Christian nationalism! The more I learn the worse it sounds!

Tish Harrison Warren is an Anglican priest.

The State of Evangelical America published in The New York Times by Tish Harrison Warren.

There are few evangelical Christians who have gotten as much media coverage or criticism in the last decade as Russell Moore. He previously served as the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, and became a prominent evangelical voice opposing a Trump presidency. 

Moore is currently the editor in chief of Christianity Today, which The Times’s Jane Coaston called “arguably the most influential Christian publication” in the United States. I asked Moore if he would speak to me about the evangelical movement and his new book, “Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America.” This interview has been edited and condensed.

Tish Harrison Warren: The subtitle of your newest book is “An Altar Call for Evangelical America.” What do you mean by evangelical America?

Russell Moore: What I mean by “evangelical” is people who believe in the personal aspect of what it means to be a follower of Christ. That includes the way that we understand the Bible, the way that we understand the need to be born again.

In your book, you discuss how increasing secularization isn’t going to end the culture wars. In fact, you say it may heighten them. Why do you think that?

I was in a session several years ago in which a researcher had done a survey about religious people’s reactions to immigrants and refugees. And she was stunned to find that the more active evangelistic work a church did, the more welcoming they were to refugees in their communities. I was not surprised at all, because evangelism presupposes the possibility of conversation and persuasion. And not the coercion of raw power.

When churches have given up on evangelism, this means they’ve given up on actually engaging with and loving their neighbors. That’s bad news for everybody. You end up in a situation where these warring groups in American life are seeking some kind of total victory, where somebody is the final, ultimate winner and somebody is the final, ultimate loser. That ratchets up the stakes of culture wars dramatically.

Your book delves into Christian nationalism as a component of the evangelical movement. How would you define Christian nationalism? And how has it affected evangelicalism in the United States?

Christian nationalism is the use of Christian symbols or teachings in order to prop up a nation-state or an ethnic identity. It’s dangerous for the nation because it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. Christian nationalism takes a political claim and seeks to make it ultimate. It says: If a person disagrees with me, that person is disagreeing with God. No democratic nation can survive that, which is why the founders of this country built in all kinds of protections from it.

Christian nationalism is also dangerous for the witness of the church, because Christian nationalism is fundamentally, at its core, anti-evangelical. If what the Gospel means is for people to come before God, person by person, not nation by nation or village by village or tribe by tribe, then Christian nationalism is heretical.

Christian nationalism assumes outward conformity enforced by social or political power. It transforms the way that we see reality with the assumption that the really important things are political and cultural, as opposed to personal and spiritual and theological.

It’s been hard for me to evaluate how widespread this is. Anecdotally, I know a lot of Christians, including a lot of evangelicals, and they would not be considered Christian nationalists. So I often wonder: Is this fringe?

It is affecting almost every sector of American Christianity in varying ways. It’s similar to the Prosperity Gospel of the last generation. Most American Christians wouldn’t identify themselves as Prosperity Gospel adherents. Yet many of them were adopting key pieces of that understanding of the world.

Studies have shown the way that Christian language is being used in Europe and in other places to prop up populist authoritarian movements. You can see this in the way that survey data show how white evangelicals in America are becoming much friendlier to outright authoritarianism — as seen in the January 6, insurrection. I don’t think that it is merely fringe at all.

We can’t talk about the rise of Christian nationalism without bringing up Donald Trump. 

You said that he was morally unfit to be president and received intense backlash — even from Trump himself. Were you surprised by the severe criticism from certain Christians for your denunciation of Trump?

It didn’t surprise me that there would be overwhelming buy-in once Trump became the Republican nominee. One of the things I was worried about is that people would say: I’m not supporting him, I’m just voting for him because I think the alternative is worse. I feared, at the time, that the way that American politics works right now is inherently totalizing, so there would not be people after Trump was elected who would, for instance, support him on some judicial appointments and oppose him on a Muslim ban or whatever the issue is. And I think that has proved to be the case. Trump has transformed evangelicalism far more than evangelism has influenced Trump.

I was surprised by the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape. When the “Access Hollywood” tape was released, I was saying to people around me: “Don’t say ‘I told you so.’ We need to have empathy for Trump-supporting evangelicals who are really hurting at this revelation.” But what ended up happening is that white evangelicals made peace with “Access Hollywood,” if anything, quicker than the rest of America did❗

I received a castigating email from a sweet Christian lady who had taught me Sunday school when I was a kid. And none of it argued: “You’re wrong about Trump’s moral character.” The argument was: “Get real. This is what we have to have in order to fight the enemy.” That was surprising to me. And disorienting.

In your book, you tell a story about how an evangelical person said to their pastor: “We’ve tried to turn the other cheek. It doesn’t work. We have to fight now.” Why do certain evangelicals feel so embattled now?

Some of it is a response to legitimate fears. There are many people in American life who assume that religion itself is oppressive and should be done away with. And there is a general sense of crisis and decline in American life, and it’s translated into religious terms. In many cases, I would not disagree with the diagnosis about some of the things that are wrong. What I would disagree with is the sense of futility and giving up on what it means to live in a pluralistic democracy.

I would also point to the decline in personal evangelism. When you have people who are trained to share the Gospel with their neighbors, they have an understanding from the very beginning that people in my community aren’t my enemies, they’re my mission field. This changes the way that you see people.

