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https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/21/2357452/-Cartoon-Racist-douchenozzle?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

A cartoon by Clay Jones.

Related | Why can't Trump remember why he had an MRI?

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https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/21/2359217/-Inside-the-Trump-administration-s-man-made-hunger-crisis?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

By Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester, photography by Brian Otieno for ProPublica

On July 18, a mild, overcast night in Nairobi, Kenya, a team of President Donald Trump’s top foreign aid advisers ducked into a meeting room at the Tribe Hotel, their luxury accommodations in the city’s diplomatic quarter, for a private dinner.

The visitors from Washington included Marcus Thornton, a former Border Patrol agent known for a series of public lawsuits against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; Kenneth Jackson, a former oil executive who had done a stint in government under the first Trump administration; and Laken Rapier, who’d previously managed communications for the city of Fort Worth, Texas. This year, all had been appointed to leadership roles in the U.S. Agency for International Development, the premier government humanitarian agency in the world.

Five months earlier, some of the visiting aides had celebrated USAID’s destruction over cake and speeches in Washington. With that job done, they’d embarked on a world tour of half a dozen cities, including the Kenyan capital. They were granted special permission to fly business class “to help ensure maximum rest and comfort,” according to an internal memo. Thornton alone received authorization to expense more than $35,000 in taxpayer money for the trip. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s top experts, who were being forced out of the agency amid the administration’s stated commitment to austerity.

Related | More kids are dying—thanks to Trump

When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi learned of the visit, officials there arranged the dinner with a goal in mind. It would be their last opportunity to explain, face-to-face, the catastrophic impact of Trump’s drastic cuts to foreign aid.

A top concern: the administration’s failure to fund the World Food Program’s operation in Kenya, where about 720,000 refugees, among the most vulnerable people on earth, relied on the organization to survive. After providing $112 million in 2024, the U.S. abruptly cut off money in January without warning, leaving the program with no time to find adequate support or import the food needed for the rest of the year.

For months afterward, U.S. government and humanitarian officials  warned Washington that the cutoff had led to increasingly dire circumstances. They begged Trump’s political advisers, including Thornton, to renew WFP’s grant and give the money it needed to avert disaster. The embassy in Nairobi sent at least eight cables to the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, explaining the situation on the ground and projecting mass hunger, violence and regional instability.

Those warnings went unheeded. Rubio, facing pressure from lawmakers and humanitarian groups, nevertheless publicly asserted that the agency’s mass cuts had spared food programs — even as the administration failed to fund WFP in Kenya behind the scenes. “If it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio told reporters on Feb. 4. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”

By the spring, WFP still had not received funding, ran low on supplies and would be forced to stop feeding many of Kenya’s refugees. In Kakuma, the third-largest camp in the world, WFP cut rations to their lowest in history, trapping most of the 308,000 people in the camp with almost nothing to eat.

They began to starve, and many — mostly children — died because their malnourished bodies couldn’t fight off infections, ProPublica found while reporting in the camp. Mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed. Young men took to the streets in protests, some of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud. Out of options and mortally afraid, refugees began fleeing the camp by foot and in overcramped cars, threatening a new migration crisis on the continent. They said they’d rather risk being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly starving in Kakuma.

To press the urgency of the situation in East Africa at dinner, the embassy officials enlisted Dragica Pajevic, a WFP veteran of more than two decades. Pajevic arrived at the Tribe Hotel early. She brought props. The bag slung over her shoulder held a collection of Tupperware containers with different amounts of dry rice, lentils and oil.

As they ate, she placed each container on the table. The largest represented 2,100 daily calories, what humanitarians like her consider the minimum daily intake for an adult. The next container showed 840 calories. That is what a fifth of refugees in Kakuma were set to receive come August. Another third would get just over 400 calories. Then she showed an empty container. The rest — almost half of the people in Kakuma — would get nothing at all.

Pajevic ended her presentation by relaying a truism that she said a government official in Liberia had once told her: The only difference between life and death during a famine is WFP and the U.S. government, its largest donor.

“The one who’s not hungry cannot understand the beastly pain of hunger,” Pajevic said, “and what a person is willing to do just to tame that beastly pain.”

The response was muted, according to other people familiar with the dinner. Jackson, then USAID’s deputy administrator for management and resources, said the decision to renew WFP’s grant was now with the State Department, and gave no indication he would appeal on the organization’s behalf. Thornton, a foreign service officer who ascended to a leadership post under Trump, did not speak. Instead, he spent much of the meal looking at his cellphone.

The dinner plates were cleared and the visitors headed to the airport. “They just took zero responsibility for this,” one of the attendees said, “and zero responsibility for what’s going to happen.”

The details of this episode are drawn from accounts by six people familiar with the trip, as well as internal government records. Most people in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. This year, ProPublica, The New Yorker and other outlets have documented violence and hunger due to the aid cuts in Kenya’s camps. But the scale of suffering throughout Kakuma — and the string of decisions by American officials that contributed to it — have not been previously reported.

The camp had seen similar spikes in pediatric malnutrition in recent years, but they were tied to natural causes, such as malaria outbreaks, extreme drought or COVID-19, according to staff of the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that operates Kakuma’s only hospital.

This was something different: an American-made hunger crisis. So far this year, community health workers have referred almost 12,000 malnourished children for immediate medical attention.

“What has come with Trump, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” said one aid worker who has been in Kakuma for decades. “It’s huge and brutal and traumatizing.”

In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official insisted that no one had died as a result of foreign aid cuts. The official also said that the U.S. still gives WFP hundreds of millions a year and the administration is shifting to investments that will better serve both the U.S. and key allies like Kenya over time. “We just signed a landmark health agreement with Kenya,” the official said, pointing to recent endorsements by government officials there. “That’s going to transform their ability to build their domestic capacity, to take care of their populations, to improve the quality of health care in Kenya.”

***

The day of the dinner, 370 miles from the Tribe Hotel, Mary Sunday sat on a vinyl bed in the pediatric malnutrition ward of Kakuma’s hospital, cradling her 7-month-old baby, Santina. The name means “little saint” in Italian, and Mary could only pray that God would save her baby’s life.

Slender, with close-cropped hair and arresting eyes, Sunday had rushed Santina to the hospital four days earlier after the infant developed severe diarrhea. Her husband, Juma Lotunya, had stayed behind to care for their 2-year-old, Grace.

