You’ve probably seen coverage of the firestorm over Florida’s newly updated African-American history curriculum. Most of the coverage has (understandably) focused on the quote that suggest that slaves were taught skills which they could use for their own benefit. (“Slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”) I read the entire updated curriculum. So I wanted to share my take. As most of you know, I have a PhD in American history, with a focus on the colonial period but covering the full sweep of American history. I haven’t been professionally engaged with the literature for about 25 years. But I generally keep up.

Overall the text isn’t as clownish as that one quote might suggest — a low bar. But there are still pretty major problems. As is usually the case with educational standards, they tend to be ones of emphasis and omission rather than outright fabrication. Along the way, there’s a decent amount of general sloppiness and a hard-to-miss affirmative action for right-wing Black intellectuals. I want to focus on three points. These are by no means exhaustive. They’re just the ones that struck me as most glaring and also illustrative. 

As we continue to watch the ignominious collapse of Ron DeSantis’s campaign (predicted many months ago by yours truly but not like I’m focusing on that or anything), there’s a curious bit of backstory I’m reminded of. But before we get to that I wanted to flag this weekend New York Times article. It’s so passively devastating I think DeSantis’s estate might have a plausible wrongful death claim against the authors.

Most of the attention to this article has focused on a scooplet about that infamous gay/trans-bashing video. The story was that it was put together by some unknown fan in the DeSantis-o-sphere. The campaign simply picked it up and amplified it. The Times reports that in fact it was produced by a campaign staffer who then gave it to a Ron fan site to release so that the campaign could then pick it up from the fan. In other words, the campaign laundered it out for some plausible deniability.

My takeaway from the piece was different: The campaign appears to be trapped in a sort of people-hating, private-jet-taking death loop. We learn from the article that Ron and wife Casey really, really like flying on private jets, which of course cost a ton of money. I confess that I’m not a huge fan of flying. But if I were, a private jet would probably be pretty cool. But it’s also not hard to see their extreme attachment to private jets as part of or at least a symbol of not liking being around regular people. Maybe not liking being around anybody at all. Some people just want the privacy to unwind with a handful of pudding.

As you can see, Trump Judge (in every sense) Aileen Cannon has scheduled ex-President Trump’s documents case trial for May 2024. This wasn’t as soon as prosecutors wanted. But Cannon rejected Trump’s request for an indefinite delay until after the 2024 election. I wanted to share some thoughts on what this all means for the rule of law generally as well as for the 2024 election.

I was corresponding this morning with a former federal prosecutor who sees this decision as a significant win for Trump on this reasoning: We assume that in the coming days or weeks federal prosecutors will indict Trump for felonies tied to January 6th. Now we have two federal trials in addition to the state trial in New York and a likely one in Georgia. By scheduling the trial in May, Cannon has left very little time to schedule a January 6th trial prior to the May/documents trial. A federal judge in D.C. would be quite unlikely to schedule the two federal trials at the same time. That leaves it highly likely that the January 6th trial gets scheduled after the May 2024 documents trial.

Not that it matters. But needless to say there’s no such thing as expunging an impeachment.

We’ll be recording and posting this week’s episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast later this week.

Yesterday I noted that January 6th remains radioactive for the GOP in a way that Trump’s other crimes simply don’t. It keeps coming up again because they’ve never dealt with what happened. And they haven’t because that would mean dealing with Donald Trump. And, let’s be honest, they haven’t because a substantial minority (or more?) of their supporters are in fact insurrectionists and unreconstructed ones.

The preference at all times is to ignore January 6th. The next line of defense is to offer general condemnation but say it’s time to move forward. If that doesn’t work the defense moves to “politicization” and general arguments that the Justice Department should never bring charges against the man the incumbent defeated or the one he’ll face in the next election. But defending Trump’s actions on and around January 6th remains basically impossible for all but the most authoritarian and criminally minded Republicans. Because January 6th is simply indefensible. What I wanted to note today is that the insider sheets, the ones generally inclined to say that in fact this is good news for Trump or, more seriously, that Republicans have a plan for this, are generally saying the same thing. This Axios update from last night is a good example. January 6th is different. There’s no denying it.

As you know, this morning ex-President Trump announced that he’d received a target letter from prosecutor Jack Smith. While nothing is certain, this means there’s a strong likelihood that Trump will be indicted for his attempted coup in late 2020, culminating on January 6th, 2021. Yesterday Georgia’s Supreme Court unanimously rejected Trump’s Hail Mary bid to shut down Fulton County (Atlanta) DA Fani Willis’ investigation into Trump’s election tampering in Georgia. Indictments there seem likely as well. Trump has of course already been indicted for his theft and refusal to return classified documents in federal court in Florida as well as fraud in New York City. It now appears all but certain that Trump will A) receive the Republican presidential nomination with little real opposition and B) face four separate batches of felony indictments in four separate jurisdictions for crimes ranging from comparatively minor fraud to the greatest crime of all, attempting to overthrow the state and the constitution itself.

Those two almost certain probabilities — seemingly facts in utter contradiction — are in fact mutually reinforcing. A normal candidate would be driven from the race. For Trump they become just more evidence of a larger battle that validates his status as not simply the head but the inevitable leader of the Republican Party. His role as victim effectively boxes out any serious challenger for the nomination.

Trump says he got a target letter from Jack Smith in the J6 probe. Normally that means an indictment is quite likely. And with the pattern of the letter followed by the indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, even more so. Nothing’s for certain. But we should now operate on the assumption that Trump will be indicted for the January 6th coup, which of course involves acts going back a couple months before the violence on January 6th. Josh Kovensky has our first report.

You’ve probably seen the brouhaha about ersatz Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. getting in trouble for saying that COVID was “ethnically targeted” to “spare the Jews.” I wanted to take a moment to dig into just what happened, just what he said and what if anything it all means. This is one of those crazy and yet in many ways predictable stories that manages to be both deeply stupid and yet also quite illustrative of our times.

First, what’s the story? I noticed immediately that all the coverage stemmed from a single story in The New York Post (not a great sign) by Jonathan Levine. I’ve had a couple run-ins with Levine over the years, or at least I’ve seen pieces of his that struck me as tendentious, either by design or lack of familiarity with certain political questions. Don’t get hung up on whether I was right or wrong about him. I note this only to highlight that even though I have an extremely low opinion of RFK Jr. I went into this story with more than a little skepticism.

But in this case, Levine was right on the mark. Kennedy’s words are his words. In fact Levine was so right on the mark it’s a bit shocking he was the only one to write it up. Lots of reporters were at this dinner and a lot of them wrote it up. But none mentioned this. The most one can say about Levine’s reporting in this case is that he drew out the obvious implication of Kennedy’s remark which was necessary because Kennedy used the standard many-people-are-saying and just-asking-questions type phrasings that are the calling card of his brand of conspiracy freaks. But again, his words are his words. He’s guilty as charged.

Here’s what he said …

If you’ll remember the last time we discussed Incel Chieftain Ron DeSantis the story was that even though his polling numbers had faltered and campaign discourse had settled into describing his deep personal weirdness he was still sitting on a mountain of money. Well, maybe not. Now DeSantis has been forced to fire staff amid a spending crunch. A campaign insider tells Politico the number was “fewer than 10 staffers.” NBC says it was a dozen. The first reports tried to suggest this was part of a strategy shift as opposed to spending woes. But in those terms the new strategy seems to be to not run out of money before the end of the summer.