Something to Know - 28 November

Continuing on with new writers and a diversity of perspectives on the same general subject, this is today's newsletter.   The author is Daniel Pinchbeck, and this is his bio for you to gather background information on him and his writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pinchbeck .  This is Thanksgiving Day, and there might be a chance to read it later if you are busy with friends and family.   

Author Daniel Pinchbeck

Below is my latest newsletter. I thought I would share it here. I look at the thesis that Trump is an operative for the Kremlin. He owes a huge debt to Putin, who not only has Kompromat on him but also has provided the strategic model for the authoritarian playbook that Trump is using. This model for how to deconstruct a society has also been used by other authoritarians over the last decades, in countries like Turkey, Romania, Hungary, and so on. Some may argue that this explanation isn't necessary, that "the president of the United States is an elderly, narcissistic nihilist who is making it up as he goes along." I don't think these ideas are mutually exclusive. Both can be true at the same time. The Trump regime shows fealty to Putin because he provides the model for how to take over this country. Putin is motivated by a desire for vengeance against the U.S. for the breakup of the Soviet Union and other actions. He has accomplished a tremendously successful campaign of assymetric warfare to tear us apart. The only question for us is what we can do now, and what comes next. 

"Power is not a means; it is an end." - George Orwell, 1984

Today I want to say out loud what my most well-informed friends say in private when we talk about our increasingly rogue federal government and Trumpocalypse2. It feels crucial that U.S. citizens understand what is happening. We need to talk about it. Personally, I think we should be out on the streets protesting in huge numbers before we lose our country—and perhaps the world—beyond hope of salvation. But hey, that's just me.

The core of the argument is that Trump is deeply enmeshed with Vladimir Putin and the Russian mafia state. A substantial body of investigative work now suggests that Trump has functioned for decades as a kind of Russian "asset," consistently advancing the Kremlin's interests. Journalists like Craig Unger, in books such as House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat, describe how Soviet and then Russian security services began cultivating Trump as far back as the late 1970s and 1980s, when he first came onto their radar. 

After his casino empire and other ventures collapsed, Trump and his companies reportedly owed around $4 billion to dozens of banks. Cut off from mainstream credit, he became increasingly dependent on opaque inflows of capital from Russia and the post-Soviet world. Russian buyers, including figures later identified as mobsters or oligarchs, bought up condos in Trump Tower and other Trump properties, often through shell companies, providing Trump with a financial lifeline when he was otherwise near collapse.

Unger and others report that Trump Tower was, strangely, one of only two buildings in New York permitted to sell apartments to anonymous buyers via shell companies. That practice allowed purchasers to conceal their identities while moving large sums into U.S. real estate. Unger writes about how two forces converged: on one side, a torrent of flight capital and dirty money pouring out of the collapsing Soviet bloc; on the other, Trump's eagerness to sell high-priced condos "no questions asked" to buyers using shell companies. In his account, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and other white-collar intermediaries helped transform Trump properties into a de facto laundromat for Russian and post-Soviet money, possibly on a scale of billions of dollars. Whether or not every detail can be proven beyond doubt, the broad pattern of Russian-linked buyers using Trump properties to move money into the United States is well documented.

Trump's 2016 campaign, we now know, was riddled with contacts with Russian officials and intermediaries. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report documented hundreds of contacts and dozens of meetings between Trump campaign figures and people linked to the Russian state, including intelligence-adjacent actors. Michael Flynn, for instance, had been paid by Russian state media and attended an RT gala in Moscow where he sat near Putin; he later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the transition. Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chair in 2016, had long-standing ties to pro-Kremlin oligarchs and passed internal campaign polling data to a man the U.S. government later described as a Russian intelligence asset. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Putin ordered an extensive influence campaign to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton; Mueller did not charge a criminal conspiracy, but he did find that the campaign "expected it would benefit electorally" from Russia's actions and welcomed them.