Devout Christians in their early 20s, the couple fled to Kakuma together from South Sudan. They considered parenthood a sacred responsibility — especially Sunday, whose own mother died when she was young. As their family grew, Lotunya had hoped to start a small shop so he could afford to send their daughters to school. “I had that simple dream,” he said.

But in June, when Santina was 6 months old, WFP cut the camp’s food rations. Families like theirs were allotted just a small amount of rice and lentils — 630 daily calories per person — which they were expected to make last until August. Sunday and Lotunya stretched it as long as they could, eating one small meal per day. But the food ran out before the end of June. Sunday stopped producing enough breastmilk to feed Santina, and their chubby baby began to waste away. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Santina weighed only 11 pounds. Staff noted in her charts that she was severely malnourished, her eyes sunken.

Sunday watched helplessly under the clinic’s fluorescent lights as hospital staff pumped her baby with medicine and tried to reintroduce more calories.

On the clinic’s walls, next to decals of butterflies, monkeys and seahorses, loomed dry-erase boards with columns of data tracking how many children and babies had died in the room this year. Sunday spoke no English, but she knew what the numbers meant: One row listed admissions to the pediatric malnutrition ward — about 400 per month on average, including the highest number of edema cases, a key marker of severity, in years.

Another row on the whiteboards tallied those who never left the clinic: At least 54 children have died in the hospital with complications brought on by malnutrition in 2025 alone, including a surge in the spring when families first began rationing their food because of the USAID cuts. Worldwide, this year is the first in decades that early childhood deaths will increase, the Gates Foundation recently reported. Researchers said a key factor is the cuts to foreign aid.

In the hospital’s courtyard, another mother, 20-year-old Nyangoap Riek, leaned against a tree with her two children at her feet and said she was considering an extreme solution. “The thing I think about is committing suicide,” she told ProPublica, “because I heard the U.N. takes care of the kids when the parents are gone.”

Kakuma has been a sanctuary in East Africa since the United Nations and Kenyan government began accepting refugees there in 1992. People have come fleeing deadly violence in some two dozen countries — mainly from South Sudan like Sunday and Lotunya — but also as far away as Afghanistan. Covering an area about half the size of Manhattan, Kakuma is a loose constellation of head-high mud and thatch neighborhoods and corrugated metal slums, like a macabre oasis in a desert, stitched together by rutted motorcycle trails.

Its sheer scale has drawn political figures, Olympic gold medalists and Hollywood celebrities on humanitarian visits. Movies have been made, including a documentary about the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a group of unaccompanied minors escaping war and conflict. Angelina Jolie opened a school there.

A high-ranking Republican-appointed diplomat from the U.S. once called Kakuma the hottest, driest land on earth, “a place that is very close to the edge of Hades.”

“We are sustaining life,” she said, “by helping fund the World Food Program.”

In the past, USAID gave WFP’s global operations billions every year, including the funds to feed refugees at camps in Kenya. The aid is one end of a bargain to bring stability to the region. Countries like Kenya take in refugees from a host of other countries fleeing violence, famine or natural disasters. In exchange, the U.S., along with other wealthy nations vested in saving lives, help foot the bill for essential services. Without food, experts say, refugees would likely spill out of Kenya into other countries. Conflicts may last longer, claim more lives and create new refugees.

USAID has been ubiquitous in Kakuma for so long that it’s a literal building block in the camp; millions of old cans of cooking oil bearing the agency’s letters have been flattened and repurposed as lattice fencing.

When the Trump administration froze thousands of USAID programs during a putative review of the agency’s operations in January, Rubio insisted food programs would be spared.

But then Rubio’s lieutenants failed to extend WFP’s Kenya funding, blowing up the typical timetable the organization needed in order to ship food to Kakuma by summer.

WFP was blindsided. The organization’s leaders had received no notice ahead of the cuts and no communication about whether the Trump administration would ever renew their grant. “There was zero plan, except causing pain,” said one U.N. official. “And that is not forgivable.”

Even before the second Trump administration, funding shortfalls in recent years had forced the organization to drop rations by around 20% to 40% throughout the camp. To adjust for the long term, WFP was planning to reform its model in Kenya to make sure the small minority of people with some income, like small-business owners, didn’t receive food.

Thousands of Refugee Families in Northwest Kenya Starved After USAID Funding Cuts

In August, food rations were cut to historic lows. Almost half the Kakuma camp got nothing at all.

But this year, WFP’s leaders were forced to stretch their remaining supplies from last year. They made the drastic decision to cut rations to their lowest in Kakuma’s history. They also reduced distributions to once every other month instead of monthly.

In August, the handouts would become even more austere, as WFP rushed to prioritize families based on need. They determined only half the population would receive food. Most people learned which half they were in from a number stamped on the back of their ration card.

Across the world in Washington, the fate of places like Kakuma was in the hands of a select few political appointees, including Thornton, who was named the agency’s deputy chief of staff on March 18. Thornton first worked beneath Peter Marocco, Rubio’s head of foreign assistance, and later under Jeremy Lewin, initially an Elon Musk hire. Besides Rubio, none of them were subject to Senate confirmation.

As pleas poured in from government officials in Washington and abroad to restart aid operations in Africa, including WFP in Kenya, the appointees often failed to act, records and interviews show.

On March 18, USAID’s political leadership invited career government aid officials from the agency’s major bureaus to pitch the handful of programs they thought were most critical. It was the only time the agency’s Africa bureau had an opportunity to make a full-throated case for its development programs across the continent. They had just 45 minutes to do it.

In the room was Thornton, a member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, an organization that champions “the primacy of American sovereignty.” Thornton said in podcast appearances that his campaign against President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers introduced him to a government bureaucracy “that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves” and requires “fear and accountability” to come to heel, Mother Jones reported.

As part of the meeting, Brian Frantz, acting head of USAID’s Africa bureau and a diplomat with nearly 25 years of experience, pitched Kenya as an important trade and national security partner. At one point when discussing another country, Frantz mentioned the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, using the acronym TDA. Thornton perked up, according to two attendees. Then he asked: Was TDA a reference to the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua?

The USAID officials were stunned. “That was the one thing he said in that meeting,” one of the attendees recalled. “There was just zero interest in the subject matter.”

In a blistering memo circulated around the agency before he was laid off in late summer, Frantz upbraided political leaders. He detailed how they had prevented lifesaving programs from coming back online by refusing to pay for services already rendered and restricting access to USAID’s payment systems. He said they had frequently changed the process for how to appeal program terminations, burying their subordinates in paperwork for months.

