State-Level Choices

Most of us are obsessively focused on the national election, but the stakes of our state-level choices are equally dire–at least, in Indiana.

The Indiana GOP is running a staewide ticket composed of lunatic White Christian Nationalist Micah Beckwith, two Beckwith clones, and MAGA Mike Braun. I’ve posted numerous times about Todd Rokita, our embarrassing, unethical Attorney General. Today, I want to remind readers that the only difference between Beckwith and Jim Banks, who is running for the U.S. Senate, is that Banks is too politically-savvy to publicly claim the White Christian Nationalist title to which he is amply entitled.

Let me just reiterate why Banks is–as I’ve previously noted–wrong about everything. In Congress, he joined clowns like Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, pursuing a pro-Trump, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-liberty performative politics.

He makes no bones about his desire for a national ban on abortion with no exceptions, not even for rape, incest or life of the mother. He has an A+ rating from Pro-Life America, and a 100% lifetime rating from the National Right to Life Committee. His voting record on abortion/reproductive health can be accessed here.

He opposes even the most modest efforts to control the proliferation of firearms. He opposes both a renewal of the ban on assault weapons and a federal “Red Flag” law. He supports concealed carry and has voted against background checks for private sales. His voting record on gun issues can be accessed here.

Banks calls climate change a “liberal hoax,” and the Biden Administration’s environmental efforts “a war on energy.” The League of Conservation Voters gives him a 1% lifetime rating. His votes on the environment can be accessed here. 

When it comes to labor issues, Banks gets a zero rating from the AFL-CIO. In the Indiana legislature, he supported “Right to work” legislation (dubbed by labor as “Right to work for less.”) On vote after vote in Congress, he has voted against labor; a list of those votes can be seen here. 

He continues to oppose any expansion of healthcare coverage, and rejects medical science. He voted against the most recent expansion of Medicaid and supports legislation that would ban vaccine mandates. He has voted to repeal the ACA, and against legislation that would prevent insurers from discriminating on the basis of pre-existing conditions.  A review of all of his healthcare votes is here.

Banks has voted repeatedly against efforts to fund research into the effects of marijuana. (Those anti-research votes track well with his “know nothing” approach to all issues.) Banks’ votes on issues related to pot are here.

He is an extremist on immigration. He supports finishing Trump’s wall, eliminating federal funding for sanctuary cities, and deporting “criminal illegal aliens.” He opposes legislation granting amnesty for any undocumented persons (presumably including children currently protected by DACA) and opposes any expansion of guest-worker programs.

Banks created the “anti-Woke” caucus in the House of Representatives and introduced legislation to outlaw any remaining affirmative action in college admissions. He has been dubbed “Focus on the Family’s Man in Washington.” He opposes all DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs. He has been especially vocal in his opposition to gay rights generally, and to trans children especially– in addition to his “Anti-Woke Caucus,” he has supported efforts to ban trans people from the military, prevent trans women from participating in women’s sports, and prevent medical personnel from treating children for gender dysphoria. He recently sponsored a particularly odious bill that would prevent agencies charged with placing children in foster homes from taking measures to see that gay and trans children not be placed with foster parents who have religious objections to homosexuality, saying that refusal to place those children in such homes was discrimination against religion.

Banks consistently attacks educational institutions of all kinds. He has vowed to investigate the National Association of Independent Schools, focusing on the group’s role in political advocacy and its tax-exempt status. He has threatened to “expose” what he calls “widespread political indoctrination” in America’s public schools, and has claimed that lawmakers have a “moral duty” to investigate the use of academic accreditation associations as “political tools by leftist ideologues.”

When Banks was in the Indiana legislature, he voted to allow instruction in creationism and enthusiastically supported the educational vouchers that send tax dollars to private, overwhelmingly religious schools.

And of course, he’s described Trump’s felony convictions as “rigged,” posting on social media that “New York is a liberal sh*t hole.”

As I’ve previously written, having a Neanderthal like Banks in Congress is bad enough. Electing him Senator would be worse.

Republicans should be embarrassed by the whole statewide ticket. As this Republican says, Hoosiers should vote BLUE this year.

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SO SORRY

My site suddenlly began sending out old posts–a LOT of them. I have no idea why. My son is looking into it. Meanwhile, my apologies for inundating your inboxes.

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About Project 2025

This morning, I will speak at the Unitarian church in Danville. I was asked to address Project 2025, Here’s what I will be telling the congregants.

