They Want to Destroy Everything
We won't let them.
There is plenty of doom scrolling right now, but it is important to remember two things. The first is that we are far from powerless – there are a great many things our side can do to fight back, from lawsuits to filibusters to organizing in the most vulnerable Republican districts and states. And so much more, like getting out in the streets all across the country to protest this rottenness.
The second is that Trump and his people are incompetent, full of bluster and bullshit, but not anywhere near the juggernaut they are trying to sell people on. Dan Pfeiffer’s piece on this is brilliant today. In it, he goes point by point on how many failures Trump’s team has already had.
Take heart, folks. I remain an optimist that Americans will fight back and defeat the evil but stupid people running our government right now.
Which is not to say the evil and nastiness isn’t real. In every political party that’s won power throughout history, there were two coalitions: an electoral coalition and a governing coalition. The Republicans’ electoral coalition consists of fundamentalist Christians, rich people who care mostly about how low their taxes are, and lots of hard working people who don’t follow the details of government much but know they hate the establishment that has allowed them to be screwed over economically.
However, the Republicans’ governing coalition, the people Trump has put into power, is quite different. It is a coalition of libertarian billionaires who want to dismantle government so that they can use their wealth and power to run everything, a group of low rent scam artists and grifters who want to enrich themselves by taking the government’s money, and fascists bent on undoing every good thing that has happened in American life since before the days of Teddy Roosevelt.
I want to highlight one of those people today: Christopher Rufo, who fits into both the second and third categories above. Rufo’s special mission is to utterly destroy public education, so that the people who run private schools can take money currently being allocated to public education and put it into right wing religious schools.
Rufo is one of those anti-public education zealots who was probably stopped from bullying people with disabilities in his class as a kid, and has held a grudge against teachers ever since. He has been frothing at the mouth in excitement over Donald Trump letting him walk around the Department of Education and start the destruction there. Rufo tweeted yesterday:
“Things will start to move fast, but here’s a tidbit I can share now: I will be launching a new campaign to expose ideological corruption at the Department of Education beginning next week. The permanent bureaucracy must and will- be held accountable.”
By ideological corruption, Rufo means people in the Dept of Ed being in favor of education. Shocking, I know.
The reason grifters like Rufo hate public education is that it represents everything good about America. Public schools let everyone in regardless of income, race, gender, religion, or disability. Schools and teachers try to lift all their students up so that they have a real chance at the American dream.
We can and we will fight back against these terrible ideas and terrible people. The American people will not stand for having their schools and health care and freedom destroyed.