When that starts to diminish, there’s a lack of confidence and a frantic looking about for whatever tool is at hand. Ideological zealotry becomes the tool at hand.

I mentioned in the book about how many pastors talk about referencing Jesus’ call to “turn the other cheek,” only to have blowback from people in their congregation because they say that that doesn’t work in times like these. The assumption is that we’re in a hostile culture as opposed to a neutral culture — as though the Sermon on the Mount is delivered in Mayberry, not ancient Rome. And the assumption also shows a lack of confidence in the means that God has given us to advance the church through proclamation and demonstration.

A moving part of your book is when you write about your father, who had a complicated relationship with the church.

He never lost his faith. But he was always very suspicious of church structures and found it hard to go to church for long periods at a time. When I was younger, I judged him for it. I thought that this was a spiritual defect. Now that I have more perspective and can see his life, I understand it.

You write about how his experience has given you compassion for folks who have left the church. And you often say that people don’t always leave the church because of what Christians believe, but instead because they don’t think Christians actually believe what they claim to believe. What do you mean by that?

When I first started in ministry, if someone came and said, “I’m losing my faith, I’m walking away from the church,” the cause was almost always one of two things. Either the person started to find the supernatural incredible. Or the person thought that the morality of the church was too strict in some way, usually having to do with sex. I almost never hear that anymore. Instead, the people that I talk to often have a sense that for the church, the Gospel is a means to an end — whether that end is politics or cultural control or cultural influence or something else. And in many cases they’re starting to question not whether the church is too strict, but whether the church actually holds to a morality at all. What is alarming to me is that some of the people I find who are despairing are actually those who are the most committed to the teachings of Christianity.

So with all this dysfunction that you are speaking about in evangelicalism, why are you still an evangelical Christian?

I think the fragmentation that’s happening to the evangelical movement right now is actually a necessary precondition for renewal.

I won’t give up on the word “evangelical.” There was a time when I did. I wrote an op-ed in 2016, in The Washington Post called “Why This Election Makes Me Hate the Word ‘Evangelical’” — but I’ve come around. I can’t find a good alternative shorthand to describe the kind of Christian that I am. But also because Tim Keller came with me to a class I was teaching at the University of Chicago, and one of the students asked why we would use the word “evangelical” when it’s become so politicized and toxic. And Tim responded, “Well, it’s because most of us evangelicals are in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the North Americans don’t get to just choose what we’re called because we’ve wrecked the brand.” The student said, “Fair enough.”

What do you think a healthy political engagement from evangelicals would look like?

It would mean a reordering of priorities. The church could see ultimate things as ultimate and other things as falling in line behind those ultimate things. That’s the fundamental shift.

I do think that we need to have the right ordering of our priorities and our loves, and also the right understanding of what it means to follow Christ. The figure of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels is not a frantic, angry culture warrior. He is remarkably tranquil about the situation around him. I think we need more of that. If our neighbors saw us loving one another and forgiving one another, even if they find our theological beliefs to be strange or even dangerous, that would be a good start.
An Announcement

I have some news. The past two years of writing this newsletter for The Times have been a profound joy and privilege, so it is bittersweet to announce that I will be leaving this post in early August, first for a brief sabbatical, and then to work on longer-form book projects. I am very grateful for my editors and colleagues at The Times. And for you, my readers, who have generously shared your lives, thoughts and prayers with me through thousands of weekly notes and emails. You have stuck with me through controversial pieces and lighthearted ones. You’ve walked with me as I’ve written my way through grief, doubt and joy. I cannot thank you enough. For fans of my work, I intend to keep writing. And I hope you will see my work in The Times, too, in the future.

Florida must repeal racist school curricula and focus on researched history

Ron DeSantis and the State Where History Goes to Die:

Opinion echo by Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times.

Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was, along with his state’s Board of Education, embroiled in a controversy over a new curriculum for student instruction in African American history.

Most of the coverage, and much of the outrage, focused on a quote from the state’s guidelines for the history of slavery, in which students are expected to learn that “Slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

DeSantis defended the curriculum language, telling reporters that teachers are “probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” In a statement, two members of Florida’s African American history standards work group defended the language in question, citing 16 individuals who, they say, developed valuable skills while in bondage.

Unfortunately for the Florida Department of Education, several of the people cited weren’t ever enslaved, and there’s little evidence that those who were learned any relevant skills for their “personal benefit” in slavery.

The good-faith explanation for this language, if you’re inclined to be generous, is that the authors wanted to emphasize the agency and skill of the enslaved, whose labor fueled large parts of the American economy in the decades before Emancipation. 

It’s an important point that you can also find in the College Board’s Advanced Placement class in African American studies. “In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians and healers in the North and South,” the A.P. guidelines state. “Once free, African Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.”

Similar points, yes, but the language isn’t quite the same. In addition to using the term “enslaved” rather than “slave” — a linguistic shift that continues to be a subject of real debate — the language for the A.P. curriculum emphasizes that Black Americans could use these skills only after Emancipation.

This is key. Slaves were owned as chattel by other human beings who stole their freedom, labor and bodily autonomy. To say that any more than a fortunate few could “parlay” their skills into anything that might improve their lives is to spin a fiction. Just as important is the fact that a large majority of the Africans enslaved in North America, whether under the British Crown for the better part of two centuries or under the American Constitution for eight decades after the revolution, died in bondage. For them, there was no point after slavery where they could use their skills.

