Archive | January, 2023

EMOs Generating Profits and Harm

29 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/29/2023

Carol Burris, Darcie Cimarusti and the gang at Network for Public Education (NPE) just published “Charter for Profit: Pandemic Profiteering.” This is an update to their 2021 report “Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain.” Both reports describe and document how the vast majority of for-profit charter schools hide their true nature when “By law, only the state of Arizona allows for-profit entities to be licensed to run charter schools.”(Page 3) The industry work around is to found schools as non-profit entities, but use a for-profit Education Management Organization (EMO) to run them.

To determine how many students were attending charter schools controlled by for-profit EMOs was no easy task. To confirm an EMO’s status, the authors utilized state business search engines. Once confirmed, the team turned to EMO websites for their lists of schools which were compared with the relevant state’s list of charter schools. EMOs that did not have a website required a deeper search for documentation. (Page 34)

In December 2022, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University Josh Cohen did an evaluation for the National Education Policy Center of a September 2022 Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s study. That study attempted to justify the for-profit charter sector. However, Cohen found the study itself did not match the rosy conclusions in the forward by Fordham executives Amber Northern and Michael Petrilli. In fact, it showed for-profits having lower student achievement, lower graduation rates, and higher absentee rates. Furthermore, students in for-profit virtual charters quickly fell significantly behind students in brick-and-mortar schools.

Education Management Organizations

The current NPE study reports,

“At the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year, we identified 1,305 charter schools, run by one of 150 EMOs. This is an increase since our 2021 report, which identified 1,138 for profit-run charter schools run by 141 EMOs. …

“During these two school years – as the pandemic wore on – the percentage of charter schools run by for-profits jumped from 15 percent to about 16.6 percent of the charter sector.” (Page 10)

Those 150 EMOs were identified as belonging to one of three groups. The organizations with one or two charter schools could be labeled micro-EMOs. The mid-sized EMOs are constituted by three to nineteen schools while the large EMOs manage twenty or more schools.

Most states allow for-profits to manage charter schools; however five states have a very large for-profit footprint. Three of the states – Michigan, Florida and Ohio – have a majority of their charters managed by for-profit companies.

Accessing those Sweet Taxpayer Dollars

For the last several years, it appears that the for-profit charter industry has been perfecting profiteering by applying insider deals, sweeps contracts and sweetheart business deals.

The NPE report described: “Insider deals, formally referred to as related party transactions, occur when those who have control of a charter school’s decision-making process award contracts to their own companies or those owned by family members, colleagues, or friends. (Page 12)

An example of this type of profiteering comes from Arizona and APEX Charter Services solely owned by Raena Janes. Her for-profit EMO manages nine charter schools. The schools are overseen by two non-profit boards; the Arizona Community Development Corporation and Liberty Traditional Charter Schools, Inc. However, the non-profit boards both consist of Raena Janes, her employees and her business partners.

Much more about the details of this Byzantine business structure can be found by delving into the LittleSis Map below. In 2018, I attended a presentation by Darcie Cimarusti on using the LittleSis data base and oligrapher. Since then Darcie has become a master at using these facilities. In the map below, she lays out the connections that have allowed Janes and a very small group of accomplices to over the last 12 years extract $33 million from Arizona’s state education budget. APEX’s complicated structure led to an Arizona state audit reporting,

“During consideration of the service agreement the Director disclosed her duality of interest and recused herself from discussion or voting on approval of the agreement. The disinterested members of the Board approved the agreement. “

However, there are no disinterested members of the Board. As Darcie documented, all of the board members have a stake in APEX being profitable.  

Click here to Access the Map of Documenting Insider Dealing at APEX

The NPE report includes several more examples of insider dealing.

Sweeps contracts are another vehicle EMOs employ to build profits. The report says, “A sweeps contract is an arrangement in which a charter school turns over all or nearly all of its public funding to an operator who then runs the school.” (Page 16)

In 2014, ProPublica published “When Charter Schools Are Nonprofit in Name Only.” This prescient article focused on the actions of National Heritage Academies an EMO which today manages more than 100 schools. It reported,

“In Michigan, where NHA is the largest charter-school operator, state education regulators have voiced … frustrations about the degree to which these private firms are shielded from having to answer to the public about how money is spent.

