A while back, the Indianapolis Capital Chronicle published an article reminding readers of the importance of the nation’s public schools. The article began with an acknowledgement of the war being waged on those public schools by the Trump Administration and the Christian Nationalists responsible for Project 2025, and it followed that acknowledgement by underscoring what the nation stands to lose if that war succeeds. The authors reminded readers that the nation’s public schools have been responsible for creating an educated workforce–and far more importantly, for inculcating generations of students with the United States’ fundamental values of liberty, equality, fairness and concern for the common good.
As the great political scientist Benjamin Barber wrote, the public schools have been constitutive of a public–they have forged a community of Americans from the diverse families who sent their children into those public school classrooms.
Education is a public good; it doesn’t simply benefit individual students, it benefits the country. The authors quote Horace Mann–often dubbed the father of our public school system–for the assertion that universal, publicly funded, nonsectarian public schools would help sustain American political institutions, expand the economy and fend off social disorder. Mann’s words really resonate right now, as the years of persistent war on public schools and the diversion of tax dollars to primarily religious schools has contributed greatly to the current polarization and tribalization of the American public, and contributed to our growing social disorder.
The authors of the article noted that they’d written a book titled “How Government Built America,” and they shared two lessons they took from their research for that book.
One is that the U.S. investment in public education over the past 150 years has created a well-educated workforce that has fueled innovation and unparalleled prosperity.
As our book documents, for example, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the states expanded public education to include high school to meet the increasing demand for a more educated citizenry as a result of the Industrial Revolution. And the GI Bill made it possible for returning veterans to earn college degrees or train for vocations, support young families and buy homes, farms or businesses, and it encouraged them to become more engaged citizens, making “U.S. democracy more vibrant in the middle of the twentieth century.”
The other, equally significant lesson is that the democratic and republican principles that propelled Mann’s vision of the common school have colored many Americans’ assumptions about public schooling ever since. Mann’s goal was a “virtuous republican citizenry” – that is, a citizenry educated in “good citizenship, democratic participation and societal well-being.”
Mann believed there was nothing more important than “the proper training of the rising generation,” calling it the country’s “highest earthly duty.”
The people currently in positions of authority have made it abundantly clear that they have no interest whatsoever in that “rising generation,” neither its training nor its very survival. From the replacement of medical science with quackery likely to cost children’s lives to denial of the climate change that threatens the livability of the planet, the grifters and con men currently in power are interested only in what they can extract during their time in office. They are perfectly happy to advance Christian Nationalists goals, including the destruction of “government” schools and their replacement with “godly academies” that deepen America’s social divisions.
Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education has been accompanied by pious statements about returning control to the states, but in direct contradiction to that rhetoric, the administration has also been busy mandating what can and cannot be taught in public schools. It continues to threaten funding for school districts that fail to penalize transgender children or that teach about slavery and contemporary forms of discrimination. The White House is demanding a curriculum highlighting “patriotic” education–a curriculum that ignores the less admirable parts of our history and instead depicts the founding of the U.S. as “unifying, inspiring and ennobling.”
A shining City on a hill…
Trump and MAGA fear true education. Instead, they want to indoctrinate–and the material they want to impart is (to put in mildly) inconsistent with reality.
The weakening and eventual destruction of America’s public schools is an essential part of the Christian Nationalist/MAGA/Project 2025 plan to privilege (certain) White Christians and turn others into second-class citizens.
The assault on our universities has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, and the assaults on our public schools have nothing to do with the quality of education.
Yesterday, I was honored to keynote NOW’s state convention. Here’s the message I delivered. (And yes, it’s another long post. Sorry…)
__________
These really are the times that try women’s souls.
I don’t need to tell this audience how long and hard women have fought to be treated like human beings entitled to the Equal Protection of the Laws. And I don’t need to explain to anyone here why this is an incredibly dangerous, pivotal moment—not just for women’s rights, but for the entire American experiment.