Now, with Trump's return to office, we've entered a far more brazen phase. The recent rollout of his so-called "peace plan" for Ukraine exposed the power dynamic between Trump and Putin in an unusually crude way. The 28-point plan tracks almost point-by-point with Moscow's maximalist demands: freezing lines roughly along current frontlines, entrenching Russian control over occupied territories, and placing tight constraints on Ukraine's future security arrangements—while Russia rebuilds its military to strike again. European diplomats and language experts quickly noted that the draft reads like a direct translation from Russian, with clumsy phrasing and legal constructions characteristic of Russian originals. Critics have suggested it looks as if it were dropped straight into a translation program and barely edited. There is also the surreal image, widely circulated on social media, of Steve Witkoff, our emissary to Russia, placing his hand over his heart while meeting Putin, like he was showing fealty from a knight to a king.

All of this comes at a moment of painful vulnerability for Ukraine. A major corruption scandal in the country's energy sector, involving figures close to President Volodymyr Zelensky, has shaken public trust and given ammunition to critics at home and abroad. Zelensky has moved to purge some officials and promise reforms, but his standing has been undeniably weakened at exactly the time when he faces enormous pressure from Washington to accept a settlement on terms largely favorable to Moscow. In that context, Trump's "peace plan" is actually a capitulation plan: a tool to force a battered ally into submission, to Putin's advantage, radically endangering not just Ukraine but all of Europe.

Across a range of policy arenas, Trump acts like a sad jester-puppet, shilling for Kremlin objectives. Putin seeks vengeance for what the U.S. did to the U.S.S.R. in the past. Russia's strategic goals include humiliating the United States, weakening its alliances, and degrading its political institutions, economy, and social fabric. 

Trump's trade wars and tariffs have disrupted global supply chains and alienated traditional allies. His efforts to chip away at the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansions undermine the basic health security of millions of Americans. His administration has rolled back environmental and climate regulations, opened more federal land and offshore areas to oil and gas drilling, and sabotaged programs that support renewable energy, all of which prolong dependence on fossil fuels—the foundation of the Russian state's power. Meanwhile, he has increasingly allied himself with anti-vaccine activists and taken steps that weaken public health institutions, both physically and psychologically. These choices make Americans sicker, poorer, and more divided, which supports Russia's strategic plan to destroy the United States as a functional entity.

What's shocking to me is how many Americans I know still support MAGA, after everything we've learned, because they believe it meshes with their self-interest, despite the negative impacts on the general population, the Earth's ecology, our future, and so on. This includes many people I know in crypto, AI, tech, podcast comedy bros, and so on. These people wil have a lot to answer for, if we manage to escape this catastrophe with some freedom intact. 

We just learned that much of the loud pro-MAGA chorus on Twitter / X is not actually coming from the United States at all, but from countries like Russia, Nigeria, India, Thailand, and others. We already knew that Russia deploys bot networks and fake personas to inject propaganda, polarize Americans, and exhaust our ability to discern truth from lies. The MAGA social media ecosystem is one front in a multi-leveled psychological operation designed to turn our public discourse into toxic sludge.

Russia under Putin is a "mafia state.' There are no boundaries between security services, political leadership, and organized crime, just a single system of kleptocratic power wrapped in faux Christian pieties. Trump and his entourage want to remodel the United States along similar lines. Unless we stop this authoritarian collapse, we will see a narrow elite prosper while the vast majority slide into precarity and uneducated ignorance. Young women will be reduced to breeding stock and unpaid caregivers in a resurrected patriarchal order; young men will be channeled into militarized roles in wars of conquest or into low-wage, surveilled labor at home.

We should look at the Trump regime as a soft occupation by a hostile foreign power—even if foreign soldiers are not shooting at us on our streets. The war being waged is less about tanks and missiles than about psyche, perception, and attention. Territory, in this new form of conflict, is cognitive and emotional, not just physical. The right-wing media ecosystem and its extensions in tech platforms aim to saturate every information channel with lies, half-truths, and numbing cliches until people cannot distinguish reality from fabrication and finally give up. Attention and psychology are war zones to be invaded and taken over.

What I find terrifying is that a large portion of the U.S. public seem oddly oblivious and uncaring, not paying attention to the scale and intent of what is happening.

