Speaker Mike Johnson’s Christian Nationalism Gets Congressional Attention—Not the Good Kind by Robyn E. Blumner

 

We have a caucus in Congress. Yes, we do. The Congressional Freethought Caucus (CFC) is dedicated to promoting the secular character of government by protecting the strict separation of church and state, as well as evaluating public policy based on its adherence to reason and science…

If you were to look for the opposite to this approach to lawmaking, one name would stand above the rest: Mike Johnson, the current Speaker of the House and the second in line to the presidency.

The Louisiana congressman is a Christian Nationalist of the first order and an energetic promoter of young-earth creationism. As HuffPost reported in December 2023, Johnson once lauded the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, saying they are “one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”¹

He sought to have a course on the Bible, grounded in biblical literalism and the Genesis creation story, offered to public school students. The course was created by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, a group that claims “the Bible was the foundation and blueprint for our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, our educational system, and our entire history until the last 20 to 30 years.”²

My sense is no one at the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools has read our godless Constitution or has the vaguest clue about the religious antipathy of Thomas “A Wall of Separation between Church and State” Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But I guess if you fall for one delusion, you can fall for more.

Parroting these views is Johnson, who has talked of the “so-called separation of church and state” and said that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.”³

But remember we have a congressional caucus, and it has not taken all this lying down. First, the CFC invited Johnson to talk with the caucus about protecting religious freedom. That invitation was ignored. Then, in January, the CFC put out a white paper titled “Speaker Johnson: Christian Nationalism in the Speaker’s Office?” I urge you to read it in full.⁴

The twenty members of the Congressional Freethought Caucus say that what is known about the Speaker’s record on religious freedom and church-state separation is “troubling and alarming.” It states bluntly that Johnson “is deeply connected” to Christian Nationalism.

As the CFC report points out, Johnson has ties to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, a dominionist philosophy that says Christians must take over the key levers of society, including government, business, media, etc., to bring society into alignment with what they consider God’s plan for Christian hegemony.

“He has spent decades working to deny, reject, and undermine the constitutional separation of church and state, including trafficking in fake histories about our nation’s founding and distorting the meaning of the Establishment Clause,” the CFC says.

Johnson has spent much of his professional life working to impose Christian dogma on society through operation of law. As senior legal counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a national Christian Right legal organization (with contributions and revenues in 2022 totaling $104 million!), he promoted the teaching of intelligent design in public school science classes and worked to shut down abortion clinics in Louisiana.

As the CFC reports, as a member of Congress, Johnson has pushed for a nationwide ban on abortion and called for prison time and “hard labor” for any doctor who performs one.

The CFC has put forth a series of nearly two dozen questions for Johnson. Questions such as: “Does he believe, as many Christian Nationalists argue, that the Bible—not the Constitution—must function as the supreme law of the United States and that the Bible must prevail in the event of conflict between the Bible and civil law?”

A simple “no” would suffice.

The caucus members are asking Johnson to talk with them to alleviate some of their concerns. They want assurances that he is not trying to impose his own “radical religious views” on others or “transform our secular democracy into an authoritarian theocracy.”

There is little likelihood of a response or of anything reassuring to come. Johnson is the real deal: a man who sees himself as a modern day Moses being called by his god—a god who talks to him apparently—to lead the nation.⁵

Where he wants to take us, none of us should want to follow.

Notes

1 Paul Blumenthal, “How Mike Johnson Helped Open the Door to Creationism in Louisiana Public Schools.” HuffPost, December 9, 2023. Available online at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mike-johnson-creationism-schools_n_657380ffe4b09724b4342739.

2 Mark A. Chancey, “A Textbook Example of the Christian Right: The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion vol. 75, no. 3 (September 2007), pp. 554–581.

3 Rob Boston, “Down the Memory Hole: House Speaker Mike Johnson and His Allies Would Like to Cover Up His History of Extreme Statements. It’s Not That Easy.” Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, December 30, 2023. Available online at https://www.au.org/the-latest/church-and-state/articles/down-the-memory-hole-house-speaker-mike-johnson-and-his-allies-would-like-to-cover-up-his-history-of-extreme-statements-its-not-that-easy/#.

4 Congressional Freethought Caucus, “Speaker Johnson: Christian Nationalism in the Speaker’s Office?” (white paper), January 10, 2024. Available online at https://huffman.house.gov/imo/media/doc/CFC%20White%20Paper%20–%20Speaker%20Johnson.pdf.