“We were given make-work to keep us spinning our wheels,” another former official recalled.

Months before the last-ditch appeal at the Tribe dinner, embassy staff in Nairobi had also tried unsuccessfully to get funding restored to WFP. In March, Marc Dillard, the acting U.S. ambassador, went to Kakuma for a tour of the hospital where Sunday and Santina would later check in.

After seeing the stakes firsthand, Dillard signed a series of cables to Washington documenting the chaos and death in Kakuma and other camps caused by the sudden funding cuts to WFP. On May 6, the embassy wrote that declining food assistance had “already contributed to several deaths and could result in escalating instability in Kenya.”

At one point, a group of teenagers and young men in Kakuma splintered off from a protest and set fire to WFP’s tents. Kenyan police responded by shooting at them, wounding at least two, including a teenager who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the head. Ordinarily considered among the most peaceful refugee camps in Africa, Kakuma went into lockdown. Aid workers hid inside their compounds.

Sexual assault, violent protests and other crimes would only increase without aid, Kenyan government officials warned the embassy, according to another cable. They predicted the cuts could destabilize one of America’s closest allies in Africa, “undermining Kenyan willingness to host thousands of refugees, many of whom would likely otherwise join the illegal migration flows bound for Europe and the United States.”

At a roadside staging area, some of those fleeing Kakuma hired smugglers to take them the 70 miles to the South Sudan border — the same country where they had escaped violence. As many as two dozen women, children and babies contorted inside cars with their belongings piled on the roof. “It’s hunger that chased us,” one woman said through the cracked window of a car about to depart. “It’s hunger that’s making us leave.”

In mid-May, USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau in Washington delivered a memo again requesting the political appointees approve funding for WFP Kenya. “Without this additional assistance,” the appeal stated, “the WFP-provided food rations will reduce from normal levels of 60% to 20%, putting nearly 1 million people at risk of starvation and death and likely triggering additional insecurity within the refugee camps.”

Records show seven advisers in the chain of command signed off on more funding for WFP in Kenya. When the request got to Thornton, who by then had been promoted to USAID’s chief of staff, he did not. No money went through at that time. “Thornton became a real road block,” a former USAID official said.

Thornton did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions about episodes like this, the senior State Department official said the Office of Management and Budget, not USAID or the State Department, has ultimate authority to approve new foreign aid money. They said they worked closely with OMB to review all of the funding requests. “In order to make an obligation like that,” the official said, “you need to have apportioned funds from OMB.”

When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB’s communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false.

***

Santina declined rapidly in the days after arriving at the clinic. Hospital staff tried everything. They gave her IV fluids, put her on oxygen support and updated the diagnosis to marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition where the body starts to eat itself. Pneumonia gripped her lungs. Santina’s color faded and she struggled to breathe. She became unresponsive to pain.

Cradling her baby, Sunday thought about her oldest daughter back at home. Two-year-old Grace wore a little bell around her ankle because she was prone to wandering off. Sunday thought: What will Grace eat today? Tomorrow? Will she end up here too?  

Just after 5 a.m. on July 21, hospital staff pronounced Santina dead.

A doctor and nutrition specialist with the International Rescue Committee said Santina almost certainly would have survived if she weren’t malnourished. To Lotunya, the cause was clear: After starving for weeks, his wife could no longer breastfeed, which is why Santina had become so tiny and weak. “That is why she died,” he said.  

Santina was transferred to the hospital’s morgue, a squat concrete building at the edge of the compound. Lotunya borrowed $10 to bury his daughter in Kakuma’s cemetery, just on the other side of the hospital fence.

Once proud to be the mother she’d grown up missing, shame washed over Sunday. “I felt I wasn’t mother enough,” she said later, nearly in a whisper.

***

In early August, Sunday came home after helping to harvest the sallow greens a neighbor was growing out of dry, cracked earth. In exchange, they had given her a few handfuls of the vegetable wrapped in fabric. It was the family’s only food.

The August food distribution was supposed to come any day; the camp was tense. WFP’s new rankings determined that only half of Kakuma would receive food, a decision most refugees deeply opposed. Lotunya, Sunday and Grace were among those who would get nothing.

Someone had stolen the roof off the family’s single-room mud house, so Lotunya had used tarp and cardboard for a makeshift cover, which was disintegrating in the hot sun. Grace played on the dirt patio, the bell on her ankle chiming as she moved between her parents, clinging to their legs and crawling into their laps.  

Doting on her, they said, was the only way to cope with losing Santina. They have just one picture of their youngest child: a fuzzy, black-and-white image on the family’s refugee registration. “But,” Sunday said, looking at her oldest daughter asleep on Lotunya’s shoulder, “I have Grace.”

***

In late September, the State Department signed an extension to WFP’s Kenya operation. This year, the U.S. gave $66 million, which is 40% less than it received last year and, critically, the funds arrived nine months into the year.

WFP has told refugees it plans to provide food through at least March. Even then, most families are set to receive between one-fifth and three-fifths of the recommended minimum daily calories.

Sunday, Lotunya and Grace would each get the equivalent of 420 calories a day.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research. Yiel Awat contributed reporting. Photo editing by Peter DiCampo. Graphics by Chris Alcantara.

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/21/2359217/-Inside-the-Trump-administration-s-man-made-hunger-crisis?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/21/2355329/-Black-Music-Sunday-Tunes-for-winter-solstice-and-December?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

 Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 290 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

As we move through the month of December, we are now entering the official U.S. winter, the winter solstice.

I decided to listen to December and solstice tunes in multiple genres, rather than post a Christmas or Hanukkah collection which I’ve done here in the past, like last year’s Black Music Sunday from this time of year. 

I’m opening with Branford Marsalis’ cover of Keith Jarrett’s “Solstice.”

Ralph Towner’s “Winter Solstice” from the album by the same name continues the theme.

For many of us who live or have lived in New York City or visited during the holiday season, the winter solstice celebrations at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, spearheaded by saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Paul Winter, have been a not-to-miss event:

In 1980, Paul Winter and the Consort were invited to be artists-in-residence at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Paul Winter explains: “The dean had a personal mission to create a bridge between spirituality and ecology. … The premise of the invitation was entirely secular; it was not to have us play liturgical music. We could present any events we wanted, as long as we produced them ourselves.”

