Jeanne Kentch, the chairwoman of the Mohave County Republican central committee, said that most conservative voters in the area were still devoted to Mr. Gosar. Yes, people are worried about inflation and housing scarcity and looming water shortages from climate change and uncontrolled groundwater drilling. But she said his hard-right conservative views were the most important factor in earning her vote.
“He’s the only one who would guarantee America first,” Ms. Kentch said.
Chuck Coughlin, an Arizona political analyst, said that challengers like Mr. Morgan were not just fighting Mr. Gosar but going against the DNA of most Republican primary voters. He said the challenger campaigns were likely to fail.
“Those Republican primary voters believe the election was stolen,” Mr. Coughlin said. “The more extreme the candidate is, you’re rewarded for that behavior. Because that’s the constituency that votes.”
Still, Mr. Gosar recently sought to distance himself from white nationalists who have become his allies and supporters. After he gave a video speech to a conference organized by a white nationalist, he blamed his staff for a “miscommunication,” telling Politico that the video had gone to the wrong group. Mr. Gosar spoke in person to the same group a year earlier.
The question of whether Arizona’s Republicans choose Mr. Gosar or a more mainline Republican reflects broader tensions about which faction will prevail as Republican standard-bearers as the party tries to hold control of the Arizona governorship and unseat one of the Senate’s more vulnerable Democrats.
Gov. Doug Ducey, a conservative Republican, recently signed laws banning abortions after 15 weeks, prohibiting surgeries for transgender minors and requiring that voters provide proof of citizenship. Nevertheless, he still received the ire of the state’s Republican Party for affirming President Biden’s narrow win and for defending how Arizona had run its elections.
Kari Lake, a former television anchor and a leading Republican contender to succeed Mr. Ducey, has promoted falsehoods that the election was stolen. One of the Republican candidates for Senate, Jim Lamon, falsely claimed to be an elector able to cast Arizona’s electoral votes for Mr. Trump.
View Source
>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<
With only 1,500 students on a small-town campus in southern Michigan, Hillsdale College is far from the power corridors of government and top-ranked universities.
But it has outsize influence in the conservative world, with strong ties to the Washington elite. Republican leaders frequently visit, and Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the 2016 commencement address, calling Hillsdale a “shining city on a hill” for its devotion to “liberty as an antecedent of government, not a benefit from government.”
Now the college is making new efforts to reach beyond its campus, this time with an even younger audience. The college is fighting what it calls “progressive” and “leftist academics” by expanding its footprint in the charter school world, pushing the boundaries on the use of taxpayer money for politically tinged education.
Hillsdale has ambitious plans to add to its network of classical public charter schools, which focus on “the centrality of the Western tradition.” And Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee recently invited the college to start 50 schools using public funds, including $32 million set aside for charter facilities. Hillsdale’s network currently includes 24 schools in 13 states.
1776 Curriculum,” which sets out to portray America as “an exceptionally good country.” During a time when education has become inflamed by divisive cultural debates, Hillsdale has been criticized for its glossy spin on American history as well as its ideological tilt on topics like affirmative action. Educators and historians have also raised questions about other instruction at Hillsdale’s charter schools, citing their negative take on the New Deal and the Great Society and cursory presentation of global warming.
Mr. Lee, a Republican, sees his new charter school expansion as part of an effort to develop what he called “informed patriotism” in Tennessee students.
“For decades, Hillsdale College has been the standard-bearer in quality curriculum and in the responsibility of preserving American liberty,” Mr. Lee told lawmakers recently. “I believe their efforts are a good fit for Tennessee.”
Charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, have been more commonly promoted as alternatives to low-performing schools in urban centers. In Tennessee, they have been clustered in the state’s four biggest cities, where like other charters, they have been criticized for siphoning money and students out of more traditional public schools.
Mr. Lee’s plan envisions an expansion into suburban and rural areas where, like many Hillsdale charter schools, they would most likely enroll children who are whiter and more affluent than the average charter school pupil.
the college’s Washington program.
