Commentary Culture Investigations

The Atlantic staff writer Annie Lowrey joined PBS’s Amanpour and Company on Tuesday to allege that the reason why the United States does not have “universal, simple benefit systems” like universal basic income or single-payer health care is because of the legacy of Jim Crow.At one point co-host Bianna Golodryga wondered, “You mentioned the socioeconomic factor. You also pick up on race as well. What evidence did you find on that front?”Lowrey was to promote her book, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time and How to Fix, which naturally argues that it costs too much time and money in order to receive benefits in this country due to excessive bureaucracy. While attacking unnecessary bureaucracy may sound nice, Lowrey’s attempt to identify a source was way off track, “Part of the reason that we do not have universal, simple benefit systems in this country, like some of our peer countries have, is because we were creating those programs often during Jim Crow. And we wanted to have ways to get benefits to some people, but not others.” The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey tells PBS that “Part of the reason that we do not have universal, simple benefit systems (UBI, Single-payer health care, ect.) in this country, like some of our peer countries have, is because we were creating those programs often during Jim Crow. And… pic.twitter.com/yfX8z6fxKH— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) September 3, 2026 By “universal, simple benefit systems,” Lowrey mostly means UBI, even though she has admitted that any benefits it might hypothetically produce could be wiped out by inflation. Lowrey has also sung the praises of British-style, government-run health care, despite its notorious waiting lines, but has conceded that implementing such a system is not politically realistic. Therefore, while Lowrey laments administrative overhead costs driving up the cost of health care, ironically, her solution there is to implement even more regulations.As it was, Lowrey continued, “But now, we still have this legacy of these non-universal, very complicated systems that are meant to suss out who is deserving and who isn’t deserving because of our racial makeup. And other countries, when they’re designing these systems, they often, you know, they’re smaller and they’re more racially and ethnically homogenous than the United States.”In “universal” systems, the government still ultimately decides who receives health care and who does not. Nevertheless, Lowrey lamented, “And I think that diversity is obviously our strength, and we are a grand experiment in multiracial, multiethnic democracy. But it does, it affects service delivery. And we still have a legacy of those same rules applying today.”The reason why the U.S. does not have UBI or single-payer health care is because the American people don’t believe in giving away free money or that the government is competent enough to manage one-sixth of the economy, not because of Jim Crow.Here is a transcript for the September 2 show:PBS Amanpour and Company9/1/2026BIANNA GOLODRYGA: You mentioned the socioeconomic factor. You also pick up on race as well. What evidence did you find on that front?ANNIE LOWREY: Part of the reason that we do not have universal, simple benefit systems in this country, like some of our peer countries have, is because we were creating those programs often during Jim Crow. And we wanted to have ways to get benefits to some people, but not others.Jim Crow, of course, was a time when we invented a huge number of administrative burdens to make sure that black folks in the South couldn’t vote, but white folks could, when we couldn’t legislate a rule saying that you cannot vote if you’re black. So, instead, they come up with all of these bureaucratic procedural things to make sure that white families can vote, black families cannot, along, obviously, with a campaign of racial terror that was occurring in the South at the time.But now, we still have this legacy of these non-universal, very complicated systems that are meant to suss out who is deserving and who isn’t deserving because of our racial makeup. And other countries, when they’re designing these systems, they often, you know, they’re smaller and they’re more racially and ethnically homogenous than the United States.And I think that diversity is obviously our strength, and we are a grand experiment in multiracial, multiethnic democracy. But it does, it affects service delivery. And we still have a legacy of those same rules applying today. 

