Kamala Harris was masterfully prepared during the debate with the grumbling DonOLD Trump

Trump May Not Have Met His Waterloo, but He More Than Met His Match- Echo opinion published by Charles M. Blow in The New York Times:

Vice-President Kamala Harris makes toast our ot DonOLD Trump during debate (The Lincoln Project)

Being drunk on hubris and narcissism is the surest way to lose a confrontation to a clever, clearheaded opponent. It’s a story that’s been repeated throughout history.

Napoleon was a cocksure emperor and commander, a skilled battle tactician who became a master of propaganda in service of his own legend. In 1812, he invaded Russia, but in that campaign, his military innovating failed him.

The Russians used attrition warfare, retreating as Napoleon’s armies advanced, his supply lines unable to adequately keep up. By the time the French occupied Moscow, the Russians had Napoleon on their turf and the brutal Russian winter approaching. Napoleon entered Russia with hundreds of thousands of troops. He withdrew with only a fraction surviving.

It was a historic humbling, a staggering miscalculation that still resonates.

I kept thinking about this episode during the (Harris/"Dump") debate as Donald Trump — also a cocksure propagandist, who has in many ways reshaped politics in this country — was repeatedly outmaneuvered by Kamala Harris, in part because his strategies have become predictable and his weaknesses well known.

Picture exhibit proposed for the Louvre Museum as per The Lincoln Project

Trump has spent weeks trying to cast Harris as “crazy,” “weak” and “incompetent” with a “low I.Q.” He has denigrated her so often that he appeared utterly unprepared to face off against a woman who was both shrewd and strategic.

Harris laid traps on Tuesday night and Trump kept walking into them. A perfect example: After she said that “people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” he was champing at the bit to retort, saying, “People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go,” adding, “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

Apart from the obvious, that her rallies have been large and rollicking, the exchange perfectly underscored the ease with which Trump can be goaded. It was almost — almost — a surprise to see how easy it was for the vice president to get him to reveal his complete lack of message discipline.

The genius of her approach was to constantly have him chase her, only for her to pivot again and again from his meanderings to her portrait of an American future guided by her plans, values and optimism.

Harris’s rage-baiting of Trump forced him to descend into a reliance on some of MAGA’s most divisive set pieces: the notion that some Democrats favor allowing abortion to include killing babies after they’ve been born; claims that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets.

The Trump we saw on the debate stage should concern us all, and not just for the usual reasons. He should worry us because we saw how easy it is to emotionally manipulate him and how hard it is for him to self-regulate.

We saw how dictators around the world would be able — are able — to sway him. When Harris said to Trump that Vladimir Putin would “eat you for lunch,” anyone watching the debate with any remotely objective sense really had no choice but to credit the comment because we were watching Harris eat Trump’s lunch.

So what happens now?

In many ways, Trump’s base of support is set. His core constituents had long since made their peace with his lying and rambling. And many of his voters, including those whom my Opinion colleague Kristen Soltis Anderson recently described as “begrudging Trump voters,” seem to have either priced in or affirmatively embraced his shortcomings and even his criminal convictions.

By contrast, it was pretty clear that going into the debate, Harris had room to increase her support: A New York Times/Siena College poll published this week found that more than a quarter of likely voters felt they needed to learn more about her. Many of them will still want to know more about her positions on specific issues — Harris delved into some of that on Tuesday, but not, as Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury noted, to great degree.

Trump never made an adjustment. Maybe he couldn’t. Whatever the reason, it led to a disastrous night for him.

Donald Trump tells Americans how he will destroy the U.S. Constitution

Echo opinion by Charles M. Blow published in The New York Times:  At a rally in Wildwood, N.J., former guy Donald Trump said that if he is re-elected, he will “immediately deport” any campus protesters who “come here from another country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or antisemitism.”

Trump Is Still at War With the Constitution

Of course, Trump dwells in linguistic imprecision (😉IOW "lies"). What does “try to bring” mean? Are we using his definitions of jihadism, anti-Americanism and antisemitism? How would those sentiments be monitored? Would the deportations be extrajudicial? Would the deportations be only of student visa holders, or would it include green card holders?