5 Azhar Majeed, “Mike Johnson Isn’t Just the Avatar for Christian Nationalism—He’s Actually Much Worse Than That.” Free Thinking, January 10, 2024. Available online at https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/mike-johnson-isnt-just-the-avatar-for-christian-nationalism-hes-actually-much-worse-than-that/.

-Robyn E. Blumner is the CEO of the Center for Inquiry and the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason &, Science. She was a nationally syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times) for sixteen years.

 

"It’ll be bedlam": how Trump is creating conditions for a post-election eruption

 

As the ex-president fans the flames of violence, experts and insiders say November will be a brutal test for US democracy.

A bloodbath. The end of democracy. Riots in the streets. Bedlam in the country. Donald Trump has made apocalyptic imagery a defining feature of his presidential election campaign, warning supporters that if he does not win – and avoid criminal prosecution – the US will enter its death throes.
 
The prophecies of doom, repeated ad nauseam at rallies and on social media, have raised fears that the former president is making an electoral tinderbox that could explode in November. While there has been much commentary assessing the implications of a Trump win, some experts warn that a Trump defeat could provide an equally severe stress test of American democracy.
 
“Regardless of whether Donald Trump wins or loses, there’s going to be violence,” said Michael Fanone, a retired police officer who was seriously injured by pro-Trump rioters at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. “If Donald Trump loses, he’s not going to concede and he’s going to inspire people to commit acts of violence, just like he did in the weeks and months leading up to January 6, 2021.
 
“If he wins, I also believe that there’s going to be violence committed by his supporters, targeting people who previously tried to hold him to account, whether it was members of the press, average citizens like myself, Department of Justice officials, state, and federal prosecutors. I believe him when he says that he will have his vengeance.”

Trump has long sought to sow distrust in the electoral system while using rhetoric outside the boundaries of modern political discourse, dehumanizing opponents and immigrants and portraying the US as a nation on the verge of collapse.

During his first run for president, in 2016, he encouraged his supporters to “knock the crap out” of protesters and said he would pay their legal bills if they got into trouble. Should he be denied the presidential nomination at the Republican national convention in Cleveland, he warned: “I think you’d have riots.”
 
In the summer of 2020, Trump is said to have called for the military to shoot peaceful protesters in Washington during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. When he disputed his election defeat that year, he suggested that an adverse ruling by the Pennsylvania supreme court would “induce violence in the streets”.

Then, at a rally before his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, Trump said: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness … If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”
 
After the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in August 2022, he predicted that “terrible things are going to happen”, and then quoted the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham warning of “riots in the streets” if Trump were charged.
 
Since declaring his candidacy in November 2022, Trump has intensified inflammatory and racist statements on the campaign trail. He has promised to pardon January 6 insurrectionists, suggested that Gen Mark Milley should be executed and asserted that immigrants who are in the US illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

At last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump declared: “This is the final battle, they know it. I know it, you know it, and everybody knows it, this is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.”
 
He threatened “potential death & destruction” if he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney over a hush-money payment and criticized those urging his supporters to remain peaceful, fuming on his Truth Social platform: “OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED, AS THEY TELL US TO BE PEACEFUL!”
 
In November, at a rally in New Hampshire, he promised that he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” In January this year, returning to New Hampshire, Trump told supporters: “I only want to be a dictator for one day.”
 
Addressing efforts to remove him from the ballot under the 14th amendment, Trump warned that “if we don’t [get treated fairly], our country’s in big, big trouble. Does everybody understand what I’m saying? I think so.” 

And referring to those 88 criminal charges that could yet scupper his electoral chances, he opined: “I think they feel this is the way they’re going to try and win, and that’s not the way it goes. It’ll be bedlam in the country. It’s a very bad thing. It’s a very bad precedent. It’s the opening of a Pandora’s box.”
 
Campaigning this month in North Carolina, Trump claimed that Biden’s immigration policies amounted to a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States” because, in his view, they allow millions of people to stream across the border with Mexico.

History has shown that Trump’s words are taken both seriously and literally by his base. Hannah Muldavin, a former spokesperson for the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 attack, said: “We know when Donald Trump says something – whether it’s in a tweet or in a speech – his supporters listen.
 
“That’s what we saw on January 6. His tweet – ‘Be there. Will be wild!’ – led to a rise in activity online that led people to organize and come to DC on January 6. When Trump uses this incendiary language, it’s concerning.”

Last week, appearing alongside a Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, Trump again referred to immigrants in the country illegally in subhuman terms. “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it.”

