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- Losing My Perspicacity March 21, 2025
Losing My Perspicacity March 21, 2025
Trump illegally shuts down the Department of Education; Judge Boasberg lets the DOJ have it; Tesla has another hilarious day; Yet another Michigan assistant coach caught in nefarious acts; and the Trump's pettiness extends to Ukrainian children
Julie DiCaro
March 21, 2025
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Good morning and Happy Friday! Thanks for starting your day with me, and welcome back to all our free subscribers.
I wrote a piece for Dame Magazine yesterday that I’d love for you to read and share, if you find it worthy. I felt compelled to write it because I am disturbed by the similarities we are seeing between the Trump Administration’s treatment of women and the rights German women lost after the Nazis took power in 1933.
Here’s a quick snippet:
Even the talking points used by the Nazis to convince women to remain barefoot and pregnant are echoed by the right-wing anti-DEI machine. At an opening of a women’s exhibition in Berlin in 1933, Goebbels told his audience, “German women have been transformed in recent years. They are beginning to see that they are not happier as a result of being given more rights but fewer duties. They now realize that the right to be elected to public office at the expense of the right to life, motherhood, and her daily bread is not a good trade.”
What’s worrisome: In a 2021 podcast interview, VP Vance said that women “pursuing … gender equality is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery.” Sen. Hawley sat by and smiled approvingly while Kansas City Chiefs’ kicker Harrison Butker advised women to “maybe just step aside and prioritize their family and spend time with their children and raise their family.” Same sentiment, fewer words.
Obviously, as a woman, this issue is vitally important to me, and I can’t emphasize enough the parallels between the way the Nazis marginalized women and what we are seeing from the implementation of Project 2025. Most social media algorithms are suppressing news links these days, so, as I said, shares are appreciated!
Speaking of social media, I found out today that Meta fed my book into its stupid AI machine, so if you have any idea what, if anything, I should do about that, please let me know.
Before we get to the news, here’s my weekly pitch for upgrading to a paid subscription of LMP! It’s a lot of work to put out a newsletter five days a week and, if you upgrade before 5 pm ET tonight, you can get LMP in your inbox five days a week for the rest of 2025 for just $50. What a bargain! If you can’t swing a paid subscription, please click on the ad below (which I only run on Fridays), which helps defray the monthly fee to post on beehiiv.
Today: Trump illegally shuts down the Department of Education; Judge Boasberg lets the DOJ have it; Tesla has another hilarious day; Yet another Michigan assistant coach caught in nefarious acts; Trump Administration tells Ukrainian kids to get lost (literally); and The High Note.
Here we go.
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So long, DOE
Donald Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education yesterday as part of his ongoing assault on every marginalized group in America. As I wrote a few weeks back, much of the country is under the misapprehension that the DOE controls school curricula. It does not. It does, however, provide funding and oversight for a number of programs designed to help various groups (including girls) get a quality education:
The Department of Education was created by Congress in 1979, and that means Trump can’t just destroy it with the stroke of a pen/executive order, though I’m sure he believes he can. A law dismantling the DOE would have to pass through Congress, where Trump’s policies have been met with little to no resistance. But what, exactly, does the DOE do?
Public K-12 schools are funded primarily by local property taxes, which is why blighted neighborhoods lead to blighted schools. A K-12 school’s curriculum is also in the hands of the state. What the DOE does with regard to K-12 schools is mostly to administer federal programs, like Title I, which supplements low-achieving schools in high-poverty areas, and IDEA, which helps schools educate and care for children with disabilities.
Title I and IDEA are federal laws enacted by Congress that Trump can not unilaterally do away with, though the funding is complicated and explaining it all is above my pay grade. Moreover, the federal government enforces civil rights in schools at all levels and tracks how American students are doing when it comes to unimportant things like reading and math. So, by doing away with the DOE, Trump is leaving our most vulnerable students without the resources they need to get a quality education.
All that is before we even get into the DOE administering the federal student loan program that has put millions of Americans through college.
Predictably, the states that will be most impacted by the ending of the DOE are red states, with Mississippi, South Dakota, Montana, Alaska, Arkansas, North Carolina, Kentucky, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, respectively, receiving the most federal aid for their K-12 schools. How will those states make up the shortfall, which in some cases, is more than 20 percent of their state’s education budget? No one knows.
I don’t want to hear anyone in this country blathering on about Americans “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps” ever again. The Trump White House is systemically removing every single program designed to help people escape poverty and marginalization.
Moreover, why Linda McMahon would go through the process of being confirmed as Secretary of Education only to see the DOE shut down within weeks of her taking over, is mindboggling. Who would want their name associated with such a monstrous act? Then again, her name has been associated with Vince McMahon for decades, so I guess she’s used to it.
As with everything, Trump is attempting to (illegally) do this by executive order because he’s not sure he can get the votes to do it properly in Congress. Not that I doubt the congressional GOP will line up to do his bidding. Then again, their town halls have been going pretty badly lately. Here’s Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) getting her socks booed off on Wednesday night.
Harriet Hageman got booed to oblivion last night in her own town hall for pumping up Doge so hard that even her loyal suckers woke up and smelled the bullshit—about five months too late!
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com)2025-03-20T11:54:31.323Z
Big ups to whoever brought the cowbell. That happened in a state where Trump won by 46 points. Here’s Rep. Mike Flood’s (R-NE) town hall earlier this week:
Chants of “Tax the rich!” resonated at Republican Rep. Mike Flood’s town hall in Nebraska’s deep-red 1st congressional district. Today, protesters held demonstrations both outside Flood’s office and outside the town hall.
