Politics
Oklahoma measure seeks to make school district superintendents an elected position
Oklahoma will consider a new measure to make the role of school district superintendent an elected position in response to a spate of controversial situations involving scholastic leaders, Fox News Digital has learned.
There have been allegations and news reports about several issues: the refusal to remove “pornographic books” from school libraries, the dismissal of a teacher for failure to comply with a COVID-19 face mask mandate, and media coverage of “nothing [being] done” in response to reports a school football coach was bragging about sexual conquests with parents.
In 2021, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt called firings of mask-averse teachers “preposterous” and said their talents are needed more than ever.
“This is about a school district not following state law — this isn’t a debate about masks,” he said, after the Oklahoma City district reportedly fired multiple educators, adding the state previously banned such firings.
STATE SCHOOLS CHIEF BILLS KAMALA HARRIS $474M FOR EDUCATION COSTS OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
In February, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters — who is an elected official himself — threatened to lower the accreditation of Edmond, Oklahoma, schools if it didn’t remove the books “The Glass Castle” and “Kite Runner” from its high school libraries.
Walters called the inaction “subversion of accountability,” though Edmond’s superintendent said the state lacked authority to remove the books based on a 1997 district policy.
In another case, in Edmond, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz from neighboring Texas, among others, blasted videos showing a portion of a school fundraiser wherein students were licking each other’s toes.
In a public statement, school officials appeared to celebrate the event:
“This afternoon, Deer Creek High School announced a grand total of $152,830.38 raised for Not Your Average Joe Coffee, an organization created to ‘inspire our community by including students and adults with intellectual, developmental and physical disabilities,” school staff wrote.
“All participants in the assembly were students who signed up for the game(s) they played ahead of time. No Deer Creek faculty or staff participated in any of the games during this Clash of Classes assembly,” a portion of the latter part of the statement read.
LANDMARK BILL TARGETS HIDDEN FOREIGN FUNDING IN SCHOOLS AS OFFICIALS WARN OF CCP INFLUENCE
Walters called the fundraiser “filth,” and Cruz said it was “child abuse.”
In another district on the Arkansas line, now-former Muldrow Superintendent Leon Ashlock resigned after driving drunk and crashing a school vehicle on Creek Turnpike. Two 100-proof bottles of cinnamon schnapps were found in its console, according to KOCO.
Walters told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that a case involving a school’s response to an athletic director’s criminal exploits with a student also drew his attention.
“Even in a conservative state like Oklahoma, where voters have overwhelmingly made clear they want the radical progressive policies of the left out of public schools, we continually see superintendents defying their will, ignoring their concerns, and refusing to take action necessary to improve education outcomes while protecting Oklahoma children,” Walters said.
“This has to end.”
“And, the best way to do that is by requiring superintendents to be elected by the voters.”
Walters called the legislation a common-sense solution to efforts to improve education for Sooner State children.
Walters previously made headlines when he led his state in becoming the first to appropriate funding toward supplying a Bible to each school. The official said the move blunts “woke curricula” and provides students a “historical document” that the founders used to form their government.
Politics
Trump's own unorthodox rise, focus on loyalty loom large as nominees face headwinds
For weeks, President-elect Donald Trump has faced a barrage of criticism over his nomination of Pete Hegseth for Defense secretary.
Hegseth, an Army National Guard major and co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” is a staunchly conservative combat veteran who has defended Trump’s “America First” policies and called for an end to decades of progress in the U.S. military, including the deployment of women in fighting roles.
He also has little leadership experience and a raft of personal baggage that has dripped out steadily since Trump selected him — from sexual assault allegations in California, to accusations of financial mismanagement at two veterans groups, to widespread claims of severe alcohol abuse going back years, including in work settings.
Those issues have sparked concern among senators who would need to confirm Hegseth to the Pentagon post, and reports swirled Thursday that the nomination was doomed and Trump was considering withdrawing it.
Trump, however, swung back sharply Friday, defending Hegseth as a “WINNER” who was still in the fight.
“Pete Hegseth is doing very well,” Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social. “His support is strong and deep, much more so than the Fake News would have you believe.”
The pitched battle over Hegseth is one piece of a broader fight among Trump, his critics on the left and a handful of Senate Republicans who have shown a willingness to block the president-elect’s most unqualified nominees. It is also one of the clearest examples yet, experts said, of how Trump’s own unorthodox rise to power and extreme need for loyalty will play a defining role in his second term.