Political scientists speak of the "resource curse," where a country rich in a single commodity like oil or diamonds ends up with a small hyper-wealthy elite and a population mired in poverty and corruption. For Russia, the cursed resource has been fossil fuels. John McCain once called Russia "a gas station masquerading as a country," only with thousands of nuclear warheads attached. The emerging vision for the United States under Trump and his allies swaps oil for data centers and AI. Our equivalent of the resource curse will be artificial intelligence and the infrastructure that supports it: vast data centers and mining operations that devour energy, water, and land, poisoning the environment around poor communities (as is happening now in Memphis and elsewhere) while generating extraordinary wealth and power for a tiny class of tech and finance barons, surveillance capitalists, warmongers, and their political patrons.

Trump still rails against "Russiagate" as a hoax and seeks to punish those who investigated him like James Comey. But in fact, multiple investigations—the U.S. intelligence community assessment, the Mueller report, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee findings—converged on a basic story. Russia, under Putin's direction, mounted a wide-ranging influence and hacking operation to damage Clinton and help Trump. The Trump campaign and its orbit had extensive, unexplained entanglements with Russian interests. They benefited greatly from those operations, even if prosecutors said the evidence did not meet the standard for charging a criminal conspiracy.

Craig Unger describes the origins of this arrangement in the late Cold War. In the 1980s, the KGB was frustrated by its failure to recruit more American assets and instructed its officers to find new U.S. targets. In Trump, they saw an ambitious businessman intoxicated by attention and desperate for cash, someone who would engage in dubious deals without asking where the money came from. Over the following decades, Russian mobsters, oligarchs, and their intermediaries bought into Trump's buildings, did joint ventures with his organization, and floated him when he could not get loans from mainstream banks. Unger and former KGB officers like Yuri Shvets argue that this was not a single master plot but a long, opportunistic cultivation of a particularly useful mark, who eventually found his way into the Oval Office. Whether you accept every part of that thesis or not, it fits disturbingly well with the observable pattern of Trump's behavior toward Russia and Putin.

I find it darkly fascinating to watch as MAGA seeks to import this style of rigid, Byzantine authoritarianism, grafting it onto the very different political culture in the United States. The result looks awkward and unstable, like a foreign operating system forced onto incompatible hardware. The same copy-and-paste feeling was present in the technocratic management of the Covid pandemic and vaccines: a sense of scripts being run from elsewhere, with little sensitivity to the actual needs and intelligence of the public. That awkwardness is not reassuring, but it does suggest that the project is not yet complete or irreversible. There remains, at least in principle, opportunity for the American people to reject this hybrid of Trumpism and Putinism before we live through grotesque scenarios scripted by Orwell.

The only way we don't go down in flames is if we refuse to get numbed or cowed into silence. We need to keep researching, reflecting, and informing people about what is unfolding. We need to wake people up by connecting the dots between Putin, the Russian mafia state, and Trump, his puppet. We need to understand whose interests this malevolent regime is serving as it pursues policies that seek to systematically devastate the United States. We need to confront the information war that keeps Trump's base deluded. The good news is there are also huge cracks appearing in the MAGA base and the GOP right now: Those need to be exploited and intensified. 

PS if you read to the end of this piece, please subscribe to my newsletter for regular updates. I will put the link in the comments.

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Juan Matute

CCRC

Claremont, California

Harold Wilke House

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-01-me-wilke1-story.html

Something to Know - 27 November

If you have been watching The American Revolution by Ken Burns, this message from HCR is appropriate for today - Thanksgiving.

November 26, 2025

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Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>  Unsubscribe	Wed, Nov 26, 9:07 PM (13 hours ago)
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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more November 26, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson Nov 27   READ IN APP   Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday…but not for the reasons we generally remember. The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers' attacks on their Indigenous neighbors. In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women's magazine Godey's Lady's Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slave-holding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving. And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed. Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that "all men are created equal," but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all. In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders' rebellion. The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays. New York governor Edwin Morgan's widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year "is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones." But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because "the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value." The next year, Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant's army. The military tide was turning. President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain. In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to wreck the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, "with a large increase of freedom," would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans "in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands" to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving. In 1863, November's last Thursday fell on the 26th. On November 19, Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He reached back to the Declaration of Independence for the principles on which he called for Americans to rebuild the severed nation: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Lincoln urged the crowd to take up the torch those who fought at Gettysburg had laid down. He called for them to "highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. "Moreover," Lincoln wrote, "He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions." In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law. And in 1865, at least, they won. Happy Thanksgiving.