‘“I can’t FOIA National Heritage Academies,’ said Casandra Ulbrich, Vice President of the Michigan State Board of Education, referring to the right to request public documents from public agencies. ‘I don’t know who they’re subcontracting with, I don’t know if they’re bid out. I don’t know if there are any conflicts of interest. This is information we as taxpayers don’t have a right to.’’’

Another seeps contract example from the NPE report is ACCEL Schools the fourth largest EMO with 54 schools of which the majority are in Ohio. In 2017, Akron Preparatory Schools signed a sweeps contract with ACCEL. The NPE report described the contract as muscular noting,

“From beginning to end, it not only details the sweeping services that ACCEL will provide but also makes it clear that the decision-maker will be the for-profit, not the board. ACCEL is the ‘exclusive custodian’ of all revenues, choosing the bank into which the funds are deposited and managing the accounts. The 18 percent fee from revenue received ensures that ACCEL makes a profit.” (Page 17)

The third big profit driver for EMOs is sweetheart real estate deals. Burris et.al shared, “When we began our investigations into chartering for profit, we were told that ‘the real money’ is made in real estate.” Academica, National Heritage Academy, Charter Schools USA, ACCEL, and Leona are the five largest for-profit EMOs. They all use related real estate corporations and employ contracts that put the EMO in charge of lease relationships. (Page 17)

The second largest EMO in the country is National Heritage Academies (NHA). NHA’s real estate arm is the Charter Development Company (CDC). Both NHA and CDC are owned by J.C. Huizenga, whose father and uncle created the huge multinational company Waste Management. The NPE paper reports,

“In 2021, Charter Development Company began selling off schools to a nonprofit called Campus Partners 1, which appears to have been formed for the sale. Campus Partners secured one billion in bond funding from La Paz County in Arizona. The president of the board of Campus Partners 1 was Huizenga’s personal attorney. The sale allows Huizenga to profit from the sale of the schools while still managing the lease and facilities through Huizenga’s Charter Development Company. This real estate deal will potentially net up to one billion dollars from the sale of schools that had been paid for with tax dollars. Even after the sale, the schools will pay the lease via CDC to the new nonprofit, meaning the taxpayer will continue to foot the bill for the buildings over and over again.” (Emphasis added) (Page 21)

This is just one of the outlined real estate swindles setup to fleece taxpayers and purloin education dollars. The report goes into more detail about this deal and shares several more outrageous episodes. 

Some Observations

Clearly the charter school industry has been corrupted by greed. In statehouses across America, it appears that education laws are being deliberately written to facilitate fraud and charter industry lobbyists work hard to keep it that way. Charter schools do clearly outperform voucher schools but that is not saying much.

Josh Cohen is a researcher who has been studying vouchers since the beginning of the millennium. At one time, he was pro-voucher but his own research and that of others changed his mind. In a recent article he wrote, “Large-scale independent studies in D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show that for kids who left public schools, harmful voucher impacts actually meet or exceed what the pandemic did to test scores.” The article is well sourced and yes he did claim that testing data shows that the negative affects of voucher schools education engenders worse learning loss than the pandemic.

Since voucher schools are substandard and charter schools are fraud centers that under-perform public schools, why do we have them? I believe it is because school choice is a racist and authoritarian agenda aimed at ending universal free public education in America. Obviously, choice has zero to do with improving education in America.

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El Guapo’s Election Report Card

22 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/22/2023

Going into the recent general election, I prepared and published recommendations for forty-two K-12 school board seats on various voters’ ballots. Those positions were from the fifteen largest school districts out of San Diego County’s forty-two school districts. Twenty-nine of my recommendations won and thirteen were defeated.