Since that time, the Winter Solstice Celebration has become a beloved annual tradition in New York City and for millions around the country, broadcast live on NPR. […]

The Winter Solstice Celebration is a contemporary take on ancient solstice rituals, when people felt a calling to come together on the longest night of the year, to welcome the return of the Sun and birth of the new year.

“Central to all the traditions of solstice is the renewal of spirit,” Paul notes, “symbolized by the rebirth of the sun. Winter solstice is a time for healing and hope; it is a time to celebrate community and relatedness; and a time to honor the diversity and the unity of the great cornucopia of life on Earth. Remembering the solstice, we resonate once again with the rhythm of the cosmos and allow our hearts to embrace the optimism of our ancient knowledge that the light will overcome the darkness.”

The film “Solstice Saga Celebration” is a retrospective three-hour video odyssey that interweaves iconic performances from our first forty years of celebrations at the Cathedral”:

I particularly appreciated the performances by gospel artist Theresa Thomason and Brazilian singer Fabiana Cozza. Here’s a link to the detailed notes written by Winter about the music and the performers.

When referencing December, the late great Count Basie joined up with The Mills Brothers to record their “The Board of Directors” album which was released in 1968, and it included a tune simply named “December.”

The inimitable Roberta Flack, who joined the ancestors early this year, recorded “I Can See the Sun in Late December” which was written by Stevie Wonder.

Here’s Stevie doing his version:

Poet, author, filmmaker, and teacher Kalamu ya Salaam discussed the song on his Breath of Life blog.

Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by Stevie’s fascination with the seasons. When he writes, “I bet that you can’t even see the sun / Although the sun is shining right before your eyes,” it’s as though he’s telling us to appreciate what we have. On a personal level, it’s a blind man telling the rest of us to appreciate the valuable gift of sight. On a general or metaphorical level, it’s a gifted songwriter showing us that beauty is all around us and yet, we don’t even notice it, let alone appreciate it.

Laura Nyro is one of my all-time favorites (I’m biased—she went to the High School of Music & Art with me). I featured her here in 2014 in a December Christmas post. Diane Garisto’s tribute website does a deep dive into her life and music.

Give a listen to her “December’s Boudoir”:

Robert Glasper and Andra Day came together to pay tribute to December in 2024:

I’ll close with music from Maurice White, Allee Willis, and Al Mckay, who wrote an update to Earth, Wind & Fire’s famed tune “September” for the month of December:

There’s lots more music in the comments section below. Join me, and post your winter solstice and December favorites! 

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https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/20/2359073/-Why-Republican-scandals-and-misdeeds-get-a-pass?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

President Donald Trump has been neck-deep in a series of scandals and outrages that would have ended the career of a Democratic commander in chief, or at minimum caused them a lot of political heartache.

For instance: Trump has gone on extend racist rants about Somalian immigrants like Rep. Ilhan Omar, tried to pardon a conspiracy theorist for state violations where he has no jurisdiction, demolished portions of the White House, and used the tragic murder of director Rob Reiner to advance his petty political grievances.

The mainstream media has treated all of these developments with kid gloves, making them at best one-day stories or mere blips on the media radar. Contrast this to onetime Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean’s singular scream that effectively ended his campaign in 2004 (Trump regularly screams at anyone within earshot) or the days and days of negative press former President Joe Biden received when he finally ended the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

Related | Trump screams at America that everything is fine

To be sure, Trump has the benefit of a Republican establishment that backs him no matter how grave the embarrassment or outrage—House Speaker Mike Johnson always conveniently seems to have missed the latest news—but the press is perfectly capable of harping on stories that involve Democrats. That scrutiny just doesn't apply to Rrpublicans—especially Trump.

Why does this happen, and with such regularity? The mainstream media has an institutional bias towards both-sidesism, which is the notion that the Democratic and Republican parties and the related liberal and conservative movements engage in outrages at the same pace. This simply isn’t true by any objective measure.

Leading Democratic figures like former Presidents Obama and Biden or congressional leaders like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer don’t operate at the same volume as figures like Trump and other MAGA-brand Republicans.

In all his time as a public figure, Obama never praised Nazis or argued that climate change is a Chinese hoax.

But it isn’t just an internal media problem.

The right has spent over six decades consistently and relentlessly going after the media, in what writer Eric Alterman dubbed “working the refs.” The notion is that by relentlessly putting the press on defense with allegations of bias, the right has preemptively pushed the mainstream press to bend over backward to disprove the right’s most dishonest and specious arguments.

After decades of this behavior the mainstream media consistently rolls over for the right—but conservatives never let up in their attacks. It’s never good enough, so even though former President George W. Bush referred to a member of the press as a “major league asshole” in 2000, Trump is still whining about the “fake news” in 2025.

Another reason the right’s scandals and outrages don’t linger is the lack of an outrage machine on the left that compares to the pearl-clutching energy on the right. Conservative leaders have message discipline and a disconnect from reality that allows them to make specious attacks on Democrats relentlessly.

These attacks are then regurgitated by right-wing media like Fox News, which turns national tragedies like the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi into a long-form narrative about Democratic incompetence, pulling in figures like Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who conveniently was preparing to run for president).

Yet in spite of these media failures, not everything can be ginned up to favor the right. Media complicity and weakness can only go so far, because everyday Americans have to live their day-to-day lives navigating the mess that Republicans so often create for them.

No amount of spin can turn back the effect of a cratering economy or a war claiming the lives of thousands.

Related | Seriously? The Trump-Kennedy Center?

Republican media domination falters in the face of voter anger, over and over. We’ve seen this in elections rebuking GOP failures in 2018, 2020, and now in 2025.

And we are likely to see it again in the near future, because there’s only so much abuse and gaslighting that people can take before they reset the terms of the debate.

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/20/2359073/-Why-Republican-scandals-and-misdeeds-get-a-pass?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/20/2359195/-Guns-marketed-for-personal-safety-fuel-public-health-crisis-in-black-communities?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

By Fred Clasen-Kelly and Daniel Chang for KFF

Leon Harris, 35, is intimately familiar with the devastation guns can inflict. Robbers shot him in the back nearly two decades ago, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. The bullet remains lodged in his spine.

“When you get shot,” he said, “you stop thinking about the future.”

He is anchored by his wife and child and faith. He once wanted to work as a forklift driver but has built a stable career in information technology. He finds camaraderie with other gunshot survivors and in advocacy.