Recent Issues on America’s College Campuses
The college accepts no state or federal funding, including no student grants or loans, allowing it to avoid some government oversight, such as compliance with federal Title IX rules governing sexual discrimination.
Instead, it relies partly on donations from conservative benefactors that are fueled by aggressive fund-raising campaigns, including on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program before he died, and in Hillsdale’s widely circulated digest, Imprimis, which is known for provocative articles — including a 2017 piece in which President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was called “a hero to populist conservatives around the world.”
In a recent fund-raising appeal, Hillsdale pleaded for $17.76 to help counter “leftist” academics teaching a “biased and distorted” view of American history. The pitch cited The New York Times’s 1619 project — which argues that slavery and white supremacy are dominant themes in American history — as an example of false teaching in schools.
taught by its graduates, while tapping into government money to run the schools.
Hillsdale’s president, Larry P. Arnn, and his daughter Kathleen O’Toole, who runs the charter school initiative, declined interviews. But in a speech last year to Hillsdale supporters in Tennessee, Dr. Arnn outlined his vision for expansion — including plans for a new master’s program to train teachers in classical education, a home-school division, online students and education centers.
“It’s a grand adventure,” he said.
‘An Exceptionally Good Country’
At Atlanta Classical Academy, one of the member schools in Hillsdale’s network, the motto — “Virtus, Scientia, Felicitas” — is inscribed in the lobby, near a photograph of Frederick Douglass, the once enslaved abolitionist writer and orator, who is now lauded by American conservatives for his emphasis on self-reliance.
1776 Curriculum, an ambitious 2,400-page program released last year, appears to be partly an outgrowth of President Donald J. Trump’s 1776 Commission — which Dr. Arnn chaired.
1776 Commission report, openly criticizes affirmative action.
chief critics of The Times’s 1619 Project, also criticized the 1776 Curriculum, calling it overly positive.
“It talks about the enormity of slavery, but in almost every case, everything that’s bad about America will be undone by what is good,” Dr. Wilentz said. “Almost, literally, that American ideals will overcome whatever evils may be there.”
Hillsdale’s history curriculum also appears to take on the modern liberal state. A school curriculum guide posted in one school’s charter lists the book “New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.” The author, Burton Folsom Jr., is a fellow and professor emeritus at Hillsdale, and a frequent speaker at conservative conferences.
The National Center for Science Education also reviewed the 2018 science curriculum, after an unsuccessful effort by Arizona officials to adopt it in public schools.
“The phrase ‘climate change’ doesn’t appear at all, and ‘global warming’ occurs only once, at the sixth-grade level, as ‘global warming theory,’” Glenn Branch, the organization’s deputy director, wrote in an email.
according to a 2020 state report.
Overall, Hillsdale’s charter school racial demographics are close to that of the Atlanta Classical students. That is a departure from charter schools nationally, which are about 30 percent white.
“They’re catering to white families and affluent families,” said Charisse Gulosino, an associate professor of leadership and policy studies at the University of Memphis, whose research has found that students in suburban charter schools do not outperform their public school counterparts.
Not all of Hillsdale’s charter school collaborations have been successful. Hillsdale recently announced it is ending ties with Tallahassee Classical School in Florida.
The school, approved by the state despite local opposition, set out to serve a diverse student body. But two teachers interviewed by The Times said they suspected that the school was trying to jettison low-performing students, a tactic that charter schools have been accused of as a way to increase test scores.
appeared at Hillsdale last year, where he applauded efforts to move quickly in Tennessee by placing students in seats before a liberal governor could take over.
Once that’s accomplished, Mr. Corcoran said, “You can’t put the animals back in the barn.”
View Source
>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<
Others have also been charged in connection with the investigation. Two men, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, pleaded guilty before the trial to kidnapping conspiracy and testified against the defendants in the federal case. Eight other men were charged with related crimes in state court.