Across that nation, school board races became targets of culture warriors speciously targeting schools to promote their ultra-right ideology often verging on fascism. Schools were unscrupulously accused of teaching critical race theory (CRT) and grooming students to become gay. It did not matter that CRT has never been taught in the K-12 environment or that turning a straight student gay is not any more possible than turning a gay student straight.  

There was some of that kind of dishonest campaigning in San Diego but it was largely unsuccessful.

Awaken Church is not Woke

In 2004, C3 founder Phil Pringle asked veterans of the evangelical megachurch tradition in Australia, Jurgen Matthesius and his wife Leanne Matthesius, to move to San Diego and found the church. They arrived in 2005 and began holding services in hotels, elementary schools and even at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). The year 2014 witnessed the establishment their first permanent site in Carlsbad and they have since grown to five campuses with about 10,000 parishioners. Originally established as the C3 church, in January 2020 they relaunched as Awaken Church.

Early in the pandemic Awaken Church defied government orders not to hold indoor services. Until the orders against indoor gatherings were lifted, Awaken continuously defied cease and desist orders from the county even in the face Covid-19 outbreaks linked directly to their services.  

In the recent school board elections, Awaken became extremely active calling for a change in school operations. Their RMNNT political action arm labels themselves as “warriors of liberty.” They self define as a remnant of people rising up violently, if need be, to fight tyranny. They are a dangerously misled and armed people with a doctrine that could hardly be more un-American. Following the national movement, school boards were targeted as the place for promoting their radical ideology of change.

Out on Coronado Island, Awaken found a fellow traveler in the MAGA right organization, We the Parents Coronado (WTPC). Like Awaken they have rudely railed against state and local mask mandates and vaccine requirements. WTPC’s web page links to anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQ materials. The reality is WTPC is a small organization but very loud.

Coronado is an upscale city of 20,000 on a sort of island with San Diego Bay to the north and east plus the Pacific Ocean to the west. There is a narrow strip of land known as the Silver Strand extending south to Imperial Beach. Driving down the strand one sees the iconic Hotel Del Coronado, the Seal Team training facility and Silver Strand State Beach. It is a stunningly beautiful community filled with naval flag officers, doctors, lawyers and expensive real estate.

In the general election, there were 3 four-year school board terms and 1 two-year board term on the ballot for Coronado Unified School District. The Awaken candidates were Scott Youngblood, Lisa Meglioli and Geri Machin. Scot Youngblood is an orthopedic surgeon and retired Navy Captain who was endorsed by the Republican Party. On his campaign webpage this Navy doctor revealed himself to be anti-vax and anti-mask. RMNNT the political action group affiliated with Awaken offered candidate training. Lisa Meglioli is a member of Awaken who took the RMNNT training where Coronado’s Republican Mayor Richard Bailey served as an instructor. Awaken’s third candidate, Geri Machin, was a founder and former executive director of WTPC.

When the election results came in, three of my four recommended candidates won (Alexia Palacios-Peters, Malachy Denis Sandy and Renee Cavanaugh). However, it was disappointing to see the anti-masker who is supposedly a doctor win that fourth seat. There are five total seats on the Coronado school board.

In San Diego Unified, the Awaken style change candidate was Becca Williams. She is the anti-mask and anti-vaccine mandates candidate endorsed by the Republican Party. Becca has teaching experience in charter schools and along with her husband founded Valor Education a charter management organization whose classic education is a conservative response to progressive values. She lost to the candidate I endorsed environmentalist and UCSD lecturer Cody Peterson.

In Carlsbad, the Awaken style change candidate was Sharon Mckeeman locally infamous as the founder of the anti-mask and anti-vaccine mandates organization “Let them Breath”. She was endorsed by the Republican Party. I endorsed Michele Tsutagawa Ward a 20-year educator and a school principal in Poway. She won.

The Encinitas Elementary School District is relatively small, but I agreed to review it at the request of a few concerned parents. The Republican Party endorsed Andre Johnson for one of the three seats on the ballot in which voters selected three from a list of candidates. Johnson manages information technology and the database for Awaken Church. It is a reasonable conjecture that he aligns with writer Jakob McWhinney’s observation that Awaken candidates have a “hyperbolic worldview that casts them as righteous fighters against a diabolical liberal ruling class.”  