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Juan Matute

CCRC

Claremont, California

Harold Wilke House

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-01-me-wilke1-story.html

Fwd: How to Gaslight Your MAGA Relatives on Thanksgiving

Sent from Gmail Mobile

In deference to all the turkey's who have made this day possible, there should be no attention paid to the turkey in the Ofal Orifice.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: The Borowitz Report <borowitzreport@substack.com>
Date: Thu, Nov 27, 2025 at 4:08 AM
Subject: How to Gaslight Your MAGA Relatives on Thanksgiving
To: <juanma2t@gmail.com>

Helpful tips!

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Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more How to Gaslight Your MAGA Relatives on Thanksgiving Helpful tips! Andy Borowitz Nov 27 Photo by Gabriel Garcia Marengo on Unsplash Stuck with MAGA relatives around the table today? Gaslight them by pretending you're a convert to their movement! Just slip these surefire talking points into the conversation: I'm more grateful for this Thanksgiving meal than last year's because it cost so much more. I agree with RFK Jr.—polio's not so bad. Pete Hegseth has made me feel so much better about my drinking. I'm grateful to live in a country where if you've committed violent crimes and gone to prison you can still get a job working for ICE. After we're done eating, let's tear down this house and build a ballroom. Thank God Trump is deporting all those undocumented workers! If I want fruit and vegetables I'll just pick them myself. Say what you will about Trump, he's a loyal friend—look at how many times Epstein mentioned him in his emails. © 2025 Andy Borowitz 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe

Something to Know -26 November

Most of you expect to see stories and columns about the political theater of our government.  Well, yes that is true.   However, there are other sources of things to know which are more relevant and need understanding.   Today's newsletter is about something that is probably more important than a lot of stuff that goes on in the political world; education of our young people.   Well, that is not totally true - you will see how politics are to blame for much of the problems. The article was sent to from someone in my college circle who makes it her purpose in life to inform.   She has forwarded this piece, which is only acknowledged as "Yang for NYT".  Some internet sleuthing leads one to believe it is from this employee of the New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/by/jia-lynn-yang .  It is a longer read than usual, but I think you will be wiser for the effort to read it all.

Yang for NYT: "One of the more bewildering aspects of the already high-stress endeavor of 21st-century American parenting is that at some point your child is likely to be identified with a psychiatric diagnosis of one kind or another. Many exist in a gray zone that previous generations of parents never encountered.

A diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is practically a rite of passage in American boyhood, with nearly one in four 17-year-old boys bearing the diagnosis. The numbers have only gone up, and vertiginously: One million more children were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. in 2022 than in 2016.

The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31.

Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of "onset" is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates. New categories materialize. There is now oppositional defiant disorder, in addition to pathological demand avoidance.

So perhaps it should be little surprise that even among our deeply polarized political leaders, there is broad agreement that America's children are not well.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a strategy report in September entitled "Make Our Children Healthy Again," with ideas on how to improve the mental health of children with better diets, less screen time and fewer medications. Illinois's governor, the Trump antagonist JB Pritzker, recently made his state the first in the nation to require schools to do universal mental health screenings.

No doubt the causes of the mental health crisis are multifaceted. Some disorders tend to run in families. Screens have thoroughly invaded childhood, supplanting the sleep, exercise and socializing in person that can ward off depression and anxiety.

And yet no one in political leadership — or our broader national conversation about mental health — seems to be asking about the environment where children spend most of their waking hours: school.

There is growing evidence that school itself is essential to understanding why so many children seem to be struggling. It can be a cause of stress that exacerbates anxiety or depression; but just as importantly and less frequently acknowledged, it is often where disorder presents, leading many children — and their parents — down the path toward a diagnosis.

The experience of school has changed rapidly in recent generations. Starting in the 1980s, a metrics-obsessed regime took over American education and profoundly altered the expectations placed on children, up and down the class ladder. In fact, it has altered the experience of childhood itself.