At the same rally, Trump warned: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” At the time he was discussing the need to protect the car industry from overseas competition, and Trump and allies later said he had been referring to the car industry when he used the term. Biden’s campaign team rejected that defense.
 
Once again, Trump has crossed lines and broken conventions like no other politician in his lifetime. Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die, said: “Since 1945 I don’t think there has been a politician in a democracy who’s used such authoritarian language, ever. It’s hard to think of anybody. 

Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin when running for office don’t use the kind of language that Donald Trump uses, so that’s pretty notable.”
 
As historical examples around the world have shown, such language can create a permission structure for violence. Ziblatt added: “No matter what happens, there will be some effort to deny the results of the election if he loses. My best-case scenario is a decisive defeat so that his claims of a stolen election are just simply not credible. But if it’s close, as it seems like all indicators suggest, then I would expect violence and threats of violence and at least protests of the sort that we experienced in 2021.”

Opinion polls suggest another tight race. Several have shown Trump with a narrow lead and, in the bars and cafes of Washington DC, it is not hard to overhear idle chatter predicting a Trump victory as more likely than not. This, combined with Trump’s own exaggerated projections, raises the prospect that his supporters will take victory for granted – and assume foul play if, in fact, he loses again.

Trump supporters at a North Carolina rally this month. Larry Jacobs, director of the center for the study of politics and governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Donald Trump is engaged in a misinformation campaign both to raise the expectation of his supporters that he is going to win, he’s ahead, it’s in the bag, and to set the conditions for claiming that the election was stolen if he doesn’t win. Obviously, these polls are far out and not predictive but he’s clearly using them now to set the conditions.”
 
In an early preview of how aggressively Trump’s supporters might react to defeat, Charlie Kirk, a far-right political influencer, told an audience at a faith-based event last week: “I want to make sure that we all make a commitment that if this election doesn’t go our way, the next day we fight. It’s a very important thing; a lot of people don’t want to hear that. They say: ‘What do you mean it doesn’t go our way? It has to go our way. We have to win.’ I agree.”
 
Trump’s divisive rhetoric and election denialism in 2020 culminated in the attack on the US Capitol. But members of Congress returned the same night to certify Biden’s election victory, and Trump reluctantly departed the White House two weeks later. This time Biden is the incumbent and Trump has no control over the levers of government, making a replay of the insurrection in Washington less likely.

Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots movement, said: “Trump is already spreading lies that this election is rigged and we know there is no realistic scenario where he concedes after losing. One big difference between his loss this year and 2020 is this time they’re better prepared and have already gone through a dress rehearsal. But the other big difference is he won’t be a sitting president – he’ll just be a sore loser who the nation rejected in record numbers two elections in a row.”

Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, added: “What I fear is that the repetition of violent rhetoric will lead to the normalization of violent acts. There’s no sugarcoating it. This is a dangerous period for American constitutional government. In the end, the institutions are no better or worse than the men and women who are sworn to defend them and, if they do their duty, we’ll be OK. If they’re stormed, or if they’re paralyzed by fear, then there’s a chance that they would not hold. It’s more likely than not that it won’t happen, but this election will be the ultimate stress test.”

-David Smith, The Guardian

Love Anyway

 

Love Anyway

You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal.

I think about this and a passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum (public library) flits across the sky of my mind:

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

This, of course, is what life evolved to be — an aria of affirmation rising like luminous steam from the cold dark silence of an indifferent cosmos that will one day swallow all of it. Every living thing is its singer and its steward — something the poetic paleontologist Loren Eiseley captures with uncommon poignancy in his 1957 essay “The Judgment of the Birds,” found in his altogether magnificent posthumous collection The Star Thrower (public library).

Eiseley recounts resting beneath a tree after a day of trekking through fern and pine needles collecting fossils, dozing off in the warm sunlight, then being suddenly awakened by a great commotion to see “an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak” perching on a crooked branch above. He writes:

“Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents. No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. 

"He was a bird of death. And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. 

"And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.”

-Maria Popova, The Marginalian

Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia has committed thousands of crimes in Ukraine

 

Ivan Vyhivskyi, the National Police head, said that Kyiv is investigating over 100,000 war crimes cases committed by Russian troops in Ukraine. Among them are some of the most horrendous crimes – deliberate murder, torture, and rape of civilians, and the kidnapping of Ukrainian children. The Russian army has been well documented to execute Ukrainian prisoners of war and to perform a wide range of crimes.