Still, trauma remains lodged in his daily life. As gun violence surged in the shadows of the COVID pandemic, it shook Harris’ fragile sense of security. He moved his family out of Philadelphia to a leafy suburb in Delaware. But a nagging fear of crime persists.

Now he is thinking about buying a gun.

Harris is one of tens of thousands of Americans killed or injured each year by gun violence, a public health crisis that escalated in the pandemic and churns a new victim into a hospital emergency room every half hour.

Over the past two decades, the firearm industry has ramped up production and stepped up sales campaigns through social media influencers, conference presentations, and promotions. An industry trade group acknowledged that its traditional customer was “pale, male and stale” and in recent years began targeting Black people and other communities of color who are disproportionately victimized by gun violence.

Related | It's my machine gun, and I want it now

The Trump administration has moved to reduce federal oversight of gun businesses, heralding a new era announced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as “marked by transparency, accountability, and partnership with the firearms industry.”

The pain of gun violence crosses political, cultural, and geographic divides — but no group has suffered as much as Black people, such as Harris. They were nearly 14 times as likely to die by gun homicide than white people in 2021, researchers said, citing federal data. Black men and boys are 6% of the population but more than half of homicide victims.

Washington has offered little relief: Guns remain one of few consumer products the federal government does not regulate for health and safety.

“The politics of guns in the U.S. are so out of whack with proper priorities that should focus on health and safety and most fundamental rights to live,” said attorney Jon Lowy, founder of Global Action on Gun Violence, who helped represent Mexico in an unsuccessful lawsuit against Smith & Wesson and other gunmakers that reached the Supreme Court. “The U.S. allows and enables gun industry practices that would be totally unacceptable anywhere else in the world.”

KFF Health News undertook an examination of gun violence during the pandemic, a period when firearm deaths reached an all-time high. Reporters reviewed academic research, congressional reports, and hospital data and interviewed dozens of gun violence and public health experts, gun owners, and victims or their relatives.

The examination found that while public officials imposed restrictions intended to prevent COVID’s spread, politicians and regulators helped fuel gun sales — and another public health crisis.

As state and local governments shut down schools, advised residents to stay home, and closed gyms, theaters, malls, and other businesses to stop COVID’s spread, President Donald Trump kept gun stores open, deeming them essential businesses critical to the functioning of society.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not respond to interview requests or answer questions about the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce regulation of the firearm industry.

During the pandemic, the federal government gave firearm businesses and groups more than $150 million in financial assistance through the Paycheck Protection Program, even as some businesses reported brisk sales, according to an analysis from Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group.

Federal officials said the program would keep people employed, but millions of dollars went to firearm companies that did not say whether it would save any jobs, the report said.

About 1 in 5 American households bought a gun during the first two years of the pandemic, including millions of first-time buyers, according to survey data from NORC at the University of Chicago.

Harris is keenly aware of what drives the demand.

“Guns aren’t going away unless we get to the root of people’s fears,” he said.

Surveys show most Americans who own a gun feel it makes them safer. But public health data suggests that owning a gun doubles the risk of homicide and triples chances of suicide in a home.

“There’s no evidence that guns provide an increase in protection,” said Kelly Drane, research director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “We have been told a fundamental lie.”

Record Deaths

Less than a year into the pandemic, 20-year-old Jacquez Anlage was shot dead in a Jacksonville, Florida, apartment. Five years later, the killing remains unsolved.

His mother, Crystal Anlage, said she fell to her knees and wailed in grief on her lawn when police delivered the news.

She said Jacquez overcame years in the foster care system — living in 36 homes — before she and her husband, Matt, adopted him at age 16.

Jacquez Anlage had just moved into his own apartment when he was shot. He loved animals and wanted to become a veterinary technician. He was kind and loving, Crystal Anlage said, with the 6-foot-4, 215-pound physique of the football and basketball player he’d been.

“He was just getting to a point in life where he felt safe,” Crystal Anlage said.

Gun violence researchers say parents like Crystal Anlage carry trauma that destroys their sense of security.

Anlage said she endures post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. She is terrified of guns and fireworks.

But she has made something meaningful of her son’s killing: She co-founded the Jacksonville Survivors Foundation, which works to raise awareness about the impact of homicide and to support grieving parents.

“Jacquez’s death can’t be in vain,” she said. “I want his legacy to be love.”

His legacy and that of other young men killed by guns is muted by firearm manufacturers’ powerful message of fear.

Related | Why conservatives love guns so much

During the pandemic, gun marketers told Americans they needed firearms to defend themselves against criminals, protesters, unreliable cops, and racial and political unrest, according to a petition filed by gun control advocacy groups with the Federal Trade Commission.

In a since-deleted June 18, 2020, Instagram post from Lone Wolf Arms, an Idaho-based manufacturer, a protester is depicted being confronted by police officers in riot gear between the words “Defund Police? Defend Yourself,” the petition shows. The caption says, “10% to 25% off demo guns and complete pistols.”

Impact Arms, an online gun seller, posted a picture on Instagram on Aug. 3, 2020, showing a person putting a rifle in a backpack, the document says. “The world is pretty crazy right now,” the caption reads. “Not a bad idea to pack something more efficient than a handgun.”

The National Rifle Association in 2020 posted on YouTube a four-minute video of a Black woman holding a rifle and telling viewers they need a gun in the pandemic. “You might be stockpiling up on food right now to get through this current crisis,” she said, “but if you aren’t preparing to defend your property when everything goes wrong, you’re really just stockpiling for somebody else.”

The messaging worked. Background checks for firearm sales soared 60% from 2019 to 2020, the year the federal government declared a public health emergency.

The same year, more than 45,000 Americans died from firearm violence, the highest number up till then. In 2021, the record was broken again.

Weapons sold at the beginning of the pandemic were more likely to wind up at crime scenes within a year than in any previous period, according to a report by Democrats on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, citing ATF data.

Gun manufacturers “used disturbing sales tactics” following mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, “while failing to take even basic steps to monitor the violence and destruction their products have unleashed,” according to a separate memo released by congressional Democrats in July 2022 following a House Oversight and Reform Committee investigation of industry practices and profits.

The firearm industry has marketed “to white supremacist and extremist organizations for years, playing on fears of government repression against gun owners and fomenting racial tensions,” the House investigation said. “The increase in racially motivated violence has also led to rising rates of gun ownership among Black Americans, allowing the industry to profit from both white supremacists and their targets.”