Outside the courthouse, Andrew Birge, the top federal prosecutor in western Michigan, did not respond when asked directly whether his office would seek a second trial for Mr. Croft and Mr. Fox. But he said in a statement that he was limited in what he could say because “two defendants now await re-trial.”
“Obviously we’re disappointed in the outcome,” Mr. Birge said. He added: “We still believe in the jury system, and really, there’s not too much more I can say at this time. I appreciate the time the jury put in. They listened to a lot of evidence, deliberated quite a bit.”
During weeks of testimony at the federal courthouse in Grand Rapids, prosecutors showed jurors inflammatory social media posts and chat messages from the defendants, and presented audio secretly recorded by Mr. Chappel and other informants. One former co-defendant who pleaded guilty testified that he hoped to set off a chain of events that would prevent Joseph R. Biden Jr. from being elected president and would perhaps foment a civil war.
“That was the whole plan: They wanted to kick that off by kidnapping the governor,” Nils Kessler, a federal prosecutor, said during closing arguments.
But the prosecution’s case was hampered by a lack of clarity on what exactly the men were accused of plotting. No attack ever took place and no final date for an abduction was set, testimony showed. The details of the alleged plan sometimes differed drastically from prosecution witness to prosecution witness.
The F.B.I. informant, Mr. Chappel, said he believed that the group planned to kill Ms. Whitmer, whose handling of the Covid-19 pandemic had infuriated the men. Mr. Garbin, who earlier pleaded guilty in the case, said he thought the group of men might abandon the governor in a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan. Mr. Franks, who also pleaded guilty, told jurors that he had hoped to die in a shootout with the governor’s security detail.
View Source
>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — After deliberating all week, jurors said Friday morning that they had reached a verdict on several charges in the trial of four men accused of plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan but that they were deadlocked on other charges. The judge told them to continue deliberating to try to reach agreement on all counts.
The note from the jury on Friday was the first substantive update on the progress of deliberations since closing arguments concluded a week ago, in one of the highest-profile domestic terrorism cases in decades.
Prosecutors said the men — Brandon Caserta, Barry Croft, Adam Fox and Daniel Harris — wanted to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, at her vacation home in northern Michigan in 2020. Defense lawyers argued that there was no firm plan to abduct the governor, and that their clients had been drawn into heated political conversations by F.B.I. informants and undercover agents.
scholars on domestic extremism said the openness to political violence and embrace of political conspiracy theories alleged in both cases represented a chilling pattern.
combat domestic extremism, and the administration called white supremacists and militia groups a top national security threat.
In the Michigan courtroom, testimony focused narrowly on the conversations and training of the men accused of planning to kidnap the governor.
Witness after witness for the prosecution recounted regular training sessions during the summer of 2020, called “field training exercises,” where members went through shooting drills, received medical training and practiced navigation skills. Others described how some members of the group twice went to scope out Ms. Whitmer’s vacation home in northern Michigan, where prosecutors said they planned to snatch her. (On one of those trips, they had the wrong address for the house, so they just drove aimlessly down her street.)
No attack ever took place, no final date for an abduction was set, testimony showed, and the details of the alleged plan sometimes differed from witness to witness. The F.B.I. informant, Dan Chappel, said he believed the group had planned to kill Ms. Whitmer, whose handling of the Covid-19 pandemic had infuriated the men. Ty Garbin, the man who earlier pleaded guilty in the case, said he thought the group of men might abandon the governor in a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan. Another man who pleaded guilty, Kaleb Franks, said he had hoped to die in a shootout with the governor’s security detail.
“There was no plan to kidnap the governor, and there was no agreement between these four men,” Joshua Blanchard, a lawyer for Mr. Croft, said in closing arguments. He said the government tried to conjure up a conspiracy by using a network of informants and undercover agents, and that “without a plan, the snitches needed to make it look like” there was movement toward a plan.
View Source
>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<
The new director of the Census Bureau, Robert L. Santos, has his work cut out for him. He took office in January on the heels of a 2020 census hobbled by a pandemic, natural disasters and political interference by the Trump administration.