The Philadelphia public schools hosted a series of “liberation” workshops for students taught by a convicted felon who has argued that Jews control the media and was involved in torching a police car.
Anthony Smith, who has also praised the Hamas “freedom fighters” behind the October 7 terrorist attacks, facilitated workshops for hundreds of students—including some as young as seventh grade—as part of a partnership between the school district and the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction, a self-described “political education program for aspiring revolutionaries.”
Held between 2025 and 2026, the workshops drew more than 150 students and included a session titled “Imagining A World Without Prisons,” according to emails and documents obtained by North American Values Institute (NAVI). Other facilitators included Eliana Atienza, a University of Pennsylvania student who participated in the school’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampent,” and Geo Maher, a Penn lecturer who was pushed out of Drexel University after he tweeted in 2017, “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”
Attendance at each “Liberation Symposium” was mandatory, though students could choose between different sessions. The workshops were endorsed by Assistant Superintendent for School Performance Jeffrey MacFarland, who thanked the organizers of the symposium in a February 2025 email, and appear to have had the sign-off of the district’s social studies director, Ismael Jimenez, who sits on the Movement School’s board.
The Movement School has said that its goal is to create a “revolutionary pipeline” for K-12 students. The group’s Study With Us page, which says “young people are the key to … resisting capitalist imperialism,” advertises its curriculum to public schools and includes a quotation from Karl Marx.
“The District needs to answer for why it has repeatedly allowed a radical organization, one that boasts of creating a ‘revolutionary pipeline’ into K-12, access to its students,” said Mika Hackner, NAVI’s director of research.
MacFarland, Jimenez, and the School District of Philadelphia did not respond to requests for comment.
Hosted at the Workshop School—where zero percent of students are proficient in math, according to state test scores—the sessions show how self-proclaimed radicals have influenced the curriculum of Pennsylvania’s largest school district, which is facing a $300 million deficit and where just 18 percent of eighth-graders read at grade level. The workshops came amid an ongoing congressional probe into reports of antisemitism in the district, including statements from Jimenez, the social studies director, who has praised the convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur and argued that “every child should walk into a classroom and feel the revolution stirring in the air.”
The Liberation Symposia were part of this revolutionary project. In a December 2025 email, Smith said he planned to teach a workshop for 10th-graders on the neo-Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who argued that revolutionaries must build influence in civil society—including schools—in order to overthrow existing power structures.
Smith has also participated in less subtle forms of revolution, such as when he helped a group of rioters flip over an empty cop car in the wake of George Floyd’s death. A member of the crowd shot a road flare into the car, lighting it ablaze, and Smith threw a piece of paper into the fire. He was arrested in October of that year and eventually pleaded guilty to one felony count of obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder, admitting as part of the plea that he aided and abetted arson. Smith’s attorney noted at the time that the felony conviction “bars him from teaching for 10 years.” Prior to his arrest, Smith taught at a charter school for underprivileged youth.
Now a leader at the Movement School, which describes Smith as an “organizer and educator” focused on “addressing police violence,” the convicted felon has said that Hamas’s rampage through Southern Israel “sounded lit” and wrote in a 2022 Instagram post that “the secret illuminati made of Jewish billionaires … are desperately trying to *cancel* the REAL revolutionaries standing up against the ‘man’ by ruining their white-owned, million dollar business.”
“We can tell the media is Jewish owned because look how quick they cancel you over anti-semitic comments,” Smith added. “They don’t do that for anti black shit though.”

 

A more genteel form of racialism permeates the social studies curriculum designed by Jimenez. Students learn that “racist attitudes played a foundational role in the formation of American identity” and that a “mythology of whiteness” sustained capitalism throughout the Cold War, according to materials obtained by the Free Press. One assignment asks students to find a song that “should replace the national anthem” in light of the “racism in the United States.”
The partnership between the Movement School and the district was organized by Hannah Gann, a 10th-grade history teacher who referred to the workshop facilitators as “freedom fighters.” The first event, an “End Incarceration Symposium” on Feb. 19, 2025, included 159 students from four Philadelphia public schools—the Workshop School, Academy at Palumbo, West Philly High, and SLA Middle School—as well as two private schools, Bridge Way and Revolution School. Emails obtained by NAVI and shared with the Free Beacon show that Gann offered to “volunteer time and pedagogical ideas” with the Movement School.
One workshop at the February 19 symposium, “Imagining A World Without Prisons with The Youth Art and Self-Empowerment Project,” was hosted by “youth leaders who have experienced incarceration and who are fighting to end mass incarceration.” Those students are taught to think “about whether prisons make us safer, discuss what we need to do to create safe communities, and begin envisioning the possibilities of a future free from police and prisons,” according to a flier for the event.
Another session, facilitated by Black Lives Matter’s Philadelphia chapter and the Youth Art and Self-Empowerment Project, was called “Restorative Yoga for Restorative Justice.” In that session, participants learned “breathing, meditative, and somatic techniques and tricks for calming their nervous system,” which “can be especially potent during or following periods of heightened stress or conflict.”
A session called “Let’s be Forreal: What does restorative justice look like in practice?” was hosted by a group called Collective Climb, which works to “transform what would have been a juvenile case for a felony-level offense into a holistic experience focused on self-empowerment, community connection, and direct accountability.” The organization’s website states that “at no point post-referral do responsible youth or survivors engage with DAs, police, or courtrooms.” That session “breaks down how restorative justice can work against carceral mindsets and systems to create more just and connected communities.”