— Stephanie Kennedy (@wordswithsteph.bsky.social)2025-03-19T01:19:16.685Z
And here’s Rep. Mike Baumgarner (R-WA) getting it from his constituents in Spokane:
Will Congressional Republicans, like the Cowardly Lion before them, find their courage? Stay tuned!
Be the Judge Boasberg you want to see in the world
Yesterday, our second-favorite federal judge (no one will ever replace Judge Ana Reyes in our hearts) issued a pretty scathing opinion regarding the information the DOJ was ordered to disclose. The case is the one the ACLU brought on behalf of immigrants shipped off to El Salvador without a shred of due process. As you might recall, the DOJ’s response to Boasberg’s disclosure order was to basically say, “We can’t tell you, and we can’t tell you why.” (Border Czar Tom Homan, of course, made it abundantly clear why.)
Yesterday, having reviewed what little the DOJ sent over, Boasberg had plenty to say:
A federal judge in Washington edged closer on Thursday to holding the Trump administration in contempt for possibly having violated his ruling pausing the deportation of scores of Venezuelans under a rarely invoked wartime statute.
In a sternly written order, the judge, James E. Boasberg, told the administration to explain to him by Tuesday why officials had not violated his instructions when they allowed two flights of immigrants to continue on to El Salvador even after he directed the planes to return to the United States.
****
“The government again evaded its obligations,” he wrote, adding that the Justice Department’s most recent filing about the flights was “woefully insufficient.”
A reminder that what Boasberg is ruling on at this time is not whether or not the removal of planefuls of undocumented immigrants was legal — that will come later — but whether or not the federal government willfully defied his temporary order prohibiting them from removing those immigrants and telling the planes in the air to turn around.
I’ve seen a lot of written orders in my time, and “woefully insufficient” is pretty harsh language from a federal judge. Boasberg also wrote that the government had “again evaded its obligations” and chided the government for proffering “a regional ICE official to attest to Cabinet-level discussions of the state-secrets privilege.” You can read the entire order here. Boasberg gave the DOJ until 10 am today to supplement their disclosure with the information he asked for.
More to come!
First, there’s this:
As you know, this has sent Elon Musk into a tailspin, where he’s been insisting that he’s never done no harm to nobody, mister! And he doesn’t understand why people keep lighting his cars on fire. Then yesterday, Tesla recalled more than 46,000 Cybertrucks after videos surfaced of owners literally pulling the siding off with their bare hands
In 2023, Elon Musk told the world that the Cybertruck was “apocalypse-proof.” Since then, we’ve seen Cybertrucks rendered immobile by snow and puddles, and we’ve learned that their doors might lock when they catch fire.
Move over, Connor Stalions
Another Michigan assistant football coach is in trouble. Like Connor Stalions before him, Matt Weiss is accused of engaging in athletic espionage during Jim Harbaugh’s reign of terror. Only Weiss wasn’t doing it in the name of helping the maize & blue win. He was doing it for far grosser reasons.
A former Michigan football assistant coach was indicted on federal criminal charges Thursday, accused of hacking into computers at more than 100 universities across the country and stealing the identities of more than 3,300 student athletes — most of them women he spied on.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, former U-M quarterbacks coach and co-offensive coordinator Matt Weiss, 42, of Ann Arbor, pulled off his scheme over eight years, between 2015 and 2023, during which he broke into student-athlete databases maintained by a third-party vendor.
"Weiss primarily targeted female college athletes," the indictment reads. "He researched and targeted these women based on their school affiliation, athletic history and characteristics. His goal was to obtain private photographs and videos, never intended to be shared beyond intimate partners."
Only the best people work with Jim Harbaugh. Michigan declined to comment on the charges.
A new low for the Trump Administration
The Trump White House is defending defunding a program that kept tabs on hundreds of Ukrainian children who have been forcibly deported to Russia since the invasion began in 2022. Those children have reportedly been put up for adoption in Russia.
WASHINGTON − The Trump administration cut off funding to a project tracking thousands of Ukrainian children forcibly taken to Russia, even as President Donald Trump promised President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a Wednesday call to help the abducted children return home.
The project, run by Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, was tracking Russia's "systematic, intentional, and widespread coerced adoption and fostering of children from Ukraine," according to its latest report. Researchers with the project were told recently that its funding was "discontinued," a Yale University spokesperson confirmed. A Monday news release from the lab asked for donations to keep the investigation running.
Worse, the data on the whereabouts of those children may have been permanently deleted.
Data collected by the Yale project on more than 30,000 Ukrainian children held at "dozens of locations" in Russia may now be gone, according to a letter Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, and more than a dozen other members of Congress sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday.
"We have reason to believe that the data from the repository has been permanently deleted," Landsman wrote. "If true, this would have devastating consequences."
If you, like me, can’t fathom why the President of the United States would do such a thing, I’ll refer you to this piece I wrote at the beginning of March:
The High Note
Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.
I started watching CBS Sunday Morning with my dad when I was a kid and Charles Kuralt was the host. Now that (fellow IU alum) Jane Pauley is the host, I never miss it. It never fails to have a story that makes me feel better about the world, and this one is no exception.
Is it dusty in here?
Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.
Defy. Disobey. Disrupt.
See you on Monday.
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