You might say that these are minor, semantic differences. But in history the same ideas can be used to very different effect. And it is exactly these questions of wording and emphasis that mark one of the differences between a modern, more truthful depiction of American slavery and an older, tendentious approach that either de-emphasized or ignored outright the basic injustice of human bondage in favor of a gloss that placed a more pleasant sheen on an otherwise horrific institution.

“Until the mid-1960s,” the historian Donald Yacovone writes in “Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity,” “American history instruction from grammar school to the university relentlessly characterized slavery as a benevolent institution, an enjoyable time and a gift to those Africans who had been lucky enough to be brought to the United States.”

As Yacovone notes, an American student in 1903, reading a textbook written for pupils enrolled in secondary school, might learn of antebellum slavery, for example, that the “systematic training bestowed upon him during his period of servitude and his contact with higher intelligence have given to the Negro an impulse to civilization that neither his inherent inclinations nor his native environment would of themselves bestowed.”

A different student, flipping through his grammar school textbook in 1923, might read in a section on slavery that the typical plantation was a “self-supporting community” where “the great majority of Negroes remained quietly and faithfully at work” as laborers and artisans.

A student in 1943, reading a similar textbook, might learn that “the slaves loved the people of the plantation and stood by them even after slavery was ended.” 

And a student in 1963, would have read in his history book that slavery “made it possible for Negroes to come to America and to make contacts with civilized life.” 

Other authors emphasized, in Yacovone’s words, that “slaves learned valuable trades such as sewing, weaving, carpentry and nursing.”

This wasn’t just bad history and false information. It also served an ideological purpose. “As the history of textbooks reveal,” Yacovone writes, “Americans came to see a path to national reconciliation through their shared devotion to white supremacy.”

Or, as the historian David Blight observes in “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory”: “A segregated society demanded a segregated historical memory. The many myths and legends fashioned out of the reconciliationist vision provided the superstructure of Civil War memory, but its base was white supremacy in both its moderate and virulent forms.” The point of teaching fictions about slavery was both to inscribe racist ideologies into the nation’s identity and to justify the renewed subjugation of an entire class of Americans.

It is worth mentioning a few other elements of the new Florida history curriculum. Florida wants students to learn how “trading in slaves developed in African lands” and about the “practice of the Barbary pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries.” And in its guidelines on Black history after the Civil War, the state wants students to study “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

Read together, these guidelines seem like an exercise in equivocation and blame shifting — an attempt to downplay the enormity of American slavery and its defining feature, hereditary racial bondage. This is bad enough. But then consider, as well, the political context of Florida under DeSantis.

Florida, says the Republican presidential hopeful, is where “woke goes to die.” It’s where state officials refused to offer students a class in African American studies on the grounds that it “significantly lacks educational value.” And it’s where DeSantis, as governor, has vetoed spending on Black history celebrations, actively worked to reduce the representation of Black voters in the state and promised, if elected president, to change back the name of an Army base in North Carolina from Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg, as in the Confederate general Braxton Bragg.

It is possible (although, given their response to criticism, unlikely) that the Florida curriculum authors didn’t mean anything by their characterization of American slavery. But when the board that approved the language was handpicked by DeSantis — as part of his crusade against so-called wokeness — it’s hard not to see this new instruction on the history of slavery as yet another part of the Florida governor’s larger ideological project.

This is why the history of textbooks past is particularly relevant. The history we teach to students in the present is as much about the country we hope to be as it is a record of the country we once were. A curriculum that distorts the truth of past injustice is meant, ultimately, for a country that excludes in the present.

"A Republic if you can keep it" said Benjamin Franklin

A prophetic editorial echo worth an encore in this blog by Maine Writer. Published in The Seattle Times in April 2022, but the intentions of this opinion essay (below) continue to be relevant to our democracy.

Prelude: After the violent events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, one year ago today, Senator Amy Klobuchar and other federal legislators reminded us that we have “a republic,” but only “if you can keep it.” The source of this quotation is a journal kept by James McHenry (1753-1816) while he was a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention. On the page where McHenry records the events of the last day of the convention, September 18, 1787, he wrote: “A lady asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy – A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.” Then McHenry added: “The Lady here alluded to was Mrs. Powel of Philada.” The journal is at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.

Congress must stop efforts to defraud democracy.

By The Seattle Times editorial board

A violent mob (motivated by the former guy #tfg #djt) invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, spurred on by false claims of a stolen election. The invaders were incensed that Vice President Mike Pence refused to exploit ambiguities in the process of certifying Electoral College results — flaws in the law that could have plunged America into chaos.

A group of senators led by Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., have taken the first step in what must continue to be a bipartisan quest to protect the will of the voter. They introduced the Electoral Count Reform Act to help prevent future schemes to defraud democracy.

Former President Donald Trump’s efforts to remain in office were successfully thwarted after the 2020 election, but there is no guarantee that he — or one of his followers — would not try again. If anything, the possibility is growing as his acolytes continue to vie for positions of power, including overseeing elections.

Legislation, which had gathered enough GOP support to bypass a filibuster, would clarify aspects of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, removing the vagueness that Trump and his cohorts tried to exploit.

The bill would affirm that the vice president’s role in the electoral count is only ministerial and make it harder for members of Congress to object to a state’s electors. Currently, all it takes is one member in the House and one in the Senate for an objection to proceed, a requirement that would increase to at least one-fifth of the members in each chamber, under the proposal.