In 2024, then-President Joe Biden’s Department of the Interior provided a $215,000 grant to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a leading firearm industry trade group, to help companies market guns to Black Americans.

The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for protecting consumers from deceptive and unfair business practices and has the power to take enforcement action. It issued warnings to companies that made unsubstantiated claims their products could prevent or treat COVID, for instance.

But when families of gun violence victims, lawmakers, and advocacy groups asked the FTC in 2022, during Biden’s term, to investigate how firearms were marketed to children, people of color, and groups that espouse white supremacy, officials did not announce any public action.

This summer, the National Shooting Sports Foundation pressed its case to the FTC and derided “a coordinated ‘lawfare’ campaign” that it said gun control groups have waged against “constitutionally-protected firearm advertising.”

FTC spokesperson Mitchell Katz declined to comment, saying in an email that the agency does not acknowledge or deny the existence of investigations.

Serena Viswanathan, who retired as an FTC associate director in June, told KFF Health News that the agency lost at least a quarter of the staff in its advertising practices division after Trump came into office in January.

Gun companies Smith & Wesson, Lone Wolf Arms, and Impact Arms did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the National Shooting Sports Foundation or the NRA.

In an August 2022 social media post, Smith & Wesson President and CEO Mark Smith said gun manufacturers were being wrongly blamed by some politicians for the pandemic surge in violence, saying cities experiencing violent crime had “promoted irresponsible, soft-on-crime policies that often treat criminals as victims and victims as criminals.”

He added, “Some now seek to prohibit firearm manufacturers and supporters of the 2nd Amendment from advertising products in a manner designed to remind law-abiding citizens that they have a Constitutional right to bear arms in defense of themselves and their families.”

Guns and Race

In 2015, the National Shooting Sports Foundation gathered supporters at a conference in Savannah, Georgia, and urged the firearm industry to diversify its customer base, according to a YouTube video and reports from Everytown for Gun Safety and the Violence Policy Center.

Competitive shooter Chris Cheng gave a presentation called “Diversity: The Next Big Opportunity.” Screenshots from the conference include slides purporting to show “demographics,” “psychographics,” and “technographics” of Black and Hispanic shooters.

The slides described Black shooters as “expressive and confident socially, in a crowd” and “less likely to be married and to be a college grad.” They said Hispanic shooters were “much more trusting of advertising and celebrities.”

Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, said industry marketing shifted in the latter half of the 20th century as the popularity of hunting declined. The new sales pitch: guns for personal safety.

“They said, ‘We need to break into new markets,’” Suplina said. “They identified women and people of color. They didn’t have a lot of success until the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the death of George Floyd. The marketing says, ‘You deserve the Second Amendment too.’ They are selling the product as an antidote to fear and anxiety.”

Gun manufacturers were harshly criticized in the Oversight Committee’s 2022 investigation for marketing products to people of color, as gun violence remains a leading cause of death for young Black and Latino men.

At the same time, some companies also promoted assault rifles to white supremacist groups who believe a race war is imminent, the investigation found. One company sold an AK-47-style rifle called the “Big Igloo Aloha,” a reference to an anti-government movement, it said.

Still, Philip Smith wants more Black people to get guns for protection.

Smith said he was working as a human resources consultant a decade ago when he got the idea to form the National African American Gun Association, which helped the National Shooting Sports Foundation compile its report on communicating with Black consumers.

Smith encourages Black people to buy firearms for self-defense and get proper training on how to use them.

After 10 years, Smith said, his group has about 45,000 members nationwide. Single members pay $39 a year and couples $59, which gives them access to discounts from the organization’s corporate partners, including gunmakers, and raffles for gun giveaways, according to its website.

The police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin helped spark early interest from doctors, lawyers, and others in joining the group, he said. But interest took off during the pandemic, he said, even among Democrats who had resisted the idea of owning a gun.

“Hundreds of people called me and said, ‘I don’t agree with anything you’re saying, but what kind of gun should I buy,’” Smith recalled.

Smith, describing himself as “quiet, nerdy, and Afrocentric,” said criticism of guns misses the point.

“My ancestors bled for us to have this right,” he said. “Are there some racist white people? Yes. But we should buy guns because there is a need. No one is forcing us to buy guns.”

‘American Amnesia’

During the pandemic, gun violence took its greatest toll on racially segregated neighborhoods in places such as Philadelphia, where roughly 1 in 4 residents live in poverty.

A city report says a one-year period in the pandemic saw more than 2,300 shootings, or about six a day. Many of the cases haven’t been solved by police.

City officials cited the boom in gun sales in the report: Fewer than 400,000 sales took place in Pennsylvania in 2000, but in 2020 it was more than 1 million.

Gun sales have dropped since the pandemic ended, but the harm they’ve caused persists.

At a conference last year inside the Eagles’ football stadium, victims of firearm violence or their relatives joined activists to share accounts of near-death experiences and the grief of losing loved ones.

Paintings flanked the stage and the meeting space to commemorate people who had been fatally shot, nearly all young people of color, under messages such as “You are loved and missed forever” and “Those we love never leave.”

Marion Wilson, a community activist, said he believes the nation has forgotten the suffering Philadelphia and other cities endured during the pandemic.

“We suffer from the disease of American amnesia,” he said.

Harris was on his way home from a job at Burlington Coat Factory nearly two decades ago when robbers followed him from a bus stop and demanded money. He said he had none and was shot.

Harris had spent his early life fixing cars with his grandfather, when he wasn’t at school or attending church. He remembers lying in a hospital bed, overcome with a sense of helplessness.

“I had to learn to feed myself again,” he said. “I was like a baby. I had to learn to sit up so I could use a wheelchair. The only way I got through it was my faith in God.”

Harris endured years of rehabilitation and counseling for PTSD. As someone in a wheelchair, he said, he sometimes fears for his safety — and a gun may be one of the few ways to protect himself and his family.

“I’m mulling it over,” Harris said. “I’m afraid of my trauma hurting someone else. That’s the only reason I haven’t gotten one yet.”

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/20/2359195/-Guns-marketed-for-personal-safety-fuel-public-health-crisis-in-black-communities?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/20/2356308/-Cartoon-Health-care-position?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

A cartoon by Tim Campbell.

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https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/20/2359228/-Cartoon-Turn-up-the-crazy?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.