The census proved accurate enough in the end to be used to reapportion the House of Representatives and guide the drawing of new political maps nationwide. But it also undercounted Black and Latino people — and overcounted white and Asian people — to an alarming degree. Those flaws resonate with Mr. Santos, a Latino who is the first person of color to hold the top Census Bureau post.
His task is not just to rebuild battered public trust in the census, but to prepare for a 2030 count that could rely on government data and even private data from internet giants like Amazon to achieve a more accurate count.
Mr. Santos is a statistician with more than four decades of experience in corporate, nonprofit and government posts, most recently at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit that analyzes social and economic policies. In a recent question-and-answer session, edited for length and clarity, he talked about those challenges.
redrawing of the boundaries of congressional and state legislative districts. It happens every 10 years, after the census, to reflect changes in population.
How does it work? The census dictates how many seats in Congress each state will get. Mapmakers then work to ensure that a state’s districts all have roughly the same number of residents, to ensure equal representation in the House.
Who draws the new maps? Each state has its own process. Eleven states leave the mapmaking to an outside panel. But most — 39 states — have state lawmakers draw the new maps for Congress.
If state legislators can draw their own districts, won’t they be biased? Yes. Partisan mapmakers often move district lines — subtly or egregiously — to cluster voters in a way that advances a political goal. This is called gerrymandering.
Is gerrymandering legal? Yes and no. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts have no role to play in blocking partisan gerrymanders. However, the court left intact parts of the Voting Rights Act that prohibit racial or ethnic gerrymandering.
There are a variety of areas where we expect the data only to improve. Part of it is coming from the work that we’re doing with O.M.B. on setting statistical standards.
It would be nice if we could encourage states to abide by those too, to embrace those standards, but that is a state choice. Maybe it would be nice if the commercial sector adopted those standards, but sometimes that’s in conflict with what the Census Bureau needs.
The 2020 census questions about race and ethnicity led to seismic shifts in how people characterized their race and ethnicity, which confused many people. Is there a better way to ensure that answers to that question are more accurate?
There are certainly ways to come to ask questions to more accurately collect self-identity. Our country not only is becoming more wonderfully diverse, but we’re also appreciating culture and ancestry in ways that maybe didn’t exist 20 years ago with the advent of DNA testing and finding where your roots and ancestors are with genealogy and so forth. We’re appreciating who we are more, and I think that’s a beautiful thing and we should be capturing that.
I don’t think it’s useful to superimpose somebody else’s idea on what race or ethnicity you are, and instead I tend to prefer that people self-identify. But I leave it to our wonderful subject matter experts and demographers and O.M.B. and our federal statistical community to discuss.
Political interference was a big problem in 2020. Are there steps that Congress or the administration could take to better protect the bureau from inappropriate political interference?
I can tell you that I have thoughts, but I will not communicate them. I don’t think it’s the role of the Census Bureau to be advising Congress on what it can be doing. What I can say with confidence is that regardless of what the structure is I have absolutely 100 percent confidence in the career staff to maintain scientific integrity and reduce and eliminate any political meddling, including my own by the way.
View Source
>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<
A 33-year-old cryptocurrency investor named Denys, No. 1170, said he had paid a smuggler 5,500 euros to guide him over mountains and through dense forest to cross into Romania. “I didn’t want to fight. I don’t know how to fight,” said Denys, who declined to give his last name because he had fled in violation of Ukraine’s order barring military-age men from leaving the country.
A friend in Poland, he said, planned to put his beloved American Staffordshire Terrier on a flight to Chicago once he and his girlfriend arrived there.
Like many of those waiting at the border, he said he had never contemplated immigrating to the United States before the war. “I had a flat, a car, a dog. I was happy,” he said, standing outside the tent he was sharing with his girlfriend, Rina, and two other people. A sign in Cyrillic posted on the side said: “Don’t leave food on the ground. Keep rats out.”