This campaign pledge — this threat — is not only unworkable; it’s ludicrous. But it’s a powerful bit of propaganda. It ties together Trump’s message of nativism and xenophobia with one of his fixations: an iron-fist approach to protests that challenge his beliefs or interests.

Trump understands, intuitively, the power of crowds, and views it as a pressing threat when aligned against him.

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has said Trump was furious about the protests in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd. In his memoir, Esper wrote that in one meeting, Trump asked, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” According to Esper, Trump believed that the protests made the country — and him — look weak.

Trump has a thirst for authoritarianism because he conflates suppression with strength. In a 1990, interview with Playboy, Trump said this about the Chinese government’s response to the Tiananmen Square protests: “They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”

It’s hard not to conclude that Trump relishes the idea of doing the same.

But what Trump seems to see as a weakness is actually one of America’s strengths, the First Amendment. It protects not only freedom of speech but also the freedom to peaceably assemble.

The First Amendment also protects the freedom of the press, which has been under constant assault from Trump. Not only have his incessant references to the news media as the “enemy of the people” helped to poison public sentiment about the trustworthiness of basic facts; he has long expressed a desire to erode press freedoms in the country in general.

During his 2016, campaign, he promised to “open up our libel laws” to allow news organizations to be more easily sued if they write what he deems “purposely negative and horrible and false articles.” There is already an avenue for litigation for false reporting, but it is the subjective “negative” and “horrible” designations that should set off alarms.

In many ways, Trump is at war with the Constitution itself.

In 2022, just weeks after announcing his current campaign, he took to social media, continuing his lie that the 2020, election had been stolen, writing: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

In fact, one of the founders’ greatest fears was a populist demagogue.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote to George Washington in 1792, just a few years after the Constitution was ratified, “the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the country is by flattering the prejudices of the people and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion and bring on civil commotion.”

That is a rather prophetic description of the rise of Trump and the precarious point at which the nation now finds itself.

And if Trump is re-elected, some of his allies are already planning to indulge and institutionalize his authoritarian inklings. Much of what they have planned involves reshaping the executive branch and exploiting regulatory power.

But it would be unwise to think that Trump would limit himself in this way. With an obsequious Congress — which he would have if it is controlled by Republicans — he could also, potentially, enact laws that undermine the Constitution. We’ve seen this before.

In 1798, fearing a possible war with France, a Federalist Party-controlled Congress passed a series of laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, permitting the president to deport “aliens” and allowing the arrest, imprisonment and deportation of citizens of an enemy country during wartime. The Sedition Act made it illegal to “print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous and malicious writing” about the government.

As the National Archives explains: “The laws were directed against Democratic-Republicans, the party typically favored by new citizens. The only journalists prosecuted under the Sedition Act were editors of Democratic-Republican newspapers.”

The Sedition Act is no longer on the books, but it is now widely considered to have been unconstitutional. It’s alarming to see so many Americans shrug when a former president floats a similar idea.

As Benjamin Franklin printed in his newspaper, a half-century before our Constitution was written and adopted: “Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved and tyranny is erected on its ruins.”

That appears to be Trump’s (stated❗) ambition.💥

If Speaker Mike Johnson really reads Scripture then he must know Matthew 23: 27-28

An echo opinion published in The New York Times by Charles M. Blow:  ...."second wave Trumpism..."? (It boggles my mind to try and understand the "un-understandable", i.e., how it is that Trumpism is a euphemism for Christian Nationalism.....in other words, smokescreen etymology for "smokescreen rhetoric")

I Grew Up in Mike Johnson’s District, Where Kindness Can Mask Cruelty

Cruelty masked in Christian nationalism

I don’t know Mike Johnson, the brand-new speaker of the House of Representatives, but I feel as if I do because we’re from the same neck of the woods. He’s from Shreveport, in Caddo Parish, Louisiana., where I was born and where one of my brothers died.

Johnson’s district encompasses my childhood hometown, Gibsland, about 40 miles east of Shreveport, and home parish, Bienville, which is where most members of my family have lived for as long as I can track them back. My mother and two of my brothers still live there.

He graduated from Louisiana State University. A few years earlier, I had turned down a scholarship to L.S.U. to accept one at Grambling State University, a historically Black college about a half-hour east of Gibsland. He also wrote opinion essays for the newspaper where I cut my teeth as a working journalist, The Shreveport Times.