Russia has also gone a long way in its attempt to destroy the Ukrainian language, culture, and statehood, with the country's state-controlled propaganda putting an emphasis on "re-educating" Ukrainians to become Russians. A regular theme of Russian propaganda is the need to "erase the Ukrainian nation," and murdering those who don't agree to become Russian. 

-The Kyiv Independent

 https://kyivindependent.com/

Bolton says Trump wants to be treated like North Korean leader

 

Former national security adviser John Bolton said Tuesday that former President Trump wants to be treated like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and people should “get ready.”

“Donald Trump wants Americans to treat him like North Koreans treat Kim Jung Un. Get ready…..” Bolton posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Bolton, who served as the national security adviser under the Trump administration, posted a viral clip of Trump speaking with Fox News’s Steve Doocy in 2018, where the former president offered praise for the North Korean leader.

“He’s the head of a country, and I mean he’s the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention,” Trump said in the clip. “I want my people to do the same.”

Bolton joins a list of former Trump officials who are warning of his return to power, just after he clinched the Republican nomination for president and will face off against President Biden in the polls this fall.

The clip of Trump speaking highly of Kim follows a meeting between the former president and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump received sharp criticism for meeting with the Hungarian leader, who said he hopes to see Trump return to the White House.

After the meeting, Trump said Orbán is a “Great Leader” who is “respected all over the World.” The former president has also favorably commented about Adolf Hitler on multiple occasions.

In the past, Trump has said that he would not be a dictator if he were reelected, “Except for day one.” 

-The Hill

Perhaps this is a better comparison:

The Right Wing in America

 

In the past few weeks, Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo has deepened our understanding of the right-wing attempt to impose Christian nationalism on the United States through support for Trump and the MAGA movement. On March 9, Kovensky explored the secret, men-only, right-wing society called the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), whose well-positioned, wealthy, white leaders call for instituting white male domination and their version of Christianity in the U.S. after a “regime” change. 

On March 19, Kovensky explained how that power was reaching into lawmaking when he reported on a September 2023 speech by Russ Vought, a key architect of the plans for Trump’s second term, including Project 2025. In the speech, which took place in the  Dirksen Senate Office Building, Vought explained the right wing’s extreme border policies by explicitly marrying Christian nationalism and an aversion to the pluralism that is a hallmark of American democracy. Vought argued that the U.S. should model immigration on the Bible’s Old Testament, welcoming migrants only “so long as they accepted Israel’s God, laws, and understanding of history.”

These religious appeals against the equality of women and minorities seem an odd juxtaposition to a statement by United Auto Workers (UAW) union president Shawn Fain in response to the claim of the Trump campaign that Trump’s “bloodbath” statement of last Saturday was about the auto industry. Fain is also a self-described Christian, but he rejects the right-wing movement.   

“Donald Trump can’t run from the facts,” Fain said in a statement to CBS News. “He can do all the name-calling he wants, but the truth is he is a con man who has been directly part of the problem we have seen over the past 40 years—where working class people have gone backward and billionaires like Donald Trump reap all the benefits…. 

“Trump has been a player in the class war against the working class for decades, whether screwing workers and small businesses in his dealings, exploiting workers at his Mar a Lago estate and properties, blaming workers for the Great Recession, or giving tax breaks to the rich. The bottom line is Trump only represents the billionaire class and he doesn’t give a damn about the plight of working-class people, union or not.” 

In the 1850s the United States saw a similar juxtaposition, with elite southern enslavers heightening their insistence that enslavement was sanctioned by God and their warnings that the freedom of Black Americans posed an existential threat to the United States just as white workers were beginning to turn against the system that had concentrated great wealth among a very few men. While white southern leaders were upset by the extraordinary popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the 1852 novel that urged middle-class women to stand up against slavery, it was Hinton Rowan Helper’s 1857 The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It that made them apoplectic. 

Hinton Helper was a white southerner himself and showed no abolitionist sympathies in his deeply racist book. What that book did was to show, using the statistics that had recently been made available from the 1850 census, that the American South was falling rapidly behind the North economically. Helper blamed the system of slavery for that economic backwardness, and he urged ordinary white men to overthrow the system of enslavement that served only a few wealthy white men. The cotton boom of the 1850s had created enormous fortunes for a few lucky planters, as well as a market for Helper’s book among poorer white men who had been forced off their land. 