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https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/20/2358896/-Clips-of-the-week-Trump-yells-at-America-and-new-GOP-head-scratchers?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

 President Donald Trump turned up the volume this week in an effort to force through his delusional view of the state of the country. Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s continued failure to offer any meaningful policy or solution to rising health care costs continues to weigh down its 2026 prospects like a two-ton boulder tied to a pool noodle.

And it’s all on video!

Trump screams at America that everything is fine

Frequently yelling,Trump addressed the nation, telling Americans that their experiences of the current economy were wrong, and that actually it was the “hottest” country in the world. However, hours after he spoke, the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the costs of groceries remain stubbornly high under Trump’s watch.

Nation's dumbest senator is back with a new head-scratcher

During a gaggle with reporters, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma tried to defend the Trump administration’s barring all of Congress from reviewing unedited footage related to the administration’s possible war crimes off the coast of South America. Mullin, arguably our dumbest senator, claimed giving Congress access to it could result in leaks.

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LOL! Tomi Lahren is preaching restraint and decorum now.

Right-wing media personality Tomi Lahren appeared on Fox News to discuss Erika Kirk’s private meeting with podcaster Candace Owens, who has been promoting outrageous conspiracy theories about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Republicans have nothing but excuses for health care failures

House Republicans unveiled their latest nonanswers about how they’ll fix rising health care costs caused by their refusal to renew enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits.

No laughing matter: Trump impersonator launches very real House bid

As New Jersey gears up for a special election to fill an empty seat in Congress next year, one political comedian is looking to turn his talk into action. J-L Cauvin, a lawyer by day and Trump-impersonating stand-up comic by night, is trading in his blond wig and MAGA hat to jump into a very crowded race to fill Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill’s former seat.  

Watch this Democrat blast Trump over endless empty health care promises

Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts delivered a series of blistering speeches on the House floor as Congress debated what he called a “stupid pathetic last minute bill designed to let Republicans cover their ass before they flee town for the holidays.” And he isn’t wrong.

For more video content, check out Daily Kos on YouTube. 

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https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/12/20/2359213/-Racial-harassment-against-black-students-ignored-under-Trump?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=

Since Trump returned to office, the Education Department’s civil rights office has not resolved a single racial harassment investigation. It sends a message that “people impacted by racial discrimination ... don’t matter,” one attorney said.

By Jennifer Smith Richards, Megan O’Matz and Jodi S. Cohen for ProPublica

In Colorado, students taunted their Black classmates by playing whipping sounds on their cellphones and saying they should be shot “to make us a better race.”

The only two Black students in a small district in Ohio were called the N-word by white peers starting on their first day. They got accustomed to hearing slurs like “porch monkey” and being told to go pick cotton.

And at a school in Illinois, white students included Confederate flags in their PowerPoint presentations for class assignments and shook a school bus as Black students were exiting to try to make them tumble off.

In each case, the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights arm investigated and concluded that school districts didn’t do enough to stop racial hostility toward Black students. It struck agreements with those districts to require changes and to monitor them for months, if not years. They were among roughly 50 racial harassment cases the OCR resolved in the last three years.

But that sort of accountability has ended under the second administration of President Donald Trump. Nearly a year since he took office, the department’s Office for Civil Rights has not entered into a single new resolution agreement involving racial harassment of students, a ProPublica analysis found.

“The message that it sends is that the people impacted by racial discrimination and harassment don’t matter,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, an attorney with a Texas nonprofit that has worked with families who’ve filed racial harassment complaints with OCR.

Related | Trump's push for 'patriotic education' is predictably corrupt and dumb

The Education Department had been investigating nine complaints in the Lubbock-Cooper school district tied to racial discrimination, but Duggins-Clay said she and others involved in the cases haven’t heard from the department this year.

The OCR regularly resolves dozens of racial harassment cases a year and did so even during Trump’s first administration. In the last days of the Biden administration, OCR workers pushed to close out several racial harassment agreements, including one that was signed by the district the day after Trump was inaugurated. With Trump in office, the agency has shifted to resolving cases involving allegations of discrimination against white students.

At the same time, the administration has been clear about its goal of dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs across all facets of American life. This has been especially pronounced at schools and colleges, where the administration has also eroded protections for transgender students and considerations for historically disadvantaged groups.

Internal department data obtained by ProPublica shows that more than 1,000 racial harassment investigations initiated in previous administrations still are open. Most of those complaints involve harassment of Black students.

Not only has the Education Department failed to enter into any resolution agreements in those racial harassment cases, but it also has not initiated investigations of most new complaints. Since Jan. 20, it has opened only 14 investigations into allegations of racial harassment of Black students. In that same time period, more than 500 racial harassment complaints have been received, the internal data shows.

The Education Department did not respond to ProPublica’s questions and requests for comment. Trump is working to shutter the Education Department, and the agency has not updated online case information typically accessible to the public since he took office.

Under Trump, OCR even stopped monitoring many districts the agency previously found had violated students’ civil rights — including some that the OCR rebuked days before Trump took office. In most cases, districts had agreed to be monitored.

On Jan. 13, the OCR closed out a nearly three-year investigation into the Cottonwood-Oak Creek Elementary District in Arizona, which it found had made “minimal and ineffective” attempts to address racial and sexual harassment at the school.

A seventh grader who describes herself as Afro-Indigenous said school employees witnessed her being pushed, kicked and ridiculed for having darker skin, then having water poured over her head by a boy to “baptize” her for “the sin” of being gay, using a slur. But the school, according to records, merely documented the incidents and then removed the boy from music class for the last weeks of the school year.

Students in Cottonwood who identified as queer told an OCR investigator that they were having anxiety attacks and considering harming themselves after sustained harassment. Peers groped their bottoms and nipples and yelled, “That’s the homo way!” A teacher told OCR she heard a kindergartener use the N-word and saw swastikas doodled on notebooks, and students admitted saying “slavery is good” and “white power.” For many, the investigator found, school was a hostile, discriminatory place.

“Almost immediately my daughter’s whole personality changed. She just went from a vibrant, happy, confident person to a person with dark circles under her eyes,” said Kate Sierras, who filed a complaint with the OCR on behalf of her daughter, the girl who was “baptized.” Her daughter was heartbroken, she said.

“She started having panic attacks every day. It got to the point where I would drive her to school and she wouldn’t get out of the car.”