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I’ve done a lot of research recently into the emergence of the White Christian Nationalism that forms the basis of the MAGA movement. Project 2025 does a great service for anyone who wants to know what life would be like if the 40% of Americans who identify fully or partially with those beliefs manage to win control of Congress and the Presidency—especially at a time when the Supreme Court has been captured by ideologues who are sympathetic to their aims and apparently unwilling to follow longstanding constitutional precedents.

PROJECT 2025 was produced mainly by the Heritage Foundation, but it had the assistance of over 100 other conservative think tanks. (If you go online, you can find lists of them. They represent a longstanding, well-organized and well-funded effort to claim the country for their particular tribe of White Christian males.) Project 2025 is the product of over 400 contributors and writers, including the 240 former Trump administration authors who wrote 31 of the 38 chapters of the 920 page document.

Despite Trump’s effort to separate himself from Project 2025, it mentions him over 320 times, and in 2023 he referred to it as “great work. Our roadmap.”

Those who produced that “roadmap” claim that it would “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect children,” “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people,” and “Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.” What that lovely language really means, of course, is spelled out in the details—and whoever coined the phrase “the devil is in the details” might have been referring to Project 2025.

I don’t have time—and neither do you—to go through a comprehensive list of the regressive, and frankly, insane, proposals in this document, but I will hit some of the highlights (or low lights).

The chapter on “DEFENSE OF AMERICA” proposes to “” Restore warfighting as the military’s sole mission.” It proposes to end what it calls “the Left’s social experimentation in the military” by halting the admission of transgender individuals. It would increase the Army by

50,000, bring overseas troops home, grow the Navy and Air Force, and triple the number of nuclear weapons—while withdrawing America from all arms reduction treaties.

Project 2025 would withdraw the U.S. from NATO, and expressly disavow NATO’s Article Five, which is NATO’s mutual defense pact. It also proposes to make our Allies pay for any weapons we might provide them.

With respect to Trade and Foreign Assistance, the Project wants USAID to defund women’s rights provisions in foreign aid initiatives, withdraw from all multi-lateral trade agreements, stop providing financial aid to Ukraine, and institute 60% tariffs on Chinese goods and 10% on all other imports. (Every reputable economist—conservative and liberal—has pointed out that tariffs are a tax on Americans, and that imposing them would cost American families thousands of dollars a year and throw the country into recession. If a future administration actually imposed those tariffs, the economy would tank.)

There’s a lot more in this section, but the effect would be to make the world far less safe, and Americans far less rich.

Moving on…

To the extent that the media has reported on Project 2025, it has focused mostly on the Project’s proposed changes to American governance– especially the plan to replace 50 thousand civil service employees with Trump loyalists. I recently read that the Heritage Foundation is currently “vetting” individuals in order to facilitate that replacement should Trump win.

The replacement of civil service workers, however, is only the tip of the iceberg.

The Project also proposes to eliminate or re-write the First Amendment so that the government can operate on what the authors call “Christian Principles.” Those of you in this congregation, and other Christian clergy, might dispute their interpretation of Christian principles….

The media has also reported on the proposal to eliminate the Department of Education, Head Start, Title 1, & school lunch programs. The less-reported portions of their “education” policies are equally regressive: they would eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and post the Ten Commandments in all school classrooms (they don’t specify which version…probably the Cecil B. DeMille version). They would eliminate any books addressing race or gender from the nation’s classrooms, withdraw federal funding from any school requiring vaccinations, and require states to provide vouchers for religious schools.

They’d also arm teachers and defund NPR and PBS.

As I said, I can’t go through the entire list of Project 2025’s looney-tunes and profoundly unAmerican proposals, but let me just reference a few more: they’d privatize Medicare and TSA, and entirely eliminate the EPA, OSHA, the EEOC and the FDIC.

When it comes to elections, they’d eliminate mail-in ballots, and require federal elections to be done in one day, on paper, with stringent voter ID requirements.

When it comes to how their proposed government would deal with what the Project delicately calls “minorities,” the bigotries become very visible. They’d begin with the immediate mass deportation of undocumented persons that Trump and Vance have promised, ignoring both the inhumanity and the practical impossibility of conducting such a massive effort. Other measures they propose in connection with immigration include construction of internment camps and limiting lawful immigration to 20,000 annually—good luck to any of you who need to hire people to work in restaurants or pick crops or any other jobs disproportionately done by immigrants. They’d deport all the Dreamers (who came as children with their parents, and most of whom have never known another country). They want to end birthright citizenship—which I note would require amending the 14th Amendment– and ban Muslims and Haitians from entering the country. Lest you wonder where the homophobia and misogyny come in, they propose to roll back gay rights, invalidate same-sex marriages, and outlaw transgender rights and no-fault divorce.

Given our recent experience with hurricanes, I thought I’d just end with the Project’s ”Principles Guiding Climate Decisions.” Those “principles” begin with science denial. I guess their version of God will protect them…

Authors of the Project say—and I quote– the “climate is not changing and schools are not to teach that it is.” Since climate change is just a liberal myth, they would eliminate climate and environmental protections, eliminate the regulation of greenhouse gases, and defund FEMA. (I will note that both Mike Braun and Jim Banks—currently running for Governor and Senator—both recently voted against funding for FEMA.) Project 2025 would return management of emergencies to the states. (I imagine even Ron DeSantis might now disagree with that one…)

Project authors want to dismantle the National Hurricane Center and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. They would halt all climate research and revoke the Global Change Research Act of 1990. Of course they would once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Accords. And they would halt research into electrical vehicles and revoke tax incentives for clean energy.

If even a small portion of this truly insane wish list became reality, the America we inhabit would disappear. Unfortunately, we’d take most of the world down with us.

In my blog, I keep warning readers about the threat posed by a well-organized, well-financed theocratic movement. The small dip into Project 2025’s 900 pages that I’ve just shared should illuminate that threat.

I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that these people hate the America we inhabit. They love an America that existed only in their fevered imaginations. This is a very scary time.

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What If?

A line from an essay I read a few weeks ago in the Bulwark has remained with me, growing in resonance as we approach November 5th. The author wrote that “there aren’t any excuses left. Something like 47 percent of American voters have seen Trump, understood what he was, and wanted it.” Beneath everything–the pundits insisting that Harris do X or Y rather than whatever she’s doing at the time, the armies of lawyers preparing to do battle over the next “Big Lie,” the GOP’s increasing efforts to suppress votes–America has to grapple with that reality.

Some forty-seven percent of our fellow Americans support a mentally-ill, profoundly ignorant narcissist who tells them that they are the only “real” Americans. Forty-seven percent of us want to hand control of the nuclear codes to a misogynistic, homophobic, racist felon who has no comprehension of foreign policy–or for that matter, no understanding of how American government  works.

It really is incomprehensible. 

As the Bulwark essayist noted, that fact is the ugly truth this campaign has laid bare. If, when the votes are counted, Donald Trump garners forty percent or more–or, God help us, wins– we will no longer be able to take refuge in the comforting (and obviously inaccurate) belief that a large majority of Americans are people of good will and common sense. Even more than the pivotal choice we face–a choice between continuation of the American experiment and a country remade to conform to Project 2025’s theocratic and autocratic principles–the vote will be a referendum on that comforting belief.

The November 5th election will not be a choice based on policy differences–or on policy at all. It will be a twenty-first century replay of the Civil War–a challenge to the most fundamental bases of what I frequently refer to as “The American Idea.”

What the MAGA “patriots” don’t understand, what they actively reject, is the actual American exceptionalism that was baked into this country’s origin: the notion that one wouldn’t be an American by virtue of status or identity, but by embracing the philosophy of the new nation, by the willingness to “pledge allegiance” to an entirely new concept of governance.

It was–as anyone who has read any history will acknowledge–mostly aspirational. But with fits and starts (granted, lots more fits than most of us learned in our high school history classes), we’ve tried to follow that philosophy to its logical conclusion. We extended the franchise, welcoming non-landowners, freed slaves and women into the ranks of “We the People.” Our courts (again, with fits and starts) protected the rule of law against efforts to subvert it in favor of the greedy and unscrupulous and the efforts of racial and religious bigots.

What has so many of us worried sick right now isn’t simply the realization that many of our fellow citizens are credulous, racist and mean-spirited. There have always been folks like that (although not as vocal or empowered by rampant disinformation and the reinforcement of a semi-fascist cult).

We are worried to discover that there are so many of them, and terrified that we are losing that aspirational America, that “American Idea,” to frightened and angry people who never understood or embraced it.

Like so many other Americans, I live in a bubble. My friends and family and neighbors (including a number who’ve been life-long Republicans) are inclusive and welcoming–and equally appalled by polling that (correctly or not) tells us that the upcoming election–between a senile, certifiable lunatic who wants to be a dictator and a sane, experienced woman who has spent her entire adult life in public service–is “too close to call.”

Back in 2021, I quoted a Leonard Pitts column in which he wrote:

I’m an American. By that, I don’t simply mean that I’m a U.S. citizen, though I am. But what I really mean is that I venerate the ideals on which this country was founded.

Unalienable rights. Life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech. Of faith. Of conscience. Government by consent of the governed. Equality before the law. Because of those ideals, America already was a revolution even before it won independence from England. Despite themselves, a band of slaveholding white men somehow founded a nation based on an aspirational, transformational declaration of fundamental human rights.

In a few days, we’ll know whether we will hang on to those ideals for at least the time being–and we’ll know just how many voters reject Pitts’ (and my) definition of “American.”

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Trump’s Mental Decline

There are ten days until November 5th, millions of Americans have already cast their ballots, and finally–finally–the media has begun to focus on the fact that a major-party candidate for President is bat-shit crazy.

Do MAGA voters even care? Or does their hatred of “those people” [fill in the minority of your choice] outweigh the very real prospects of domestic autocracy and potentially, World War III? Do they even understand that Trump’s mental breakdown means they are actually voting for a JD Vance presidency?

Google “Trump’s mental breakdown” or something similar, and Google obliges with numerous hits. Even the New York Times, which has been inexplicably unwilling to hold Trump to the same standards they applied to Biden, has noted the evidence. Under the headline “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age,” the Times noted Trump’s age and the fact that

the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.

Other outlets have been less restrained. The Boston Globe addressed the seeming reluctance to call a lunatic a lunatic:

We can see the decline in the former president’s ability to hold a train of thought, speak coherently, or demonstrate a command of the English language, to say nothing of policy. So why are Republicans and the press holding Trump to a different standard than Biden?…

President Biden, after struggling with his answers during a June debate with Trump, ended his bid for a second term in July. That decision came after Democrats publicly voiced concern about Biden’s cognitive fitness and the press pursued the controversy breathlessly for weeks. Editorial boards, including the Globe’s, had even urged Biden to step aside.

Yet neither the media nor Republicans have shown that kind of urgency as Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be, to put it kindly, unwell. That is not only unfair and irresponsible, it is dangerous for the future of our country.

Forbes —hardly a Left-wing publication–has also weighed in, noting that

In interviews and speeches that have grown progressively longer during his third White House campaign, Trump often leaps back and forth from one topic to the next, appears increasingly unhinged, and mixes up and mispronounces words.

The article went on to catalog the reasons for concluding that Trump’s senility has become too obvious to ignore. And the New Republic–which is Left of center–recently noted that efforts to normalize what is decidedly not normal have finally given way to concerns over Trump’s very obvious mental incapacities.

Newsweek has also covered Trump’s decline. The article quoted Trump’s niece and fierce critic, Mary Trump, a psychologist by training, who pointed out that her uncle is “the oldest person in American history ever to run for the presidency,” and that “he can’t pronounce words or stay on topic,” and “engages in a worrisome degree of tangential thinking.”  Huffpost ran a similar critique by an unrelated mental health expert,. who warned that Trump’s “diminishing cognitive ability can’t be ignored.”

“There’s reasonable evidence suggestive of forms of dementia,” clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis told the website. “The reduction in complexity of sentences and vocabulary does lead you to a certain picture of cognitive diminishment.”

There’s much more, but the relative recency of these articles is unnerving, because rational observers have noted his mental issues–including an inability to engage in complex thought or analysis– for far longer. Yet the same media that hounded a much more mentally-competent Joe Biden out of the race basically engaged in what has been aptly called “sane-washing.”

As a September article from Mother Jones put it:

In recent days, I came across what seems to be a new term to describe much media treatment of Donald Trump: “sane-washing.” This is similar to the more common phrase “normalization,” but it extends beyond what we’ve seen for years—the media reporting on Trump as if he is a regular politician who operates within the conventional bounds of political spin and human actions—to covering up (or sidestepping or downplaying) Trump’s apparent cognitive flaws.

Among other examples, the article cited Trump’s claim that schools are providing sex change operations to children without their parents’ consent. Direct quote: “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school.’ And your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”

What is wrong with our country is the prospect that this lunatic will get millions of votes.

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