Additionally, the bill intended to thwart attempts by rogue state legislatures to submit different electors by giving governors conclusive authority to certify their state’s electoral slate. However, it also allows for candidates to petition for judicial review in cases of legitimate controversy.

Philadelphia, 1787. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention are just leaving Independence Hall, having decided on the general structure for the new United States. A crowd had gathered on the steps of Independence Hall, eager to hear the news. A sturdy old woman (sometimes referred to as “an anxious lady”), wearing a shawl, approached Benjamin Franklin and asked him, “well, Doctor, what do we have, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied sagely, “a republic, if you can keep it.”


The Senate should pay attention to election experts who have pointed out the importance is implementing enhanced safeguards against the unfortunately plausible scenario of election-denying governors and state legislative majorities.

Fixing the Electoral Count Act is a critical component of ensuring election integrity, but it is far from the final word. As pointed out by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan public policy institute, the law applies only to presidential races and doesn’t address broader national threats, including intimidation of election workers and efforts to manipulate the vote counting process.

The Senate should pass legislation such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore and update the 1965, Voting Rights Act protections that were gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court, including prohibiting race-based discrimination in voting. Republican leadership blocked debate on the bill last year, with only Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, voting to advance discussion.

Congress is on the right track with the Electoral Count Reform Act, but the bipartisan momentum must reach further if the U.S. is to ensure that the events of January 6 weren’t a dress rehearsal.

The Seattle Times editorial board members are editorial page editor Kate Riley, Frank A. Blethen, Melissa Davis, Alex Fryer, Claudia Rowe, Carlton Winfrey and William K. Blethen (emeritus).

White Christian nationalism is not Christian and is a threat to democracy rooted in the Constitution

Echo editorial opinion by Steve Corbin, published in The Gazette, an Iowa newspaper:

You may be among the 35 percent of Americans who have never heard the term “white Christian nationalism.” But, of those citizens who are knowledgeable of the concept, it carries a decidedly negative view. The belief is becoming more and more important to understand as cultural diversity, racism, immigration issues, political divisiveness and political candidate pandering is before us.

What is white Christian nationalism? Generally — according to the Southern Poverty Law Center — it “refers to a political ideology and identity that fuses white supremacy, Christianity and American nationalism, and whose proponents claim that the United States is a `Christian Nation.’”

Research conducted by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) with the non-partisan Brookings Institution (BI) as well as a poll sponsored by Southern Poverty Law Center/Tulchin have the same conclusion: white Christian nationalism movement is a growing threat to America’s democracy.

The far-right anti-government and religious rights movement of the 1990s, is getting stronger and stronger and will play a major role in the 2024, local, county, state and federal elections❗

During the November 21-December 14, 2022, time period, 6,212 Americans were asked by PRRI/BI for their reply to these five statements: 

1. The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation, 2. U.S. laws should be based on Christian values, 

3. If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore, 

4. Being Christian is an important part of being truly American and 5. God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

Answers across all five questions were found to be highly correlated with a margin of error of plus or minus 1.6 percent at the 95 percent level of confidence.

Fifty-four percent of the GOP faithful are adherents of Christian nationalism vs. 23 percent of independents and 15 percent of Democrats.

The PRRI/BI research notes five core attitudes are often associated with Christian nationalist beliefs: 

• anti-Black, antisemitic, 
• anti-Muslim,
• anti-immigration and 
• patriarchal adherence of traditional gender roles.

Furthermore, research revealed “Christian nationalism beliefs are strongly correlated with support for QAnon, an extremist movement of the political right,” whose tenets include: 

1. The government, media and financial worlds are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation. 

2. There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders and 

3. Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.

The Southern Poverty Law Center offers a summary of the movement that should be a wake-up call to Americans: “White Christian nationalism is a key ideology that inspired the failed January 6, 2021, insurrection and fueled multiple failed political campaigns in 2022,… however, white Christian nationalism remains a persistent and growing threat to U.S. democracy.”

Any person with a modicum of intelligence knows European colonists immigrated to America to escape religious persecution, expand their economic opportunities and live in a country where there was separation of church and state. Followers of the white Christian nationalism movement want to contradict the principles and norms of democracy and make America an authoritarian country.

Adherents of white Christian nationalism are like wrecking balls, the drivers of antidemocratic conspiracy theories and election denialism (SPLC, 2023) and possibly book banning, LGBTQIA denigration, “sanitized” Black history curriculum, anti-female reproductive laws, gerrymandering and attacking diversity, equity and inclusion.

Currently there are 14 Republicans and three Democrats wanting to win the 2024, presidential election. Hundreds of candidates will be seeking local, county, state and federal offices of power. Citizens must be vigilant and keep candidates who espouse any resemblance of white Christian nationalism out of public office.

Steve Corbin is professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa.

Opinion content represents the viewpoint of the author or The Gazette editorial board. The Gazette has been informing Iowans with in-depth local news coverage and insightful analysis for 140 years

Florida is not a destination conference center while "dah" Santis wrongly revises American history

Black fraternity joins list of Orlando convention cancellations.

Echo opinion by Skyler Swisher published in the Orlando Sentinel, a Florida newspaper.

Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s oldest historically Black fraternity, is joining a growing list of groups canceling their Orlando conventions over political concerns.