That Trump would downplay traditional experience, dismiss alarming baggage and prioritize camera-ready adherence to his agenda as he seeks candidates for top positions in his new administration is not surprising, they said. Rather, it is in keeping with his own against-all-odds rise to power and his belief that the voters who reelected him — despite his own baggage — are largely unbothered by such issues, experts said.
Time and again, they said, Trump has shown he is willing to overlook criminal charges and convictions, allegations of sexual misconduct and various other red flags that may have short-circuited nominations in the past, as long as the nominees in question have a clear track record of loyalty to him. And while not all of those picks have panned out, and more may still fall, it remains likely that Trump will assemble one of the most unorthodox and inexperienced leadership teams in American history, the experts said.
In some ways, backers of the president-elect have championed that idea.
In a statement to The Times, Karoline Leavitt, a Trump transition spokeswoman, said that Trump “was re-elected by a resounding mandate from the American people to change the status quo in Washington,” and “has chosen brilliant and highly-respected outsiders” whom he will continue to “stand behind” despite efforts to “derail the MAGA Agenda.”
“All of President Trump’s cabinet nominees are receiving great feedback and support on Capitol Hill because they are qualified men and women who have the talent, experience, and necessary skill sets to help Make America Great Again,” Leavitt said.
Other conservative backers of Trump have echoed that idea — including in closing ranks around Hegseth — while Trump has lashed out at any suggestion that he is not in complete control of the nominations process. After the Wall Street Journal reported on a second Trump nominee pulling out under pressure, Trump lambasted the newspaper, writing on Truth Social that Chad Chronister, his pick to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration, “didn’t pull out, I pulled him out.”
Democratic critics and some outside experts take a different view. They say loyalty to Trump appears to be the only metric being applied to his nominees, and that those picks are facing stiff headwinds because they are clearly unfit for the roles otherwise.
Andrea Katz, a legal historian who teaches constitutional law at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and writes often on presidential power, said all presidents make appointments based on a “mixture of who they like, who they can get, who will actually do the job well, and who needs to be rewarded for their loyalty.” And, conservative presidents for years have held the added assumption that many mainstream candidates and agency experts are too liberal to be trusted, she said.
“With the GOP generally, there’s been since Nixon — definitely accelerating under Reagan — this idea that the bureaucracy is not a conservative president’s friend, and you need to appoint people who are loyal to you and not to the agency you are appointing them to,” Katz said.
But Trump has taken that idea to a new level, she said, making the notion that career civil servants are “woke” and the “deep state” must be destroyed in favor of his own loyalists core to his approach to governance — and to nominations.
His picks, she said, “are historically aberrational outliers, beyond the pale normally, and therefore he is making a point by appointing them.”
In addition to Hegseth, Trump has put forward several Justice Department candidates who have raised eyebrows. His first pick for attorney general, former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, withdrew his name amid allegations that he paid for sex with a minor and used illicit drugs and the widespread concerns about his fitness for office among senators.
Critics have noted that some of the allegations were already public — and under investigation by a House ethics panel — when Trump selected Gaetz for the nation’s top law enforcement position.
Trump’s replacement pick for attorney general, former Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, is viewed as more qualified, but has also been criticized for backing Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election being stolen. His pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, has been widely panned given his thin credentials and his embrace of Trump’s calls for retaliation against a “deep state” of government workers, members of the media and others who have challenged the once and future president.
FBI directors are normally appointed and left in office for 10-year terms, and Trump’s suggestion that he will replace current FBI Director Christopher A. Wray — who Trump himself appointed — has drawn derision in its own right.
Trump nominated Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, to serve as ambassador to France. The elder Kushner was pardoned by Trump in 2020 after pleading guilty in 2005 to 16 counts of tax evasion, one count of retaliating against a federal witness and one count of lying to the Federal Election Commission.
Trump nominated Peter Navarro, a top trade aide in his first administration, to again serve as a trade advisor. Navarro got out of prison earlier this year after being convicted of two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a congressional subpoena from a House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump also has taken heat for his nominations of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to serve as his director of national intelligence despite her having little relevant experience and a history of defending U.S. adversaries; of billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to serve in his newly invented “Department of Government Efficiency” despite having clear conflicts of interest through their business holdings; and of various others with ties to the conservative Project 2025 playbook despite his disavowing the blueprint during the campaign.