We never crossed paths, but we came of age politically in the same locality, a place I know better than almost any other on Earth, shaped by many of the same cultural forces.

And for that reason, I believe that he’ll most likely be able to avoid being tagged as an extremist — at least in the short run — as America gets to know him.

In a statement after Johnson was elected speaker, the Democratic National Committee castigated him as an “election-denying, anti-abortion MAGA extremist” who was “a mastermind behind House Republicans’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election” and “is a loyal foot soldier to the real leader of the Republican Party — Donald Trump.”

All that is true, but unlike Trump’s, Johnson’s efforts to undermine American democracy are served like a comforting bowl of grits and a glass of sweet tea. He is not abrasive. He is likable- (like a used car salesman.....).

He is from a part of the country where your nemesis will smile at you and promise to pray for you, where people will quickly submit that they “love the sinner but hate the sin,” where one hand can hold a Bible while the other holds a shackle. He is from a place where people use religion to brand their hatred as love so that they act on it cheerfully and without guilt.

He is what many have feared: an example of second-wave Trumpism — politicians rising in Trump’s wake who come with the same policy priorities and ideological proclivities, but in a far more congenial and urbane package, propelled by something more than personal grievance. Trumpism is a religion (i.e., cultism❗) developed to serve a man (not a deity). What happens when it evolves into a pillar of an established creed and is viewed as a way to serve God?

Johnson has taken that ethos into his politics.

In an interview last week on Fox News, Johnson said: “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview.”

Johnson tried to create some daylight between his zealotry and his politics, saying that not all lawmakers’ deeply held beliefs can become law. He also said that when the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was constitutionally protected it became “settled” law and “the law of the land,” and as a constitutional lawyer, “I respect that.”

But does he?

Anticipating that decision in 2015, he introduced a failed religious exemption bill in the Louisiana State Legislature aimed at blunting the ruling’s effect. He said at the time about the court’s eventual ruling, “It is difficult to overestimate the damage this will do to our culture and deep religious heritage that has defined America since its founding.”

On another occasion, he said the court had decided “to usurp the authority of the people and force same-sex marriage on all 50 states by judicial fiat.”

Mike Johnson's religious crusade. He is leading a second wave of Trumpism shrouded in religious fanaticism.

Does that sound like respecting a ruling to you? Of course not. It’s an example of Johnson’s fundamentalism in action: his Captain Ahab-like obsession with opposing L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

He has a longstanding friendship with Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana legislator who is the president of the Family Research Council, an organization whose website says that “homosexual conduct” — not just same-sex marriage — is not only “harmful to the persons who engage in it” but “also harmful to society at large.”

Like Perkins, Johnson is on a crusade to advance a religious agenda, even when it comes at the expense of constitutionally protected liberty.

As Peter Wehner wrote for The Atlantic, Johnson “uses his Christian faith to sacralize his fanaticism and assault on truth.” Johnson’s worldview seems to be that the will of God is greater than the rights of man — a view nurtured by the place that nurtured him.

The year after same-sex marriage became legal nationwide, the American Bible Society ranked Shreveport the country’s fourth most “Bible-minded” city, a measure of Bible reading habits and beliefs about the Bible.

Bibleism and Trumpism

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean." Matthew 23: 27-28

This patina of piety affords Johnson a sense of cheerfulness, the sense that he’s a harmless, happy warrior in the conservative Christian cause: After Johnson’s bill was killed in the State Legislature in 2015, he smiled for photos with two of the activists who had helped kill it.

Where he and I are from, even would-be oppressors can be affable. It’s not just good manners; it’s the Christian way, the proper Southern way. And it is the ultimate deception.

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.’ ”

Ron DeSantis has a censorship obsession but his compulsion violates Constitutional freedom

Opinion echo by Charles M. Blow, a columnist who writes for 

The New York Times.  

"People of African descent have been in Florida from the arrival of Ponce de Leon in 1513, yet our presence in the state is virtually hidden,: Dr. Marvin Dunn.

FLORIDA- Midday on Saturday in Orlando, Florida, Greenwood Cemetery, and just up an incline from an algae-covered pond a group of students encircle a grave. Many are holding a book — some clutching it to their chests the way a preacher holds a Bible.

