#Tennessee Department of Education

[svalleynow]

School Voucher Program Passes in Tennessee

The Tennessee Senate and House of Representatives have passed Gov. Bill Lee’s statewide expansion of school vouchers, otherwise known as the “Tennessee Education Freedom Act of 2025.” The legislation was passed after hours of debate on both sides of the issue during a speedy four-day special session on vouchers, disaster relief, and immigration enforcement. The bill provides around $7,000 in…

[nationallawreview]

2024 Title IX Regulations Vacated Nationwide

On January 9, 2025, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decided the case of Tennessee v. Cardona, vacating the 2024 Title IX regulations nationwide. The court ruled that the issuance of the 2024 regulations exceeded the Department of Education’s authority and was unconstitutional on multiple grounds. The ruling may be appealed, but for now, institutions covered by Title IX should revert to…

[realjdobypr]

Tennessee HBCU Partnership Empowers Incarcerated Students' Historical Graduation Inside Prison

Six men, incarcerated at the Northwest Correctional Complex (NWCX), made history in November 2023, as they proudly marched across the stage, receiving their Bachelor of Science in Business degree from Lane College an HBCU. This monumental achievement is a testament to the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative (THEI), which continues to blaze a trail, offering education to those behind the prison…

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #27

July 12-19 2024

President Biden announced the cancellation of $1.2 billion dollars worth of student loan debt. This will cancel the debt of 35,000 public service workers, such as teachers, nurses, and firefighters. This brings the total number of people who've had their student debt relived under the Biden Administration to 4.8 million or one out of every ten people with student loan debt, for a total of $168.5 billion in debt forgiven. This came after the Supreme Court threw out an earlier more wide ranging student debt relief plan forcing the administration to undertake a slower more piecemeal process for forgiving debt. President Biden announced a new plan in the spring that will hopefully be finalized by fall that will forgive an additional 30 million people's student loan debt.

President Biden announced actions to lower housing coasts, make more housing available and called on Congress to prevent rent hikes. President Biden's plan calls for landlords who raise the rent by more than 5% a year to face losing major important tax befits, the average rent has gone up by 21% since 2021. The President has also instructed the federal government, the largest land owner in the country, to examine how unused property can be used for housing. The Bureau of Land Management plans on building 15,000 affordable housing units on public land in southern Nevada, the USPS is examining 8,500 unused properties across America to be repurposed for housing, HHS is finalizing a new rule to make it easier to use federal property to house the homeless, and the Administration is calling on state, local, and tribal governments to use their own unused property for housing, which could create approximately 1.9 million units nationwide.

The Department of Transportation announced $5 billion to replace or restore major bridges across the country. The money will go to 13 significant bridges in 16 states. Some bridges are suffering from years of neglect others are nearly 100 years old and no longer fit for modern demands. Some of the projects include the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River which connects Portland Oregon to Vancouver Washington, replacing the Sagamore Bridge which connects Cape Cod to the mainland built in 1933, replacing the I- 83 South Bridge in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Cape Fear Memorial Bridge Replacement Project in Wilmington, North Carolina, among others.

President Biden signed an Executive Order aimed at boosting Latino college attendance. The order established the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity through Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) are defined as colleges with 25% or above Hispanic/Latino enrollment, currently 55% of Hispanic college students are enrolled in an HSI. The initiative seeks to stream line the relationship between the federal government and HSIs to allow them to more easily take advantage of federal programs and expand their reach to better serve students and boost Hispanic enrollment nationwide.

HUD announced $325 million in grants for housing and community development in 7 cities. the cities in Tennessee, Texas, Alabama, Florida, Nevada, New York and New Jersey, have collectively pledged to develop over 6,500 new mixed-income units, including the one-for-one replacement of 2,677 severely distressed public housing units. The 7 collectively will invest $2.65 billion in additional resources within the Choice Neighborhood area – so that every $1 in HUD funds will generate $8.65 in additional resources.

President Biden took extensive new actions on immigration. On June 18th The President announced a new policy that would allow the foreign born spouses and step children of American citizens who don't have legal status to apply for it without having to leave the country, this would effect about half a million spouses and 50,000 children. This week Biden announced that people can start applying on August 19, 2024. Also in June President Biden announced an easing of Visa rules that will allow Dreamers, Americans brought to the country as children without legal status, to finally get work visas to give them legal status and a path way to citizenship. This week the Biden Administration announced a new rule to expand the federal TRIO program to cover Dreamers. TRIO is a program that aims to support low income students and those who would be the first in their families to go to college transition from high school to college, the change would support 50,000 more students each year. The Administration also plans to double the number of free immigration lawyers available to those going through immigration court.

The EPA announced $160 million in grants to support Clean U.S. Manufacturing of Steel and Other Construction Materials. The EPA estimates that the manufacturing of construction materials, such as concrete, asphalt, steel, and glass, accounts for 15% of the  annual global greenhouse gas emissions. The EPA is supporting 38 projects aimed at measuring and combatting the environmental impact of construction materials.

The US announced $203 million in humanitarian assistance for the people of Sudan. Sudan's out of control civil war has caused the largest refugee crisis in the world with 11 million Sudanese having fled their homes in the face of violence. The war is also causing the gravest food crisis in the world, with a record setting 25 million people facing acute food insecurity, and fears that nearly a million will face famine in the next months. This aid brings the total aid the US has given Sudan since September 2023 to $1.6 billion, making America the single largest donor to Sudan.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put forward a new rule that would better regulate popular paycheck advance products. 2/3rds of workers are payed every two weeks or once a month and since 2020 the number of short term loans that allow employees to receive their paycheck days before it’s scheduled to hit their account has grown by 90%. the CFPB says that many of these programs are decided with employers not employees and millions of Americans are paying fees they didn't know about before signing up. The new rule would require lenders to tell costumers up front about any and all fees and charges, as well as cracking down on deceptive "tipping" options.

[fearfulfertility]

The Department of Reproductive Compliance (DRC) stands at the forefront of safeguarding our nation's future, ensuring future generations' prosperity and survival. Through compassionate oversight and innovative reproductive programs, the DRC offers fertile men the opportunity to serve a higher purpose—bringing new life into the world for the benefit of all. With every pregnancy, these dedicated surrogates contribute to a brighter tomorrow, embracing their vital role in rebuilding our population. The DRC is committed to providing the utmost care, support, and guidance throughout this noble journey, fostering unity, strength, and hope for a thriving future. Together, we are creating life, one miracle at a time.

REPORTS ARCHIVE

External Affairs

Necessity for Immediate Draconian Measures

Legal Precedents in Surrogacy Enforcement

Barry the Belly

Re-Education Efforts in Rural Tennessee

State News Broadcast Transcript

Healthcare Services

Case Study: Surrogate S124-1437-L

Above Average Fetal Quotas

Paternity Compound Cost-Saving Efforts

Introduction of O-4 Visa Program

Cost of Conscripting Youth in Rural Communities

Increased Demand for Dermatological Supplies

Psychological Breakdowns in High-Fetal Load Surrogates

Planning & Evaluation

New Paternity Compound Construction

Enforcement of Surrogate Conscription

Surrogate Management Protocols

Operation Overdue

Surrogate Clothing Policy Review

Research & Development

Impact of Prenatal Nymphomania

Termination of Medical Intervention Research

Identifiable Traits of Fertile Male Surrogates

Administration & Management

Internal Memo - All Staff

Disciplinary Action - Unauthorized Harem

Deputy-Directors’ Team Building Event

Rise in Compound Work Injury Claims

Large-Scale Canadian Surrogate Conscription

Restricted Access

Security

Black Ops

Operation R.I.P.E.

Operation W.O.M.B.

Massage Service for Covert Insemination

Food for Wombs

Conscription of Olympic Wrestling Team

Private Chat Log - Lt. Gen. [REDACTED]

Surrogate Recruitment via Social Media Application

Internal Affairs

Corruption and Abuse in Paternity Compounds

Director [REDACTED], Intelligence Profile

Comprehensive Review of the Ethics Training Program

Operational Justification of Surrogate Conscription

Internal Audit - Quota Breach

Internal Security

Uprising in Paternity Compound 112

Suspected Sabotage Activities

Suppression of “Whistleblower” Film

Analysis of Quarterly Surrogate Escape Attempts

[mimi-0007]

Eva Beatrice Dykes (13 August 1893 – 29 October 1986) was a prominent educator and the third black American woman to be awarded a PhD.

Dykes was born in Washington, D.C., on August 13, 1893, the daughter of Martha Ann (née Howard) and James Stanley Dykes. She attended M Street High School (later renamed Dunbar High School). She graduated summa cum laude from Howard University with a B.A. in 1914. While attending Howard University, where several family members had studied, Eva was initiated into the Alpha chapter of Delta Sigma Theta. At the end of her last semester she was awarded Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated's first official scholarship. After a short stint of teaching at Walden University in Nashville, Tennessee, Dykes attended Radcliffe College graduating magna cum laude with a second B.A. in 1917 and a M.A in 1918. While at Radcliffe she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1920 Dykes began teaching at Dunbar High School, and in 1921 she received a PhD from Radcliffe (now a part of Harvard University). Her dissertation was titled “Pope and His influence in America from 1715 to 1815”, and explored the attitudes of Alexander Pope towards slavery and his influence on American writers. Dykes was the first black American woman to complete the requirements for a doctoral degree, however, because Radcliffe College held its graduation ceremonies later in the spring, she was the third to graduate, behind Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (1921, University of Pennsylvania) and Georgiana R. Simpson (1921, University of Chicago).

After her graduation from Radcliffe in 1921, Dykes continued to teach at Dunbar High School until 1929 when she returned to Howard University as a member of the English Faculty. An excellent teacher, Dykes won a number of teaching awards during her 15 years of service at Howard University. Her publications include Readings from Negro Authors for Schools and Colleges co-authored with Lorenzo Dow Turner and Otelia Cromwell (1931) and The Negro in English Romantic Thought: Or a Study in Sympathy for the Oppressed (1942). In 1934 Dykes began writing a column in the Seventh-day Adventist periodical Message Magazine, this continued until 1984.

In 1920 Dykes joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and in 1944 she joined the faculty of the then small and unaccredited Seventh-day Adventist Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, as the Chair of the English Department. She was the first staff member at Oakwood to hold a doctoral qualification and was instrumental in assisting the college to gain accreditation. Dykes retired in 1968 but returned to Oakwood to teach in 1970 and continued until 1975. In 1973 the Oakwood College library was named in her honor and in 1980 she was made a Professor Emerita. In 1975 the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church presented Dykes with a Citation of Excellence honouring her for an outstanding contribution to Seventh-day Adventist education. Dykes died in Huntsville on October 29, 1986, at the age of 93.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Noel Sims at Popular Information:

In a January 24 press release from the Department of Education, the Trump administration declared that book-banning was a “hoax.” But last month, President Trump invited John Amanchukwu, the self-proclaimed “book-banning pastor,” to the White House for a Black History Month event. Since 2023, Amanchukwu, a youth pastor from North Carolina, has travelled to at least 23 school board meetings in 18 states on a nationwide book-banning tour financed by Trump donors and allies, including Turning Point USA (TPUSA). On this tour, Amanchukwu demands that school districts remove books that do not align with his conservative Christian ideology — usually books written by or about LGBTQ people. Amanchukwu relies heavily on insults and threats during his school board speeches, maximizing each appearance's potential for social media virality. At a recent stop in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Amanchukwu launched into a typical rant about the book "It Feels Good to Be Yourself." Amanchukwu said the book was "a lie" because it acknowledged that gender identity is fluid and intersex people exist. As proof that the book was lying to children, Amanchukwu cited Genesis 1:27. Informed by the chair of the school board that he was out of order because his comments did not pertain to items on the day's agenda, Amanchukwu just began speaking louder, attempting to drown out the board members. Asked to return to his seat, Amanchukwu was undeterred. "We want to ban books that seek to pervert the hearts and minds of children," he shouted. The shouting continued for approximately three minutes, until the board declared a recess. In April 2023, Amanchukwu attended a meeting of the Wake County Board of Education in his home state of North Carolina with then-candidate for state superintendent Michele Morrow and other local activists. In his comments, Amanchukwu said that inappropriate books were being "purchased and delivered" to local schools as part of a plot by the "Democrat Party" that "castrates children, mutilates children, perverts children, grooms children, murders children, and indoctrinates children." (The Wake County Board of Education is non-partisan.) [...]

The money behind Amanchukwu

In August 2023, Amanchukwu officially announced a nationwide tour of school boards in partnership with a “major organization,” TPUSA. In June 2024, he appeared on a podcast hosted by TPUSA Founder Charlie Kirk during which Amanchukwu revealed that TPUSA had chipped in “thousands and thousands” of dollars to support his work. Amanchukwu also said he received “hundreds of thousands” of dollars from Robert “Dr. Bob” Shillman. Shillman is a businessman and right-wing donor who has previously funded anti-muslim activists including Laura Loomer, Brigitte Gabriel, and Tommy Robinson. Shillman also hosted a fundraiser with J.D. Vance for the Trump campaign in September 2024. Some specifics of the financial arrangement between Amanchukwu, TPUSA, and Shillman have not been disclosed. But, based on TPUSA social media posts, it appears that Shillman’s donations to TPUSA are being used to fund Amanchukwu's school board tour. Amanchukwu has worked with TPUSA Faith, an offshoot of TPUSA, as a contributor since July 2022. Amanchukwu was a featured speaker at America Fest, TPUSA’s annual conference, in December 2024 and is often featured on TPUSA's social media accounts.

[...] In Fall 2024, Amanchukwu became a visiting fellow at the Center for Renewing America, an organization founded by Russell Vought, a lead author of Project 2025 who was recently confirmed as Trump's Director of the Office of Management and Budget. The Center for Renewing America did not respond to questions about Amanchukwu’s work. [...]

Causing chaos at school board meetings to create viral social media content

When Amanchukwu announced his school board tour, he said he would travel to the “wokest and bluest and darkest cities in America.” Instead, his tour has largely stopped in purple or red districts — Boise, Idaho; Washoe County, Nevada; Gwinnett County, Georgia; Midland, Texas. On at least two occasions when Amanchukwu visited school boards that only allow public comments from people residing in their district, Amanchukwu has claimed to be the roommate of a local activist. Amanchukwu’s school board speeches follow a routine format. He identifies a few books he feels do not belong in school libraries. These books often feature LGBTQ characters and range from picture books to more mature young-adult novels. Amanchukwu reads a passage from one of the more mature books and admonishes school board members for allowing such “perverse” material in their libraries. Amanchukwu frequently breaks meeting rules, which has resulted in him being escorted out of meetings by police on several occasions — and provides eye-catching content for his social media accounts.

Popular Information does an exposé on anti-LGBTQ+ extremist and book ban advocate John Amanchukwu. Amanchukwu’s activities have been funded by right-wing bigwigs, such as Turning Point USA.

[eretzyisrael]

by Seth Mandel

Shafik never took anything resembling serious action against the students, and she left a Morningside Heights-sized mess for Armstrong to clean up. Trump’s victory in the presidential election changed the debate, but Jew-baiters still gathered in numbers and assaulted people, broke various property laws, and generally continued trampling on the idea that anyone in the Columbia or Barnard administrations was in charge. Armstrong, sensing that the federal government’s patience had run out, began doling out actual punishments for some of the more psychotic behavior of the Hamasniks, which at one point required the school to post security at Israel-related classes.

The punishments inspired more Hamasnik temper tantrums. Armstrong’s threats of disciplinary action were ignored. It was as if the Romanovs were standing at the windows of their Yekaterinburg prison house shouting orders at passersby.

And so the idea that faculty are “apoplectic” at Armstrong for “letting it get to this point,” is rich with irony. The only way to have prevented this loss of funding was to have instituted order on campus and shut down the junior PFLP camps. But when college administrators at Columbia and elsewhere called in law enforcement to do just that, faculty rebelled and essentially joined the opposition.

And this is an important point: The faculty at Columbia put the university in a situation in which there was no way for it to retain its funding unless the federal government decided to look the other way. The faculty are a not-insignificant reason Columbia is in this position in the first place. They arguably made it inevitable.

And not just at Columbia, either. Yesterday the Trump administration notified 60 other schools that they risked the same fate. The New York Times reports that it is quite a diverse group: “The list of five dozen schools included colleges from both Republican- and Democratic-voting states, elite Ivy League schools such as Brown and Yale, state schools including Arizona State University and the University of Tennessee, and smaller institutions, like Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., which has about 2,000 students.”

The secretary of education is Linda McMahon, and she has moved fast. As the Times notes, four days after her confirmation hearing she had the department announce its prioritization of campus anti-Semitism. McMahon, like the rest of the Trump team, hit the ground running.

Indeed, the speed with which the new administration has taken action on numerous fronts has frequently caught the White House’s targets and the Democratic opposition completely off-guard.

And the higher-education landscape was already changing by the time Trump took office. As of today, 148 schools representing 2.6 million students have adopted policies of “institutional neutrality,” according to the Heterodox Academy. Rather than putting out institutional statements on every passing piece of news, schools officials have balked at such activism ever since the American intifada began. Officials were caught between not wanting to align their schools with Hamas and their fear of student anger at any acknowledgement of Israel’s right to exist.

Fear, cowardice, whatever you want to call it, the universities have succumbed to it rather than stand up for their Jewish students. All those 148 schools adopted neutrality before Trump brought the hammer down on Columbia. Institutional neutrality, therefore, is only going to grow.

[beardedmrbean]

Two high school graduates who say they can't read or write are suing their respective public school systems, arguing they were not given the free public education to which they are entitled.

Cornell Law School Professor William A. Jacobson, director of the Securities Law Clinic, told Fox News Digital the lawsuits signify a "much deeper problem" with the American public school system.

"I think these cases reflect a deeper problem in education. For each of these cases, there are probably tens of thousands of students who never got a proper education — they get pushed along the system," Jacobson said. "Unfortunately … we've created incentives, particularly for public school systems, to just push students along and not to hold them accountable."

President Donald Trump has railed against the Department of Education for "failing American students," a White House fact sheet published Thursday reads. The administration has suggested plans to eliminate the Department altogether, directing education authority to individual states.

"Since 1979, the U.S. Department of Education has spent over $3 trillion with virtually nothing to show for it," the fact sheet reads. "Despite per-pupil spending having increased by more than 245% over that period, there has been virtually no measurable improvement in student achievement: Math and reading scores for 13-year-olds are at the lowest level in decades. … Seven-in-ten fourth and eighth graders are not proficient in reading, while 40% of fourth grade students don’t even meet basic reading levels."

An appellate court judge recently sided with Tennessee student William A., ruling that the student was denied the free public education to which he is entitled under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

"William graduated from high school without being able to read or even to spell his own name," Circuit Judge Raymond Kethledge wrote in his judgment. "That was because, per the terms of his IEPs, he relied on a host of accommodations that masked his inability to read."

To write a paper, William would speak the topic into a speech-to-text software and paste the words into an AI app like Chat-GPT, which would then "generate a paper on that topic," Kethledge explained. William would then paste that text back into his own document and "run that paper through another software program like Grammarly, so that it reflected an appropriate writing style."

William, who has severe dyslexia, went through 12 years of public education with an individualized education program (IEP), never learned to read or write, and still graduated with a 3.4 GPA, according to court documents.

When William was in 9th grade in 2020, a special education teacher asked a school psychologist to "[p]lease take a look at William [A]. I am very concerned."

The teacher stated: "this kid can’t read," according to the suit.

The Clarksville-Montgomery County School System (CMCSS) in Tennessee, "knowing he cannot read, passed him right along, creating an artificial GPA of 3.41 by the end of eleventh grade putting William on a path to regular education diploma, even though he lacked basic reading skills," the original complaint reads.

CMCSS told Fox News Digital it does not comment on pending litigation.

"By March 2023, William could not consistently spell his own first and last name while signing his IEP. And in June 2023, William’s own writing sample illustrated he was unable to write more than 31 words in three minutes. He misspelled half the words, all of which were Kindergarten level sight words he had memorized," the lawsuit reads.

In a similar lawsuit out of Connecticut, a high school graduate named Aleysha Ortiz argues similarly that she went through years of public education in Hartford County with a learning disability and IEP without ever being taught how to read or write.

Ortiz not only graduated with honors, but she was also admitted into the University of Connecticut, according to the complaint.

Ortiz argues in her complaint that while her reading and writing skills were not properly addressed, she presented "younger than her age socially and emotionally" and was subjected to bullying.

Like William, Ortiz began using "assistive technology to help her read and write, and advocated for herself tirelessly in school," the complaint states.

"In May 2024, the Plaintiff reported to her case manager and PPT that she had been accepted and planned to attend the University of Connecticut after graduation," the complaint states. "She told them that she was concerned that she was not prepared for college and would not be able to obtain the accommodations she would need in college to be successful due to the Board’s refusal to permit proper testing."

Ortiz was concerned that her elementary-level reading and writing skills would "impact her ability to be successful in college," but "[t]t wasn’t until approximately one month before graduation that the [Hartford Board of Education] agreed to conduct additional testing that the Plaintiff had been asking for."

The Hartford Board of Education told Fox News Digital that it does not comment on pending litigation.

Hartford Public Schools also does not comment on pending litigation, but the school system told Fox News Digital in a statement that it remains "deeply committed to meeting the full range of needs our students bring with them when they enter our schools — and helping them reach their full potential."

Jacobson told Fox News Digital that "in fairness" to teachers and school districts, they are "caught between various forces pushing against each other."

"On the one hand, there's oftentimes money tied to performance. And if you fail students, if you don't advance them, that could affect the funding that the school district gets," he explained. "There are individual students who have parents who … want them not to fail. And so there's a lot of pressure there."

An increasing number of public school students have IEPs, meaning more students have individualized learning programs that teachers, who are already overwhelmed by national employee shortages, must accommodate by law.

"Obviously, it varies district to district," Jacobson said. "Some have perfectly good intentions. Some have maybe not good intentions and just want to go along to get along."

The Cornell Law professor added that while he does not see AI going anywhere in the future of education, "we've got to be very firm that AI does not end up actually dumbing down the students rather than informing the students, because you can become very dependent on it, and that's another problem, but it's one we can't ignore."

Additionally, Jacobson said, parents should be more focused on helping their children to read and write.

"I think parents would be better focused on helping their students and their children learn, rather than worrying about the next lawsuit," he said. "I realize that might be a little unrealistic, because we are in a culture of trying to cash in on lawsuits, but I think our energy should be focused on fixing the system and getting students properly treated, as opposed to: how are we going to sue the school district?"

Justin Gilbert, the attorney representing William A., told Fox News Digital that "[w]ith up to 20% of the students in the United States having dyslexia, William’s case reinforces the need for dyslexia-trained teachers."

"Most of us take reading for granted, but once we move outside the ‘reading window’ of the elementary school years, learning to read becomes much harder," Gilbert said. "That’s particularly true for students with dyslexia. William’s case is a reminder, though a tragic one, of the need for greater awareness of dyslexia in the public schools."

[ritchiepage2001newaccount]

MAGA congressman says top priority is shutting down FEMA like the Department of Education

A Tennessee Republican congressman on Friday told a conservative podcaster that the first thing he wants to do when he returns to Washington D.C. is advocate to reorganize FEMA – and “shut it down.”…

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Leor Sapir

Published: Feb 14, 2025

On January 28, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order’s most important provision defunds health-care and medical education institutions that engage in or facilitate sex-trait-modification procedures for adolescents 18 or younger. Within a week, at least ten hospitals in states where these procedures are still legal announced that they were changing their practices. The list includes some of the top pediatric gender clinics.

On February 4, the American Civil Liberties Union announced a lawsuit challenging the executive order. Joining the ACLU in the suit are other transgender advocacy groups and two law firms, which together represent two trans-identified 18-year-olds and five trans-identified minors and their families; they also represent PFLAG National, an LGBT organization with nearly 350 chapters nationwide, and the named plaintiffs.

The suit alleges that the executive order exceeds Trump’s Article II powers by directing “public funds to advance the President’s policy preferences, rather than those of Congress.” It argues as well that the EO discriminates based on sex—a claim also made against Tennessee’s ban on pediatric “gender-affirming care,” which the Supreme Court is considering in U.S. v. Skrmetti—and violates plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to equal protection and due process under the Fifth Amendment. Finally, and most surprisingly, it alleges that the order violates Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits discrimination because of disability in federally funded programs. Gender dysphoria, the ACLU claims, is a disability of the kind protected by this law.

On February 13, a federal district court in Baltimore blocked the executive order’s defunding provision from going into effect for a period of 14 days, at which point the court will reassess. The Department of Justice is expected to appeal these injunctions to the Fourth Circuit and, possibly, to the Supreme Court.

The ACLU’s case contains an unusual feature. One of the plaintiffs, Cameron Coe (pseudonym), is a 12-year-old New York–area resident who received a puberty-blocking injection in 2024. Cameron was scheduled for a puberty-blocking implant at NYU Langone the day after the executive order went into effect. Unlike plaintiffs in similar suits, however, Cameron does not identify as a boy or a girl. When Cameron was born, “they [sic] were designated as male. From the age of four, Cameron communicated to their parents that they were neither a boy nor a girl. They began to express their nonbinary identity in the fourth grade.”

The suit never defines the term “nonbinary.” Instead, it lists “nonbinary” as a “gender identity,” which it defines as “a person’s internal sense of belonging to a particular gender.” The complaint does not define “gender,” either, or explain how a “particular gender” can include no “particular gender,” which is presumably the substance of a “nonbinary” identity.

People across time and civilizations have felt that they did not fit into their society’s sex-role expectations. Contemporary therapeutic culture, empowered by novel medical technologies and theories from the postmodern academy, has recast this enduring human experience as an innate “identity” corresponding to a distinct type of human. Girls who once would have been referred to as “tomboys” are now “nonbinary” and part of the “LGBTQIA+ community.”

Nonbinary is the “fastest growing” gender category among adolescents and young adults, according to the U.K.’s Cass Review. As Jean Twenge reports in Generations, according to U.S. Census data, by 2022 more than 3 percent of those born in the 2000s identified as transgender and nearly 5 percent identified as nonbinary, representing a rise of 48 percent and 60 percent, respectively, from 2021. The U.S. Transgender Survey of 2015 found that close to one-third of its nearly 28,000 adult respondents identified as nonbinary, 80 percent of whom were female. By 2022, 38 percent of 92,329 respondents identified that way, with similar female overrepresentation.

The phenomenon of (mostly female) celebrities “coming out” as nonbinary, adopting “they/them” pronouns, and receiving instant media attention has become familiar to many in the West. This would likely be of less public interest if not for the fact that kids who embrace the nonbinary label are being offered irreversible medical interventions on that basis.

In its legal filing against the Trump executive order, the ACLU appeals to medical “guidelines” supported by “[d]ecades of clinical experience and a large body of scientific and medical literature.” The ACLU doesn’t specify which “guidelines” it has in mind, likely because it is referring to the now-discredited World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s “Standards of Care,” Version 8.

SOC8 introduced several innovations on SOC7, among them chapters on “eunuchs” (a “gender identity” that WPATH claims even children can have) and on nonbinary identity. WPATH states that nonbinary identity “first emerged in approximately the late 2000s.” The term

includes people whose genders are comprised of more than one gender identity simultaneously or at different times (e.g., bigender), who do not have a gender identity or have a neutral gender identity (e.g., agender or neutrois), have gender identities that encompass or blend elements of other genders (e.g., polygender, demiboy, demigirl), and/or who have a gender that changes over time (e.g., genderfluid).

WPATH writes that nonbinary “may communicate a specific consciously politicized dimension to a person’s gender” but also that it “functions as a gender identity in its own right.” Rather than explain the tension, WPATH reverts to cliché: “the same identities can have different meanings for different people, and the use of terms can vary over time and by location.”

Further:

A non-linear spectrum indicates differences of gender expression, identity, or needs around gender affirmation between clients [missing word?] should not be compared for the purposes of situating them along a linear spectrum. Additionally, the interpretation of gender expression is subjective and culturally defined, and what may be experienced or viewed as highly feminine by one person may not be viewed as such by another. . . . [Health care providers] benefit from avoiding assumptions about how each client conceptualizes their gender and by being prepared to be led by a given client’s personal understanding of gender as it relates to the client’s gender identity, expression, and any need for medical care.

The expectation, standard in gender medicine, that clinicians be “led by their patients” is never more applicable than when treating individuals whose “gender” and “embodiment goals” have no parallel in nature.

WPATH recommends various procedures to help those who feel neither male nor female align their bodies with their “internal sense of gender.” These include surgeries like “penile-preserving vaginoplasty” and hormone micro-dosing. Unlike male-to-female or female-to-male “transitions,” where the end goal is to resemble the opposite sex, nonbinary medicine lacks defined objectives. It is entirely dependent upon the patient’s subjective, idiosyncratic (or as WPATH puts it, “particularly diverse”) goals.

Nonbinary is both the result and a likely cause of gender medicine’s drift away from a clinical model, which at least pretended to care about evidence-based medicine, toward an autonomy-focused framework that deems cosmetic procedures “medically necessary,” for insurance purposes. The autonomy model discourages “gatekeeping” and insists that physicians’ proper role is to counsel “clients” (“patients” is too stigmatizing) on the technical possibilities and limitations of drugs and surgeries. If a male wants “softening of skin and reduction in facial hair growth” but not “breast growth,” WPATH says, the doctor must explain that estrogen will inevitably result in the latter. If a female patient wants testosterone for “facial hair development,” she should be told that this comes with “genital growth” (i.e., clitoral growth that can result in chronic, painful chafing). Gender surgery centers across the U.S. now offer clients a range of a la carte procedures catered to their individual “embodiment goals.”

If you are wondering what any of this has to do with medicine, you’re not alone.

What of the ACLU’s claim that the Trump executive order negates “[d]ecades of clinical experience and a large body of scientific and medical literature”? According to SOC8, “The most robust longitudinal evidence supporting the benefits of gender-affirming medical and surgical treatments in adolescence” comes from the Dutch studies that launched the field. Considered the “gold standard” of evidence for such treatments, the initial outcomes of the Dutch pseudo-experiment were reported in two papers, published in 2011 and 2014. Lurie Children’s Hospital gender clinician Aron Janssen, who has served as an expert witness in gender-medicine lawsuits, attested in a 2022 Florida hearing that the Dutch data are “the best . . . we have.” 

The Dutch first proposed early intervention as a possible solution to a problem that they observed in their adult patients: “subjective well-being of the transsexuals has increased, whereas an ‘improvement’ in their actual life situation is not always observed.” The Dutch clinicians theorized that their patients’ difficulty passing, a problem they attributed to the irreversible effects of puberty on the body, was a key reason for their psychosocial dysfunction. The problem, in short, was “wrong puberty”—that is, a puberty that a kid doesn’t want—and the solution, for adolescents in these situations, was the administration of puberty-blocking hormones.

Showing at least superficial awareness of the ethical problems involved, the Dutch devised what they thought were strict eligibility criteria. Only adolescents with documented history of gender distress arising in childhood and who had a strong desire to be of the opposite sex were considered. Crucially, what we today call nonbinary was seen as a contraindication—a sign that an adolescent’s sense of self was unstable. Such youths were ineligible for medical intervention. As the Dutch clinicians wrote: “adolescents… whose wish for sex reassignment seems to originate from factors other than a genuine and complete cross-gender identity are served best by psychological interventions” (emphasis added).

The Dutch approach quickly “escaped the lab,” was grafted onto a nascent transgender-rights movement, and became entrenched as the standard of care shorn of its original safeguards in multiple Western countries. Rates of transgender identity and gender dysphoria in youth skyrocketed, partly because “being transgender” was popularly redefined such that it was indistinguishable from regular gender nonconformity or puberty-related angst. Adolescent girls, most with mental-health challenges and no documented history of gender non-conformity in childhood, became the primary demographic identifying as trans and being referred to gender clinics.

Society’s shifting conceptualization of sex and gender coincided with a change in the rationale for early intervention. No longer was it about trying to detect future (mostly male) transsexuals and help them pass. No longer were puberty blockers envisioned as diagnostic tools that would allow patients “time to think.” The goal was now to help “trans kids” who “know who they are” to realize their autonomy and achieve their unique “embodiment goals.” The “child’s sense of reality,” explains the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’s statement on gender medicine, is the “navigational beacon to . . . orient treatment around.” And that sense of “sense of reality” need not be binary. All individuals now had a right to “gender euphoria,” regardless of age, mental-health status, or comfort with the sex binary.

One of the architects of this new way of thinking is UC San Francisco’s Diane Ehrensaft. “[N]othing less than a gender revolution is going on,” the Bay Area child psychologist gleefully declared in her 2016 book, The Gender Creative Child. “Who is leading this revolution? Children who are nimbly pushing the boulders around, creating an ever-shifting terrain as we try to grasp ‘What’s your gender’?”

In a 2017 interview with Tomboy author Lisa Selin Davis, Ehrensaft said that she had “kids as young as four or five” telling her that they are neither boys nor girls but rather “a boy-girl” or “just a rainbow kid.” It “just shakes the foundations of what we think gender is,” she said. “We have a number of gender nonbinary kids coming to the clinic, asking for, for example, a touch of testosterone. They would just like to have a little bit of a deeper voice and a little bit of peach fuzz and then stop the testosterone.”

Yesterday’s tomboy wore baggy clothes and rode skateboards. Today’s nonbinary girl micro-doses on testosterone to grow peach fuzz.

In a 2018 US Professional Association for Transgender Health symposium titled “Outside the Binary—Care for Nonbinary Adolescents and Young Adults,” Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a leading U.S. gender clinician, expressed a similar sentiment. “I don’t like the word ‘pass’ at all,” she explained. “Passing as a member of the other sex is not a criterion for treatment, whereas achievement of personal comfort and well being are.” The role of the physician is “to work with [a] person to determine what it is that they’re interested in.”

The clearest demonstration of how the goalposts have moved came in December 2024, when the lead author of the Dutch studies, Annelou de Vries, coauthored a peer-reviewed article arguing that the field should no longer concern itself with whether “gender-affirming care” is “effective,” or results in mental-health “improvement” (the article places these words in quotation marks). Drawing on the theoretical framework of “trans negativity,” which “critiques” the notion that “negative affect” in trans-identified people is “a problem to be resolved through medical intervention,” de Vries promptly abandoned the clinical reasoning that she had defended so vigorously throughout her career. In this schema, doctors are reduced to highly educated vendors of consumer services.

I asked Laura Edwards-Leeper, the psychologist who helped establish the first pediatric gender clinic in the country at Boston Children’s Hospital, whether her clinic saw kids with nonbinary identities in the early days and, if so, how they treated such patients. “There wasn’t even a term for it back then,” she told me. “All the kids we saw were straightforward binary adolescents”—meaning, they identified as either male or female—“with severe dysphoria, with some indication since childhood.” The nonbinary phenomenon among clinic-referred teens emerged in the late 2010s, she added, “but it was rare. Doctors were very hesitant to do anything medically” with these kids “because they said, ‘there was no research.’”

There are still no long-term studies on the impacts of using hormones this way, not for binary transitions and certainly not for nonbinary ones.

Blocking the puberty of boys like ACLU plaintiff Cameron at Tanner stage 2—the earliest stage of physical puberty—and placing them on estrogen therapy will result in lifelong sterility. They will have undeveloped penises and suffer from sexual dysfunction. Those lucky enough to have passed through Tanner 2 will still be exposed to a range of negative health effects, including cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Gender clinicians like de Vries, who abandon the pretense that they care about evidence-based medicine, appeal to the value of personal choice as the sole ethical consideration. As evidence that their “clients” are choosing autonomously, they argue that regret from pediatric gender transition is vanishingly rare, at less than 1 percent. The main piece of evidence furnished in support of this claim is a deeply flawed “systematic” review published in 2021. Notably, of the more than five thousand of patients documented in the review,only one identified as nonbinary.

Summarizing the findings of her multiyear review of youth gender medicine, Hilary Cass wrote that “This is an area of remarkably weak evidence,” and when it comes to nonbinary-identifying children in particular, “we know even less about the outcomes for this group.”

The ACLU’s decision to include Cameron and his parents in its lawsuit may prove to be a strategic mistake. But this would be on brand for the organization, which has thrown its institutional weight behind the most radical and unpopular campaigns for transgender rights. The ACLU’s star attorney, Chase Strangio, is a controversial figure even within the nonprofit, according to a source with high-level knowledge of LGBT movement politics. Strangio, who has used “they/them” pronouns, once tweeted that “Stopping the circulation of [Abigail Shrier’s] book [Irreversible Damage] and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

In 2020, Strangio told The New Yorker that she and a group of lawyers had asked trans-identified male inmates whether they wanted to integrate into women’s prisons or have a separate trans section in a male prison. An extremely high percentage of trans-identified male inmates are convicted of sexual crimes, and their placement in women’s prisons puts incarcerated women at risk. The inmates “all said that they wanted a trans unit,” but they were overruled by Strangio and the others. A separate unit, Strangio reportedly believed, would be “stigmatizing, and only served to perpetuate the prison system.”

Like other gender-medicine apologists, Strangio seems willing to say whatever the moment demands. For example, she once said that she “sort of regret[s] the emergence of gender identity as this entire separate thing from sex” and that assumptions about the reality of sex, not only of gender, “are socially, culturally, and politically contingent”—that is, they “take on meaning as we talk about them and interface with systems of power.” Yet when arguing before the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Skrmetti, Strangio accepted that while “gender identity” may be “fluid,” it nevertheless is an “immutable characteristic” deserving of constitutionally protected status because, as she argued, it has “a strong biological basis.”

“I am a civil rights and constitutional lawyer,” Strangio said in a 2019 interview, “who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution and the legal system.” Rest assured, she will now call upon that system and its Constitution to protect her favorite client, the gender industry.

==

It's amazing how inconsistent the genderists are. The same people claiming sex "discrimination" also say that sex is a "spectrum." They're claiming dysphoria is a disability, having spent a decade insisting you don't even have to have dysphoria to be "trans," that diagnosis is "pathologizing" and "gatekeeping," and any attempt to treat the disability is "conversion therapy."

Make any of this make sense.

I really want them to explain what type of disability it is, though.

It's going to be amazing watching them try to argue this and struggle to make it not obviously ridiculous and self-contradictory.

In 2020, Strangio told The New Yorker that she and a group of lawyers had asked trans-identified male inmates whether they wanted to integrate into women’s prisons or have a separate trans section in a male prison. An extremely high percentage of trans-identified male inmates are convicted of sexual crimes, and their placement in women’s prisons puts incarcerated women at risk. The inmates “all said that they wanted a trans unit,” but they were overruled by Strangio and the others. A separate unit, Strangio reportedly believed, would be “stigmatizing, and only served to perpetuate the prison system.”

Thought I knew where this was going, but I did not. Wow.

[svalleynow]

Bledsoe County Schools Receive Grant

The Tennessee Department of Education announced over $2.6 million in Perkins Reserve Grant (PRG) grant funds have been awarded to 55 school districts for the 2024-25 school year to support Career and Technical Education (CTE) across the state. The PRG grant awards support the implementation of programs of study aligned with emerging technology in regionally identified high-skill, high-wage,…

[collapsedsquid]

Jackson strongly identifies as a MAGA populist — she even went to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, to ​“show up” for Trump, a fact she trumpets in her X bio. But while she remains a loyal Trump supporter, she is troubled by his vocal support for vouchers as well as a series of controversial choices he’s made concerning the education department, including nominating a former Tennessee education commissioner, widely loathed on the Right for allegedly dismissing culture war issues, as second in command at the DOE. If these objections highlight a potential vulnerability for the GOP, they also reveal the highly fragile nature of the anti-voucher coalition. In states that have seen unlikely bedfellows ally in order to try to block vouchers, public education advocates are now demanding more accountability and oversight — the very ​“strings” that led many conservative activists to oppose vouchers in the first place. While the anti-voucher coalition may prove difficult, or even impossible to sustain, opposition to vouchers among GOP voters could still undermine support for Trump. Texas teacher Brett Guillory, a three-time Trump voter, once felt so strongly that the 2020 election was stolen that he considered challenging his congressman, Dan Crenshaw, for voting to certify the election. Guillory has now soured on Trump and cites vouchers as the primary reason. “I am now convinced that Trump is just another rich guy that the wealthy want in that spot so that they can stay wealthy,” says Guillory. ​“And to me vouchers are the clearest indication of that.”

A case in point for Guillory: Trump’s proposal for a federal voucher plan, which incentivizes the wealthy and corporations to give to voucher programs in exchange for unheard-of tax breaks, what some experts are calling ​“the quintessential definition of a tax shelter.” “It’s about money hoarding, pure and simple,” says Guillory. ​“These people don’t say ​‘how can I make your life better’ but ​‘how can I use you as a means to an end?’” A vocal part of Texas’ anti-voucher conservative coalition, Guillory says that the impact of what he characterizes as ​“the little guy fighting the giants” reflects the growing popular antipathy towards billionaires. ​“Government works by having billionaires buy politicians, and when you find all of that out, mad isn’t the word.”  These days, Guillory is doing his part to educate his friends and family, not just about why vouchers are an ​“elite scam,” but that Trump himself is a fraud. 

School vouchers you see are very neoliberal

[ifelllikeastar]

Bessie Smith experienced a "wretched childhood". Her parents and a brother died while she was young. Her older sister Viola took charge of caring for her siblings and as a consequence, Bessie was unable to gain an education. To earn money for her impoverished household, Bessie and her brother Andrew busked on the streets of Chattanooga. She sang and danced as he played the guitar. They often performed on street corners for pennies, and their habitual location was in front of the White Elephant Saloon at Thirteenth and Elm streets, in the heart of the city's African-American community.

Bessie began forming her own act around 1913. Working a heavy theater schedule during the winter and performing in tent shows the rest of the year, Smith became the highest-paid black entertainer of her day and began traveling in her own 72-foot-long railroad car. Columbia Records publicity department nicknamed her "Queen of the Blues", but the national press soon upgraded her title to "Empress of the Blues". Smith's music stressed independence, fearlessness, and sexual freedom, implicitly arguing that working-class women did not have to alter their behavior to be worthy of respect.

Bessie Smith was born on April 15, 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee and died on September 26, 1937 in Clarksdale, Mississippi from critical injuries she suffered in a car crash at the age of 43

[posttexasstressdisorder]

If you want to see what the GOP has in store for the rest of America, visit the Old South

Thom Hartmann

June 27, 2024 5:42AM ET

Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash

Today is the first Biden-Trump debate and many Americans are wondering how each will articulate their ideas for the future of America.

Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug.

It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery.

The SEDM explicitly works to:

— Maintain a permanent economic underclass of people living on the edge of poverty, — Rigidify racial and gender barriers to class mobility to lock in women and people of color, — Provide a low-cost labor force to employers,

— Prevent unions or any other advocates for workers’ rights to function, — Shift the tax burden to the working poor and what’s left of the middle class while keeping taxes on the morbidly rich extremely low, — Protect the privileges, power, and wealth of the (mostly white and male) economic overclass, — Ghettoize public education and raise the cost of college to make social and economic mobility difficult, — Empower and subsidize churches to take over public welfare functions like food, housing, and care for indigent people, — Allow corporations to increase profits by dumping their waste products into the air and water, — Subsidize those industries that financially support the political power structure, and, — Heavily use actual slave labor.

For hardcore policy wonks, the Economic Policy Institute(EPI) did a deep dive into the SEDM last month: here’s how it works in summary.

Republicans claim that by offering low-cost non-union labor and little to no regulatory oversight to massive corporations, they’re able to “attract business to the region.” This, they promise, will cause (paraphrasing President Kennedy out of context) “a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Somehow, though, the only people who own boats that rise are those of the business owners and senior executives. The permanent economic underclass is key to maintaining this system with its roots in the old plantation system; that’s why Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina have no minimum wage, Georgia’s is $5.15/hour, and most other GOP states use the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour and $2.13/hour for tipped workers.

It’s thus no coincidence that ten out of the 20 Republican-run states that only use the federal minimum wage are in the Old South.

Anti-union or “right to work for less” efforts and laws are another key to the SEDM; the failed unionization effort last month at the Alabama Mercedes factory was a key victory for the GOP. Unions, after all, balance the power relationship between management and workers; promote higher wages and benefits; support workplace and product safety regulations; advance racial and gender equality; boost social mobility; and have historically been the most effective force for creating a healthy middle class.

Unionization, however, is antithetical to creating and maintaining a permanent economic underclass, which is why, as EPI notes, “while union coverage rates stand at 11.2% nationally, rates in 2023 were as low as 3.0% in South Carolina, 3.3% in North Carolina, 5.2% in Louisiana, and 5.4% in Texas and Georgia.”

Unions also make wage theft more difficult, essentially forcing government to defend workers who’ve been ripped off by their employers. That’s why Florida doesn’t even have a Department of Labor (it was dismantled by Republican Governor Jeb Bush in 2002), and the DOLs in Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina no longer bother to enforce wage theft laws or recover stolen money for workers.

Another key to the SEDM is to end regulation of corporate “externalities,” a fancy word for the pollution that most governments in the developed world require corporations to pay to prevent or clean up. “Cancer Alley” is probably the most famous example of this at work: that stretch from west Texas to New Orleans has more than 200 refineries and chemical plants pouring poison into the air resulting in downwind communities having a 7 to 21 times greater exposure to these substances. And high rates of cancer: Southern corporate profits are boosted by sick people.

Between 2008 and 2018, EPI documents, funding for state environmental agencies was “cut [in Texas and Louisiana] by 35.2% and 34.8% respectively.… Funding was down by 33.7% in North Carolina, 32.8% in Delaware, 20.8% in Georgia, 20.3% in Tennessee, and 10% in Alabama.”

To keep income taxes low on the very wealthy, the SEDM calls for shifting as much of the taxpaying responsibility away from high-income individuals and dumping it instead on the working poor and middle class. This is done by either ending or gutting the income tax (Texas, Florida, and Tennessee have no income tax) and shifting to sales tax, property taxes, fees, and fines.

Nationally, for example, sales taxes provide 34.4% of state and local revenue, but in the SEDM states that burden is radically shifted to consumers: Tennessee, for example, gets 56.6% of their revenue from sales tax, Louisiana 53.3%, Florida 50.9%, Arkansas 49.6%, Alabama 48%, and Mississippi 45.5%. Fees for registering cars, obtaining drivers’ and professional licenses, tolls, traffic and other fines, and permits for home improvements all add to the load carried by average working people.

Republicans argue that keeping taxes low on “job creators” encourages them to “create more jobs,” but that old canard hasn’t really been taken seriously by anybody since Reagan first rolled it out in 1981. It does work to fill their money bins, though, and helps cover the cost of their (tax deductible) private jets, clubs, and yachts.

Another way the SEDM maintains a low-wage workforce is by preventing young people from getting the kind of good education that would enable them to move up and out of their economic and social class. Voucher systems to gut public education, villainization of unionized teachers and librarians, and increasing college tuition all work together to maintain high levels of functional illiteracy. Fifty-four percent of Americans have a literacy rate that doesn’t exceed sixth grade, with the nation’s worst illiteracy mostly in the Old South.

Imposing this limitation against economic mobility on women is also vital to the SEDM. Southern states are famous for their lack of female representation in state legislatures (West Virginia 13%, Tennessee 14%, Mississippi and South Carolina 15%, Alabama and Louisiana 18%), and the states that have most aggressively limited access to abortion and reproductive healthcare (designed to keep women out of the workplace and dependent on men) are entirely Republican-controlled.

Perhaps the most important part of the SEDM pushed by Republicans and Project 2025 is gutting the social safety net. Wealthy rightwingers have complained since FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s that transferring wealth from them to poor and middle-class people is socialism, the first step toward a complete communist tyranny in the United States. It’s an article of faith for today’s GOP.

Weekly unemployment benefits, for example, are lowest in “Mississippi ($235), Alabama ($275), Florida ($275), Louisiana ($275), Tennessee ($275), South Carolina ($326), and North Carolina ($350)” with Southern states setting the maximum number of weeks you can draw benefits at 12 in Florida, North Carolina, and Kentucky, 14 in Alabama and Georgia, and a mere 16 weeks in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

While only 3.3% of children in the Northeast lack health insurance, for the Southern states that number more than doubles to 7.7%. Ten states using the SEDM still refuse to expand Medicaid to cover all state residents living and working in poverty, including Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas.

The main benefit to employers of this weak social safety net is that workers are increasingly desperate for wages — any sort of wages — and even the paltriest of benefits to keep their heads above water economically. As a result, they’re far more likely to tolerate exploitative workplace conditions, underpaid work, and wage theft.

Finally, the SEDM makes aggressive use of the 13th Amendment’s legalization of slavery. That’s not a metaphor: the Amendment says, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” [emphasis added]

That “except as punishment for crime” is the key. While Iceland’s and Japan’s incarceration rates are 36 for every 100,000 people, Finland and Norway come in at 51, Ireland and Canada at 88, there are 664 people in prison in America for every 100,000 people. No other developed country even comes close, because no other developed country also allows legalized slavery under color of law.

Fully 800,000 (out of a total 1.2 million prisoners) Americans are currently held in conditions of slave labor in American jails and prisons, most working for private prison corporations that profitably insource work and unfairly compete against normal American companies. Particularly in the South, this workforce is largely Black and Hispanic.

As the ACLU documented for the EPI, “The vast majority of work done by prisoners in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas is unpaid.” Literal slave labor, in other words. It’s a international scandal, but it’s also an important part of this development model that was, after all, first grounded in chattel slavery.

The Christian white supremacist roots of the SEDM worldview are best summed up by the lobbyist and head of the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, Vance Muse — the inventor of the modern “right to work for less” model and advocate for the Southern Economic Development Model — who famously proclaimed in 1944, just days after Arkansas and Florida became the first states to adopt his anti-union legislation, that it was all about keeping Blacks and Jews in their places to protect the power and privileges of wealthy white people.

So, if you want to see what Republicans have in mind for the rest of America if Trump or another Republican becomes president and they can hold onto Congress, just visit the Old South. Or, as today’s MAGA GOP would call it, “the New Model.”

[thebiscuiteternal]

Gov. Bill Lee said Wednesday that he’d welcome closing the U.S. Department of Education under President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, adding that states can do a better job of deciding how to spend federal dollars on students. “I believe that Tennessee would be more capable than the federal government of designing a strategy for spending federal dollars in Tennessee,” Lee told reporters when asked about the prospect. “We know Tennessee. We know our children. We know the needs here much better than a bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. does,” Lee said.

Reminder that this dickweed is the one currently trying to force a program that would spend state money on vouchers for out-of-state religion-based schools run by Hillsdale College, the only school that could match Liberty University for the amount of right-wing evangelicalism it's inserted into issues of education.