Besides Gaetz, the only Trump nominee to withdraw to date is Chronister, Trump’s pick to run the Drug Enforcement Administration. Chronister, the sheriff in Hillsborough County, Fla., had been criticized by conservatives over his record on immigration and his having arrested a mega-church pastor who defied a COVID-19 lockdown.
The unorthodox nature and baggage of Trump’s various picks have raised questions about his process for selecting leaders for his next administration, with some questioning whether his transition team is simply bad at vetting. Others see a purposeful disregard for past improprieties, with loyalty being the only true test.
“Trump is assembling a palace of the most loyal guards,” said Michael Sozan, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, who worked for years in the Senate — including as chief of staff to former Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado — and has written extensively about the checks and balances in American government.
Trump’s nominees, Sozan noted, include people who lent credence to wild conspiracy theories, who have promised to “weaponize government to assault Trump’s political enemies,” and who have been accused of sexual assault or served time in prison, as well as “billionaires with massive conflicts of interest.” The only thing they all have in common is that they are “extremely loyal to Trump” — which is by design, he said. “This is what we see from authoritarians, what we see in other backsliding democracies.”
Sozan said every president “should get a lot of deference” in standing up their own administration, but Trump’s nominees are “so far out of the mainstream” that they deserve special scrutiny. “We have never seen anything like this in modern times.”
Sozan said he doesn’t think Trump cares whether people have been accused or convicted of crimes, and might even see nominating such people as “a way of minimizing” his own legal troubles, including allegations of sexual assault. “It’s almost a way of inoculating himself when he is surrounding himself with loyalists who have gone through similar travails.”
Katz said Trump’s revelry in shocking the mainstream leaders of his own party, angering his progressive opponents and delighting his anti-establishment MAGA base is clearly a factor in his nominations. But so is his deeply held belief, which he has “tested” repeatedly in the past, that “the public is going to perceive a legal liability the way he wants it to be perceived,” she said.
Trump tested that idea when he fired FBI Director James Comey during his first term amid an investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia, and when he derided as baseless that investigation, the separate investigations into his political strong-arming of Ukraine, his 2020 election denial and the Jan. 6 attack, and both of his resulting impeachments, Katz said.
Each time, voters “didn’t leave him,” she said, “so I think he’s pretty confident that he is able to mold people’s perceptions of where an ethical red line is,” including when it comes to his nominees.
Robert C. Rowland, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Kansas and author of the book “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy,” said Trump’s picks — a dozen now from Fox alone — have been characteristic of his approach to governing.
“Image and loyalty are always the first two things that influence Trump’s view of those with whom he works. He has picked any number of people who excel in praising him and who also have experience on television,” Rowland said.
Trump has “total faith in his own gut instincts” — over and above formal vetting — and “relishes playing the role of provocateur, with a special focus on ‘owning the libs,’” Rowland said.
Rowland said the result may well be a “crazy” mix of loyalists running the country — which he said was scary, as “they are not the adults in the room.”
Politics
Fall of Assad regime a 'moment of historic opportunity' for Syrian people, Biden says
President Biden said during a Sunday afternoon press conference that the U.S. will support Syria’s neighboring nations and help bolster stability in the region after dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country amid an ongoing civil war.
“At long last, the Assad regime has fallen. This regime brutalized and tortured and killed literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians. A fall of the regime is a fundamental act of justice. It’s a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their proud country. It’s also a moment of risk and uncertainty,” Biden said Sunday during a press conference from the White House.
Biden detailed that following Assad’s departure in the face of rebel forces, the U.S. will support Syria’s neighboring countries – such as Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Israel – “should any threat arise from Syria during this period of transition.” Biden said this effort will include senior administration officials meeting with world leaders, and the president also speaking directly with leaders in the neighboring nations.
“Second, we will help stability, ensure stability in eastern Syria. Protecting any personnel, our personnel, against any threats, and will remain our mission against ISIS will be maintained, including security of detention facilities where ISIS fighters are being held as prisoners,” Biden continued of the U.S. plan of action after the collapse of the Assad regime. “…. Third, we will engage with all Syrian groups, including within the process led by the United Nations to establish a transition away from the Assad regime toward an independent sovereign” Syria.