The fraternity is pulling its 2025, convention out of Florida because of a “hostile” political environment created by Gov. Ron DeSantis, General President Willis L. Lonzer III said in a prepared statement.

“In this environment of manufactured division and attacks on the Black community, Alpha Phi Alpha refuses to direct a projected $4.6 million convention economic impact to a place hostile to the communities we serve,” he said.

The event was planned for the Rosen Shingle Creek hotel and was expected to draw about 4,000 to 6,000 fraternity members in addition to family members and guests, said Eric Webb, an Alpha Phi Alpha spokesman.

Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Florida to criticize the standards, while DeSantis and his (wrong minded) supporters defended them and said a national Advanced Placement course includes similar language.

The College Board, the organization that runs the AP program, took issue with that characterization, issuing a statement that it disagrees “with the notion that enslavement was in any way a beneficial, productive, or useful experience for African Americans.”

Jeremy Redfern, a DeSantis spokesman, dismissed Alpha Phi Alpha’s cancellation when asked for comment.

“This a stunt,” he said in an email.

Founded in 1906, Alpha Phi Alpha’s members have included civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, among other notable alumni.

A search is underway for a new location for the 2025 conference, Webb said.

At least four events planned for the Orange County Convention Center have been canceled over political concerns, spokeswoman Nicolette Sewell said.

The National Society of Black Engineers moved its 2024 convention out of Orlando, an event that organizers say attracts up to 15,000 people. The American Education Research Association and AnitaB.org, an organization of female and nonbinary tech workers, also nixed events planned for 2024.

The Association of perioperative Registered Nurses cited political concerns in canceling a conference and surgical expo planned for 2027, according to the convention center.

And organizers of Con of Thrones canceled an event planned for the Hyatt Regency Orlando they say draws 3,000 to 4,000 fans of the “Game of Thrones” books and television shows.

Several groups issued travel warnings for Florida, including the NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens and Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group.

Groups canceling their events have cited laws that banned most abortions after six weeks, allowed Floridians to carry concealed weapons without a permit, cracked down on illegal immigration and targeted transgender and LGBTQ+ issues.

DeSantis, though, has said Florida’s overall tourism numbers are rebounding from the pandemic. More than 74 million visitors came to the Orlando area in 2022, up 25% from the previous year and just shy of pre-pandemic levels, tourism officials said in May.

But as of late, Orange County’s tourism tax collections have dipped, posting back-to-back monthly declines in May, which officials attributed to pent-up demand normalizing after the pandemic.

Will US Congress hear the immigration reform message when the Wall Street Journal explains the issue?

The U.S. has a people problem.  

A Wall Street Journal opinion published in Quad City Times, an Iowa newspaper.  This is an important essay republished in Iowa in advance of Republicans campaigning for the 2024, election.

In fact, the birth rate has been sliding for years, and it’s about to translate into a shrinking labor force. By 2040, according to a recent study, America could have more than 6 million fewer working-age people than in 2022. The only way to counter the domestic trend is by attracting workers from abroad.

“The working-age U.S. population has peaked absent additional immigration,” writes Madeline Zavodny, in a forthcoming paper from the National Foundation for American Policy. “New international migrants are the only potential source of growth in the U.S. working-age population over the remainder of the next two decades.”

Zavodny is an economics professor at the University of North Florida, and her analysis is based on data from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At a time when some Americans view foreign workers as cheap competition, she offers a prescription for growth and vigor. In particular she notes that, though foreign-born workers accounted for nearly half the gain in U.S. employment from January 2021, through May 2023, “employment among prime-aged U.S.-born workers also soared during this period.”

Unemployment has been historically low, she adds, and difficulty of finding good workers will increase if the pool of working-age people shrinks.

The domestic trend lines aren’t good, for two big reasons. The declining birthrate is one. The other is Baby Boomers are both living longer and aging out of the work force. 

Anyone who imagines that a shrinking population is pleasant should spend some time in Japan and Italy. As these countries are finding, decline means fewer people to produce goods and services, as well as less innovation. 

Even China’s Communists now admit that owing to their pursuit of a one- child policy, they now face, as Milton Friedman predicted, a huge worker shortage that will challenge economic growth.

So far the U.S. has been able to compensate via immigration, which was “the sole source of growth in the U.S. working-age population in 2021 and 2022,” Zavodny says. But this isn’t guaranteed. She suggests a future of competition among countries hit by the double whammy of a declining birth rate and aging society. 

Canada recently rolled out a new work permit to lure away foreigners in the U.S. on high-skill H-1B visas. The target of 10,000 applicants was met in two days.

Amid Donald Trump’s talk about a wall and Joe Biden’s chaos at the southern border, it’s hard to imagine any solutions from Congress before 2025. But Zavodny identifies labor-force trends that will have damaging consequences if they aren’t addressed. Someone needs to make the case that admitting foreign workers is good for America.

Christian Nationalism is a cover up for evil human slavery and a euphemism for white supremacy

Opinion echo by Charles M. Blow published in The New York Times:

Black History Is a Casualty in Ron DeSantis’s Christian Nationalist Quest

Difficult to understand how just one individual, the Florida Governor Ron "Dah" Santis, can turn around the history about slavery in America.  

Nevertheless, Florida approved an overhaul of its African American history standards, including guidance that middle schoolers should be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Outrage ensued, including from Vice President Kamala Harris, who blasted the standards, saying, “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us.”