That book, “A History of Florida Through Black Eyes,” was written by Marvin Dunn, an emeritus professor at Florida International University, who is among those gathered. He quiets the group before telling the gripping story of the man beneath the tombstone. The man was Julius “July” Perry, a Black voting rights activist who was killed — arrested, then dragged from jail by a white mob and lynched — on Election Day in 1920 during the Ocoee Massacre, the culmination of a tragic chain of events set in motion, according to accounts, by a Black man attempting to vote.

The stop at the cemetery was part of the second “Teach the Truth” tour, a field trip to historic Black sites in Florida, organized by Dunn in response to the threat to teaching comprehensive Black history posed by the anti-woke hysteria of the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.

Teaching Truth International social media page here.

“Teach the Truth” is full of visits to the graves of Black people killed by white racists, cases Dunn told me he focuses on “because those are the ones that are easiest to forget” — the “hard stories” that are, as he says, the ones most in need of preservation.

On this tour there are about two dozen students. One of them is Marcus Green, a 15-year-old Black boy, tall and thin, with searching, almond-shaped eyes, a crown of finger-length braids and a quiet, deliberative demeanor that occasionally surrenders a smile.

As we stand under a shade tree waiting for the tour bus, Marcus tells me what it feels like for him to be a student in Florida right now, that he is balancing a sense of empowerment and fear. I asked why he invoked fear, and he said: “Because you can’t help but feel it.”

His mother tells me that she signed him up for the tour because he was frustrated by the feeling that there was so much of his history that he didn’t know.

The next tour stop was in Live Oak, at the graveside of Willie James Howard, a teenager lynched because he wrote a love letter to a white girl. Her father kidnapped Howard from his home at gunpoint, took him to a bluff overlooking the Suwannee River and offered the boy an impossible choice: take a bullet from a barrel aimed at his head or jump — with his hands and feet bound — and take his chances in the water.

The boy chose the river. The river won.

As Dunn told the story of Howard — whom he has described as Florida’s Emmett Till — Marcus’ face rippled as he repeatedly clenched his jaw and furrowed his brow. Howard was then the same age as Marcus is now: 15. As he told me: “That could have been me.”

Dunn called the students forward to touch Howard’s gravestone, which they did, one at a time. 

Marcus held back, but eventually stepped forward, bent down and pressed his open palm to the stone. He held it there, then slowly released, later telling me that when he touched it, he “felt a sense of serenity.”

As the group made its way to the spot along the river where Howard leapt to his death, a local radio station replayed an interview between DeSantis and Sean Hannity in which DeSantis called the Advanced Placement course in African American studies that he has vocally opposed “garbage” and “neo-Marxist indoctrination.”

The message — like the message in several of DeSantis’ broadsides aimed at academic freedom and so-called wokeness — is a medley of buzz-wordy circumlocution.

Too much of the debate about DeSantis’ cynical censorship craze has centered the opinions of adults, the theories of politicians and the feelings of white children — feelings presumed to be hurt if they encounter, in class, some of our history’s bleakest episodes.

But what about the other children, the roughly 600,000 Black students in Florida’s public schools, like Marcus, searching for a history that includes them — a history of them — who now feel targeted and afraid? Do they not matter in this debate? What about their needs and their feelings?

My conversations with Marcus echo those I recently had with another 15-year-old student from Florida, Adrianna Gutierrez, who identifies as Afro-Latina and as a lesbian, and therefore feels the brunt of both DeSantis’ anti-Black studies and history push and his anti-LGBTQ push, including his state’s Don’t Say Gay law.

Adrianna called the situation in Florida “surreal” and said it feels like things are in a “state of chaos,” all of which has pushed her toward activism.

She said the first protest she attended, late last year, was “scary” because although she knew some people didn’t like her for who she was, she had never come face-to-face with hate as intense and concentrated as it was among the counterprotesters who were there.

As she recalled it, many of the counterprotesters brought young children with them, carried signs with slogans about school being a “place to learn and not teach about transgenderism” and they yelled, “Protect our children.”

But who’s going to protect children like Marcus and Adrianna, children who want to know our full history; who want to find themselves and be themselves and deserve to feel safe in the pursuit? Hiding the complexities or harsher truths of the past from them is to rob them of tools they need to navigate and survive in a still-hostile world, one in which horrors aren’t confined to graves nor queer people confined to closets.