This era of policymaking has largely ebbed, with disappointing results. Math and reading levels are at their lowest in decades. The rules put in place by both political parties were well-meaning, but in trying to make more children successful, they also circumscribed more tightly who could be served by school at all.

"What's happening is, instead of saying, 'We need to fix the schools,' the message is, 'We need to fix the kids,'" said Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College and the author of "Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life."

"The track has become narrower and narrower, so a greater range of people don't fit that track anymore," he said. "And the result is, we want to call it a disorder."

No Child Left Behind, No Time to Eat Lunch

School was not always so central to American childhood. In 1950, less than half of all children attended kindergarten. Only about 50 percent graduated from high school, and without much professional penalty. A person spent fewer years of their life in school, and fewer hours in the day furiously trying to learn. However bored a child might become sitting behind a desk, freedom awaited after the final bell rang, with hours after school to play without the direction of adults.

But as the country's economy shifted from factories and farms to offices, being a student became a more serious matter. The outcome of your life could depend on it.

During an era of global competition, the country's leaders also began to see school as a potential venue for national glory, or shame. In 1983, a commission created by Ronald Reagan's secretary of education, Terrel H. Bell, released a dire report on the state of American schools called "A Nation at Risk." It warned that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

Over the next decade, Democratic and Republican governors such as Bill Clinton in Arkansas and Lamar Alexander in Tennessee began molding their states' schools with new standards of testing and accountability. Schools were treated more like publicly traded companies, with test scores as proxies for profits. Before long, schools had public ratings, so ubiquitous they now appear on real estate listings.

The pressure kept rising. By 2001, 30 states had laws that imposed a system of punishments and rewards for schools based on their test scores. The next year, President George W. Bush's signature education reform law, No Child Left Behind, made the effort national.

With school funding now on the line, there were unmistakable incentives for children to be diagnosed. Starting in the 1990s, students with autism or A.D.H.D. become newly eligible for added support in the classroom. Getting a child treated, potentially with medication, could help an entire classroom achieve higher scores, especially if the child's behavior was disruptive to others. And in some parts of the country, children with disabilities were not counted toward a school's overall marks, a carve-out that could boost scores.

The added metrics may well have compelled more children to receive the support they needed. Either way, educational policymaking yielded a change in diagnoses. In states that added new accountability standards, researchers found a clear rise in A.D.H.D. According to one analysis, the rate of A.D.H.D. diagnoses among children ages 8 to 13 in low-income homes went from 10 percent to 15 percent after the arrival of No Child Left Behind.

The impact of the law on autism diagnoses has been less documented. But there is a great deal of overlap among these disorders. Anywhere from 30 to 80 percent of children diagnosed with autism also have A.D.H.D. Experts have also pointed out that the rise in autism has largely taken place on the more subtle end of the spectrum, where psychiatrists expanded the diagnosis. Students with this profile often need educators who can be eminently flexible in their approach, a tough task when an entire classroom has to focus on narrowly mastering certain testable skills.

The demands on performance in higher grades trickled down into younger and younger ages. In 2009, the Obama administration offered greater funding to schools that adopted new national learning standards called the Common Core. These included an emphasis on reading by the end of kindergarten, even though many early childhood experts believe that not all children are developmentally ready to read at that age.

With each new wave of reforms, the tenor of kindergarten changed. Rote lessons in math and reading crept into classrooms, even though experts say young children learn best through play. Researchers discovered that in the span of about a decade, kindergarten had suddenly become more like first grade.

Preschool was not far behind, as even toddlers were expected to stay still for longer stretches of time to imbibe academic lessons. This again defied the consensus among early childhood experts. Children, parents and teachers struggle through this mismatch daily. In 2005, a study showed that preschoolers were frequently being expelled for misbehavior, and at rates more than three times that of school-age children.

"We're not aligning the developmental needs of kids with the policies and practices that go on daily with schools," said Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford University and co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit group that works with schools to improve student well-being.

The pressure to learn more led to a restructuring of the school day itself. Before the 1980s, American children usually had recess breaks throughout the day. By 2016, only eight states required daily recess in elementary schools. And when researchers studied what had become of lunchtime, they learned that children often had just 20 minutes to not only eat but stop to use the bathroom after class, walk to the cafeteria and wait in line for food.