Vice President Harris is correct. But I think the project underway in Florida is far larger, and far more consequential than many comprehend. The insult to Black people — and to the country — is incidental.

In the same way that Donald Trump made his bones as America’s white nationalist in chief, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is trying to make his as the country’s chief Christian nationalist, a subset of white supremacy that holds that God has ordained America as a Christian nation, and that its ideals must be protected from the encroachment of pluralism — racial, religious or otherwise.

In February 2022, in a speech at Hillsdale College, a private Christian school in Michigan, DeSantis said:

“Put on the full armor of God. Stand firm against the left’s schemes. You will face flaming arrows, but if you have the shield of faith, you will overcome them, and in Florida we walk the line here.”

In November, DeSantis released a political ad in which the voice-over announcer bellows: “On the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a protector.’” The ad goes on to convey that DeSantis is that protector — that he’s the Christian warrior of American politics.

It almost seems like DeSantis, Trump’s closest rival for the Republican presidential nomination, is banking on Christian nationalists being in a separate category of voters, but Trump has already captured them, particularly with his appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices.

On top of that, the vocabulary of Christian nationalism often is too pedantic (difficult and daunting) and distant, even among people who follow the philosophies in practice, to propel DeSantis ahead of Trump.

A survey published in October by Pew Research Center found that most American adults had never heard anything about Christian nationalism, and almost one in 10 who had heard “at least a little” about it didn’t know enough to offer an opinion.

One survey respondent described Christian nationalism as “patriotic Christians who believe in God, family and country, morality and kindness.” And I suspect that many people just think of Christian nationalists as patriotic white people who go to church — akin to the definition of white nationalism that Senator Tommy Tuberville was recently trying to sell.

Slavery was missionary work that, in these distorted accounts, brought Black heathens into contact with white people’s Christianity and civilization.

Some of these books outrageously positioned the enslaved as the main beneficiaries of slavery while white people were cast as having been saddled with the burden of it. Some books even papered over the horrors and mass death of the Middle Passage.

This worldview never fully went away. A 2021 analysis of American textbooks by The Guardian found that “private schools, especially Christian schools, use textbooks that tell a version of history that is racially biased and often inaccurate” including those that “whitewash the legacy of slavery.”

This is a shadow educational approach that people like DeSantis want to reestablish as the dominant one.

Florida’s standards recast slavery as a beneficial training ground, a school of sorts, and that is the way that many would refer to it. A great danger, of course, is that the people oppressed by this notion can absorb it.

But Christian nationalism isn’t merely “patriotic Christians” and it’s not Christianity, but rather, as the University of Oklahoma sociologist Samuel Perry put it, can be understood as “an impostor Christianity that uses evangelical language to cloak ethnocentric and nationalist loyalties.”

And DeSantis is a paragon among the impostors. His anti-woke crusade is a manifestation of the intolerance and battle-thirst of Christian nationalism, and Florida’s distortion of Black history and its attempt to rehabilitate the image of slavery is part of it.

Donald Yacovone, an associate at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, reviewed scores of textbooks from the 19th and 20th centuries for his book, “Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity.”

As he told me on Wednesday, American textbooks, especially those published before the middle of the 20th century, are notorious for being rife with the idea that “people of African descent were brought to America as a benevolent act on the part of whites.”

In Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” he wrote, “We must acknowledge that, notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally and religiously, than is true of an equal number of Black people in any other portion of the globe.”

DeSantis and other conservatives constantly complain about indoctrination, but indoctrination, political mythmaking, is precisely what Christian nationalism aims to do.

Insulting Black people may be an effect, but it’s not the ultimate aim. As Anthea Butler, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America,” told me, Christian nationalists don’t care about insulting Black people; they’re on a mission to establish a “pretension of naïveté” to absolve whiteness of guilt.

As she put it, “We are just pawns to their narrative of how they want to make ‘greatness.’ ”

Donald Trump is guilty for leading an insurrection against the United States Government! Full Stop!

If Trump is indicted for January 6, it will be clear why, an echo opinion published by Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post.

Is it fair and just — is it a wise use of prosecutorial power — to bring criminal charges against the former president Donald Trump for his failed efforts to overturn the results of the 2020, election?

The answer to this question will become clearer once the indictment is handed up, as now seems to be inevitable. And, I suspect, the accumulation of evidence, both that already known and facts newly revealed, will point strongly in the direction of yes.

Still, there is a challenging paradox embedded in the idea of charging Trump for his behavior on January 6, 2021, and in the lead-up to that day. His conduct simultaneously involves the most wicked crime — he orchestrated an assault on democracy, literally and metaphorically — and a crime that presents the greatest challenge to fit within the demanding rubric of criminal prosecution.

If Trump shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, most of us would have no problem understanding that to be a criminal offense for which he should be charged and convicted. In the aftermath of the 2020, election, he took aim at our democratic system.

In other words, this is the one we’ve been waiting for, for two-plus years now. It is the real deal — not getting Al Capone for tax evasion but for the true crime of being a gangster. But it also comes with worries — some concocted and inflated for partisan advantage, some serious and deserving of consideration.

Criminal law can be an imperfect tool to punish wrongdoing, especially when it comes to fuzzy, inchoate crimes in the arena of public corruption.