On the last stop of the “Teach the Truth” tour, Dunn drove the group down an ivory-colored dirt road in the Rosewood community to a wooded area he’s converting into a remembrance park for the victims of the Rosewood Massacre.

He told the children about a tense encounter in September, when he visited the site with another group, including his son, and the neighbor across the street charged at them in his truck while yelling the “n-word” and “almost killed my son.” The neighbor was arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

As Dunn told the story, a placard next to the neighbor’s fence was visible. It read: “DeSantisland: Land of Liberty.”

Maine Writer:  Censorship 101- The First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution provides that Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise. It protects freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Free speech does not exist in Florida. Big Brother Governor Ron DeSantis will decide what is legally "free speech"

America, Right-Wing Censors and the ‘Battle for the Next Century, echo essay published in The New York Times, by Charles M. Blow.

Christopher Rufo, the man who orchestrated the attack on critical race theory, underscored a new focus this month. Unfortunately, he is best known for his activism against critical race theory,

“Conservatives must move the fight from ideology to bureaucracy,” he tweeted. “We’ve won the debate against CRT; now it’s time to dismantle DEI.”

D.E.I. stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, a concept that goes far beyond just the racial prism of critical race theory and moves into the worlds of ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age and class.

What Rufo is proposing is the distorting and demonizing of legitimate practices and areas of academic inquiry. He admitted as much in a 2021 tweet, back when he was still focused primarily on critical race theory: “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote. “We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Republicans who are elected officials are quick to “amen” Rufo’s talking points. Representative Chip Roy of Texas, for instance, amplified Rufo’s tweet this month about moving on from fighting “ideology” to taking on the entire bureaucracy. Rufo, Roy said, was “speaking my language.”

This is the same Roy who voted against the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, one of only 14 members of the House to do so, on the grounds that it created “a separate Independence Day based on the color of one’s skin.”

This is the same Roy who, during a congressional hearing a few years ago, referred to an “old saying” that seemed to be celebrating lynching: “Find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree.”

OMG! Christopher Rufo is a right wing extremist prominent advocate for bans on teachers discussing LGBTQ issues in classrooms.

This is the same Roy who was one of only three representatives to vote against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, saying that the legislation “simply raises the punishment” for offenses that are already federal crimes “in an effort to advance a woke agenda under the guise of correcting racial injustice.”

Meanwhile, Roy has been pushing his Restoring Military Focus Act, a bill he first introduced two years ago that would, if passed, eliminate the Department of Defense’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.

In 2022, Senator Marco Rubio introduced companion legislation in the Senate, and together, the two men released a report on political influences in the military titled “Woke Warfighters.”

The report, which featured on its cover six cartridges strapped to the back of a helmet, each one carrying a rainbow-colored bullet, repeatedly invoked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as it railed against the Pentagon’s attempts to deal with racism within its ranks.

The report also focused on trans people serving in the military and receiving gender-affirming care, as well as what it called the military’s promotion of “individual identity and self-actualization in recruitment and retention efforts, particularly for the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community.”

This year, just a week before Roy responded to Rufo’s tweet, he reintroduced the bill, this time to a House that Republicans controlled.

This fight against D.E.I. isn’t confined to public institutions and bureaucracies. As the leader of this movement, Rufo has set his sights on corporate America as well. In July he published what he called a survey of the “programming” of every Fortune 100 company and found they had all adopted D.E.I. programs, including those that “promote the most virulent strands of critical race theory and gender ideology.”

When Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a law limiting D.E.I. in the workplace last April, Rufo likened him to Teddy Roosevelt and praised his “muscular” strategy for combating “corporate malfeasance.” “Conservatives,” he wrote, “need to build on these efforts by developing a comprehensive agenda for pushing back against left-wing ideology in corporate America.”

In fact, Rufo sees Florida as the seeding ground for his censorship, where it can take root and spread, and Texas has already followed suit. This month, just a few days after DeSantis announced plans to block state colleges from having programs on D.E.I., the office of the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, issued a memo warning state agency and public university leaders that the use of D.E.I. in hiring was illegal.