ASSAD ARRIVES IN MOSCOW, IS GRANTED ASYLUM BY RUSSIA
Bashar al-Assad fled Syria after rebels stormed the capital city of Damascus on Saturday. Assad, whose government used chemical weapons repeatedly on its residents, reportedly fled with his wife and children.
Biden said the U.S. did not have confirmation on Assad’s whereabouts, noting that “there’s word that he’s in Moscow.”
Syria has been in the midst of a nearly 14-year civil war as Islamist rebels attempted to overthrow Assad and his family’s dynasty, which had ruled the country for the last 50 years.
“The United States will do whatever we can to support [Syrians], including through humanitarian relief, to help restore Syria after more than a decade of war and generations of brutality by the Assad family,” Biden said.
“And finally, we will remain vigilant. Make no mistake, some of the rebel groups that took down Assad have their own grim record of terrorism and human rights abuses. We’ve taken note of statements by the leaders of these rebel groups in recent days. And they’re saying the right things now, but as they take on greater responsibility, we will assess not just their words, but their actions,” Biden continued Sunday.
The president noted that the U.S. will also continue efforts to secure American journalist Austin Tice, who has been missing in Syria for more than a decade.
“We are mindful that there are Americans in Syria, including those who reside there, as well as Austin Tice, who was taken captive more than 12 years ago. We remain committed to returning him to his family,” Biden said.
Ahead of reports of Assad fleeing, President-elect Trump warned that the U.S. should not get involved in the civil war.
TRUMP RESPONDS AFTER REBELS OVERTAKE SYRIA, OUSTING LONGTIME DICTATOR: ‘ASSAD IS GONE’
“Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” he wrote.
Trump added on Truth Social early Sunday morning: “Assad is gone. He has fled his country. His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer. There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place. They lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever.”
“Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success,” his post continued. “Likewise, Zelenskyy and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness. They have ridiculously lost 400,000 soldiers, and many more civilians. There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin.”
SYRIAN INSURGENTS REACH GATES OF DAMASCUS, THREATENING DECADES-LONG ASSAD REGIME
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu touted the fall of Assad’s regime on Sunday, saying it was a “direct result” of Israel’s attacks on Iran and Hezbollah, while noting the situation overall is “fraught with significant dangers.” Israel is in the midst of a more than year-long war after Hamas launched attacks on the nation on Oct. 7, 2023.
TRUMP URGES US TO STAY OUT OF SYRIAN CIVIL WAR, BLAMING OBAMA FOR FAILURE AS ISLAMISTS CLOSE IN ON CAPITAL
“This is a historic day for the Middle East. The collapse of the Assad regime, the tyranny in Damascus, offers great opportunity but also is fraught with significant dangers. This collapse is the direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad’s main supporters. It set off a chain reaction of all those who want to free themselves from this tyranny and its oppression,” Netanyahu said Sunday.
“We send a hand of peace to all those beyond our border in Syria: to the Druze, to the Kurds, to the Christians, and to the Muslims who want to live in peace with Israel. We’re going to follow events very carefully. If we can establish neighborly relations and peaceful relations with the new forces emerging in Syria, that’s our desire. But if we do not, we will do whatever it takes to defend the State of Israel and the border of Israel,” Netanyahu added.
Fox News Digital’s Michael Lee and Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.
Politics
Analysis: Assad was a brutal dictator. Will Syria's new leaders be any better?
WASHINGTON — The stunning overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad by Islamist rebels half a century after his family took power raises an old question when it comes to regime change in the Middle East: Will the new governing forces behave any better than those that have been deposed?
“The Assad regime has fallen,” President Biden declared Sunday from the White House. “It’s a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria.”
“It’s also a moment of risk and uncertainty, as we all turn to the question of what comes next,” Biden said.
In a matter of weeks, the rebels achieved what the United Nations, the U.S. and other Western powers long tried but failed to do. The Russian government announced late Sunday local time that Assad and his family had arrived in Moscow and were being given asylum, Russian state news agencies reported.
Decades of brutal rule by Assad has left Syria fragmented ethnically, religiously and politically. The victorious insurgency is also divided. The leading group, Hayat Tahrir al Sham, known as HTS, traces its roots to the terror organizations Islamic State and Al Qaeda but claims to have reformed.
Long concerned about HTS taking power, Washington continues to designate it a terrorist group, which will complicate any dealings with it.