The district agreed to extensive training for staff, training for students and their parents, and a thorough audit of reported harassment for two school years. A district spokesperson said the district has tried to address OCR’s findings but that it never heard from OCR again after the agreement was reached.

“We’re prepared and ready to move forward as soon as they reach out,” the spokesperson said.

A Diminished “Dismissal Factory”

The OCR operates under a 1979 congressional mandate to ensure equal treatment at school for students regardless of race, gender or disability. As recently as last year, it remained one of the federal government’s largest enforcers of antidiscrimination laws, with nearly 600 civil rights workers.

It has weathered the prerogatives of each presidency. In Trump’s first term, the OCR took a less aggressive stance than in previous years. But as he entered office a second time, Trump was not ready to settle for incremental change. He pledged to carry out the long-held conservative dream of shutting down the Education Department. His education secretary, Linda McMahon, has decimated the OCR and shifted its purpose.

The Trump administration started the process of laying off hundreds of Education Department workers in March — about 300 of them from the OCR — and closed seven of the 12 regional civil rights offices. While court challenges played out, those workers have been on paid leave.

Amid the staffing chaos and the shift in priorities at the OCR, families’ discrimination complaints have piled up. When President Joe Biden left office, there were about 12,000 open investigations; now there are nearly 24,000. The majority involve students with disabilities, as has been the case historically.

At the same time, even getting complaints into the investigative queue is getting harder. Attorneys still on the job at OCR describe working in what they call a “dismissal factory.” Records filed in court cases show that most complaints filed by families have been dismissed without investigation.

“Real investigations are very infrequent now,” said Jason Langberg, who was an OCR attorney in Denver until this summer. “With more than half the workforce gone, pauses for various reasons, a shutdown — this is what you get.”

This month, the OCR ordered employees affected by the disputed layoffs back to work. In an email to those staff members on leave, the department said it still planned to fire them but now wants them to start working through its backlog.

The accumulation of cases that stalled mid-investigation include several in West Texas. One stems from allegations that white students accosted Black students with racial slurs and monkey sounds in the hallways at a middle school in the Lubbock-Cooper school district in 2022. Those complaints were being handled by the OCR’s Dallas office, which McMahon closed. “No information has been provided” about the cases since, according to a March court filing in one of the lawsuits to stop OCR layoffs.

Duggins-Clay, an attorney with the nonprofit Intercultural Development Research Association who has advocated for Lubbock-Cooper families, said the OCR had interviewed students and parents and was actively investigating their concerns through last year.

“We felt like OCR was close to making a determination. We thought we were going to be able to get a resolution in the next couple of months, early in 2025,” Duggins-Clay said.

She emailed the investigator in July and got an automated reply that the employee no longer had access to the email. “There has been no outreach, no communication, nothing. Period,” she said.

District officials said in a statement that they also haven’t heard from the OCR this year. The board of trustees passed a resolution in 2023 condemning racial harassment, and the district “remains committed to fostering a strong, welcoming climate for students and the community, and addressing concerns promptly and thoroughly whenever they arise,” the statement said.

The OCR did reach out in July to Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Kentucky — to sanction it for its efforts to address discrimination against Black students. In September 2024, under the Biden administration, the district had agreed to address OCR’s finding that it disproportionately disciplined Black students and to put in place measures to halt unfair treatment.

Trump’s Education Department, however, warned the district that it “will not tolerate” efforts to consider racial disparities in discipline practices and accused the district of “making students less safe.” Then it revoked a nearly $10 million federal magnet-school grant and chastised the district for having sent extra funding to schools with more students of color.

Related | Trump follows through on promise to destroy the Education Department

The district revised its school funding formula in response but has asked an administrative law judge within the Education Department to reinstate the grant, which is designed to help further school desegregation nationwide and ensure all students have access to a high-quality education.

The OCR’s work has slowed, but racial harassment of Black students at school hasn’t, said Talbert W. Swan II, president of the Greater Springfield NAACP in Massachusetts. Only last year in his community, white students in the Southwick-Tolland-Granville Regional School District held a mock “slave auction” on Snapchat, bidding for the sale of Black students.

The district agreed to address racial bullying and to be monitored by the state attorney general through this school year.

“When you’re talking about 13-year-olds holding a slave auction, it lets you know that these racist attitudes are not dying,” said Swan, who also is senior pastor of the Spring Of Hope Church Of God In Christ. “They’re being reproduced over and over again from generation to generation.”

Civil Rights Enforcement Abandoned

In North Carolina, one district sees Trump’s view on civil rights enforcement as a way out of a resolution agreement reached at the end of the Biden administration.

An OCR investigation at mostly white Carteret County Public Schools had found that students had hurled racial slurs at two Black teenagers who had enrolled mid-year. Classmates cornered one of the boys in a bathroom stall and taunted him about his darker skin.

The boys’ family pleaded with school officials to intervene. In response to these incidents, administrators offered access to a staff-only restroom; the school’s police officer suggested that one of the boys leave school 10 minutes early, and the principal permitted the other to skip class. Administrators viewed the harassment at Croatan High School as isolated incidents because there were many different perpetrators, records show.

William Hart II, whose son and nephew were the targets of harassment, said it was so unbearable — and the district’s reaction so inadequate — that he and his wife moved the family to Florida after just four months in Carteret County. Both students graduated, and Hart’s nephew joined the U.S. Air Force. Both remain in therapy trying to make sense of the traumatic time.

“I never would’ve thought my boys would go through this. I thought my generation would be the last to deal with it. My father went to a segregated school growing up in North Carolina,” Hart said. “We thought it would be different.”

On Jan. 16, investigators struck an agreement with the Carteret County district. But in February, the district urged OCR to nullify its findings and the deal given the “dramatic changes underway in Washington, D.C.,” according to emails from the district to the OCR that were obtained by ProPublica.

The agreement was based on the previous administration’s “notion of diversity, equity and inclusion,” wrote Neil Whitford, the attorney for the district.

“The election of Trump as President has made it crystal clear that DEI at the federal level is dead,” he wrote.

Whitford told ProPublica in an email that the district has an excellent reputation and prides itself on having strong antidiscrimination policies. The district, he said, handled the racial harassment of the two boys well and has completed some terms of the resolution agreement even though it maintains it broke no civil rights laws.

Records show that no one from the OCR has responded to the Carteret County district since February, including to its request to dismiss the agreement and postpone any remaining reform efforts.

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