Even there, the broad proscriptions of the criminal law — prohibiting conspiracies to defraud the federal government, to obstruct an official proceeding or to deprive voters of their rights — aren’t as self-evidently tailored to the specifics of Trump’s conduct. The precedents aren’t precisely on point, precisely because his behavior is so unprecedented.

There will be space for Trump’s lawyers to argue, for example, that the statute prohibiting obstruction of an official proceeding was meant to apply to tampering with documents, not pressuring Congress not to certify electoral votes.

Should Trump then be allowed to escape responsibility for his most egregious actions, with prosecutors relegated to contenting themselves with Capone-like charges? More fundamentally: Is the criminal justice system the best venue for pursuing justice when it comes to Trump?

Trump’s allies, along with nearly all his rivals for the GOP nomination, have an answer that aligns conveniently with their political interests: No. “He should be held accountable at the ballot box, not at the behest of a federal administrative police state,” said tech executive Vivek Ramaswamy. 

Former vice president Mike Pence, among the more direct victims of Trump’s behavior, told CNN’s Dana Bash that voters already have a “deep concern” about “unequal treatment of the law” when it comes to Trump and having “one more indictment against the former president will only contribute to that sense among the American people.”

This is not the right way to think about criminal prosecution. The best place to start is with the opening words of the manual that governs federal prosecutors. “A determination to prosecute represents a policy judgment that the fundamental interests of society require the application of federal criminal law to a particular set of circumstances — recognizing both that serious violations of federal law must be prosecuted, and that prosecution entails profound consequences for the accused, crime victims, and their families whether or not a conviction ultimately results,” the Principles of Federal Prosecution instruct.

The fundamental interests of society. Nothing less is at stake in deciding whether to indict Trump for his efforts to remain in power. If prosecutors can make that case — if they can fit Trump’s conduct within the necessary elements of various criminal statutes — they are duty-bound to do so. Looking away is not an option. There has already been too much of that.

House and Senate Republicans looked away — not just through the course of the Trump presidency, but most fatefully after Trump left office, when they declined to vote for his impeachment and conviction even while knowing, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “there is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.” Convicting Trump would have served the important function of disabling him from seeking future elective office, but the Senate chose not to take that route. “We have a criminal justice system in this country,” McConnell said then. “We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

No, they aren’t. Trump already faces federal charges stemming from his post-presidential refusal to turn over classified documents to the National Archives. Those who lament the anticipated “legal flimsiness” of the forthcoming election-related indictment would do well to recall supposed overreach by the Justice Department in choosing to execute the search at Mar-a-Lago. The eventual facts quelled all but the most partisan critics.

The fact of charges being brought in the documents case does not inform the separate matter of whether charges are appropriate for Trump’s election-related conduct as well. Being prosecuted for an armed robbery in one jurisdiction does not excuse you from being indicted on kidnapping charges in another.

And those who complain of a supposed double standard in going after Trump but turning a blind eye to the conduct of Hunter Biden somehow choose to ignore another, more glaring inequity: that more than 1,000 people, incited by Trump, have been charged in the January 6 insurrection. 

McConnell put it powerfully: “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.”

And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole that the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth. Where is the fairness in prosecuting the foot soldiers but not their general?

Bringing charges against Trump for trying to undo the election isn’t piling on. It’s protecting “the fundamental interests of society,” which is another way of saying what prosecutors are supposed to do.

Florida's Governor DeSantis wasting time and money in political no man's land. He should stay home and take care of Floridians.

Obviously, I am not a political strategist. Nevertheless, Florida's Ron D. Santis should have considered consulting with me.....

Based on my humble political advocacy experience 101~ this is what I know: "Thou shalt not run a presidential campaign against a political colleague who is the former president of the United States and who is also a constituent who lives in the state where you are  the governor. But if you do make this wrongminded decision, then you must behave like a candidate instead of a one trick pony." 

Echo opinion by Michelle Cottle published in The New York Times:

Admitting you’ve made mistakes is tough for anyone!

For a hard-charging, hyper-scrutinized political candidate who presents himself as infallible, it can be as excruciating as a root canal without anesthesia.

But, Ron DeSantis clearly has hit the point where his presidential quest is crying out for a serious course correction. 

• I know it !
• You know it. 

Anxious Republican strategists and donors know it. And Team DeSantis knows it, no matter what kind of happy talk the candidate was spewing in his interview with CNN last week. (Tip: If you find yourself babbling about being one of the few folks who knows how to define “woke,” you are not nailing your message.😒 )

If things were going well for DeSantis — if he were catching fire as the less erratic, unindicted alternative to Donald Trump — there’s not a snowball’s chance he would have set foot in CNN. 

But. as things stand, consorting with non-conservative media outlets, which he, until recently, avoided, like a pack of rabid raccoons, is part of a bigger overhaul.

Team Trump intends to have some fun with this.

 “Some reboots were never going to be successful, like ‘Dynasty,’ ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ or even ‘MacGyver,’” the campaign mocked in a statement last week. “And now we can add Ron DeSantis’s 2024, campaign to the list of failures.”

DeSantis campaign is wasting money trying to reset a loosing campaign strategy. Thou shalt not be a candidate running against your own "former guy" constituent!

But campaign reboots are nothing to be ashamed of. Honest! They are a common, even healthy, part of the process. Handled properly, they give candidates the chance to show off their decisiveness, tenacity, adaptability, unflappability — you name it.