The family of Daria and Sonia Speranska, two sisters, was cut off from the world when rocket fire hit a village outside Kyiv where they had sought refuge. With no power, the sisters said, they boiled water in the fireplace and rationed food. On the 10th day, they managed to escape in a convoy, and eventually, their parents convinced them that they must depart for the United States, where they had friends.
“We had no desire to leave to another country. We had a great life, we traveled,” said Daria, 24, who works in information technology.
Sonia, 16, said that she had agreed to come “only because I knew my sister couldn’t go without me; I’m the strong one.”
View Source
>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — In the four years since a former student killed 17 people and injured 17 others in Parkland, Fla., the classroom building where the shooting took place has remained standing, unused and fenced off, on the grounds of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Someday, the thinking went, the gunman could go on trial, and prosecutors might want to take jurors there to witness the remnant horrors of the tragedy from Feb. 14, 2018.
That trial began on Monday in a Fort Lauderdale courthouse with the first stages of jury selection in the state’s case against the gunman, Nikolas Cruz, who pleaded guilty in October to 17 murders and 17 attempted murders. Now, a jury will have to determine whether he should be sentenced to death or life in prison.
Though the trial will consist of only a sentencing phase, it could still last four to six months, according to lawyers for both sides. Prosecutors will detail how the gunman planned his rampage and killed or injured each of his victims. His public defense lawyers will lay out his difficult family life, mental health problems and attempts to get treatment. Testimony is expected from many victims and mental health experts.
emotional and painful toll from the two communities, Stoneman Douglas and Parkland, whose names became synonymous with America’s unbridled gun violence. The shooting, in a school of largely affluent teenagers vocal about their political opinions, ignited a national gun control movement and propelled young people and some of their parents into sustained activism.
adopted some gun restrictions, though the following year, it allowed some staff members in schools to carry guns. The tumultuous local repercussions to the shooting included the removal of the elected sheriff and the resignation of the superintendent of the county’s school system, following a perjury charge stemming from a grand jury investigation. Separately, a sheriff’s deputy assigned to Stoneman Douglas awaits trial on charges of felony neglect of a child for staying outside the building during the shooting.
Both the superintendent and the deputy have pleaded not guilty.
Killed in the shooting were Alyssa Alhadeff, 14; Scott Beigel, 35; Martin Duque, 14; Nicholas Dworet, 17; Aaron Feis, 37; Jaime Guttenberg, 14; Christopher Hixon, 49; Luke Hoyer, 15; Cara Loughran, 14; Gina Montalto, 14; Joaquin Oliver, 17; Alaina Petty, 14; Meadow Pollack, 18; Helena Ramsay, 17; Alex Schachter, 14; Carmen Schentrup, 16, and Peter Wang, 15.
is unusual for mass shootings, in which perpetrators often die, either by suicide or by being killed by the police.
The gunman’s guilt was never in doubt: Police officers captured him in the hours after the shooting, and his lawyers offered a guilty plea in exchange for a life sentence. (He was 19 at the time and is now 23.) But the Broward County state attorney, Michael J. Satz, turned down that plea, saying he was obliged to seek capital punishment for such a heinous crime.
wanted him forcibly committed for psychiatric evaluation, but he never was.
failed to investigate tips about his interest in school shootings. Last month, the Department of Justice finalized a $127.5 million settlement for 40 of the shooting victims and their survivors. A separate settlement was reached last year with Broward County Public Schools for $25 million.
The gunman, a former Stoneman Douglas student, recorded three videos on his cellphone before the shooting. “You’re all going to die,” he said in one of them.
Armed with a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle, he killed 14 students and three faculty members in one of the deadliest school shootings in American history, targeting them from the hallways of Building 12, also known as the freshman building.
Bullet-pocked, bloodstained and strewn with valentines, the building has not been used since. The school district plans to eventually demolish it.
Prosecutors have said they might want to take jurors to the building during the trial. Defense lawyers have countered that such a tour would only “inflame” emotions.
The judge decided that she would allow it.
View Source
>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<