Gann was not the only Philadelphia school district employee involved in the workshops. McFarland, the assistant superintendent, emailed Gann the day after the symposium to thank her for her “efforts within the school.”

Further emails obtained by the Free Beacon show that Gann asked the Abolition School how she could help “either with lesson planning for your symposium workshop or with other things to lighten the load,” adding that she wished she “had the budget to pay our workshop facilitators” but would be “happy to volunteer time and pedagogical ideas as a way to show [her] appreciation.” An Abolition School coordinator, referring to Gann as “comrade,” invited her to an “all hands in deck meeting” to help “gather some collective ideas for fundraising & support.”

The February 2025 symposium was not the only time Gann organized an event with the Movement School. Emails from February 2026 show that the school district held a virtual symposium that month. That Zoom meeting began with a land acknowledgment and led to students sharing “their plans to fight mass incarceration” and community partners sharing “how youth can get involved in their work to fight mass incarceration.” The schedule also includes discussion questions like “Why do you think there are so many efforts to silence education about Black history and resistance right now? Why do people with power not want us to have this knowledge?” and “How do you see the fight against incarceration connecting to other struggles for justice in your community and around the world?”

Gann’s follow-up email to facilitators states that she was “super excited to make a full in-person Symposium happen this spring” with the theme of “Education Not Incarceration,” highlighting “the relationship between school funding and facility closures with overinvestment in the prison industrial complex.”

Materials obtained by NAVI show an Abolition School workshop titled “Culture Talk: What Kind of World Do We Want?” and focused on working “through the process of changing ideas, language, action, and eventually, our world with you.”

Earlier emails show that the title hid a more ideological framing for the discussion. Smith wrote that he would “likely do the workshop that coincides with our week on Antonio Gramsci.” Gann said the idea “look[ed] amazing” but wrote that “a catchy name might help draw [students’] attention. Something like ‘For the Culture,’ maybe?”

Jimenez has made news for his radicalism in the past. The Free Beacon reported in October that he posted several online tributes to convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur in the wake of her death in September and used her photo as his Facebook profile picture. In 2024, he posted a photo of his office door—decorated with a poster of Shakur that read, “ASSATA SHAKUR is welcome here”—to social media. Jimenez was also involved in launching a “Racial Justice Organizing Committee” for educators that called for the release of another convicted cop-killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Free Beacon reported.
Jimenez has also made a series of radical statements about Israel, calling it a “terrorist state” and a “racist apartheid theocracy.” He claimed that it was “proven recently that Hamas had nothing to do with kidnapping that started current invasion of the Gaza strip.”
Philadelphia parents told the Free Beacon in July 2025 that the city’s public school system has become an “absolute cesspool” of antisemitism and anti-American radicalism and that Gov. Josh Shapiro (D., Pa.) had “completely ignored” their concerns. School officials have publicly defended terrorism and denounced the United States as a “criminal Amerikan empire,” and the school district settled a federal discrimination case in 2024 after students allegedly taunted their Jewish classmates with Nazi salutes, swastika graffiti on doors, and threats to “kill the Jews.”
The post Philadelphia Public Schools Host Prison Abolition Workshops With Convicted Felon Who Helped Torch Cop Car and Said Jews Control the Media appeared first on .

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