This was precisely the worry of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and Columbia, who played a leading role in developing critical race theory into a discipline, when I spoke with her recently.

She said: “They started with C.R.T. They moved to ‘Don’t Say Gay.’ Now they’re moving to all of Black studies. It’s not going to be long before they include all ethnic studies. We’ve already seen they’re attacking diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education. 

Ron DeSantis wants to outlaw free speech.  Is this issue destined to the Supreme Court?

And the real thing, Charles, is going to be when they come for diversity, equity and inclusion in corporations.”

This is the New Right’s strategic plan: a relentless push to re-establish and strengthen the straight, cis, patriarchal, white supremacist power structure. And, Crenshaw said, “this thing will not be satisfied by one victory. This is just one skirmish, in a wider, broader battle to make racism unspeakable and basically to contain the power of Black folks, queer folks, women and pretty much everybody else who doesn’t agree to the agenda of reclaiming this country that the MAGA group claims.”

In fact, every perceived win will only embolden the extremists. The objective is to win the war against progress and to freeze America in a yesteryear image of itself. This is a swing-for-the-fences play. They are seeking to widen the conservative aperture in their quest to suppress and reverse, to promote a universal vision on oppression, to apply uniform pressure.

As Crenshaw put it, “I believe that this is the battle for the next century.”

Radicalization of Republicans

Propaganda and disinformation are real and insidious, but I believe that to a large degree, Republicans’ radicalization is willful.

Donald Trump "You are fired!"

The New York Times echo opinion by Charles M. Blow:

Wyoming delivered Liz Cheney a resounding defeat in the primary where the hideous Harriett Hageman defeated her former Republican colleague. 

Ms. Cheney is one of the few Republicans in Congress willing to resist Donald Trump’s election lies, and the Wyoming Republican voters punished her for it.

First, let me say, I have no intention of contributing to the hagiography of Liz Cheney. She is a rock-ribbed Republican who supported Trump’s legislative positions 93 percent of the time. It is on the insurrection and election lies where she diverged.

In a way, she is the Elvis of politics: She took something — in this case a position — that others had held all along and made it cross over. She mainstreamed a political principle that many liberals had held all along.

Excuse me if I temper my enthusiasm for a person who presents herself as a great champion of democracy but votes against the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Situational morality is better than none, I suppose, but I see it for what it is, and I am minimally moved.

However, her loss does crystallize something for us that many had already known: that the bar to clear in the modern Republican Party isn’t being sufficiently conservative but rather being sufficiently obedient to Donald Trump and his quest to deny and destroy democracy.

We must stop thinking it hyperbolic to say that the Republican Party itself is now a threat to our democracy. I understand the queasiness about labeling many of our fellow Americans in that way. I understand that it sounds extreme and overreaching.

But how else are we to describe what we are seeing?

Of the 10 Republicans in the House who voted to impeach Donald Trump for his role in fomenting the insurrection, four didn’t seek re-election and four lost their primaries. Only two have advanced to the general election, and those two were running in states that allow voters to vote in any primary, regardless of their party affiliation.

Polls have consistently shown that only a small fraction of Republicans believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected. He was, of course. (That fact apparently can’t be repeated often enough.)

Donald Trump lost his 2020 bid to be reelected.

And in fact, according to a Washington Post analysis , in battleground states, nearly two-thirds of the Republican nominees for the state and federal offices with sway over elections believe the last election was stolen.

This is only getting worse. Last month, a CNN poll found that Republicans are now less likely to believe that democracy is under attack than they were earlier in the year, before the January 6 committee began unveiling its explosive revelations. Thirty-three percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the party should be very accepting of candidates who say the election was stolen; 39 percent more said the party should be somewhat accepting of those candidates.

Furthermore, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll published in January found that the percentage of Republicans who say that violence against the government can sometimes be justified had climbed to 40 percent, compared with just 23 percent of Democrats. It should also be noted that 40 percent of white people said that violence could be justified compared with just 18 percent of Black people.

We have to stop saying that all these people are duped and led astray, that they are somehow under the spell of Trump and programmed by Fox News.

Propaganda and disinformation are real and insidious, but I believe that to a large degree, Republicans’ radicalization is willful.

Republicans have searched for multiple election cycles for the right vehicle and packaging for their white nationalism, religious nationalism, nativism, craven capitalism and sexism.