As I wrote in a recent book, we are living in a time when the defenders of patriarchy are arguing for a return to traditional family roles; a time when the US Supreme Court is dominated by rogue justices who are overprotective of claims that women’s rights are inconsistent with religious freedom and who are dramatically under-protective of women’s basic civil liberties. We live in a time when a once-respectable political party has morphed into a profoundly racist, misogynist Christian Nationalist cult with retrograde beliefs about “women’s place.”
All of these efforts are part and parcel of a hysterical resistance to the social changes that have accompanied modern life– resistance to America’s growing diversity and especially to the progress of women and minority groups—a resistance led by men (largely but not exclusively White men) who resent the loss of the automatic social and legal dominance they once enjoyed simply by virtue of their skin color and gender.
So—how did we get here? Specifically, how have women gotten here? How have we advanced, and how threatening is the current, massive opposition to our hard-won status as almost-equals?
Let me begin by suggesting that there’s a very good reason that those waging a war on women have focused so single-mindedly on reversing our reproductive rights. It is impossible to overstate the effect that reliable birth control—control of reproduction—has had on women’s fight for equality.
The original longtime subservience of the female gender was the result of two major biological facts: first, women, on average, have less brute strength than men on average; and second, we get pregnant. During the many decades that workforce participation largely required brute strength, men were advantaged. And when any sexual encounter could result in pregnancy, women were disadvantaged; as a result, for generations, the female of the species was largely confined to childbearing and child-rearing.
Both of those things have changed.
Over the years, as technology has advanced, fewer and fewer jobs have required physical strength—instead, today’s work world overwhelmingly requires education, intellect and a variety of specialized skills, qualifications that are distributed far more equally between the sexes. I don’t want to minimize the importance of that changing work environment–as a result of those changes in the economy, women have been able to enter the workforce in ever greater numbers.
But by far the most important advance—the development that has allowed millions of women to navigate the economic waters—was the birth control pill and other associated innovations that gave us the tools to control our own reproduction. Before the advent of reliable birth control, every sexual encounter carried the risk of pregnancy, and pregnancy generally meant the end of women’s economic independence.
A pregnant woman was almost always unemployable, and so was a married woman in her childbearing years, since there was always the threat of pregnancy—and childcare was seen (and let’s be honest, is still largely seen) as a uniquely female responsibility. As a result, most married women were entirely economically dependent upon their husbands. If the marriage was unhappy—or worse, violent—a woman with children was literally enslaved. Since she was unable to enter the workforce to support herself or her children, unless she had independent means, she was totally dependent upon her husband, no matter how abusive or otherwise inadequate that husband might be.
Once women had access to reliable birth control, the whole world changed. If women could choose when to procreate, we could also choose when NOT to procreate. We could schedule our reproduction around educational and career opportunities. And even beyond the economic tsunami caused by the availability of birth control, the widespread use of contraception coupled with Supreme Court decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade accompanied significant changes in social attitudes that led to legal changes advancing women’s ability to participate not just in the economy, but also in America’s political and civic life.
Those changes that benefitted women, however, ran headlong into fundamentalist religion and Christian Nationalism. And if you think these fanatics simply oppose abortion—that their opposition to birth control has moderated—be disabused. Let me share just two examples of the zealotry with which the Right is attacking not just abortion but contraception. A bill recently introduced in South Carolina would criminalize hormonal contraception, defining birth control as abortion. The “logic” of the bill comes straight from fetal personhood dogma, which is a theological rather than a scientific concept, and it isn’t limited to South Carolina. There are plenty of other Red state legislators—including here in Indiana—who support legislating that theology into state law. And just last week, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration had destroyed ten million dollars’ worth of birth control pills and other contraceptives that had been destined for people in low-income countries. The administration also announced that the U.S. would no longer fund the purchase of birth control products for low-income countries. What is even more egregious, the government was determined to destroy these contraceptives despite the fact that several international organizations, including the Gates Foundation, had offered to buy them, which would have allowed the government to recoup taxpayer funds. Instead, the administration was willing to spend $167,000 to destroy them and make sure no one used them. Interestingly, after the media reported the destruction, officials in Belgium reported that they were holding them in a warehouse and trying to facilitate their sale so that they could eventually be used in low-income countries. So far, it’s a standoff with the Trump administration continuing to insist that they be destroyed.