Pope pointed to the bizarrely packed schedules for middle and high schoolers. "You've got seven different homework assignments that you've got to remember each night. Think of the cognitive load of a sixth-grade boy," she said. "I challenge many adults to do this."

Some parents may see children who simply need to toughen up. The world that awaits is not easy either. What they may not realize is how much children have begun to see school as an endless chore to be endured — the means to some promised end on the other side of childhood. This makes it only harder for them to learn the very skills they need most as adults.

Anxiety and depression seem inevitable when school is a field in a game for economic survival, played by children hoping to secure enough stability to last the rest of their lives. In a 2020 paper, Yale researchers found that nearly 80 percent of high schoolers said they were stressed; almost 70 percent reported being bored.

"Overall, students see school as a place where they experience negative emotions," explained Marc Brackett, a co-author of the report when it was released.

The Children Who Don't Fit

In the face of an unyielding education system, more parents are discovering that their children simply don't fit, a terrifying possibility when achievement in school can determine achievement in life. At that point, the best thing to do is to prove that your child has a mental disorder. With a doctor's diagnosis, at least, adaptations are possible.

In this way, the rise in diagnoses is also a revolt against education policymaking that strips away the particulars of people, treating them as interchangeable data points. The best teachers understand that every child has a distinct way of learning. This is especially true for children who fall outside the ever-diminishing definition of normal.

The people clamoring loudest for a diagnosis of A.D.H.D. or autism are often parents. For many families, the medications criticized by Kennedy allow their children to participate in school at all.

The need for special services in school has become so severe that families have lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to maintain a broad definition of autism, in order to avoid being pushed out of a diagnosis. The number of children with disabilities receiving support in public schools last year hit a record 7.5 million, a 17 percent increase since the 2012-13 school year. In some states, such as New York and Pennsylvania, as many as 21 percent of students are supposed to receive some adaptation.

Some of the support being requested — for instance, being allowed to move more, rather than sitting so long — would likely benefit all children. Instead, school districts try to mash individual needs into a system antithetical to them. The sheer cost and logistics of this are unsustainable. Many students who are legally entitled to support do not receive them.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has threatened to gut the Department of Education's civil rights division, which enforces the federal law guaranteeing that children with disabilities receive a free public education.

School districts are trying to address the mental health crisis by teaching children how to better manage their emotions. Funding has poured into counseling services. But these approaches do not lift a larger mirror to school itself as a major source of stress and anxiety. Meanwhile, the teachers of America also report overwhelming levels of burnout.

Rather than wait for changes to come, many parents are giving up on the system altogether. A poll in 2023 found that about one in three home-schooling parents were unhappy with how their schools had educated their children with special needs, prompting them to leave. Parents are also increasingly turning to microschools, essentially learning pods with small numbers of children who can receive more individual attention.

Some of these parents identify as being part of an "unschooling" movement, in which they believe that school has done more harm than good for their children. They may be onto something. A 2016 paper showed that many young adults with childhood diagnoses of A.D.H.D. saw their symptoms improve once they left school and began working in a field that interested them.

This discontent helps empower the conservative effort to defund the public school system and let parents pick their own schools, with taxpayers covering the tuition. Each child who no longer seems to fit into the country's education system — and more often than not they are boys — potentially expands the constituency for these ideas. And trust erodes further in the progressive project of a democracy built on giving everyone a free and equal education.

The chief defender of that project, the Democratic Party, is ill-suited to addressing this crisis. Not only must it navigate teachers unions who may be skeptical of still more grandiose ideas on how to fix schools. The party has also become the political home of the meritocratic elite, the people perhaps least likely to see flaws in the system that crowned them as winners.

By turning childhood into a thing that can be measured, adults have managed to impose their greatest fears of failure onto the youngest among us. Each child who strays from our standards becomes a potential medical mystery to be solved, with more tests to take, more metrics to assess. The only thing that seems to consistently evade the detectives is the world around that child — the one made by the grown-ups."

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Juan Matute

CCRC

Claremont, California

Harold Wilke House

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-01-me-wilke1-story.html