The coming midterm elections

“There’s a stirring of Democratic hearts, a blooming of Democratic hopes, a belief that falling gas prices, key legislative accomplishments and concern about abortion rights equal a reprieve from the kind of midterm debacle that Democrats feared just a month or two ago.”

There was a time when they believed that it would need to be packaged in politeness — compassionate conservatism — and the party would eventually recommend a more moderate approach intended to branch out and broaden its appeal — in its autopsy after Mitt Romney’s 2012, loss.

But Trump offered them an alternative, and they took it: Instead of running away from their bigotries, intolerances and oppression, they would run headlong into them. They would unapologetically embrace them.


This, to many Republicans, felt good. They no longer needed to hide. They could live their truths, no matter how reprehensible. They could come out of the closet, wrapped in their cruelty.

But the only way to make this strategy work and viable, since neither party dominates American life, was to back a strategy of minority rule and to disavow democracy.

A Pew Research Center poll found that between 2018 and 2021, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents gradually came to support more voting restrictions.

In a December NPR/Ipsos poll, a majority of Democrats, independents and Republicans all thought that American democracy, and America itself, was in crisis, but no group believed it more than Republicans.

But this is a scenario in which different people look at the same issue from different directions and interpret it differently.

Republicans are the threat to our democracy because their own preferred form of democracy — one that excludes and suppresses, giving Republicans a fighting chance of maintaining control — is in danger.

For modern Republicans, democracy only works — and is only worth it — when and if they win.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/opinion/liz-cheney-wyoming.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

Evangelical hypocrisy defies Scripture - Luke 6:46

 “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?"

Hypocrisy 101!*

By Charles M. Blow published in The New York Times

Evangelical Christians castigated Bill Clinton in wake of his “improper relationship” with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He had sinned. He would be stoned.

Franklin Graham, the evangelical minister, wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 1998 that Clinton’s “extramarital sexual behavior in the Oval Office now concerns him and the rest of the world, not just his immediate family,” and that “private conduct does have public consequences.”

He concluded: “Mr. Clinton’s sin can be forgiven, but he must start by admitting to it and refraining from legalistic doublespeak. According to the Scripture, the president did not have an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with Monica Lewinsky — he committed adultery. He didn’t ‘mislead’ his wife and us — he lied. Acknowledgment must be coupled with genuine remorse. 

A repentant spirit that says, ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong. I won’t do it again. I ask for your forgiveness,’ would go a long way toward personal and national healing.”

But Mr. Graham never demanded the same of Donald Trump. To the contrary, he became one of Trump’s biggest defenders.

When a tape was released during the 2016 campaign of Trump bragging years earlier about sexually assaulting women, Graham revealed his true motives: It wasn’t religious piety, but rather raw politics.

He wrote on Facebook that Trump’s “crude comments” could not be defended, “but the godless progressive agenda of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton likewise cannot be defended.” He continued, “The most important issue of this election is the Supreme Court.”

The Supreme Court represents a more lasting power than the presidency, a way to lock in an ideology beyond the reach of election cycles and changing demographics at least for a generation.

In an interview with Axios on HBO in 2018, Graham said of his
support of Trump, “I never said he was the best example of the Christian faith. He defends the faith. And I appreciate that very much.”

The courts are central to that supposed defense, in Graham’s calculation.

Case in point, his rigid defense of Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused by Christine Blasey Ford of cornering her in a bedroom at a 1982 house party. Graham dismissed the allegations as “not relevant” and said of the episode:

Well, there wasn’t a crime that was committed. These are two teenagers, and it’s obvious that she said no and he respected it and walked away — if that’s the case, but he says he didn’t do it. He just flat out says that’s just not true. 

Regardless if it was true, these are two teenagers and she said no and he respected that, so I don’t know what the issue is. This is just an attempt to smear his name, that’s all.

The hypocrisy of white evangelicals, taken into full context, shouldn’t have been shocking, I suppose, but as a person who grew up in the church (although I’m not a religious person anymore), it was still disappointing.

I had grown up hearing from pulpits that it was the world that changed, not God’s word. The word was like a rock. A lie was a lie, yesterday, today and tomorrow, no matter who told it.