They’re coming after contraception, and they haven’t reduced their focus on abortion. Despite the deeply dishonest rhetoric of Justice Alito in Boggs, that opposition is historically relatively recent; state laws forbidding abortion were scarce until the late 1800s. After their passage, however, women could only end unwanted pregnancies in overwhelmingly dangerous and unsafe ways. As officials at Planned Parenthood like to remind us, Roe wasn’t the beginning of abortion; it was the beginning of medically safe abortions.
Together with ready access to birth control, the ability to obtain safe, medically appropriate abortions empowered women to control their own lives to an extent that had previously been unthinkable—and I would suggest to you that it is women’s increased ability to exercise personal autonomy that really powers the forced birth movement.
Even though public opinion is strongly opposed to the ruling in Dobbs, what is not widely recognized is that the forced birth movement that finally toppled Roe did not grow out of genuine religious sentiment, as most people assume, but out of resistance to racial integration.
As noted religion scholar Randall Balmer has reported, America’s anti-abortion movement began in 1979—a full six years after Roe v, Wade was decided. Evangelical leaders, goaded by Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion as a rallying-cry in what was actually a segregationist effort to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term—an effort that was in reaction to the passage of civil rights laws during the Carter administration. Objecting to abortion—talking piously about “baby killing”– was seen as “more palatable” than what was really motivating the Religious Right at the time, which was protection of the segregated schools they had established following the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
Both before and for several years after the decision in Roe, evangelical Christians had been overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject of abortion, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
As Ballmer and other historians have reported, what really prompted Evangelical participation in politics was anger at tax and civil rights laws aimed at their segregation academies. Falwell and Weyrich decided to tap into the ire of the racist evangelical leaders who had established those schools, but they were savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would probably be a non-starter. The anti-integration message worked for evangelical leadership, but they needed a different issue to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale. Abortion fit the bill.
In short, historians agree that the catalyst for the Christian Right’s political activism was not, as often claimed, Roe v. Wade and opposition to abortion. The real roots of Christian Nationalism are found in the movement’s racism—and in the furious resistance of White males to the social changes that had allowed women, gay citizens and people of color to exercise increased autonomy and to compete with straight White men on an increasingly level playing field.
As Morton Marcus and I wrote in our recent book on the women’s movement, the Dobbs decision was nothing less than a frontal assault on human liberty. The decision is generally—and accurately—seen as an attack on women’s right to self-determination, but we need to recognize that it was much, much more than that. It was the expression of the growing, profoundly anti-liberty worldview that permeates Project 2025 and poses an existential danger to America’s constitutional values.
What Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade had recognized was the importance of a constitutional doctrine called substantive due process. Dobbs was a frontal attack on that doctrine, which we often call the “right to privacy.” Substantive Due Process, or the right to privacy, confirms the American principle that certain “intimate” individual decisions—including one’s choice of sexual partners or the decision to use contraception– are none of government’s business.
Most constitutional scholars agree that the individual’s right to personal autonomy has always been inherent in the Bill of Rights, but it was explicitly recognized in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut. Connecticut’s legislature had passed a law prohibiting the use of birth control by married couples. The law prohibited doctors from prescribing contraceptives and pharmacists from filling such prescriptions. The Supreme Court struck down the law, holding that whether a couple used contraceptives was not a decision government is entitled to make. (Fortunately, Samuel Alito wasn’t then on the Court..)
The court’s majority recognized that a right to personal autonomy—the right to self-government—is absolutely essential to the enforcement of other provisions of the Bill of Rights. Justices White and Harlan found explicit confirmation of it in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—which is where the terminology “substantive due process” comes from. Wherever it resided–in a “penumbra” or the 14th Amendment—a majority of Justices agreed on both its presence and importance.
