of the city’s 33 school districts, home-schooled children increased by at least 200 percent over six years. The largest growth was seen in Brooklyn and in the Bronx, where some districts exceeded 300 percent growth.

Afua Brown, who lives in Harlem, pulled her daughter out of a public elementary school in 2015 after she was bullied in kindergarten. Private school was too expensive, so Brown tried her hand at home education for her daughter and younger son.

She eventually became a leader in the New York City Home Educators Alliance, where she watched the local home-school community expand dramatically. But while their ranks can feel large at the organization’s science fairs, picnics and ice skating days, Brown recognizes home-schoolers are still a tiny fraction of the city’s school-age kids. Her children were among 377 in the fall of 2022 in a school district, including Manhattan’s Upper West Side and part of Harlem, where public enrollment is close to 20,000.

“It feels like there’s a bunch of us,” she said. “But in reality, there’s not that many of us.”

In only one of the city’s districts, Staten Island, are there more than 1,000 home-schooled kids.

The situation is very different in rural Pulaski County, Ky., where home schooling has grown 75 percent since 2017. There are now 908 home-schooled children in Pulaski — a number hard to ignore in a public school district with fewer than 7,800 students.

When Angelia Lamb stopped by the post office last summer to mail home-schooling notification forms for her 11-year-old son, the postal clerk glanced at the envelope — and then astonished Lamb by guessing its contents.

“You’re home schooling, aren’t you?” he asked, explaining that so many other parents had been sending the same official correspondence to the district that he recognized it on sight.

There is a kind of safety, or at least reassurance, in numbers for parents like 36-year-old Jessica Noplis, who lives in Crab Orchard, Ky. Noplis had misgivings when she pulled her 5-year-old son from a Pulaski elementary school: The boy loved school, and would habitually be ready in his backpack to board the bus at 6 a.m. — 50 minutes before it arrived.

But Noplis clashed with two of her son’s teachers over speech therapy (Noplis thought he didn’t need it) and grew upset when one of them didn’t seem to believe that the boy was reading better at home than in school. She soon discovered no fewer than six local and state Facebook groups devoted to home schooling.

“I was shocked to see how many people actually home-schooled,” she said.

Pulaski is one of 19 school districts in Kentucky where there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 enrolled in the public school system during the 2021-2022 school year. There were 48 such districts in Arkansas and 46 in California, according to The Post analysis. Most are rural.

Rural districts tend to struggle with especially tight budgets, and as more of their families turn to home schooling, some professional educators feel uneasy. Krystal Goode, a high school social studies teacher and head of the Pulaski County Education Association, said the district is already so strapped for cash that at least 30 students are now crowded into each of her classes.

In Kentucky, as elsewhere, public school funding is directly tied to enrollment. Goode said she worries about Pulaski’s home-schooled kids, a few of whom joined her class last year substantially behind their peers in academic skills.

But she also worries about what home schooling’s growth will mean for the children in the public education system.

“If [home-schooled] students are not enrolled in our district, we are not getting funding for them,” she said. “And we are already underfunded.”

Leaving ‘excellent’ schools

After Cassie Hagerstrom moved to De Pere, Wis., last summer, she noticed her new neighbors had a favorite topic of conversation: the superb quality of their public schools.

“It’s the first thing they bring up here,” she said.

Other parents would often talk about how much better they believed the schools were than those in the nearby city of Green Bay.

In fact, students in the Unified School District of De Pere perform better on standardized tests than their counterparts not only in Green Bay but in 95 percent of districts across the country, according to the Stanford Education Data Archive. Three of De Pere’s six public schools were rated in Wisconsin’s highest possible category in their most recent assessment, while each of the remaining three “exceeds expectations,” state officials found.

But Hagerstrom never considered giving her new town’s renowned schools a chance to meet, let alone exceed, her expectations for her 6- and 8-year-old daughters. She began home schooling when they lived in Fort Myers, Fla., she said, after a girl in her older child’s aftercare program shared a video of her father showering on her phone. The experience reinforced bad impressions Hagerstrom formed when she worked for a year as a middle school counselor.

“I’m not really on board with the schooling process as a whole,” Hagerstrom said. “Too many negative influences.”

Hagerstrom isn’t the only home educator to spurn a high-performing school system. In the fall of 2022, more than 60,000 students were home-schooled in districts that rank in the top fifth of academic achievement nationwide, The Post found.

There are 505 such school districts in The Post’s home schooling database. Data on academic performance were drawn from the Stanford archive, which collects standardized test score results from thousands of school districts across the country. (The archive does not include information for about half the districts in The Post’s database.)

Another high-caliber school district with explosive home-schooling growth is Capistrano Unified, which serves a prosperous slice of coastal Orange County, Calif. In the fall of 2022, the district had 711 home-schooled kids — a dip from its high of 1,000 in the fall of 2020 but still a 139 percent increase from the 2017-18 school year.

Until last year, when she moved to neighboring Riverside County, Stephanie Peterson lived in Capistrano Unified, which outperforms 87 percent of other school districts nationwide on standardized test scores. Peterson describes herself as “very pro-public education.”

But Peterson found that her children didn’t thrive in Capistrano Unified schools. Her eldest daughter, now 20, eventually transferred to a charter school. Officials at the local elementary school didn’t properly accommodate her 9-year-old daughter’s severe peanut allergy, Peterson said, and she worried that school services for the girl’s autism were insufficient.

Since 2021, Peterson has home-schooled both the 9-year-old and her 7-year-old son.

“I think it’s an excellent school district,” she said of Capistrano Unified, “if you are a kid who doesn’t have any special needs.”

‘The heart of the community’

Parents and students break for lunch at Trinity Education Academy of Christian Homeschoolers in Tampa. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
What lies ahead for American home schooling?

It has dropped from its pandemic peak in most of the school districts for which data are available through the 2022-2023 academic year. Yet even in those places it remains elevated well above pre-pandemic levels, and in 697 districts it kept increasing.

Other factors could fuel more growth in the years ahead.

Concerns about school shootings, bullying, and the general quality of the school environment — intractable problems, some of which school officials have limited power to solve — were among the top reasons for home schooling cited by parents in a Washington Post-Schar School poll earlier this year. Many also said they feared the intrusion of politics into public education, a worry unlikely to recede amid arguments over how sexual identity, Black history and other subjects are handled in the classroom.

Another factor that could boost home schooling’s appeal: Vouchers that offer parents thousands of dollars per year for children outside the public school system. Such vouchers have recently been made available to home educators in states including Arizona, Arkansas, Utah, West Virginia and New Hampshire, as well as Florida, and are on the agenda for conservative education activists across the country.

Thanks in part to such policies, home schooling will increasingly compete for tax dollars with the public education system.

It could also undermine the role that public schools have traditionally played in American life.

“If you go to any public school, it’s the heart of the community in which it is situated,” said Eddie Campbell, president of the Kentucky Education Association. “People gather there for football games. They gather there for concerts. They go to celebrate the academic success of their students.”

Many home-schooling families say they have re-created these communal functions through co-ops, or microschools, or Facebook. But such groups often cluster by shared ideology; home education’s rise has coincided with the fracturing of a nation unable to agree on the results of the last presidential election or how to fight a pandemic that has killed more than 1.1 million people.

And some of what schools offer is hard to replace. When floods ravaged the Appalachian region where Campbell worked as a music teacher, he said, many turned to the public schools for shelter.

But many are also turning away. In Campbell’s Knox County school district, public school enrollment declined 16 percent during the last six years.

Over the same period, the county’s number of home-schooled students grew 80 percent.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER