Trashing The First Amendment

Ten months into the Trump administration, the outlines of America’s cold civil war have become too stark to miss. MAGA is determined to remake the United States into a nation where White Christian Nationalists are legally privileged and in control. And they’re making progress.

The evidence is overwhelming. Masked ICE agents focus on people of color. Trump reportedly wants to “revamp” immigration rules in order to make it easier for Whites and harder for others to enter the country. From day one, the administration has pursued an all-out war on “DEI”–insisting that any effort to level the playing field for previously marginalized folks is really anti-White discrimination. Aided and abetted by a thoroughly corrupted Supreme Court majority, the hits have kept coming: universities prevented from continuing programs even slightly resembling affirmative action, the continued gutting of the Voting Rights Act…

And as we’ve recently seen, the racism motivating MAGA isn’t diminishing; it infuses the GOP’s young activists.

I have previously written about the faux-Christianity that motivates much of this. I particularly recommend Tim Alberta’s book, “The Kingdom, The Power and the Glory.” Alberta is a genuine Christian Evangelical, and his critique is informed by his own deep religiosity. More recently, David French–another committed Evangelical– has described what is happening in thousands of churches as a religious “revolution”–not to be confused with a true revival. In his telling, America is close to a religious revolution, and the difference between that revolution and a true religious revival is immensely important for both church and state.

Decades of scholarship, very much including scholarship by religious organizations, have attributed America’s religiosity–far greater than in other Western Democratic countries–to the fact that the First Amendment requires the separation of church and state. That understanding fails to persuade the MAGA folks who’ve turned religion into a political identity.

The Christian Nationalists who dominate Red state governments reject the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. They intend to indoctrinate the nation’s schoolchildren, and they aren’t satisfied with mandates to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. In Texas, they’ve introduced a “revised” and bible-infused English curriculum.

A new state-sponsored English curriculum infused with lessons about the Bible and Christianity could reach tens of thousands of Texas schoolchildren this year.

More than 300 of the state’s roughly 1,200 districts signed up to use the English language arts lessons, according to data obtained by The New York Times through a public records request. Many are rural, and relatively small.

The curriculum was created as several states, including Oklahoma and Louisiana, fought to bring prayer or religious texts like the Ten Commandments into public school classrooms, blurring the line between church and state.

According to the analysis done by the New York Times, the Texas curriculum features content on Christianity, the bible and the life of Jesus. Lessons include the Biblical story of his birth in a Bethlehem manger, New Testament accounts of the angel who described him as the Messiah, and even stories about the miracles he was purported to perform.

Fifth graders examine a psalm in a poetry unit. First-grade students discuss the parable of the prodigal son alongside stories like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Kindergarten children learn in depth about the Book of Genesis in a lesson on art exploration that notes that “many artists have found inspiration for creating art from the words in creation stories in religious books.”

The Times analysis found that Christianity was heavily favored in the lessons. In the materials used in the second grade, for example, “Christianity, the Bible and Jesus are referenced about 110 times. By contrast, Islam, Muslims, the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad are mentioned roughly 31 times in lessons spanning from kindergarten to fifth grade.”

The Times article has much more detail, and it is worth clicking through and reading. The curricular changes were summed up in a quote by David R. Brockman, a Christian theologian and religious studies scholar at Rice University. After he reviewed all of the Texas materials, Brockman concluded that the lessons amounted to Bible study in a public school curriculum, and he worried that the state’s adaptation of its curriculum would send an implicit message to children “that Christianity is the only important religion.”

Well, duh! Of course that’s the message, and it’s intended. In MAGA’s America–a country distant from the one occupied by the rest of us–the only real Americans are lily-White and “Christian.” The rest of us–including genuine Christians–are intruders.

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I Told You So

Who really hates America?

In the run-up to No Kings Day, Republican leaders hysterically described participants as terrorists–as people who “hate America.” Those charges were never particularly effective; the first No Kings protest had brought out a cross-section of citizens who very clearly loved the America of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and who were prepared to defend it against the real “enemy within.” Grandmothers and veterans joined young and middle-aged people in an affirmance of genuine patriotism.

If there was any confusion about who loves and who hates the America envisioned by the Founders, it came just a couple of days before the second No Kings Day, in an expose from Politico.

Here’s the lede:

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

Politico obtained 2,900 pages of Telegram chats–representing 28,000 messages– reflecting conversations among the leaders of national Young Republican groups. The chats  spanned more than seven months, and included Young Republicans from New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont. As the report summed up the discovery, the contents offered “an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.”

And the way they talk is both horrifying and profoundly unAmerican.

Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders…

The group chat members spoke freely about the pressure to cow to Trump to avoid being called a RINO, the love of Nazis within their party’s right wing and the president’s alleged work to suppress documents related to wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex crimes.

As Politico pointed out, the disgusting rhetoric employed by these Young Republican “leaders” reflects a widespread coarsening of political discourse and the increasing use of incendiary and racially offensive tropes. That coarsening comes straight from the top. The article referenced Trump’s post of an artificial intelligence-generated video portraying House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero, while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proposed trading free health care for immigrant votes. Offensive as that post was, it was only the latest of a long string of repellant social media outbursts from the senile and wildly unPresidential occupant of the Oval Office.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump spread false reports of Haitian migrants eating pets and, at one of his rallies, welcomed comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and joked about Black people “carving watermelons” on Halloween.

As the article quite accurately notes, the chat rhetoric, which spared few minority groups, essentially mirrored a number of popular conservative political commentators, podcasters and comedians, all of whom have participated in the erosion of what was previously considered acceptable discourse. It quoted a political science professor who attributed the increasing use of racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric to Trump’s “persistent use of hostile, often inflammatory language.”

In one astonishing exchange, a suggestion that they tie an opponent to neo-Nazi groups was discarded because participants noted that it might hurt more than help–because such ties would be viewed positively by their own voters. 

There is much, much more in the linked article, and it is sickening. It is also profoundly inconsistent with what I call the American Idea–the philosophy that permeates the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is an example–as if one were needed–of what the participants in protests like No Kings oppose.

Compare the disgusting, hateful, pro-Nazi comments in the chat (including one that “loved Hitler”) with the sentiments on the signs at the No Kings events, and draw your own conclusions about who the patriots truly are.

The Young Republicans who participated in this disgusting chat truly do hate the America that is trying to live up to its original ideals. And despite the pro-forma claims of elected Republicans trying to distance themselves from this filth, we know where they learned both the language and the sentiments.

 

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What Can Be Repaired? What Can’t?

Just a quick note before today’s post: my husband and I attended the No Kings protest in Indianapolis, and were blown away by the size, composition and positivity of the crowd. (I think my 93-year-old hubby may have been the oldest attendee, but there were lots of older folks–as well as younger and middle-aged ones.) The thousands of attendees were upbeat, entirely peaceful, and the numerous signs they carried weren’t just clever–they were patriotic in the best sense of the word.

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When I try to find cause for optimism, I tell myself that–while the incredible destruction being wreaked by Trump and his merry band of morons, misfits and clowns is horrific–a lot of government systems had become calcified and overly bureaucratic, and that once this despicable crew has left, we can (to use Joe Biden’s term) “build back better.”

Unfortunately, reality then kicks in.

A while back, Thomas Edsall addressed that reality in a New York Times op-ed. The title was “What Can’t Trump Wreck?” and the column distinguished between the kind of damage that can be redressed relatively quickly and the damage that can’t.

Edsall began by reminding readers that Trump’s inhumane cuts to USAID are predicted to result in more than 14.05 million all-age deaths by 2030– a number that includes the death of 4.54 million children younger than age 5 years. Rather obviously,  lives lost remain lost.

We can count the dead. We can assess–at least approximately– the damage done by ICE’s thuggish behaviors– the human costs of its indiscriminate kidnapping, the social costs of its undermining of the rule of law, and the economic losses to farmers deprived of workers to pick their crops.

What we can’t quantify are the immense consequences that flow from a lack of institutional memory and expertise. Edsall quoted Sam Issacharoff, a law professor at N.Y.U., who wrote:

Government stretches the time frame for decision making. Long-term investments, collective needs like roads and defense, these are all matters that require long-term investment and expertise. Experience creates what the Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein calls “knowledge realism,” the know-how created by experience and repeat efforts.

The dismissal of career experts, the dismantling of long-horizon science projects are examples of what cannot be recreated. What happens if tensions resurface between North and South Korea or between India and Pakistan? Who guides policy if the State and Defense Departments lose their experts? This is something where the next administration cannot simply reopen the spigot and recreate. Expertise is long to create and fast to destroy.

Ordinary citizens are likely to bear the brunt of the administration’s assaults on medical science and research, its destructive incursions into agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the withholding of  billions of federal dollars that had been awarded to medical researchers.

 “Federal funding for biomedical research is central to health care innovation,” David Cutler and Edward Glaeser, economists at Harvard, wrote in “Cutting the N.I.H. — The $8 Trillion Health Care Catastrophe,” published in May in The Journal of the American Medical Association. “More than 99 percent of all new drugs approved from 2010 through 2019 had some antecedent research funded by the N.I.H.”

Another study documented the administration’s withholding of financing and undermining of government oversight in multiple areas, including long-term care, scientific research and vaccination policy. The administration’s budget proposals and “Big Beautiful Bill” include severe reductions in health care access, including the outright termination of services for immigrants and gender minorities. Its mass layoffs of scientific and regulatory specialists will be difficult to reverse.

William Galston, a prominent social scientist, weighed in, writing that there has been “irreparable damage” on both the home front and in foreign relations. He cited the “destruction of America’s reputation as the best place in the world for the most promising scientists and innovators of various kinds to conduct research. The evisceration of funding for basic research will be hard to reverse without restoring some bipartisan agreement about the importance of knowledge and expertise. I’m not holding my breath.”

Galston argued that irreparable harm has been done to America’s relations with the rest of the world. Trump hasn’t simply upended the longstanding system of multilateral trade relations that this country created, but he has destroyed the “trust the United States built up over decades as the guarantor of European security, of support for democracy and human rights and provider of global public goods such as freedom of the seas.”

Edsall’s op-ed enumerates a number of areas where rebuilding will be difficult, if it can be done at all, very much including Trump’s assaults on the civil service–from the firing of thousands of workers (many of whom had irreplaceable expertise)  and turning thousands more into “at will” employees, to efforts to politicise the federal workforce in continued defiance of the Hatch Act.

A Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution called the Trump administration “the political-societal equivalent of a neutron bomb, and predicted that, even if Democrats take over, it will take far more than the next four years to rebuild it.

He isn’t wrong.

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The Political Divide

Libertarian friends of mine used to insist that the political spectrum is not a straight line from Left to Right, as it is often described, but a circle–and at the top of that circle, where Left and Right meet, the argument isn’t about liberty, it’s about whose agenda a powerful government should impose on the rest of us.

I’ve always agreed with that description, which is supported by another friend’s observation: there are a lot of people who simply cannot tolerate ambiguity. These are people desperate for bright lines and moral certainty, for whom inhabiting or even recognizing the existence of “gray areas” is intolerable. (That need for certainty helps to explain the appeal of fundamentalist religions.)

A recent article from Lincoln Square (a publication I increasingly consult) focused in on those observations. It was titled “The Extremes Aren’t Opposites. They’re Twins,” and it provided additional insight into the world-views of the ideologues at the top of that libertarian circle.

As the author, Trygve Olson, pointed out, assertions that the far Left and far Right are different are simply false–and if we want to save democracy, we  need to understand their shared psychology. Olson cited a study from Eastern Europe — van Prooijen & Krouwel, 2019 — that identified the four core psychological traits fueling extremism, and confirmed that they are present in both extremes of the political spectrum.

People with these mindsets are “true believers”–and they are receptive to autocracies that promise to use government to impose their beliefs on others.

The four traits are: psychological distress (the craving for certainty); cognitive simplicity (a black and white worldview);  overconfidence (belief in the superiority of their understanding); and intolerance (rejection of pluralism). The combination leaves no room for nuance, no ability to occupy–or even see–gray areas. As the essay puts it, “Every issue becomes a purity test. Every disagreement becomes a betrayal. Every opponent becomes the enemy. That’s why conspiracy theories spread so easily. They offer simple stories for a complicated world. They reduce every problem to good guys and bad guys.”

Extremists believe they are the righteous, and that people who disagree with them are morally broken. “They confuse clarity with correctness. They reject disagreement not because it’s wrong, but because it’s threatening.” That reaction–as the author correctly notes–is a characteristic of a cult, not of democratic polities. Its a characteristic that leads extremists to reject the very notion of a marketplace of ideas. What they want is an echo chamber. (While the article didn’t reference it, an echo chamber is what the Right has constructed via the extensive network of right-wing media outlets all of which obediently echo MAGA’s approved “talking points.”)

We are seeing the consequences of that extremist worldview all around us.

Once politics becomes personal identity, disagreement becomes existential. And when that happens, dissent isn’t just unwelcome — it’s dangerous.

That’s how you get threats to school board members. That’s how you justify political violence. That’s how democracies die — not with a bang, but with a crowd cheering its collapse.

It’s important that the rest of us recognize where the threat comes from. As the author says, that recognition isn’t just an academic exercise.