The doctrine of Substantive Due Process draws a line between decisions that government has the legitimate authority to make, and decisions which, in our system, must be left up to the individual. I used to tell my students that the Bill of Rights is essentially a list of things that government is forbidden to decide. What books you read, what opinions you form, what prayers you say (or don’t)—such matters are far outside the legitimate role of government. The issue isn’t whether that book is dangerous or inappropriate, or that religion is false, or whether you should marry someone of the same sex, or whether you should procreate: in America, the issue is who gets to make that decision. And in America, it is the individual, not the state.
Enabling autocracy–destroying our current system of a democratic majority restrained by the Bill of Rights—rather obviously requires eliminating substantive due process. The decision in Dobbs thus opened a pathway to an enormous expansion of government power, and that expansion threatens everyone—especially women, but also gay folks and racial and religious minorities.
So much for where we are. The obvious question—the important question—the question with which we are all struggling—is what can we do? What can an individual do in the face of this retrograde MAGA attack on the most foundational principles of the nation?
We can certainly participate in the growing number of protests being organized by groups like Indivisible and others. (The next “No Kings Day is October 18th. I hope to see you all there.) Don’t dismiss the efficacy of these events; there is scholarship showing that non-violent protests by a sufficient percentage of the population have succeeded in overcoming autocracies elsewhere. That research pegs a “sufficient percentage” at 3.5% of the population. In the U.S., that comes to just over 11 million people. Estimates of the turnout for the first “No Kings Day”—the first big protest– ranged from five to six million participants.
We can also come together with like-minded citizens who understand what is at stake. For example, it is encouraging to note that genuine Christians are finally challenging the White Christian Nationalists. Christians Against Christian Nationalism was formed in 2019, and in a very welcome response to ICE and its efforts to rid the country of Black and Brown people by categorizing them as “illegal immigrants,” a network of 5000 churches—many of them Evangelical– has organized to protect immigrant worshippers and frustrate ICE.
There is also the emerging Resolutions Project, patterned after a mechanism that helped build support for the American Revolution. In the runup to that conflict, those favoring Revolution in towns across the colonies introduced, debated and passed so-called “resolutions of condemnation” that focused on the gravity of the “injuries,” “abuses” and “usurpations” of Mad King George III. Those resolutions helped build support for the Revolution by creating local ownership of their big arguments in the fight for independence. As we speak, there are at least 75 resolutionsthat have either passed or are moving in 23 states + the District of Columbia.It’s an effort that NOW and other pro-democracy Indiana organizations should join!
Longer term, we desperately need to restore civic education and accurate history instruction, and we need to confront the collapse of responsible journalism and the exponential growth of internet propaganda and conspiracy theories. (Don’t ask me how we do that…)
Of course, unless we can stop Trump’s march to dictatorship, we may not have a “long term.” So that brings me to our best chance of derailing the not-so-slow-moving coup we are all watching in real time. That opportunity will come with next year’s midterm elections.
As you all know, more Americans failed to vote in 2024 than voted for either candidate. Getting the rational citizens among those non-voters to the polls next year has to be job number one. In Red states like ours, that means Democrats running a candidate in every district so that disaffected Republicans and apathetic Democrats have someone to vote for. It means a massive effort to increase registration and get out the vote of people who—for whatever reason (but especially the gerrymandering that’s convinced them there’s no point) haven’t been casting ballots; and it means developing messaging that will resonate with them, messaging that will give them both a reason to vote and a reason to believe that their vote will make a difference. And in most parts of the state, it really will make a difference! Let me explain why.
Indiana has long been gerrymandered, but over the years, our rural areas have been steadily emptying out, meaning that the margins enjoyed by Republicans in those “safe” districts have been thinning. That’s one reason. But there’s another. Gerrymandering’s biggest effect is voter suppression. Belief that their district is safe for the GOP, non-voters who might vote for Democrats or Independents have been convinced that there’s no point, so why bother. (When the Democrats fail to run a candidate, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.) In reality, if turnout improved significantly, many of those districts wouldn’t be safe. It isn’t only the demographic shifts; in many districts, there are substantial numbers of Democrats and Independents who have previously failed to turn out. Gerrymandering requires the line drawers to begin with data from prior elections. The failure of discouraged Democrats and Independents to vote has skewed that data by artificially inflating the Republican advantage. We need to take that message to discouraged Indiana voters.