In Encinitas, my three endorsements all carried the day.

Looking at some Election Misses

My recommendations won almost 100% of the seats in the school districts within 30-miles of the Pacific Ocean. However, in an exception, San Diego Unified candidate Shana Hazan defeated Godwin Higa. Godwin has a decade’s long history as a teacher and principal. He is also a leading expert in trauma informed teaching. Hazan had two years of teaching experience and has worked more than the last decade at Jewish Family Services. Still, she raked in big campaign contributions and racked up an impressive list of endorsements including from the Democratic Party and the San Diego Union Tribune.

I was fairly certain that Hazan would win but recommended Higa. Besides his superior experience and training, I was also concerned by her campaign reports showing $1,500 from Alan Bersin, $1,500 from Scott Peters, $1,500 from Irwin Jacobs, $1,500 from Joan Jacobs, $1,500 from Allison Price, and $1,500 from Robert Price. This is support from two neo-liberal politicians and a group of billionaires. There are reasons to believe she is a gifted young woman who believes in public education and protecting the commons. She just might be one of those political leaders who starts on a school board and goes on to higher office.  Hopefully she is not a neoliberal.

In East County, the school boards are dominated by members who are recommended by the Republican Party. I am fine with Republicans, who believe in traditional Republican values like local control, public education and fiscal management. That is why I recommended all three of the Republicans running for the Escondido Union High School District and they all won.

I was quite disappointed to see that Zesty Harper won a seat on Escondido’s elementary school board. After winning a seat in 2014, she became a controversial figure proclaiming, “No longer will it be OK for this disservice we have called your education to continue.” She declared that creationism should be taught in classrooms alongside evolution. She also sent her own children to Heritage Charter School instead of an Escondido Union School District campus. Her campaign web page states, “Zesty strongly believes in school choice and has supported local charter schools to increase innovation, competition, and choice in Escondido public schools.”

The Grossmont Union High School District has been run by the same Republican cabal for more than a decade. It was time for a change, but my council was ignored. I find board member since 2008, Gary Woods, particularly troubling. He taught online graduate courses at Liberty University and serves as executive director of the Equip Biblical Institute. Woods was endorsed by the Republican Party. There is a strong whiff of Christian nationalism here. This is the board that turned venerable Helix High School into a charter school.

Why is it El Guapo’s Report Card?

When I first entered the classroom students often asked if they could call me Mr. U. Something about that just put me off so I decided to have some fun with it. The vast majority of my students were Mexicans. Which was not unexpected since you could clearly see the Las Playas bullring just a mile or so away. I told them, “You can call me El Guapo.”

Guapo is pronounced wăpō like the Washington Post’s (WAPO). Most of the kids knew El Guapo meant Mr. Handsome. More than any kids I have ever worked with, Mexican kids love to joke around and tease. They immediately latched on to my new name and shortened it a little. Pretty soon I was Guapo as in “hey Guapo when will we ever use this stuff?” Which I would answer with the ever so encouraging “YOU; probably never.”

We all had a lot of fun learning math and physics.

The relationship between teachers and students is unique. We aren’t really friends but often develop deep attachments. We are not parents but students come to us – adults in their life that they trust – with issues they might not be willing to discuss with their parents. We are the example in their life of how to live that is working to prepare them for the future. This relationship is so important it is why machines should never replace teachers. It is probably more important than the curriculum being delivered.

Some Final Thoughts

We are a society being buried in lies.

“The election was stolen; everybody knows I won in a landslide.” This lie is still believed by 60% of Republicans because they watch Fox News which blatantly lies.

School choice is based on Milton Friedman’s lie that Public Schools are government monopolies. There are about 19,000 school districts in the United States each with their own governing bodies the vast majority of which are elected. That is not a monopoly and in reality school choice is about not having to go to school with those peoples children. It’s a racist agenda.