The rebel victory also scrambles regional relations. It deals a major setback to Assad’s allies Iran and Russia while boosting Turkey, which backed the HTS and will probably be Washington’s main conduit to Syria’s new leaders.
The U.S. backed a different rebel group, the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, a Kurdish militia that helped defeat Islamic State but that Turkey considers a terrorist group.
Clashes between the SDF and Turkish-backed factions were already being reported on Sunday.
Israel, meanwhile, is glad to see the departures of an Iran-backed Assad but not exactly thrilled at having Islamist leaders next door. The country was already bolstering a buffer zone along the border between the Israel-controlled Golan Heights and Syria and joined in the bombing of a small number of sites inside Syria.
By any measure, the immediate future of Syria will be an unstable and potentially violent melange of competing groups, intense jockeying for power and settling of scores. Among worst-case scenarios are a deepening civil war or the conversion of the once-wealthy and now devastated country into a haven for militants such as the Islamic State.
After 24 hours monitoring what the White House called the “extraordinary” developments in Syria, Biden convened his National Security Council Sunday for updates and planning before speaking to the American public.
“We will remain vigilant,” Biden said, pledging to keep militants at bay and “do whatever we can to support” the Syrian people “to help restore Syria after more than a decade of war and a generation of brutality from the Assad family.”
By contrast, Donald Trump, who becomes president in about six weeks, said on his social media platform that the U.S. should “stay out of it.” “This is not our fight,” he said.
Similarly, as president in 2019, he declared that “someone else should fight” in Syria and in a much-criticized move ordered the withdrawal of most U.S. troops posted there, clearing the way for Turkey to move in and attack the United States’ Kurdish allies.
Several hundred U.S. troops remain in Syria, officially to counter any resurgence by Islamic State.
There are other looming issues, however, that might demand a U.S. role, officials said.
Syria will need huge amounts of humanitarian aid, especially if some of the millions of citizens who fled as refugees during the last decade of war begin to return to the ruins of their former homes.
Also, critically, U.S. officials expressed concern about Assad’s large stockpiles of armament, including missiles and chemical weapons, that could end up in the hands of the rebels. Assad notoriously used chemical weapons on his own people to put down rebellion and dissent.
Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, voiced support for Assad after a 2017 visit to Syria. She said she doubted U.S. intelligence reports that he had used chemical weapons inside his country.
For many ordinary Syrians, however, the principal concern is how minorities will be treated. Some, like the Alawite Shiite Muslim faction to which Assad’s family belonged, as well as some Kurds and Christians, are seen as having colluded with the regime. Most of the rebels are Sunni Muslims.
The first government to congratulate the opposition victory in Syria was Afghanistan’s radically conservative and repressive Islamic Taliban.
Ahmed Sharaa, the bearded commander of HTS, has sought to portray the group as a reformed and more moderate faction than its past associations suggest. He has preached tolerance and pluralism, although his rule over Syria’s Idlib province where HTS has held sway only displayed the most minimal version of such policies. Christians, for example, have been allowed to attend church.
“These sects have co-existed in the region for hundreds of years,” he told CNN in an interview last week as the rebels were advancing toward Damascus. “No one has the right to erase another group.”
He promised a “transition to a state of governance and institutions” and even suggested HTS could disband having achieved its military victory.
That would be a very unusual transition in the Middle East, where players who gain power tend to hold on to it.
The Assad regime began in 1970 with Bashar’s father Hafez. With an insidious intelligence service, routine imprisonment and torture of dissidents and iron-fist control of media and public speech, the Assads maintained a ferocious and violent control of the Syrian population.
The Arab Spring protests of 2011 led to a brutal crackdown and eventually a civil war that killed an estimated 500,000 people.
Assad remained in power with military help from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed political and military faction based in Lebanon. Over the last year or so, those three allies all lost their ability to defend him.
Russia is overextended in its nearly three years of war in Ukraine. Iran has been battered by Israel from outside and dissent and economic turmoil on the inside. And Hezbollah has been vastly weakened by Israeli assassinations and bombardments.
It is expected that Syria’s new leaders will close the Russian air base and port on the Mediterranean coast. Iran has lost a large portion if not all of its land and air routes to Lebanon and Hezbollah, its proxy there.
In his speech Sunday, Biden claimed some credit for the recent turn of events in Syria, as uncertain as its future may be.
“Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East through this combination of support for our partners, sanctions, diplomacy and targeted military force when necessary,” he said.
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