Just let me conclude with the bottom line:
If there has ever been a time for political activism, this is it. If there has ever been a time for all people who oppose the cult that has replaced the Republican party to come together, to abandon our policy differences and work in concert to save the Constitution and Bill of Rights, it’s now.
I know the people in this room will do that work. We just need to encourage the citizens who have been apathetic to join us—and thanks to the daily, unconstitutional, anti-democratic and absolutely horrific behaviors of the Trump administration, a lot of those citizens are no longer apathetic. We can do this.
Okay–I know that I rarely exhibit sympathy for MAGA types, but a recent experience has reminded me that the pace of change–particularly, the rate at which the world is becoming digital–can be especially disorienting for older folks. Maddening, actually. And I say that as someone who has a smartphone and uses a computer daily.
My husband works out at our local Y with a couple of older men who still use flip phones. They’re deeply suspicious of all the newfangled technology, and they are also vocally MAGA. I’ve come to believe that–while it seems like a stretch– suspicion and disdain for the tech miracles of our brave new world and being receptive to oversimplified and racist world-views may go hand in hand.
A recent stay at a “chi chi” new hotel in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, has made me a bit more sympathetic to what must seem to some folks as an unwelcome and uncomfortable plunge into a science-fiction future.
Bear with me here.
I checked in and went to the elevator, which failed to open. After waiting for a brief time (and repeatedly pushing the button), I went back to the front desk, where the young man explained that the elevator would only work from lobby if you scanned your room key on a device mounted between the elevators before pushing the button. Nice safety feature–but there were no posted instructions that explained that. Evidently, younger folks found it intuitive.
When I got to the room, it became immediately obvious that the hotel didn’t cater to anyone one lacking a smartphone. There was no telephone in the room on which to call the desk or housekeeping, no printed materials with information about the hotel or its surroundings. What there was was a small plastic stand on the desk with QR codes, and a tiny message alerting guests that they could reach hotel services by texting a specific number.
Older guests unfamiliar with QR codes, or (unthinkable!) guests without smartphones would be unable to access hotel information. Worse–if your phone was out of juice and you’d forgotten to pack a charger (guilty as charged), the hotel didn’t have chargers (I asked). There was also no clock in the room, so if you lacked an operating phone, you didn’t know what time it was.
To say that this was all very frustrating would be an understatement. I tend to think that this particular hotel has gotten ahead of itself, but the experience did force me to recognize that I haven’t been very understanding of the people in my general age cohort (old) who encounter similar frustrations every day.
Noting the accelerated pace of change has become a cliche, obscuring the very real disorientation that so often accompanies it. America is full of people who reached adulthood before computers became ubiquitous–people who grew up with telephones firmly affixed to wires and walls, who drove cars that lacked computer screens and syrupy directions from a female GPS voice, who watched one of three networks on their televisions and read the local news on newsprint delivered to their doors daily. Etc.
Those same Americans have grandchildren for whom the avalanche of technology is intuitive–they grew up with it. Those grandkids are fixated on their screens, comfortable in a world that seems increasingly alien to their grandparents. Add to that the old folks’ daily encounter with the massive increases in America’s diversity, the contemporary prominence of women and people of color in positions of authority and celebrity, and older folks can be forgiven for feeling adrift, if not alienated, in a strange new world.
That alienation helps to explain–although it doesn’t excuse–their willingness to support a movement that blames nefarious “others” for their discomfort.
I realize that I need to be less judgmental, but it’s hard when people ignore the actual reasons for their discomfort and instead look for someone to blame…
As I write this, the initial accusations about the murder of Charlie Kirk have been confirmed–in an ironic way. The immediate–and not unreasonable– reaction was the assumption he’d been targeted for his beliefs. And evidently, he was–but not by “evil” Lefists. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the even-farther “groyper” Right that believed Kirk was insufficiently radical.