Well financed propagandist Christopher Rufo has widely spread the lie that CRT is being taught in K-12 Schools. He claims it is making white children uncomfortable; another lie.

A lot of people believe the lie that public schools are grooming students to “turn them” gay. The result is censorship and a small minority of LGBTQ+ students being tormented for who they are. They are people and they deserve respect. Prejudice is a social disease.

These lies have been used to divide us and distract us from billionaires grabbing more and more for themselves. Economic inequality has reached heights never before witnessed in this country and putting up with lies is a root cause. If we lose our Democracy then there will be no choice but to put up with lies. Look at what is going on in Russia, China and Hungry.

The American public school system is a treasure and must be protected from liars and their paymasters. If someone tells you that voucher schools and charter schools are superior to public schools, they are lying.

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Atlas Shrugged is Boring and Silly

9 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/9/2023

Preparing to fly roundtrip from San Diego to Philadelphia, I pulled Atlas Shrugged from my bookshelf for reading material. I had originally purchased the book for five cents at a Point Loma garage sale in the 1990s but never got around to reading it. While flying, I read about 200 pages of the 1,084 page paperback version. The original published hard cover version was 1,164 pages. For the next few months, I completed the book by reading six pages a day while eating breakfast.

Libertarian politicians Paul Ryan, Ron Johnson and Rand Paul claim Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and writer-philosopher Ayn Rand as their guiding lights. In 2012, Politico reported, “…, to bring new staffers up to speed, Ryan gives them copies of Hayek’s classic ‘Road to Serfdom’ and Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ — books he says inspires his political philosophy.” Hayek and Rand both subscribed to classical liberalism which means they believed in a political philosophy committed to limited government, the rule of law, individual liberties, and free markets with particular emphasis on property rights.

This knowledge was my underlying motive for reading Atlas Shrugged. I wanted to see for myself who Ayn Rand was and what she was teaching? What was so appealing to these Republican politicians?

Atlas Shrugged got a Chilly Reception

The book is quite odd. It is a romance, a mystery, a pirate story and a science fiction novel all rolled into one. The setting is a factious version of the United States. The endless descriptions of everything the characters were feeling and seeing became quite tedious but reading six pages a day made it readable – barely.

However, I did find the central character of the book, Dagny Taggart, a delight. Dagny is the granddaughter of Nat Taggart the founder of Taggart Continental the largest railroad in America. Dagny’s scumbag brother James becomes the CEO of the railroad but as COO, Dagny is the brilliant leader solving problems and making the trains run on time. She’s a force of nature that intimidates her brother.

Dagny’s three big love affairs are the backbone of the story. Her first lover is Francisco d’Anconia who is the heir to the world’s largest copper mining company out of Argentina. The second affair is with the married steel magnet Henry Reardon the inventor of Reardon steel which is lighter and more durable than conventional steel. Her final great love is John Galt the inventor of an engine that converts static electricity from the air into energy. Dagny never seems concerned about becoming pregnant and doesn’t. In this depiction of dystopian America, Galt is the instigator of an illegal strike by the “men of the mind.”

In the book, these “men of the mind” are continually being attacked by the “moochers” who loot their good works. The book’s title was originally “The Strike”, however the published title Atlas Shrugged came from the text where Francisco d’Anconia asks Henry Reardon what Atlas should do if “the greater [the Titan’s] effort, the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders”. With Reardon unable to answer, d’Anconia gives his own advice: “shrug”. (Atlas Shrugged Pages 131-132)

Rand scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein wrote about the reaction to Atlas Shrugged. She observed, “Reviewers seemed to vie with each other in a contest to devise the cleverest put-downs; one called it ‘execrable claptrap’, while another said it showed ‘remorseless hectoring and prolixity.”’ The Time magazines review in October 1957 asked,

“Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman – in the comic strip or the Nietzschean version?“

In a delightful take down in the National Review, the man detested by the left for his testimony against Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, scathingly observed,

“Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.”