*Evangelicals read the Bible and claim to believe it verbatim, but they do not demonstrate an understanding about what the Scripture actually says. 

Anti-vaxxers are COVIDIOTS - Summary echo about stupidity

Echo opinion editorial by Charles M. Blow published in The New York Times.

Nothing better exemplifies the gaping political divide in this country than our embarrassing and asinine vaccine response. #TFG Trump’s scorched earth political strategy has fooled millions of Americans into flirting with death. 

Anti-vaxxers are choosing to be stupid rather than live.

And now thousands are once again dying for it.

Almost from the beginning, the efforts to combat the virus were met with disdain from #TFG (a once upon a time failed president) who felt the crisis made him look bad. 

Unbelievably, the science was denied. We came to live in a world where masking was mocked and ingesting disinfectant was offered up as a possible cure.

All the while, the patients on ventilators gasped for breath, and refrigerated trailers filled with bodies. Death is one of the ultimate truths of life, and yet not even it could dissuade the headstrong from casting doubt on the science.

And then, a miracle.

In response to this raging, deadly virus, scientists developed multiple, highly effective vaccines with breathtaking speed. It was like a prayer had been answered. An antidote to the plague had arrived.

We should all have been celebrating in the streets and running to a lifesaving serum with our sleeves rolled up and a smile on our face. But not enough of us were.

(Caused by #TFG incompetence)...The public had been poisoned by partisanship. Masking was a political statement. Social distancing was a political statement. Receiving the vaccine, for far too many, was a political statement.

And so, countless Americans responded with a political statement of their own: (stupid!) defiance.

They hated that businesses were forced to close, and being asked to wear masks inside when they reopened. They hated their children having to stay home from school and being made to wear masks when they returned.

But, the simple truth is that all of this could have been avoided if all Americans eligible for the vaccine — and that’s pretty much every adult at this point — had simply chosen to be vaccinated. But they didn’t. They haven’t. They are too dug in, too committed to the lies and conspiracies, too devoted to rebellion.

In the beginning, as the vaccine was rolled out, there were some access hurdles and some understandable apprehensions. But now, billions of people worldwide have received the vaccine, and very few have had adverse effects.

The vaccine is safe, incredibly safe.

There are no microchips or magnets in it. It does not cause Covid and it is not more dangerous than Covid.

Believing all these lies is a luxury of people who have not sat by a hospital bedside, or watched from behind glass, because Covid regulations prevented them from comforting a relative or friend as they drew their last breath, struggling against a virus that choked that breath off.

It is a luxury to be irresponsible in a society where others will be responsible for you, where you simply assume that you are safer because others take the appropriate precautions to be safe: You do not need to get the shot because others have.

But the Delta variant is testing that faith.

You will not be safe as an unvaccinated person riding on the coattails of the vaccinated. Delta is extremely transmissible and unremitting. It is stronger than its progenitor.

As the Delta variant surges there is an uptick in the pace of vaccinations in the country. It’s almost like religion: Many disbelievers will call out to whatever God there may be when the reaper is at the door. Fear of ideological defeat is no match for the fear of imminent death. And yet, it shouldn’t have taken another surge of sickness and death for good sense to set in.

Why were Americans turning away a vaccine that many people in other parts of the world were literally dying for? Many did so because of their fidelity to the lie and their fidelity to the liar. They did it because they were — and still are — slavishly devoted to Trump, and because many politicians and conservative commentators helped Trump propagate his lies.

A recent Monmouth University poll found that “among those who admit they will not get the vaccine if they can avoid it, 70 percent either identify with or lean toward the Republican Party while just 6 percent align with the Democrats.”

The optics of countless socially distanced funerals is less offensive to those conservatives than the optics of being socially distanced in a Fuddruckers.

It was all lunacy. It is all lunacy. This should never have happened. There are people dead today — a lot of them! — who should still be alive and who would be if people in the heights of government and the heights of the media had not fed them lies about the virus.

But apparently, after you get so used to so much blood on your hands, you forget — or make yourself forget — that you weren’t born with red palms.

So, we have a situation in America where people are dying and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove that they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy.

This is like watching millions of people playing in traffic.

Charles M. Blow joined The New York Times in 1994, and became an Opinion columnist in 2008.