Not all overhauls are created equal, of course. Ronald Reagan’s in the 1980 presidential race? Golden. Jeb Bush’s in 2016? Oof. 

And plenty have fallen somewhere in between: John Kerry 2004, John McCain 2008, Hillary Clinton 2008. As the DeSantis campaign starts down this path, it has an abundance of recent cases to consult for potential tips, tricks and red flags.

While every floundering candidacy is floundering in its own way, there are a few foundational moves common to presidential campaign reboots:

1. Slash spending, which typically involves cutting campaign staff and salaries.
2. Shake up the leadership team.
3. Shift the focus toward more grass roots stumping in the early voting states.

Spending issues are almost a political rite of passage. So many campaigns get carried away early on with high-priced advisers or an overabundance of staff members, especially with front-runners eager to project an aura of inevitability.

The DeSantis campaign is still doing solidly with fund-raising, but there have been warning signs (especially in the small-donor department) that have it cutting staff and rethinking priorities. (Even more Iowa!) This is obviously no fun and may presage even less fun to come. 

But it is better to start making these adjustments before things get really ugly. During the summer of 2007, the struggling McCain campaign found itself nearly broke, prompting massive layoffs and pay cuts and causing general upheaval as the high-level finger-pointing spiraled.

Money matters aside, a campaign’s top leadership not infrequently requires tweaking — or tossing. The candidate needs to lock down savvy people he trusts and will listen to, even as he jettisons the troublemakers. When making such assessments, there is little room for sentimentality. Sometimes even (maybe especially) longtime friends and advisers need to be … repurposed … particularly if the chain of command has become confused and internal bickering is taking its toll. This can lead to even more tumult. When Mr. McCain cut loose a couple of his top advisers in 2007, several senior staff members followed them out the door.

But a failure to deal with such a situation can leave the whole enterprise feeling increasingly dysfunctional, as was often the case with Hillary’s 2008, campaign. So much infighting and backbiting. So many competing power centers. This is when a candidate really needs to step up and impose order.

In many cases, a reboot may call for pushing out a new narrative. Postdownsizing, Team McCain sought to reassure donors and supporters with a plan to get lean and mean and start “Living off the land.” The candidate doubled down on wooing New Hampshire (Iowa’s social conservatives were never a natural fit for him), playing up his bus tours and broadly aiming to recapture the underdog, maverick spirit of his 2000, presidential run. 

John Kerry, way down in the polls behind Howard Dean in 2003, wanted to create a comeback-kid narrative by notching back-to-back victories in Iowa and New Hampshire; he lent money to his campaign and basically lived in Iowa for weeks to help execute his one-two punch.

It’s hard to say how a DeSantis variation of something like this would work. He plans to start talking less about his record leading the state “where woke goes to die” and double down on an “us against the world” theme, according to NBC. This latter bit sounds very Trumpian, maybe a tad too much so, considering Mr. Trump himself is still running with a version of that line. DeSantis’s heavy investment in Iowa, along with his chummy relationship with the state’s governor, could bring Kerry-like benefits. Then again, multiple candidates are campaigning hard there and could wind up splitting the non-Trump vote.

The harsh reality of reboots is that some presidential hopefuls are just too out of step with the political moment to rescue. Mr. Bush strode into the 2016 race as the man to beat. But Republicans were in no mood for his policy-heavy, mellow style of politics. (Mr. Trump’s “low energy” insult was brutally resonant.) By the fall of 2015, Team Jeb was slashing staff and hoping for the debates to help him win free media. No one cared.

To be sure, "D. Santis" (or whatever he renamed himself) proved himself willing to get much nastier and more reactionary than did Mr. Bush in appealing to his base’s basest instincts. (That Trump-trashing anti-L.G.B.T.Q. video his campaign shared on social media — at once homophobic and homoerotic — was certainly something special.) No way anyone is going to catch Gov. Pudding Fingers being squishy on a culture-war hot topic like trans rights or immigration.

Yet the governor does carry a whiff of out-of-touch wonkiness. He can’t help but get all right-wing jargony at times — “accreditation cartels”? Really? — and his bungled, Twitter-based campaign announcement was clearly designed more to impress the online bros than the working-class voters he needs to woo away from Mr. Trump. Someone really should be working with him to fix this.

In the end, of course, it may be that Mr. DeSantis is on track to crash into that highest and hardest of reboot hurdles: likability.

This was, fundamentally, what kept the presidency just out of Mrs. Clinton’s reach. Even beyond the Republican haters, too many voters found her off-putting. She was not a natural retail politician. She struck people as standoffish and inauthentic. Time and again, her advisers tried to address this, but to no avail. Presidential contests have a lot to do with vibes, and she never quite managed to radiate the ones needed to go all the way.

DeSantis seems to be in a dangerously similar spot. He is famously awkward on the campaign trail — and with people in general. He stinks at the whole backslapping, glad-handing thing. He has trouble making eye contact. He presents as brusque, impatient, uninterested. He’s got the obnoxious parts of Trumpism down, without the carnival barker fun.

This doesn’t mean his presidential dreams are doomed. But it does suggest that a key element of his reboot should be figuring out how not to come across as a stilted, smug jerk who doesn’t care about voters.

Hey, no one said this would be easy.

Maine Writer P.S.:  Meanwhile, Floridians are suffering political, and heat related exhaustion while their governor is wasting time and money in the quick sand of a floundering Iowa campaign.