White southern elites considered Helper’s book so incendiary that state legislatures made it illegal to possess a copy, people were imprisoned and three allegedly hanged for being found with the book, and a fight over it consumed Congress for two months from December 1859 through January 1860. The determination of southern elites to preserve their power made them redouble their efforts to appeal to voters through religion and racism. 

In today’s America, the right wing seems to be echoing its antebellum predecessors. It is attacking women’s rights; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; immigration; LGBTQ+ rights and so on. At the same time, it continues to push an economic system that has moved as much as $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 10% since 1981 while exploding the annual budget deficit and the national debt.

Yesterday the far-right Republican Study Committee (RSC), which includes about two thirds of all House Republicans, released a 2025 budget plan to stand against Biden’s 2025 budget wish list. The RSC plan calls for dramatic cuts to business regulation, Social Security, Medicaid, and so on, and dismisses Biden’s plan for higher taxes on the wealthy, calling instead for more than $5 trillion in tax cuts. It calls the provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that permits the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over prices “socialist price controls.” 

Biden responded to the RSC budget, saying: “My budget represents a different future. One where the days of trickle-down economics are over and the wealthy and biggest corporations no longer get all the breaks. A future where we restore the right to choose and protect other freedoms, not take them away. A future where the middle class finally has a fair shot, and we protect Social Security so the working people who built this country can retire with dignity. I see a future for all Americans and I will never stop fighting for that future.”

Biden’s version of America has built a strong economy in the last two years, with extremely low unemployment, extraordinary growth, and real wage increases for all but the top 20%. Inequality has decreased. Today the White House announced the cancellation of nearly $6 billion in federal student loan debt for thousands of teachers, firefighters, and nurses. Simply by enforcing laws already on the books that allow debt forgiveness for borrowers who go into public service, the administration has erased nearly $144 billion of debt for about 4 million borrowers. 

At the same time, the administration has reined in corporations. Today the Department of Justice, along with 15 states and the District of Columbia, sued Apple, Inc., for violating the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. They charge that the company, which in 2023 had net revenues of $383 billion and a net income of $97 billion, has illegally established a monopoly over the smartphone market to extract as much revenue as possible from consumers. The company’s behavior also hurts developers, the Department of Justice says, because they cannot compete under the rules that Apple has set. 

At the end of February, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued to block the merger of Kroger and Albertsons, a $24.6 billion takeover affecting 5,000 supermarkets and 700,000 workers across 48 states. The merger would raise grocery prices, narrow consumer choice, and hurt workers’ bargaining power, the FTC said. The attorneys general of Arizona, California, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Wyoming joined the FTC’s lawsuit.  

The benefits of the administration’s reworking of the government for ordinary Americans have not gotten traction in the past few years, as right-wing media have continued to insist that Biden’s policies will destroy the economy. But as Shawn Fain’s position suggests, ordinary white men, who fueled the Reagan Revolution in 1980 when they turned against the Democrats and who have made up a key part of the Republican base, might be paying attention. 

In June 2023 the AFL-CIO, a union with more than 12.5 million members, endorsed Biden for president in 2024 in its earliest endorsement ever. In January the UAW also endorsed Biden. Yesterday the United Steelworkers Union, which represents 850,000 workers in metals, mining, rubber, and other industries, added their endorsement.

Just as it was in the 1850s, the right-wing emphasis on religion and opposition to a modern multicultural America today is deeply entwined with preserving an economic power structure that has benefited a small minority. That emphasis is growing stronger in the face of the administration’s effort to restore a level economic playing field. In the 1850s, those who opposed the domination of elite enslavers could only promise voters a better future. But in 2024, the success of Biden’s policies may be changing the game.

—Heather Cox Richardson

Notes:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/inside-a-secret-society-of-prominent-right-wing-christian-men-prepping-for-a-national-divorce

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/russ-vought

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/uaw-union-leadership-american-christian-culture/675741/

https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/helper/helper.html

https://rsc-hern.house.gov/about/membership

https://khqa.com/news/nation-world/republican-study-committee-presents-blueprint-to-save-america-budget-proposal-sparking-debate-on-program-cuts

https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2024/03/21/latest-house-republican-study-committee-budget-plan-again-includes-draconian-medicaid-cuts/

https://hern.house.gov/uploadedfiles/final_budget_including_letter_web_version.pdf

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/03/21/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-the-republican-study-committee-budget/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-cancels-nearly-6-billion-student-debt-78k-public-service-workers-rcna144378