 “Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.”

Chambers was even less kind when judging Rand’s philosophy stating,

“The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel.”

Ayn Rand and Associates

Ayn Rand is her pen name. She was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, to a bourgeois Jewish family in Petrograd, Russia (St. Petersburg today), on 2 February, 1905. She was 12 years old when Lenin and his communist revolution took power which led to great suffering in her immediate family. She was a history major at Petrograd University graduating in 1924. The next year, with her mother’s help, Alissa was able to secure permission to leave Russia and never looked back. 

While working for Cecil B. DeMille in Hollywood, she met actor Frank O’Connor. They were married in 1929 and remained so until he died in 1979. Professionally she was Ayn Rand but to family and friends she was Mrs. Alisa O’Connor. Alisa says Ayn is inspired by a not named Finnish writer and described Rand as an abbreviation of Rosenbaum.

In 1951, she and Frank moved to New York City where they developed an interesting group of friends. Among them were Janet Gaynor, art historian Mary Sures, economists Allen Greenspan, and Ludwig Von Mises.

Austrian economists Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Hayek promoted the classical liberal view of capitalism which attracted Charles Koch. Von Mises was one of the few critics that praised Atlas Shrugged. He declared,

“You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.

“If this is arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it still is the truth that had to be said in the age of the Welfare State.”

Rand’s Message

The whole point of the book is presenting Ayn Rand’s philosophy – Objectivism. It is her creation and the hokum ideological prism through which she viewed the world. It led her in 1964 to declare “The Virtue of Selfishness.”

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy claims,

“Whereas Rand’s ideas and mode of presentation make Rand popular with many non-academics, they lead to the opposite outcome with academics. She developed some of her views in response to questions from her readers, but seldom took the time to defend them against possible objections or to reconcile them with the views expressed in her novels. Her philosophical essays lack the self-critical, detailed style of analytic philosophy, or any serious attempt to consider possible objections to her views. Her polemical style, often contemptuous tone, and the dogmatism and cult-like behavior of many of her fans also suggest that her work is not worth taking seriously.”

In Atlas Shrugged, it is a struggle between “looters” and the heroic elites who are the root of value creation. The “looters” are proponents of high taxation, big labor, government ownership, government spending, government planning, regulation, and redistribution while her moral paragons are creators from which all economic benefit emanates. The elites are superior beings who should be acknowledged and allowed to run their businesses without interference. It is the ultimate view of laissez-faire capitalism.

In a fascinating 1964 interview with Playboy Magazine, Rand makes some statements that reveal how ridiculous her philosophical views were.

“To begin with, man does not possess any instincts.”

“I believe that taxation should be voluntary…”

“My position is fully consistent. Not only the post office, but streets, roads, and above all, schools, should all be privately owned and privately run. I advocate the separation of state and economics.”

“The disasters of the modern world, including the destruction of capitalism, were caused by the altruist-collectivist philosophy. It is altruism that men should reject.”

In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt uses his scientific genius to hijack the nationwide broadcast addressing the mounting disaster in the country. In his three hour speech which covers more than sixty pages of text in the book, Rand lays out her philosophy. Here are a few quotes,

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.” (Page 978)

“The doctrine that ‘human rights’ are superior to ‘property rights’ simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has not right to the title of ‘human.’” (Page 986)

“The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except the material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.” (Page 989)

“I swear – by my life and my love of it – that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” (Page 993)

An Observation

Growing up on a ranch in Idaho, I had a grandfather who was an immigrant from Scotland and a staunch Republican. For years, he was a big fan of Senator William Borah and his brother was a fanatical anti-New Dealer. If it were not for the anti-labor stance of the Republicans, I could have been one myself. So what happened in the 1950s that has made this party so anti-common man and pro-elites?

I think it was the right’s embrace of the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises along with the sophomoric philosophy of Ayn Rand; hard to see much daylight between their ideas and fascism. Unfortunately, it is an ideology embraced today by too many of America’s political leaders on the right.

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