Obviously, as repulsive as some of Kirk’s beliefs were, they are no excuse for violence. Freedom of speech, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded us, is not meant to protect only those who agree with us, it also extends to those expressing the “thought we hate.”
Following the shooting, denunciations of political violence came from across the political spectrum. And predictably, MAGA folks expressed outrage that was entirely missing when Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was targeted, when Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was nearly killed, and when two Minnesota Democrats were assassinated.
In the wake of Kirk’s murder, pundits and commentators have rushed to offer their perspectives. One that I found particularly insightful was an article by Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. As he began,
Charlie Kirk’s murder was not just a murder. It was an assassination. That’s the crucial point.
We often forget the philosophical underpinnings of criminal law. Rightly understood, we view crimes as being committed not against individuals, but against society itself. Thus, when someone is murdered, the offense is not against the victim and his family, but against everyone. All of us. It is an offense against nature, heaven, and man.
Assassination goes a step further. In addition to all of the above, assassination is, like terrorism, an attack on our body politic. An attack on how we choose to live together. On our system of government. Which in America’s case, means an attack not just against all of us, but against liberal democracy itself.
Last then reminded readers that this was not a “one off.” As he wrote, it had only been twelve weeks since Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated in their home, sixteen weeks since Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were assassinated outside Washington’s Jewish Museum, ten months since UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated in Manhattan.
And one could list other examples of near-assassinations from recent years—like the brutal beating of the husband of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the shots fired at an ex-president campaigning to return to office.
It is important to understand that these acts all emerged from a culture of political violence that has been waxing for nearly a decade.
Last acknowledged the presence of political violence in the past, specifically enumerating the attacks on Steve Scalise, Gabby Giffords, Ronald Reagan, JFK and RFK and MLK, and the vicious attacks on Black citizens during Jim Crow. But he pointed to a crucial difference in the way public officials responded.
The difference is that until recently, elected high officials condemned political violence as a matter of course. Their condemnations were not always sincere, but they were nearly universal. They understood that political violence is a wildfire. It spreads. And if it breaks containment, it cannot be controlled. Once unleashed, it burns everyone.
I found one paragraph in Last’s brief essay to be both undeniably true and chilling. As he wrote,
We don’t have to rehearse the litany of how we got here; we can leave that to another day. But we all know what we know. Things have changed and it’s not hard to pinpoint the moment when the normalization of political violence re-emerged among our political elites. To pretend otherwise would be to hide our heads in the sand—to deny the plain political reality of the moment.
That “plain political reality” is what keeps me up at night.
Just in case you haven’t been following the chaos at Health and Human Services–or haven’t recognized the probable effects of placing a demented conspiracy theorist at its head– nine former CDC Directors published a joint op-ed in the New YorkTimes, titled “We Ran The CDC: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health.”
An excerpt will convey their concerns, which are informed by that hated thing called expertise. (You know that in this administration, it’s disqualifying to actually know what you are talking about..)
Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replacedexperts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championedfederal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez — which led to the resignations of top C.D.C. officials — adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.
We are worried about the wide-ranging impact that all these decisions will have on America’s health security. Residents of rural communities and people with disabilities will have even more limited access to health care. Families with low incomes who rely most heavily on community health clinics and support from state and local health departments will have fewer resources available to them. Children risk losing access to lifesaving vaccines because of the cost.
This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.
It is really difficult to get one’s head around the extent of the damage–not to mention havoc– being wrought daily by the proudly ignorant, intellectually-limited and thoroughly repulsive creature who inexplicably occupies the Oval Office. America’s stature in the world has cratered; domestically, we are slipping into fascism; economically we’re heading toward recession; and the cretins Trump has put in charge of our governing agencies are waging war against science, knowledge and expertise. (And history, culture, art and architecture, education…)
It’s not much comfort to recognize that the health of the racist, know-nothing MAGA base will decline with that of the rest of us.
I keep thinking about a meme making the rounds on social media: our best hope is that Trump is getting his medical advice from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
If the online speculation about his health caused by the sudden non-appearance of our publicity-hound President turns out to be accurate, perhaps there’s something to that…