If we’re serious about fighting authoritarianism — not just Trumpism, but the broader global wave of illiberalism — we need to stop pretending the threat only comes from one side. It comes from anyone who plays the zero-sum game.

Democracy is win-win. Autocracy is zero-sum. And the people who reject democratic norms — whether they call themselves left or right — are playing the same game.

That means our job, as defenders of democracy, is to build a coalition of the reasonable. That includes liberals, conservatives, independents — anyone who believes in truth, pluralism, and peaceful transitions of power.

Because in the end, it’s not about left vs. right.

It’s about democracy vs. extremism.

When people fear ambiguity, they fear “the Other”–and anyone who disagrees with their particular world-view is “Other.” Think about that as we protest autocracy and demand a return to American constitutional liberties on this second “No Kings Day.”

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Will We See A Dummymander?

I have a theory. Bear with me…

Trump is clearly concerned that Republicans will lose the House–and even, possibly, the Senate–in the 2026 midterm election. Because he’s Trump–aka stupid– and because he always opts to cheat rather than compete, he is pressuring Red state Republicans to engage in mid-cycle gerrymanders that he believes will add “safe” districts in those states and protect Congress from a Blue midterm victory.

My theory is that–rather than a traditional gerrymander–we may see what has been dubbed a “dummymander.”

Let’s look first at Texas, where state officials who bow to every Trumpian command have already completed their obedient mid-cycle redistricting. Several observers have pointed out that those revisions incorporate assumptions based upon data from the 2024 election–an election in which a larger number of  Latino voters than expected supported Trump. Current polling suggests that those voters have changed their minds–and that far from building on that incursion, Trump is now deeply underwater with Latinos in Texas. Republicans in that state are now worried that the new districts that mapmakers drew to be “safe”–based in large part upon data reflecting that unusual (and fleeting) Latino vote– are actually likely to make several existing districts competitive. 

Here in Indiana, the reluctance of several Republican lawmakers to engage in a mid-cycle gerrymander has been attributed to integrity (stop laughing!)– to the acknowledgement of those lawmakers that doing Trump’s bidding would constitute a wrongful and arguably unlawful “rigging” of the electoral system. Perhaps some of the members of Indiana’s pathetic super-majority do actually have consciences, but I think their reluctance is more likely based upon a recognition that Indiana’s extreme gerrymandering has already reached its demographic limit.

What do I mean by that?

After the last legitimate redistricting, I had coffee with a political science colleague who had examined the data the Republicans had used to draw their district lines. He noted that they hadn’t added any new safe districts, and attributed that decision to the fact that the populations of rural Indiana–the source of GOP dominance–have been thinning out. As a result, there simply weren’t enough reliable Republican voters to support creation of an extra “safe” district–doing so would endanger incumbents in the current districts.

The emptying out of rural Indiana has continued.

Furthermore, there’s another defect in the data our Republican overlords use to draw those district lines. As I’ve frequently noted in these posts, gerrymandering is first and foremost a voter suppression tool. The current, presumably “safe” districts are home to a number of Democrats, Independents and unhappy Republicans who simply haven’t been voting–they’ve been convinced that their votes wouldn’t make a difference, a conclusion supported by the lack of a Democratic candidate in many of those districts. (Disengagement from the democratic process isn’t unique to Indiana–the number of Americans who failed to vote in the last Presidential election was larger than the numbers who voted for either candidate–a shameful statistic.) A new gerrymander would begin with the use of data incorporating the absence of those disaffected voters from the polls.

But as investment advisers like to remind us, past performance is no guarantee of future returns.

In this case, thanks to the Trump administration’s ongoing war against democracy and the Constitution, millions of Americans have become newly engaged. Indeed, evidence of that sizable public blowback is what has prompted Trump’s gerrymander push.  The millions of protesters insisting that America has “No Kings”–see you there tomorrow!– and the millions of Americans who participate in the growing number of weekly spontaneous protests aren’t likely to stay home next November. Assuming Democrats and Indiana’s newly active Independents give them a choice, a lot of those so-called “safe” districts won’t be safe.

My theory is that even the dimmer members of Indiana’s GOP super-majority have figured this out, and that their reluctance to do a mid-cycle redistricting isn’t just based upon the likely negative public reaction to such in-your-face cheating, although that does worry some of them.

It’s based upon a recognition that–as they say in those rural precincts–pigs get fed, but hogs get slaughtered.

 My theory (and yes, my hope) is that a mid-cycle redistricting, if it occurs, will turn out to be a dummymander.

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