Benjamin Frank Gilbert, “The Life and Writings of Hinton Rowan Helper,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 53 (January 1955), pp. 58–75.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/03/the-heritage-foundation-dei-project-2025-trump-diversity-equity-inclusion-american-fiction-erasure/

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-merrick-b-garland-delivers-remarks-lawsuit-against-apple-monopolizing

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-apple-monopolizing-smartphone-markets

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/21/doj-sues-apple-over-iphone-monopoly.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/26/kroger-albertsons-grocery-merger-blocked-ftc

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/09/lina-khan-federal-trade-commission-antitrust-monopolies

https://apnews.com/article/biden-steelworkers-endorsement-presidential-race-a931b0ecb0c7628ae27f19e7ccdb3454

https://aflcio.org/press/releases/afl-cio-votes-endorse-president-biden-re-election

https://uaw.org/uaw-endorses-joe-biden-for-president-of-the-united-states/

Twitter (X):

aaronlarnavarro/status/1769830953419956673

Laurie_Garrett/status/1770813449292890558

 

Pentagon Spending and National (In)Security by William J. Astore

 

In an age when American presidents routinely boast of having the world’s finest military, where nearly trillion-dollar war budgets are now a new version of routine, let me bring up one vitally important but seldom mentioned fact: making major cuts to military spending would increase U.S. national security.

 

Why? Because real national security can neither be measured nor safeguarded solely by military power (especially the might of a military that hasn’t won a major war since 1945). Economic vitality matters so much more, as does the availability and affordability of health care, education, housing, and other crucial aspects of life unrelated to weaponry and war. 

 

Add to that the importance of a Congress responsive to the needs of the working poor, the hungry and the homeless among us. And don’t forget that the moral fabric of our nation should be based not on a military eternally ready to make war but on a determination to uphold international law and defend human rights.

 

It’s high time for America to put aside its conveniently generic “rules-based order” anchored in imperial imperatives and face its real problems. A frank look in the mirror is what’s most needed here.

 

It should be simple really: national security is best advanced not by endlessly preparing for war, but by fostering peace. Yet, despite their all-too-loud disagreements, Washington’s politicians share a remarkably bipartisan consensus when it comes to genuflecting before and wildly overfunding the military-industrial complex. In truth, ever-rising military spending and yet more wars are a measure of how profoundly unhealthy our country actually is…

 

Peace Must Be Our Profession

What was true then remains true today. Real national defense should not be synonymous with massive spending on wars and weaponry. Quite the reverse: whenever possible, wars should be avoided; whenever possible, weapons should be beaten into plowshares, and those plowshares used to improve the health and well-being of people everywhere.

 

Oh, and that Biblical reference of mine (swords into plowshares) is intentional. It’s meant to highlight the ancient roots of the wisdom of avoiding war, of converting weapons into useful tools to sustain and provide for the rest of us.

 

Yet America’s leaders on both sides of the aisle have long lost the vision of George McGovern, of John F. Kennedy, of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Today’s president and today’s Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, boast of spending vast sums on weapons, not only to strengthen America’s imperial power but to defeat Russia and deter China, while bragging all the while of the “good” jobs they’re allegedly creatinghere in America in the process. (This country’s major weapons makers would agree with them, of course!)…

 

In today’s climate of perpetual war, the dream of peace continues to wither. Still, despite worsening odds, it’s important that it must not be allowed to die. The high ground must be wrested away from our self-styled “warriors,” who aim to keep the factories of death churning, no matter the cost to humanity and the planet.

 

My fellow Americans, we need to wake up from the nightmare of forever war. This country’s wars aren’t simply being fought “over there” in faraway and, at least to us, seemingly forgettable places like Syria and Somalia. In some grim fashion, our wars are already very much being fought right here in this deeply over-armed country of ours.

 

George McGovern, a bomber pilot from World War II, knew the harsh face of war and fought in the Senate for a more peaceful future, one no longer haunted by debilitating arms races and the prospect of a doomsday version of overkill. Joining him in that fight was John F. Kennedy, who, in 1963, suggested that “this generation of Americans has already had enough, more than enough, of war, and hate, and oppression.”

 

If only.

 

Today’s generation of “leaders” seems not yet to have had their fill of war, hate, and oppression. That tragic fact — not China, not Russia, not any foreign power — is now the greatest threat to this country’s “national security.” And it’s a threat only aggravated by ever more colossal Pentagon budgets still being rubberstamped by a spinelessly complicit Congress.

 

to read the entire article from Counterpunch, click here: Pentagon Spending and National (In)Security